[…] At the same time, the White House has quickly sought to mend fences with Russia and to restore a more collaborative and mutually respectful relationship, and such a rapprochement promises to restore East-West stability in the Arctic as well as worldwide, with new opportunities for a restoration of US-Russia Arctic cooperation. Washington’s pivot toward Moscow in many ways turns upside down the dynamic that has been underway in the Arctic since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and America’s rapprochement with Russia is not universally embraced by the other democratic Arctic states, who continue to worry about Russia and fear the US may next undermine their security interests, much the same way it is now doing to Ukraine.
Whether this will reassure Finland and Sweden, which had both turned to the West for their collective defense, only to see NATO itself stumble into what could prove to be an existential crisis, may soon make them long for their days of neutrality, when they did not depend entirely upon the United States or its NATO partners for their survival. […]
What began as a show of unity against Russian aggression is now revealing its internal contradictions. NATO’s northern enlargement, once framed as a stabilizing move, has fractured the very alliances it sought to strengthen—splitting indigenous organizations, paralyzing Arctic diplomacy, and provoking intra-alliance tensions from Greenland to the Baltic.
Instead of reinforcing cooperation, the expansion has accelerated militarization, revived Cold War divisions, and undermined the multilateral ethos that once defined Arctic governance. By isolating Russia entirely and overextending its own strategic coherence, NATO may have weakened its ability to manage the region it is now obligated to defend. Läs artikel