Iced Out: The Diplomacy Filter in the U.S. Arctic Strategy

I. Reducing Russia

The framework of active antagonization detailed in RAND Corporation’s Extending Russia and elucidated in Assemblage gets leveraged by Arctic strategy policy-makers. Producing Russia as an enemy of the West permits the logical isolation of Russia within all diplomatic registers. The Arctic Council’s composition is a clear consequence: it became a council without member cooperation. Russia’s cooperative positions did not change. The West, led by the U.S., became the non-participant in Arctic cooperative frameworks.

In March 2020 the Russian Federation published its Foundations of State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Arctic for the Period up to 2035.^[1] Section 16 of the document enumerates the measures by which “the development of international cooperation is to be achieved.” The measures are listed in lettered sequence: implementing “a multivector foreign policy aimed at preserving the Arctic as a territory of peace, stability, and mutually beneficial cooperation”; bilateral and multilateral cooperation through international treaties; participation in continental-shelf-boundary registration under UNCLOS provisions; “securing the Russian presence on the Svalbard archipelago on terms of equal and mutually beneficial cooperation with Norway and other states that are parties to the Treaty of Svalbard of 9 February 1920”; coordination through the Arctic Coast Guard Forum; “active participation by the Russian state and public organizations in the activities of the Arctic Council and other international forums focused on the Arctic issues”; and “ensuring effective operation of the Arctic Council under the chairmanship of the Russian Federation in 2021–23, including the promotion of collaborative projects focused on ensuring the sustainable development of the Arctic and preserving the cultural heritage of indigenous minorities.”

The document Russia published, in its own voice and in the year before its scheduled chairmanship of the Arctic Council, committed the Russian state operationally to cooperation. The Arctic Council established by the 1996 Ottawa Declaration^[2] was the forum the Russian document treated as load-bearing. The document’s other sections — on military posture, on the Northern Sea Route, on dual-use infrastructure — are also there, in their own clauses, in their own paragraphs. The cooperative frame is not a screen for the rest; it is named alongside the rest, weighted as a primary measure of national policy.

In February 2022 Russia invaded Ukraine.^[3] The seven other Arctic Council member states — Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the United States — announced on 3 March of that year that they would not attend Arctic Council meetings under Russian chairmanship.^[4] Ministerial-level diplomacy ceased. Working groups went virtual. Russia kept its seat. No state sat across from it.

Russia’s own published Arctic posture was suspended by Russia’s non-Arctic war. The cooperative framework that the 2022 U.S. National Strategy for the Arctic Region (NSAR) was still attempting to operate within,^[5] that the 2020 Russian strategy had named as its operational frame, that the 1996 Ottawa Declaration had founded — did not collapse from inside the Arctic. It was a casualty of a war that happened somewhere else.

II. Dynamic Filters

There is a specific U.S. Arctic strategy that has been executed since 2022. It is not the 2022 NSAR with its three cooperative pillars. It is not the 2024 DoD Arctic Strategy with its monitor-and-respond posture. It is not the 2026 National Defense Strategy with its perimeter framing of Greenland as “key terrain.” And it is not the unfiltered output of any single expert menu. The political-mobilization layer of the assemblage operates two mechanisms in tandem. It filters the expert menus at the level of individual recommendation, executing items that authorize buildout while discarding items that constrain it; and when the filtered set is politically insufficient, the rhetorical layer exceeds it, repositioning the most aggressive expert recommendations as the moderate option. The Greenland walk-back is the clearest case. The President’s threats of military annexation set the upper bound; when the rhetoric retreated to “expanded U.S. military access under the 1951 Defense Agreement,” what read as compromise was the most aggressive items on the expert menus. The cooperative and dovish recommendations had already been filtered out.

The March 2026 House Armed Services Committee hearing on the posture of U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command is the room where the mechanism was named in open session, in a single sentence, by Representative Sarah Elfreth (D-MD-3) in exchange with NORTHCOM Commander General Gregory Guillot.

