by Barry Scott Zellen, PhD
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America has long prided itself as being the guardian of the world’s rules-based order, and has until recently roundly criticized both Russia and China for working outside these rules. But now, with a rapprochement with Putin’s Russia in its early stages, the White House has lately refocused its rules-based scolding primarily upon China, even when it in fact appears that Washington has done all it can in recent years to blackball, marginalize, and isolate both Russia and China from the very world system it claimed to be defending. The resulting alignment of interests and policies between Moscow and Beijing – described in recent years as a “no-limits” partnership – and the intensifying perception of a menacing Russia-China axis that threatens the democratic West is in large part a self-fulfilling prophecy induced by the very strategic myopia that America’s China hawks – serving an electorate hostile to China’s rise (with a widely perceived threat to the American industrial economy posed by a powerful China) and intent on precipitating a new Cold War – have intentionally fostered.
America’s recent preoccupation with Russia, China, and their increasing alignment in the Arctic, greatly accelerated after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This can be seen in Moscow’s “Eurasian pivot,” driven by the West’s crippling sanctions, which essentially evicted Russia from the globalized world of economically integrated nations, Russia’s tightening embrace of China was first and foremost a necessary defensive move to offset the severing of critical economic ties that bound Russia to the West in the wake of its 2022 invasion. An invasion, it must be noted, that is perceived across the West as an unjust and unprovoked war of aggression, but in the East and much of the Global South as a just (or at least logical) war of sovereign restoration.1
The Moscow-Beijing Arctic alignment has been forged in lockstep with the West’s economic and diplomatic isolation of Russia, and the increasingly militarized efforts by America and its partners to sever trade links tying Russia’s Arctic energy resources to European markets: dramatically illustrated by the September 2022 Nord Stream pipeline sabotage, by means of an undersea explosive attack. These natural gas pipelines are majority-owned by Gazprom, a state-run energy enterprise, but the blame for the attacks has been directly at many factions: the United States, Ukraine, and, curiously, on Russia itself despite the illogic of such a view.
These events have in turn forced Moscow to quickly pivot toward Eurasia to offset its sudden loss of access to Western markets, and to leverage its more protected northeastern Arctic shipping lanes, after having invested heavily in its shorter and more easily accessible year round sea lanes to the west, part of its robust energy integration with Europe after the Cold War (and this integration was central to German diplomatic and economic policy up until 2022).
As the New York Times has reported:
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Moscow’s new bond with Beijing has shifted the global balance of power. The rapidly expanding partnership is one of the most consequential, and opaque, relationships in modern geopolitics. Russia has survived years of Western financial sanctions following the invasion, proving wrong the many politicians and experts who predicted the collapse of the country’s economy. That survival is in no small part due to China.
Russia’s Resurgence and the Collapse of Circumpolar Unity
While circumpolar unity and collaboration has defined American Arctic policy since the Cold War ended, Russia’s military resurgence and increased military interventions in and beyond former Soviet territories have catalyzed a growing wariness of Russia in the Arctic, evident in the numerous American Arctic policy and strategy updates since 2016.
Despite this new tilt in policy, the bones of American Arctic policy retain their collaborative spirit, albeit increasingly truncated as universal circumpolar cooperation yields to new strategic divisions between Russia and the West. After the 2024 election in the US, there was a quick pivot to a new US-Russia rapprochement, while anti-China sentiment remains ever strong after the 2024 election.
In its 2024 Arctic strategy update, the United States Department of Defense (DoD)articulated its interests through an increasingly alliance-centric geopolitical lens. As the Pentagon describes:
Vital for homeland defense, the North American Arctic region hosts aerospace warning, aerospace control, and maritime warning capabilities for the binational U.S.-Canada North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD)
is also integral to the execution of IndoPacific operations, as the northern flank for projecting military force from the U.S. homeland to that region. … The accession of new NATO Allies and the strengthening of the Alliance opens strategic opportunities and supports critical objectives in the NSAR. The Arctic serves as an avenue for power projection to Europe and is vital to the defense of Atlantic sea lines of communication between North America and Europe.
With “multiple strategically significant maritime chokepoints,” the DoD recognizes new (strategic) challenges and (economic) opportunities that arise from climate change: “Reduction in sea ice due to climate change means chokepoints such as the Bering Strait between Alaska and Russia and the Barents Sea north of Norway, are becoming more navigable and more economically and militarily significant.” From a geophysical perspective, the DoD’s analysis aligns well with both strategic and climatic realities.
