Trump’s Arctic threats: why Canada and Europe need cooperation with Russia

Uriel Araujo, Anthropology PhD, is a social scientist specializing in ethnic and religious conflicts, with extensive research on geopolitical dynamics and cultural interactions.

Tensions in the Arctic are rising sharply - and the United States has become a growing source of pressure on both Europe and Canada.

Yesterday, Iceland summoned the US ambassador after President Donald Trump posted a map showing Iceland, Canada, Greenland and much of North America under the American flag, all labeled “United States of America.”

The same day, Ottawa's retaliatory tariffs on roughly $20 billion of American goods took effect after trade talks collapsed - while Trump is reviving talk of the country becoming the “51st state”.

Finland, for its part, is preparing to host a European Arctic summit in Rovaniemi later this month amid the broader crisis.

In the context of Trump’s annexation threats, Brussels has just announced a €200 million partnership package for Greenland - with Commission President Ursula von der Leyen emphasizing the island’s strategic importance, and the bloc’s determination to deepen its presence in the High North.

Canada as well as Europe are in fact talking about how to “step up” their engagement across the wider region, and analysts such as Chatham House Associate Fellow Sharon Hudson-Dean are urging them to seize their “Arctic moment”.

Yet there is a conclusion that Western policymakers have largely avoided: Canada and the European bloc have a strong interest in pragmatic, functional cooperation with Russia in the region. Geography creates common interest here.

Moscow, for one thing, controls roughly half the Arctic’s landmass and possesses the region’s largest infrastructure, population and maritime presence.

Ottawa’s own Arctic Foreign Policy acknowledges this geographic reality even while noting that bilateral dialogue will remain extremely “difficult for the foreseeable future”.

In any case, even from a Western European perspective, the Arctic is just too important to be approached exclusively through NATO logic.

The region is not just a military theatre. It is a growing maritime space, an energy and mineral frontier, a climate laboratory, an indigenous homeland, a potential transportation corridor, and a scientific domain on its own.

Although the Arctic Council managed to preserve practical coordination between European states and Russia even after 2014, much of that joint action collapsed in 2022.

And yet search and rescue, fisheries management, oil-spill response, shipping safety, environmental monitoring and scientific observation are all areas where Canada, Europe and Russia share structural interests that the Western proxy conflict in Ukraine has not erased.

Even within a NATO framework, it would make more sense for Canadians and Europeans to pursue a dual approach (of trans-Arctic cooperation): one that involves engaging Moscow selectively where the shared geography demands it.

And now there is another reason: the United States itself. Washington increasingly is an unpredictable variable for its traditional partners: the Greenland crisis has made this abundantly visible.

While Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden and the United States issued a joint statement on Arctic security earlier this year, the EU is racing to rethink its Arctic policy as interests are diverging.

For Canada, the question is: what happens if the country that “guarantees” your Arctic security also becomes the state whose conception of Arctic sovereignty increasingly conflicts with yours?

Canadian researchers have already warned Ottawa to be “wary” of its southern neighbor on precisely these grounds - in the context of an aggressive neo-Monroeism.

The trade war and “51st-state” rhetoric have only made this contradiction more apparent.

Russia, meanwhile, has every incentive to keep channels open. Its economic and strategic future is closely tied to the Northern Sea Route, Arctic energy and minerals. Russian oil shipments to Asia via the Arctic route have increased substantially this year, for example.

Closer cooperation between Russia and China is already visible. If the West abandons engagement entirely, the region, from a Western perspective, risks evolving into a predominantly Russo-Chinese strategic space: selective coordination with Moscow towards practical Arctic governance could help prevent that outcome (as a balancing act).

Reviving the Arctic Council remains the natural course. Its original logic, separating governance from great-power rivalry, has been damaged, but not erased: a layered approach could preserve functional cooperation on non-military issues.

The European Parliament has called for deeper EU-Canada Arctic interaction in maritime security, infrastructure, research and Indigenous affairs - but still frames Russia primarily as an antagonist out of the equation.

The post-Cold War assumption that the Arctic could remain insulated from great-power rivalry is reaching its limits. The choice is between further militarization and bloc confrontation (even with a divided trans-Atlantic alliance) or instead parallel channels that accommodate Moscow within a broader Arctic order. The latter is clearly preferable.

Canada and Europe cannot afford to limit themselves to trans-Atlantic frameworks. They must invest in meaningful trans-Arctic cooperation - and Russia will necessarily be part of that equation.