The argument has six steps. The doctrinal layer’s framing hardened between 2022 and 2026 in a direction the 2022 NSAR did not commit to. The menu landscape is plural and contains its own internal debate, not the expert consensus the doctrinal layer claims. The political-mobilization layer filters individual recommendations across menus, executing the buildout subset and discarding the constraint subset. The executable subset has been operationalized in a defined and dated sequence of procurement, command-structure, and mineral-access actions. The rhetorical layer ran beyond the menus before walking back to the executable subset codified in the January 2026 Davos framework — and the walk-back was itself the legitimizing move that made the filtered subset look moderate. By the end of this trajectory, the cooperative recommendations and Indigenous-rights commitments the same expert institutions had named are no longer visible in the operational policy frame at all.

III. The Shifting Doctrine, 2022 to 2026

The October 2022 NSAR, issued under the Biden administration, names ten years of cooperative U.S. Arctic engagement and proposes another decade. Strategic Objective 3.4 commits the U.S. to “manage tensions and prevent conflict in the Arctic, both through diplomatic engagement and by maintaining the credibility of U.S. and allied deterrence.”^[5:1] Its three pillars — security, climate, sustainable development — are presented as complementary. Indigenous communities are named throughout. Russia is named as a “competitor” with whom “we will seek to manage tensions.” The framing is conflict-managed, not conflict-defined.

The July 2024 Department of Defense Arctic Strategy is transitional.^[6] The cooperative scaffolding is still present but the language has hardened: the Arctic is now “an area of strategic competition” and the document specifies a “monitor-and-respond” posture against Russian and Chinese activity. The 2022 NSAR’s “diplomatic engagement” with Russia survives as a footnote.

The January 2026 National Defense Strategy moves the framing fully.^[7] Greenland appears in the strategy’s geographic enumerations as “key terrain”; the document directs the Joint Force to “secure immediate security perimeter and key terrain from Alaska to Greenland in the Arctic to the Gulf of America and the Panama Canal and surrounding countries.” The Arctic Council’s name does not appear. “Cooperation” with Russia is no longer a strategic objective. Indigenous communities are present in the language about Alaska but recede in the language about partners. The cooperative frame has been replaced by a perimeter frame.

The three documents in succession trace what the cooperative framework’s collapse made room for. The vacuum was filled with a hostile-presence doctrine. The Russian state’s self-suspension was treated as occasion to revise the U.S. position toward what U.S. doctrine had not been willing to write down before. The 2026 NDS makes the 2022 NSAR obsolete. Neither document concedes this; both can be read on their own terms. Read in sequence, the rotation is unambiguous.

IV. The Think Tank Diet

Six expert-institutional menus shaped the landscape for the shift in doctrine.

RAND’s Plan Blue 21, sponsored by the U.S. Air Force and published in 2023, ran a strategic wargame whose players prioritized persistent sensing over capability buildouts; reported flatly that “Russia today seems to be largely satisfied with the status quo that exists in the Arctic”; treated Russian posture as “operating from a defensive mindset, quick to view Western activities as threatening”; and recommended that “Russian representatives should sometimes be included in deliberations.”^[8] In the wargame’s strategic-communications analysis, the document also reported that the U.S. and allied side’s narratives publicizing Russian Arctic activity — in wargame terminology, “Blue” refers to U.S. and allied players, “Red” to Russia — had no measurable effect on Russian behavior: “Blue narratives laying bare Red provocations in the Arctic had no discernible effects on Red actions or calculations.” The diplomatic practice of publicly calling out adversary actions in the hope of producing concession or restraint, commonly called naming-and-shaming, was the practice the RAND wargame found to be ineffective.