China’s Illusory Threat to the Arctic: Hype Without Substance
But next, the Pentagon turns to its strategic priorities for the Arctic region, and it is here that its illogical obsession with China magically manifests, as if out of thin air – with China finding itself positioned atop of the DoD’s threat matrix, seemingly elevated for ideological, budgetary-rationalization, and partisan political reasons rather than from the preceding objective strategic analysis.
Indeed, Beijing’s Arctic interests and its growing collaboration with Moscow, driven by the West’s isolation of Russia since its 2022 Ukraine invasion, features prominently in the DoD’s perception of the Arctic strategic environment.
The aforementioned undersea attack on the Nord Stream pipelines, amidst Western pressure on Germany to sever its energy ties to Russia, accelerated the decoupling of the West from Russia and its oil and gas exports (a hallmark of the East-West economic integration that cemented the post-Cold War peace), forcing Moscow to find new markets for its energy resources.
It is not just China but also two highly Westernized and predominantly democratic Asian states, Singapore and India, which take a more balanced approach to East-West divisions in world politics that better align with the historical experience and diplomatic values of the Global South, opening new opportunities for Russia as Western doors suddenly swing shut.
Moreover, even though Moscow and Beijing are now closely aligned, it would be shortsighted to presume this alignment will be an enduring partnership given their past enmity and the potential for a future breakup. Indeed, according to the New York Times, newly acquired and independently authenticated intelligence documents from Russia reveal deep concerns in its FSB counterintelligence community about Moscow’s alignment with Beijing, and describe Russia’s efforts to counter the many emergent long-term threats China could pose against Russian interests, including future assertions by China of territorial claims intent on redressing unjust historical treaties that codified imperial Russia’s 19th century expansion onto Chinese-controlled territories:
Mr. Putin and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, are doggedly pursuing what they call a partnership with ‘no limits’. But the top-secret FSB memo shows there are, in fact, limits. … In public, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia says his country’s growing friendship with China is unshakable — a strategic military and economic collaboration that has entered a golden era. But in the corridors of Lubyanka, the headquarters of Russia’s domestic security agency, known as the F.S.B., a secretive intelligence unit refers to the Chinese as ‘the enemy’.
Indeed, “China is searching for traces of ‘ancient Chinese peoples’ in the Russian Far East, possibly to influence local opinion that is favorable to Chinese claims,” the document says. In 2023, China published an official map that included historical Chinese names for cities and areas within Russia.” As the New York Times further describes:
Russia has long feared encroachment by China along their shared 2,615-mile border. And Chinese nationalists for years have taken issue with 19th-century treaties in which Russia annexed large portions of land, including modern-day Vladivostok. That issue is now of key concern, with Russia weakened by the war and economic sanctions and less able than ever to push back against Beijing. The FSB report raises concerns that some academics in China have been promoting territorial claims against Russia. The report also highlights China’s interest in Russia’s vast territory in the Arctic and the Northern Sea Route, which hugs Russia’s northern coast.
While China’s position at the top of the DoD’s list of Arctic concerns, it is all too illogical a strategic prioritization of what should be considered the least salient of Arctic security threats facing America and the West:
PRC and Russian activities in the Arctic — including their growing cooperation — the enlargement of NATO, and the increasing effects of climate change herald a new, more dynamic Arctic security environment. These changes, as well as the growing cooperation between Russia and the PRC, have the potential to alter the Arctic’s stability and threat picture. They also present opportunities for DoD to enhance security in the region by deepening cooperation with Allies and partners.
The DoD’s 2024 strategy describes “1. PRC Activities in the Arctic” as follows: “The PRC includes the Arctic in its long-term planning and seeks to increase its influence and activities in the region. Though not an Arctic nation, the PRC is attempting to leverage changing dynamics in the Arctic to pursue greater influence and access, take advantage of Arctic resources, and play a larger role in regional governance.
Unhealthy Obsession with China Clouds American Arctic Studies and Policy with a Distorting Ideological Haze
Unmentioned, but no less relevant, is that China’s Arctic policy resembles in many ways in form and substance that of its neighbors, particularly Japan, as do its Arctic capabilities which more closely resemble Japan than Russia (with whom China is now conflated in the eyes of the Pentagon).
