The Coming Northern Showdown

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1. In a new essay for *Defining Ideas*, Senior Fellow [Thomas H. Henriksen](https://www.hoover.org/profiles/thomas-h-henriksen) argues that no matter how the war in Ukraine is resolved, “another political and military hotspot is likely to erupt in the Baltic Sea and nearby Arctic Ocean.” He reviews how Russia has already engaged in sabotage of undersea cables in the region and continues to provoke European nations such as Finland with military build ups and psychological operations along western borders. Henriksen sees all this as a systematic and deliberate preparation by Russia for future cross-border aggression. As he concludes, “the Russian Federation has adopted a short-of-war strategy requiring the United States and NATO to respond to an evolving campaign against hybrid tactics while preparing to wage future large-scale military operations in the Baltic Sea and the Arctic arena.”

2. To open up a different subject of discussion than what is always said about the Arctic, it’s strange how for a development that is only really possible because of climate change, it’s rarely fully incorporated for a geopolitical analysis of what a scenario of a warming artic does to the world.

   When the arctic melts enough that it becomes a zone of exploitation and conflict we’d all be suffering from the ensuing damages it would cause to other lands. The USA, China, the EU and even Russia will be loving more fertile lands than it gains after all and will have to set aside funds for natural disaster preparation, relief and recovery. At the minimum.

   If pouring limited resources into great-power competition is considered worthwhile in even such a situation than it’s fair enough, but there’s too many who don’t even make that calculation.

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