CNAS’s Navigating Russia in a Changing Arctic, published in November 2021 before the war, framed the Arctic as the strategic theater where “there are few, if any, other areas where interests between the United States, its allies and partners, and Russia overlap to such an extent” and proposed a U.S.-Russia bilateral rules-of-the-road agreement, restart of the Arctic Chiefs of Defense forum, and continued operation of the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement scientific monitoring program.^[9]

CSIS’s America’s Arctic Moment, published in 2020 under Heather Conley and Matthew Melino,^[10] proposed a U.S. Arctic Security Initiative (ASI) funding polar cutters, ice-strengthened surface vessels, and Pituffik (Thule) radar upgrades; recommended a Senior Director for Arctic Affairs at the National Security Council, a State Department “Bureau of European, Eurasian, and Arctic Affairs,” a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Northern European and Arctic Affairs, and a senior DHS civilian for Arctic; called for an Arctic Sustainable Stewardship and Engagement Fund (ASSEF) for Indigenous community resiliency, coastal village relocation, and sub-regional economic development; and recommended “a more robust diplomatic outreach to Russia within the framework of the Arctic Council and coastal states,” annual eight-nation foreign-and-defense ministers meetings outside the Council, and continued CAO Fisheries cooperation. The same document characterized Russia’s Arctic military posture as “designed primarily for territorial defense purposes and protection of Russia’s second-strike capabilities.”

The Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise (2024 edition, the “Project 2025” volume) treated NATO as needing to “acknowledge that it is in part an Arctic alliance” and proposed U.S.-Russia cooperation against China’s so-called Polar Silk Road, deeper U.S.–Greenland economic ties, and procurement-track investments in USCG icebreaker capacity.^[11]

Lawrence Livermore’s Center for Global Security Research published Polar Power Play in May 2025.^[12] The document endorsed the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE Pact) by name, recommended dual-use Arctic infrastructure investment, advocated NATO as a force multiplier — and, in its concluding section, named long-term Russian reintegration as a requirement for pan-Arctic governance: “The European reintegration of France post-Napoleon and the lack of integration of Germany post-World War I underscores important lessons.”

The Center for European Policy Analysis published Up North: Strengthening the Allied Arctic Presence in November 2024.^[13] The document called for ice-capable surface combatants and uncrewed maritime systems; framed Russia as the principal threat; explicitly proposed “an Arctic Military Code of Conduct” among the seven non-Russian Arctic states; and warned, in a passage often unmentioned by its readers, that “discussions around Arctic military security affairs should come with the caveat that they should as far as possible not securitize the debate.”

No two menus agree on the full picture. RAND is restraint-oriented. CEPA is deterrence-oriented but proposes a Code of Conduct. CSIS is buildout-aligned but recommends Russia outreach. Heritage is hawkish on capability but proposes U.S.-Russia cooperation against the People’s Republic. Each menu contains, within itself, both items that constrain the buildout and items that authorize it. There is no expert consensus. There is a landscape with internal debate. The doctrinal-layer claim to “expert consensus” rests on a selective reading of the landscape — not on the landscape itself.

V. Filtered Recommendations

The filtering pattern emerges through a close examination of America’s Arctic Moment. It organizes its recommendations into five categories: Diplomatic Presence; the Arctic Security Initiative (ASI); the Arctic Sustainable Stewardship and Engagement Fund (ASSEF); International Norms and Frameworks; and Organizing for Success.

The ASI’s procurement-track items have been executed. Polar Security Cutters are in U.S. Coast Guard procurement.^[14] Pituffik Space Base — the renamed Thule — has a Serco $323 million modernization contract dated August 2024 and a $25 million additional tender in 2025.^[15] NORAD aircraft modernization is underway. The Organizing for Success category’s senior positions are operative in operational form; the Department of Homeland Security signed the November 2024 Icebreaker Collaboration Effort MOU with Canada and Finland as a non-treaty trilateral arrangement under DHS leadership,^[16] fulfilling the senior-DHS-civilian-for-Arctic recommendation.

The same document’s engagement-track items have not been executed. The “robust diplomatic outreach to Russia within the framework of the Arctic Council and coastal states” has not happened. The annual foreign- and defense-ministers meeting of the eight Arctic Council nations has not been held. The Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement’s “5+5 fisheries moratorium Joint Program of Scientific Monitoring,” which CSIS named as the test case for whether the cooperative scientific framework could survive, has not been operationalized in the form recommended. The ASSEF’s coastal-village relocation, water, sanitation, and mental-health components are funded substantially below the scale CSIS specified.