Also left out is the importance of strategic context: China has risen fast and high as a global power, seeking “to pursue greater influence and access” all around the world as great powers are wont to do. Implicitly, this echoes the views of many a China hawk who parochially believe China should not be permitted to pursue its global interests like all great powers do.
Indeed, China is not alone in asserting its Arctic interests and ambitions, not even close. Japan, Korea, Singapore, and India are also increasingly active non-Arctic states with expanding Arctic interests and ambitions and these should not be perceived as threats to the Arctic or to the West; indeed, they are to the benefit of Arctic peoples, many of whom continue to live in poverty and face persistent gaps in health, nutrition, and economic security with their fellow countrymen to the south, and who welcome increasing interest in developing their homelands after long histories of neglect and exploitation.2
The DoD’s 2024 Arctic strategy confirms that an unhealthy obsession with China has now clouded Washington’s judgment and blinded this stumbling superpower (one could now justifiably call it a stupidpower, reminiscent of the Soviet Union just before its inevitable collapse), not the first time American strategy has been rooted in a dangerous delusion. This was especially more than evident during its two-decade long Vietnam intervention fueled by its tragically self-fulfilling Domino Theory, as it was again during its two-decade long intervention in Afghanistan in the comparably self-defeating Global War on Terror.
Breaking with previous Arctic strategies, the DoD’s 2024 strategy elevates non-Arctic China (with not a single square millimeter of Arctic territory nor a cubic milliliter of Arctic waters under its flag) to the top of the Pentagon’s list of Arctic anxieties, above even mighty Russia, the largest (by territory, population, and economic output) if not nimblest of the Arctic states, with undisputed sovereign control over more than half the Arctic region.
In its strategy, the Pentagon neglects to mention that China’s increasing Arctic ambitions are in lockstep and therefore mirror those of dozens of other non-Arctic states which, like China, hold observer status at the Arctic Council, with Beijing’s own Arctic presence dating back to the interwar years of the early 20th century. This can be exemplified by its status as a signatory to the Spitzbergen Treaty that internationalized access to Svalbard’s economy – part of a global commons in the polar world that many nations, not just China and inclusive of many Western nations, embrace.
Moreover, the DoD’s concern with China’s “dual civil-military” efforts in Arctic research mirrors that of the United States and all of its Arctic and non-Arctic partners, who until recently worked together to span old East-West divisions in the Arctic and for whom dual-use is a fact of life for Arctic research, with government funding and policy priorities having a profound (and at times ethically corrosive) effect on Arctic research worldwide. But in fact, dual use Arctic research is much more a norm than a subversion of norms, despite the disingenuous protests by an army of DoD-funded scholars to the contrary.
For instance, consider these public comments made by a high official of the now-shuttered Wilson Center Polar Institute, which was (rightly) closed by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in early 2025, who described to NPR’s Jackie Northam in August 2024:
I think we see the PRC attempting to undermine regional governance and to increasingly advance this narrative that non-Arctic states should have influence in the region. So I think that is something where we do see the PRC influencing the governance conversation in a way that is contrary to U.S. interests … China sends its research ice breakers to the Arctic every year ostensibly to collect climate data. But, of course, they’re also collecting, you know, intelligence data and mapping submarine cables and all that kind of thing because, you know, everything they do is dual use.
Such wording is offensive in its generalization and trope-like characteristics of the world’s most populous and economically consequential nation: Everything they do is dual use. Such anti-China bias runs deep throughout the American polar research community, and has been deepening since NATO’s northward expansion to Sweden and Finland has been spreading like a zombie virus across Europe, with an increasingly corrosive impact on the objectivity and integrity of Arctic strategy across the expanded NATO family of nations.
Indeed, it’s become so pervasive that one of the three guest editors of the 17th Yearbook of Polar Law (YPL17) shared with me a particularly biased peer review from one of their “expert” reviewers specializing in Arctic and Antarctic law, who rejected a submission from Latin America that would have provided a much needed Global South perspective in a field long dominated by North American and Nordic scholars, one that looked more kindly upon China and Russia in the Arctic than this particular anonymous expert.
One reason for this peer reviewer’s rejection of this rare and much-needed submission from the Global South was the reviewer’s dismissal of the authors’ Global South foundation of knowledge and their refreshingly (in my view) positive sentiment regarding China’s and Russia’s commitment to Arctic cooperation, trivializing and thereby arrogantly delegitimizing their undeniably valid perspective.
