On July 15, U.S. President Donald Trump announced a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy toward Russia: secondary tariffs that would take effect within 50 days unless Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to peace talks and an end to the war in Ukraine. Earlier this week, Trump shortened the deadline to less than two weeks.
The new tariff threat represents a dramatic escalation in Washinton’s willingness to challenge Moscow. But the Trump administration’s tougher posture toward Russia bears sizable risks. The policy’s limits become clear when one looks beyond the immediate context of the war in Ukraine to one of the most important—and ignored—strategic locations in the world: the Arctic.
The Arctic is a site of fierce strategic competition over access to things like oil, gas, development opportunities, and waterways. That competition has intensified in recent years. Russia has been fortifying its hold on the Arctic and remains the dominant regional actor, owning access to roughly 53 percent of the region. China has positioned itself as a rising challenger. And the United States has begun eschewing multilateralism in the region to pursue new strategic footholds and priorities.
A U.S. policy that isolates Russia more, or even entirely, has the potential to accelerate Sino-Russian coordination in the Artic, undermining the balance of power along key Arctic routes and threatening Nordic allies—Norway, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden—that depend on U.S. defense and multilateral mechanisms. To protect long-term U.S. influence in the Arctic—and to combat growing Chinese assertiveness—a strategy of selective cooperation with Russia, not maximalist confrontation, is more effective than the path the Trump administration is now traveling.
An opportunistic Artic partnership between the United States and Russia would conform to a long pattern of strategic ambiguity in the region. For at least the past four decades, the United States’ Arctic policy has been shaped less by direct confrontation than by forms of restraint. Following Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s 1987 Murmansk speech, in which he proposed the Arctic as a “zone of peace,” the United States supported a vision of the region just as exceptional: insulated from global rivalries and governed through multilateral cooperation. This approach culminated in the creation of the Arctic Council in 1996, which explicitly excluded military and security issues from its mandate.
Washington played a key role in this architecture. By keeping hard security off the table, the United States enabled functional cooperation with Russia and others on issues such as climate monitoring, search and rescue, and Indigenous rights.
But Arctic exceptionalism was never apolitical. It was a deliberate strategy to reduce friction in a region where geographic proximity made escalation uniquely dangerous. As U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski argued recently, Arctic cooperation is a “choice,” not a given, and any balance is tenuous and prone to destabilization.
That equilibrium was already starting to shift well before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The first Trump administration disrupted the regional order, particularly by undermining the Arctic Council’s normative coherence. In 2019, the council failed—for the first time in its history—to issue a joint declaration, after the United States refused to accept any mention of climate change. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s May 2019 speech in Rovaniemi, Finland, warning of Chinese expansion and Russian militarization, further politicized a forum traditionally rooted in consensus and soft power.
While the council’s working groups continued functioning, the Trump administration’s posture signaled a deeper strategic pivot: The United States no longer viewed Arctic multilateralism as a diplomatic asset, and U.S. policymakers are increasingly casting the region as a competitive arena. But the Arctic Council is not merely a functional forum—it is an arena where shared norms of cooperation, environmental stewardship, and depoliticization are performed and reproduced. By refusing to endorse climate language in 2019, the United States undercut the shared identity that had underpinned Arctic exceptionalism.
The second Trump administration has pushed this logic further. The line has been blurred between symbolic provocation and strategic intent. Renewed talk of purchasing Greenland, musings about annexing Canada and a takeover of the Panama Canal, and the administration’s formal withdrawal from the Paris Agreement all signaled an Arctic vision no longer grounded in institutional restraint or shared responsibility. These gestures were not just departures from diplomatic convention—they redefined how the United States has positioned itself in the region and the world: no longer as a stabilizer, but as a disruptor.
The United States’ growing distaste for cooperation with Russia—embodied most recently by its foreign policies toward the war in Ukraine—holds particular perils for the future of the Artic region, where shared dependencies are unavoidable.
The United States and Russia share a maritime boundary in the Bering Sea. They rely on joint protocols for managing fisheries, preventing search-and-rescue failures, and maintaining situational awareness across vast, ice-covered waters. The airspace, ecosystems, and shipping lanes are entangled. The Arctic’s strategic ambiguity is underwritten not only by geographic interdependence, but also by shared expectations of restraint, which have been constructed through decades of institutional habit, joint protocols, and diplomacy.
If the United States was to pursue a purely confrontational approach in the Arctic, it risks eroding the very mechanisms that prevent escalation. Arctic deterrence depends less on domination and more on management: mutual awareness, limited cooperation, and crisis avoidance. That makes the region an uncomfortable outlier in a global landscape of hardening alliances and rising nationalism, but also a potential laboratory for pragmatic realism or even an inconsistent but at least modestly engaged U.S. presence.
The Arctic should be treated as a strategic exception, not as a blank canvas onto which global rivalry is simply projected. A rigid, punitive Russia policy risks undermining long-term U.S. interests in the High North. What’s needed is a calibrated approach, one that maintains military readiness and alliance cohesion but also preserves functional cooperation with Russia where it matters most. This includes coordination on search and rescue, maritime safety in the Bering Sea, climate monitoring, and shared environmental data, all of which have historically helped stabilize U.S.-Russia relations in the Arctic, even during periods of geopolitical tension.
If the United States severs channels of engagement, it risks accelerating Russia’s dependence on China. That shift would not only reshape the balance of power along key Arctic routes, it could leave the United States outmaneuvered in a strategic environment that it helped build. Nordic allies now depend more than ever on sustained U.S. policy, both through defense and a range of multilateral mechanisms.
Trump’s new hard line on Russia may well define the next phase of U.S. foreign policy. But for how long? If past is prologue, such a phase might be measured in days, weeks, or months; but in the Arctic, blunt tools can do lasting damage over a short time frame. Preserving selective cooperation isn’t a concession, it’s a strategy—one that protects U.S. leverage, manages regional risks, and helps contain a rising China.
Paradoxically, the region may now demand a more pragmatic posture. It might well be that the United States leans into leverage against Russia in terms of Ukraine, but also into collaboration in terms of the Arctic. To deter China’s Arctic ambitions, the United States cannot afford to isolate Russia entirely, and Russia cannot afford that isolation either. But whether Trump or Putin perceives the Arctic in such a way remains to be seen. Preserving selective engagement, through institutions like the Arctic Council, could be a low-stakes way to advance mutual interests in the region.
In the longer-term view, the Arctic remains one of the few domains where strategic ambiguity is not a weakness. This increasingly critical region serves as a performative space where diplomacy and deterrence can and do coexist. A U.S. grand strategy for the Arctic might therefore blend hard capabilities with narrative clarity. In this way, it might be fitting for a Trumpian set of demands and performances, mixed with his characteristic levels of strategic neglect. Such a policy seems not only possible but also might reaffirm the United States’ role as both a power and a steward of Arctic stability, while simultaneously not committing it to significant or costly action.