Same author. Same publication. Same 2020 strategic-context analysis. Same five-category structure. The procurement and command-structure categories executed. The diplomatic-engagement and Indigenous-resiliency categories not.

This pattern repeats across menus. The Lawrence Livermore CGSR document names both the ICE Pact (executed) and the Russia-reintegration-by-mid-century scenario (not pursued). CEPA names both Arctic-specific hardware investment (executed) and the Arctic Military Code of Conduct (not pursued). Heritage names both NATO Arctic alliance recognition (operationalized via Sweden and Finland’s accession and via the post-Davos NATO Arctic Sentry posture) and U.S.-Russia cooperation against China’s Polar Silk Road (not pursued — the Trump 2 administration has been hostile to both states simultaneously). RAND’s persistent-sensing prioritization is partly visible in the over-the-horizon radar programs but its analytical caution about overreaction is not visible in doctrine.

The political-mobilization layer is not selecting whole menus. It is filtering recommendations within and across them. The recommendations that survive authorize capability buildout, procurement, and threat-framing. The recommendations that do not survive would constrain the buildout — the cooperation channels, treaty-framework strengthening, reintegration scenarios, and Indigenous-community investments the same menus contain.

VI. Icing out the Competition

The procurement track moved across three administrations, each approval framed through the threat-protection and homeland-security language Assemblage named as the political-mobilization layer’s signature justification. The Arctic appropriations cycle reproduces the Indo-Pacific pattern: each ask presented as a defensive response to Russian or Chinese activity; each authorization passing with bipartisan support; the cumulative effect a military-industrial buildout no single appropriation paragraph would have authorized on its own merit.

The Icebreaker Collaboration Effort was formed on 11 July 2024 and the MOU was signed on 13 November 2024 by the United States, Canada, and Finland.^[16:1] The MOU is, by its own §2, deliberately non-treaty: a memorandum of cooperation, signed at the Department of Homeland Security level, designed to bypass the ratification and oversight processes that a treaty would invoke. Under the Trump administration that took office in January 2025, the arrangement was carried forward and renamed: a Presidential Memorandum authorized the construction of up to four Arctic Security Cutters abroad — bypassing Jones Act presumptions that have historically delayed U.S. Coast Guard polar acquisitions — and the Coast Guard awarded contracts for up to six.^[17] The first new Arctic icebreaker in twenty-five years was commissioned in August 2025.^[18] The Department of Homeland Security continues to host the ICE Pact ministerial meetings and posted a Federal Register Request for Information for further development on 6 April 2026.

Pituffik’s modernization is concurrent.^[15:1] The Serco contract was signed in August 2024; the additional tender followed in 2025. Greenland reception facilities on the east and west coasts — recommended by CSIS — are in various stages of planning.

Executive Order 14285, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” was signed on 24 April 2025.^[19] It directs the United States to advance seabed mineral exploration and commercial recovery outside the framework of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the United States has never ratified, and outside the framework of the International Seabed Authority, where states-party to UNCLOS adjudicate seabed claims in areas beyond national jurisdiction. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration issued the implementing final rule on 21 January 2026, allowing simultaneous submission of exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits, dramatically compressing the permitting timeline.^[20] More than ten applications were received in the months following. The U.S. Geological Survey’s stated rationale concerns critical minerals and the F-35 supply chain; the legal effect is that U.S. seabed-mining licensing now operates parallel to, and outside, the multilateral framework Russia and China both work within. The same legal-framework asymmetry that Assemblage Part II named between the U.N. Charter and Operation Epic Fury operates between UNCLOS and EO 14285.