This expert reviewer illogically dismisses the authors’ argument that China’s and Russia’s impressively high “ranking of engagement metrics” in Arctic cooperation can be used as a proxy for Beijing’s and Moscow’s “commitment to international cooperation and polar sustainability” – what seems to me at heart a most reasonable argument, but which appears to grate against the hypersensitivities of those funded by and/or otherwise associated with such tentacles of the American government as the now (mercifully) shuttered Wilson Center Polar Institute and the now greatly (and justly, IMHO) right-sized Fulbright Research Program (FRP).
The FRP, by the way, has for so long recklessly used American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars to fund expensive, globe-trotting junkets for already highly paid academics while grooming (through their provision of a toxic and addictive combination of travel and research funds) in them an ideological bias favoring a narrow set of interests as cultivated by policy elites in Washington. And these policy elites in Washington are, of course, more interested in expanding their own networks of cronyism and perpetuating their generous public sector salaries and benefits than in serving the American people (or world peace).
As the anonymous reviewer scolds: “I don’t see how a counting or ‘ranking of engagement metrics’ is a proxy for ‘commitment to international cooperation and polar sustainability’. Russia and China are ranking high on these but aren’t both of them currently spoiling and obstructing polar multilateralism?” The reviewer seems to miss the point – or, more nefariously, suppress the point, suggesting the emergence of a disturbing neo-McCarthyist censorship of the sort that festers unchecked in the ideologically corrupted anonymous peer review process favored by Western research and publishing institutions that perpetuate ideological falsehoods that serve their (and their cronies’) personal interests and their political masters’ propaganda goals.
That Russia and China are therefore portrayed as spoilers and obstructionists at this time in history by such a biased (and prejudiced in their anti-China and anti-Russia sentiment) reviewer hand selected by YPL’s editors, as if to shut down alternative viewpoints – with NATO in crisis and its alliance leader (America) threatening to annex and invade the territory of not just one but so far two member states, only a couple of years after it sought to banish Russia from circumpolar cooperation in punishment of its military action in Ukraine – is patently absurd, and shows how corrosive the DoD’s (and more broadly, the deeper and less democratically accountable echelons of the United States Government’s) influence has become in Arctic research.
The reviewer dubiously dispenses such comments as: “One gets the impression that the authors wanted to apply and introduce lesser-known concepts from Latin America to polar studies, while unfortunately not doing a convincing job of promoting them.” But the reviewer has missed the point: just introducing these concepts from South America (and the inclusion of Global South perspectives generally) of itself would go far to help reverse the bias and provinciality that permeates polar studies.
Pettily, the reviewer chastises the authors for a slew of minor typographical and formatting issues that could be quickly and easily remedied in the copy edit stage, as is routinely done so for most academic and non-academic submissions alike which are never required to be fully copy edited in the review stage (and I would wager ideologically acceptable submissions if compared on typographical and formatting grounds could reveal a double-standard used to censor those views so original and thoughtful that they threaten reviewers’ fragile egos.) As this particular anonymous reviewer described:
Additionally, the language is rather essayistic, there are a number of spelling mistakes, there are no page numbers in the document, and the references are often incomplete and inconsistent with the Chicago style. Overall, the paper is not ready for publication, and as there is no clear conceptual way forward to ‘rescue’ the paper through major revisions, I recommend ‘reject’.
I would counter-argue that a more just solution would be to reject instead the recommendations of this peer reviewer, and going forward to insist such bias is forever forbidden. Indeed, this submission from Latin America may well have been written in a second language (as stipulated by YPL’s Call for Papers, “Authors should write in English only”) and should not be so superficially smacked down for having “a number of spelling mistakes,” particularly since “a number” could be one (thanks to the Romans) or even zero (thanks to the Mayas), and need not convey many as is implied so ambiguously here.
Quite hypocritically, YPL17’s Call for Papers contains three typos that indicate it was never spellchecked before its public distribution: “intereseted” instead of “interested,” “contaning” instead of “containing,” and tellingly, “17th Yeaerbook of Polar Law” instead of “Yearbook”! From this, it seems at best hypocritical to include “a number of spelling mistakes” as a reason to reject a submission from the Global South that happens to have an open mind about China or, worse, a hypocritical act of censorship when all that was needed was a quick spellcheck.
