by Barry Scott Zellen, PhD
As the Arctic and adjacent “near-Arctic” remilitarize and old Cold War fault lines between East and West re-remerge as salient boundaries defining new blocs of increasing mutually exclusive cooperation and strategic alignment, it’s not just NATO that’s rethinking the strategic foundations for a secure polar world in response to Russia’s military resurgence underway for over a decade now, culminating with its full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Across the Pacific from NATO’s North American member states (Canada, America, and Denmark – owing to its sovereign possession of Greenland), the states of Northeast Asia are also rethinking the foundations of Arctic security for their evolving Arctic policies, keeping pace with a fundamental geopolitical transformation of the region with roots that date as far back, ironically, as the Arctic Council’s 2013 cooperative expansion to include among its new non-Arctic observer states five Asian countries (Japan, China, South Korea, Singapore and India), which in a short time have brought forth contending and at times contradictory visions of the Arctic order.
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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.
Isonomia Quarterly 