In Greenland: the U.S. Export-Import Bank issued a $120 million letter of interest to Critical Metals Corp for the Tanbreez rare-earth project in June 2025.^[21] The Department of Defense announced on 17 June 2025 that Greenland’s military oversight had been transferred from U.S. European Command to U.S. Northern Command, placing it under General Gregory Guillot, who also commands the North American Aerospace Defense Command.^[22]

By the time of the House Armed Services Committee FY27 hearing on the posture of U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command, held in March 2026,^[23] the procurement and command-structure pieces of the executable subset of the menus were operational.

VII. Excessive Rhetoric

The rhetorical track ran ahead of the procurement track and, for a stretch, beyond what any menu in the corpus recommended.

In December 2024 and through the early Trump 2 administration, the President argued publicly that the United States needed to acquire Greenland — “buy or take it,” “the easy way or the hard way.” Vice President J. D. Vance traveled to Pituffik Space Base on 28 March 2025, in a trip originally scheduled as a cultural visit by his wife Usha Vance (a dog-sled race, heritage sites) that was scaled back after Denmark and Greenland publicly condemned it as escalation.^[24] On site, Vance attacked Denmark for failing to keep Greenland secure. The base’s commander, Colonel Susannah Meyers, was relieved of command in April 2025, following the public reporting of an internal email in which she had registered dissent from Vance’s framing.^[25]

The January 2026 National Defense Strategy named Greenland as “key terrain.”^[7:1] Throughout the first weeks of 2026, the President refused to rule out the use of force; threatened a 25 percent tariff on goods from European states that opposed Greenland’s acquisition; Denmark deployed additional troops to Greenland; Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned that “a U.S. attack on a NATO ally would be the end of everything.”

No menu document in the corpus recommended military acquisition of Greenland. CSIS, in 2020, mentions the 2019 Greenland-purchase suggestion as context, not as a recommendation. Heritage’s 2024 chapter proposes deeper U.S.–Greenland economic ties and a consulate. Lawrence Livermore proposes dual-use infrastructure investment.

On 21 January 2026, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, after a meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte, the President announced a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland and, in fact, the entire Arctic Region.”^[26] The 25 percent tariff threat was dropped. The use-of-force position was rescinded. The framework’s four publicly named elements were: accelerated NATO Arctic security investment by member states; restrictions barring non-NATO states from acquiring rights to Greenland’s sub-ice rare earth minerals; integration of Greenland into the proposed Golden Dome missile defense system; and continued expansion of U.S. military access under the 1951 U.S.-Denmark Defense Agreement.^[27]

The framework’s four elements are the executable subset of the menu landscape, condensed into a single artifact. NATO Arctic capacity investment is in CSIS, Heritage, CEPA, and Lawrence Livermore. Non-NATO mineral exclusion is consistent with the EO 14285 trajectory and aligns with the Heritage and LLNL framings of critical minerals as a strategic resource. Golden Dome integration sits on the radar and missile-defense recommendations in CSIS and the 2026 NDS. Continued access under the 1951 Agreement is in every menu, because every menu assumes the Agreement as the legal floor.

The rhetoric exceeded the menus. The walk-back settled into them.

VIII. Hearing the Mechanism

The political-mobilization layer’s relationship to the operational and menu layers was named in open session at the House Armed Services Committee posture hearing on U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command, held in March 2026, chaired by Representative Mike Rogers (R-AL) and with Representative Adam Smith (D-WA) as Ranking Member.^[23:1] Three witnesses appeared: Joseph Humire, performing the duties of Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and the Americas’ Security Affairs;^[23:2] General Gregory Guillot, NORTHCOM/NORAD Commander; and General Alvin Holsey, SOUTHCOM Commander.

Humire opened with the 2026 NDS framing reproduced almost verbatim. “Our plan is to continue to transition to partner-led deterrence focused operations against narco-terrorist networks that threaten the U.S. homeland while enhancing our posture to secure immediate security perimeter and key terrain. From Alaska to Greenland in the Arctic to the Gulf of America and the Panama Canal and surrounding countries, the department is implementing what the NSS has described as the Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Both to defend America’s immediate security perimeter and to deny adversaries access to key terrain across the Western Hemisphere.”^[23:3] The doctrinal language of the NDS is the political-mobilization language of the hearing. The two layers are speaking the same sentences.