One cannot help but worry that YPL’s strict acceptance of just English-only submissions is designed to favor Western elites with an implicit, Apartheid-like structural bias, rather than a much-needed celebration of viewpoint diversity better reflected in multilingual submissions to reflect a more inclusive and universal standard of academic rights and dignity.
Normalizing China in the Arctic: Embracing the Arctic as Global Commons
As I have argued at length in my 2024 book, Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (Lynne Rienner Publishers), the United States has taken the lead in undermining a cooperative, multilateral Arctic in its quest to contain Russia, just as it does again in the DoD’s 2024 Arctic strategy to contain China. More open discussion, from more perspectives, could help contain the spread of this festering malignancy infecting the polar research community before completely metastasizing.
Much of the U.S. polar research community in the civilian academic world depends on U.S. government and military support for ice breaker access, as well as other infrastructure and transportation support, from Pituffik Space Base (formerly Thule Air Base) in north Greenland, to Northwest Passage and High Arctic marine access off Alaska’s and the Canadian Arctic’s shores, all the way to Antarctica.
Just as the Pacific Ocean is not and never truly was an American lake despite the predominance of U.S. naval power in the post-World War II Pacific, the Arctic is not and has never been an American lake (in part because Russia flanks more than half of the Arctic basin, far surpassing America’s or its allies’ Arctic littoral territories).
Tiny Iceland in the High North Atlantic barely touches the Arctic, with only its northernmost island of Grimsey straddling the Arctic Circle, and Denmark is Arctic only through its colonial possession of Greenland.
Sweden and Finland have no coastal access to the Arctic Ocean at all, which explains why, at that first, surprisingly divisive (within the West) Arctic Ocean Conference held in Ilulissat, Greenland, on May 27-29, 2008, these three Arctic states weren’t even invited (while Russia was), causing much diplomatic tension within the NATO-aligned Arctic and shattering the illusion of Arctic unity and the wishful thinking of American Arctic predominance – increasingly fostered by so many Arctic elites at too many international conferences, paid for in large measure by American tax dollars laundered through organizations like the now (mercifully) defunct Wilson Center Polar Institute and the (justly) downsized Fulbright Scholars Program.
Within this context, the continued misrepresentation of China’s legitimate Arctic interests (and its predominantly limited, seasonal, and mobile presence whether by ice breaker, submarine, or aircraft transit, or by visiting researchers seasonally resident on the Arctic territory of a sovereign host nation) as the Pentagon’s top Arctic security concern is a dangerous delusion. The DoD’s 2024 Arctic Strategy elaborates its concern with China’s Arctic interest and presence:
Although the vast majority of the Arctic is under the jurisdiction of sovereign states, the PRC seeks to promote the Arctic region as a ‘global commons’ in order to shift Arctic governance in its favor. The PRC’s 2018 Arctic Policy claims non-Arctic states should contribute to the region’s ‘shared future for mankind’ due to the Arctic’s global significance. Its ‘Polar Silk Road’ has been used to gain a footing in the Arctic by pursuing investments in infrastructure and natural resources, including in the territory of NATO Allies.
This pejoratively mischaracterizes China’s view of the Arctic as part of the global commons, which is more fairly described by Trym Eiterjord’s 2023 article discussing China’s 14th five-year plan, who cautions: “It is important not to overstate the significance of the Arctic’s inclusion in the current five-year plan,” as the “148-page-long document affords only a single sentence to the region.”
Moreover, the Arctic “showing up in a section on maritime governance and marine economic development signals a geopolitical vision of the region centered around its high seas area and its marine resources, matching earlier observations that Beijing sees the Arctic largely in the context of ocean governance. Beijing has in recent years begun to articulate more clearly its own vision of the global commons, at least domestically.”
Indeed, while the DoD unfairly and cynically casts Beijing’s vision of the Arctic as part of the global commons as a ploy “to shift Arctic governance in its favor,” the Arctic as global commons is in fact a widely held view shared by many northerners, Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike, including visionary two-term Alaska governor Wally Hickel.
In addition to serving twice as Alaska’s governor, Hickel – who served as Interior Secretary in President Nixon’s cabinet and famously saw not only the Alaska Pipeline built on his watch, but also welcomed the historic passage of the first comprehensive Arctic land claim accord with Indigenous peoples of the Arctic, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA) of 1971 – promoted Alaska and the Arctic as not only part of the global commons, but the solution to what ecologist Garrett Hardin called the “tragedy of the commons.”
China’s view of the Arctic as part of the global commons is not a nefarious plot to undermine American interests and values, but the logical outcome of a generation of globalization linking East and West since the Cold War ended, integrating the economies of both hemispheres and aligning their values; America’s strategic anxiety over a thawing Arctic’s central position in the globalized world and China’s embrace of this reveals America’s weakness, not strength; trepidation, not confidence; and paranoia, not prescience.
Redressing the West’s Long Legacy of Arctic Neglect: It’s Time to Welcome – and Not Subvert – China’s Historic Rise
U.S. policy toward both Russia’s controversial claims that the Northern Sea Route is internal to Russia and Canada’s comparable claim that the Northwest Passage is internal to Canada, which rejects both nations’ claims, counterargues that these waterways are in fact part of the world ocean and thus part of the global commons.
It is thus hypocritical of Washington to criticize China for advocating a similar view. Indeed, if America and its allies sufficiently invested in their own Arctic territories, built sufficient Arctic infrastructure, and developed remote Arctic economies to lift Arctic peoples out of endemic and persistent poverty, they would be in a better position to defend such a view.
But China’s pragmatic realization that there is mutual opportunity for investing in the Arctic that can benefit Arctic peoples long neglected by their sovereign states is only possible because of such neglect and long periods of Arctic disinterest in the United States and other Arctic states for their far northern peripheries. If the Arctic less resembled the Third World, having earned its own and even less developed designation as the “Fourth World,” and more resembled the First or even the Second Worlds, such a position would have more legitimacy.
Indeed, there would be few inroads for China’s Polar Silk Road had America and its allies shown true and sustained interest in their respective Arctics – and had climate change not opened up so much of the Arctic to external access, it is likely that the region’s relative neglect would have continued.
Even when there is evidence of a commitment to the Arctic and its development in the West, as seen in periods of resource booms from the Klondike gold rush to the North Slope oil rush to Nunavut’s uranium rush to Greenland’s rare earth metals rush, such interest is usually ephemeral, and marked by clashes of interest between Indigenous peoples, non-Indigenous settlers, external commercial interests, and governments, part of an ongoing dialectical interaction that endeavors to align disparate interests but often results in economic stagnation and protracted underdevelopment, as seen with repeated failures despite intensive reconciliation efforts to build a pipeline connecting Canadian Arctic petroleum resources to southern markets.
From Hype to Hysteria: Beijing’s Arctic Presence Intentionally Overstated, Harvard Report Finds
The June 23, 2025 release of a new report by Harvard University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs has confirmed the widespread exaggeration of China’s presence and influence in the Arctic, generating a healthy and much-needed, if short-lived and geographically concentrated, rise in media skepticism in both the Arctic and shipping media – including these headlines: “Report: Most Chinese Investments in the Arctic Have Not Fully Materialized” in High North News on June 25, 2025; “China’s Arctic Investments Exaggerated, Harvard Report Finds” in The Barents Observer on June 26, 2025; and “China’s Arctic Ambitions Are Overhyped Harvard Says: Potential Scenarios” in Container News on June 30, 2025.
Harvard’s report explains that:
Chinese Arctic ambitions and activities are contentious. Commentators in the seven Arctic states3 often frame Chinese investments in an adversarial way, describing Chinese activity in alarmist language in terms of scale, scope, and risk. Analysts have the tendency to mix proposed investments with actual investments. For example, some analysts estimate that Chinese investments in the Arctic top $90 billion and call this level of investment ‘unconstrained.’ According to one mainstream narrative, China will use this ‘inflow of investments’ to increase its influence among Arctic nations by means of debt-trap diplomacy. Our research finds that these numbers are highly exaggerated and often mobilized to support a narrative in which China is successfully ‘buying up’ the Arctic region, but that these inflated numbers include unsuccessful investment projects and proposed projects that have not been implemented.
The report concludes that the “scale and scope of actual Chinese investments are often exaggerated in media and public debate, and unsuccessful proposals are often taken into consideration when presenting the total amount of Chinese investment;” indeed, the paucity of successful Chinese projects in the Arctic as compared to stalled and/or failed projects is described as “striking.” It further observes:
Most investments were concluded several years ago. Recent Chinese investment initiatives have increasingly met with headwinds in Arctic countries except for Russia. Greenland, as part of the Kingdom of Denmark, may be the best example of this. Despite Greenland receiving intensive attention in the debate about Chinese investments and influence in the Arctic, it is apparent that most of this anxiety is about what might be, not what has actually happened.
Moreover, the report cautions: “Valuable analytical nuance is lost by discussing numbers only. The number and value of Chinese investments have become talking points for some commentators to prove the risk that China poses to the region, but the economic value and strategic value of a given asset are not always the same.”
It’s Time to Normalize, and Even Celebrate, but Not Subvert – China’s Role in the Arctic
If anything, China is rising to the challenge of Arctic development made possible by failures in the West to fully develop its own remote Arctic territories, and to fully transcend its tarnished colonial histories.
China should therefore be welcomed as an economic partner that reflects Beijing’s rising global stature and upon which so many Western nations have come to depend, and not as a spoiler intent on disrupting the Arctic status quo or tilting regional governance in its favor (any more than any other stakeholder hopes to do).
Indeed, China’s participation in Arctic economic activities, and engaging regional governance structures as it does elsewhere in the world, is part and parcel of being a global power. It is time to put such anti-China prejudices aside.
Just as it is illogical to see China sit atop the DoD’s list of concerns in the Arctic strategic environment, it is illogical to see Russia, the largest Arctic state by far, come second after China on the DoD’s strategic map of the Arctic, when China is a non-Arctic state.
Indeed, it is profoundly worrisome that America, universally considered the world’s greatest military power – fresh from its 2021 strategic defeat in Afghanistan against the materially inferior Taliban, over two decades after it invaded Iraq on faulty intelligence of a non-existent WMD threat, and 70 years after it stumbled into its disastrous Vietnam intervention – still can’t get its priorities right or assess the strategic environment objectively in a manner that correlates with reality.
With such a long string of military defeats to materially weaker but ideologically and/or spiritually more unified adversaries from Vietnam to Afghanistan behind it, and a proxy war in Ukraine with Russia that has failed keep Ukraine whole and yet whose continuation risks a dangerous escalation to general war, it is disconcerting to find the DoD’s 2024 Arctic policy so badly inverted, and so dangerously decoupled from strategic reality.
But the Arctic research community has now read the DoD’s memo, and China is now routinely portrayed by Western governments, their militaries, and their subservient ecosystem of government-subsidized Arctic researchers as the West’s Arctic nemesis. That such Kool-Aid is being so widely imbibed by so many members of the polar research and policy community is ever more worrisome – and an ominous reminder that we are creeping dangerously close to a new era of McCarthyism at so many U.S. Government-funded centers of Arctic study and policy.
NOTES
- see Aijan Sharshenova, “The impact of the war in Ukraine on the BRICS: Six takeaways from an expert discussion,” The Foreign Policy Centre, August 3, 2023; Jordan McLean and Luanda Mpungose, “BRICS and the Russia-Ukraine war: A global rebalance?,” World Commerce Review, South African Institute of International Affairs (SAIIA), September 19, 2022; and Reuters, “BRICS Neutrality on Ukraine a Diplomatic Win for Putin,” VOA, July 14, 2014. ↩︎
- i.e. Sam Hall, The Fourth World: The heritage of the Arctic and its destruction. New York: Knopf, 1987; Barry Scott Zellen, Breaking the Ice: From Land Claims to Tribal Sovereignty in the Arctic. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008; Elena Gladun, Soili Nysten-Haarala, and Svetlana Tulaeva, “Indigenous economies in the Arctic: To thrive or to survive?” Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene (2021) 9 (1), July 14, 2021; Luke Laframboise, “Brussels Looks North: The European Union’s Latest Arctic Policy and the Potential for ‘Green’ Colonialism,” The Arctic Institute, September 20, 2022; Seira Duncan, “Poverty, Well-Being and Climate Change in the Arctic: a Musical Perspective,” The Arctic Institute, September 27, 2022; Barry Scott Zellen, “From Knowledge to Power: Co-management, Knowledge Co-production, and the Re-empowerment of Arctic Indigenous Peoples,” The Arctic Institute, June 10, 2025. ↩︎
- Sic. There are actually eight Arctic states, all founding members of the Arctic Council. There are, however, now seven Arctic NATO-member states. ↩︎
Barry Scott Zellen, PhD, is a Research Scholar in the Department of Geography at the University of Connecticut (UConn) and a Senior Fellow (Arctic Security) at the Institute of the North (IoN). He is the author, most recently, of Arctic Exceptionalism: Cooperation in a Contested World (2024). Send him mail.
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