General Guillot’s prepared remarks confirmed the operational change: “With the inclusion of Greenland into the U.S. NORTHCOM area of responsibility, we are executing seamless defensive operations across North American Arctic in close cooperation with allies and partners through exercises like Arctic Edge and NORAD’s Operation Noble Defender.”^[23:4] Greenland is now wholly under NORTHCOM, dated to 17 June 2025.^[22:1]

Two hours into the hearing, Representative Sarah Elfreth (D-MD-3) — whose district contains the United States Naval Academy and who is in her first term on the House Armed Services Committee — used her round of questioning to press what she called “a disconnect between the president’s rhetoric and what we’re actually seeing as imminent threats on the ground.” After exchanges on Cuba, she turned to Greenland:^[23:5]

Representative Elfreth: There is no doubt from anybody on this committee that China and Russia pose significant threats to Arctic security, particularly because they’ve outpaced us on icebreakers and are far more aggressive. But we can all agree, I hope, that it is too broad of a terrain to monitor and protect on our own. That’s why we have allies. That’s why we have particularly our NATO allies. Yet again, the President’s rhetoric. I’ll just quote him: “We are going to do something about Greenland. If we don’t do it the easy way, we’ll do it the hard way.” General Guillot, I imagine that makes your job particularly difficult. I was heartened to hear in your opening statement respect for our allies, our NATO allies, how important Denmark and Greenland are to Arctic security. I guess my fundamental question here is what do you want to do or what does the President want to do with Greenland that the 1951 treaty doesn’t allow us to do?

General Guillot: Congresswoman, we are working with Denmark through the Department of State to expand some of the authorities that are in the 1951 treaty to give increased access to different bases across Greenland as we look at the increasing threat and the strategic importance of Greenland. But everything that we’re doing through NORTHCOM is through Greenland and through Denmark.

Representative Elfreth: So I’m hearing we could have achieved all of this diplomatically through our NATO alliance without threatening to take or to invade Greenland by force.

General Guillot: Well, I can speak to the mil-to-mil [military-to-military, i.e., the relationship between U.S. and Danish armed forces — as distinct from political, diplomatic, or commercial dimensions] portion and we have a very strong relationship with Denmark.

Representative Elfreth: And I want to commend you for maintaining that relationship despite what some of the news or what the President may say. I think the mil-to-mil relationship is essential here despite that rhetoric. With that, I yield back.

The exchange is the recommendation-level filter named in real time. The operational reality is the expansion of U.S. military access under the 1951 U.S.-Denmark Defense Agreement, negotiated with Denmark through the State Department — which is what every menu in the corpus recommends, what NORTHCOM is actually doing, and what the Davos framework formalizes. The rhetoric was a layer the operational layer did not need. The mil-to-mil relationship is essential here despite that rhetoric.

IX. What About Greenland

On 11 March 2025, Greenland held general elections to its 31-seat Inatsisartut.^[28] Demokraatit, a center-right party that favors eventual independence on a slow timeline and that campaigned on “Greenland is not for sale,” won 29.9 percent of the vote — a 20-point increase over its 2021 result — and the largest single bloc of seats. Naleraq, the pro-independence party, came second with 24.5 percent. The incumbent Inuit Ataqatigiit took 21.4 percent. On 27 March 2025, a coalition government was formed including every party that won seats except Naleraq.^[29] Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the Demokraatit leader, became Prime Minister.

The post-election polling is consistent with the result: roughly 85 percent of Greenlanders oppose becoming part of the United States.^[30] The Greenlandic political position is independence on a Greenlandic timeline, retention of the relationship with the Kingdom of Denmark in the near term, openness to the United States as a security and economic partner, refusal of the framing under which Greenland’s status is negotiable as a transaction. Prime Minister Nielsen has stated this publicly.

The Kingdom of Denmark assumed the chairmanship of the Arctic Council in May 2025 for the 2025–2027 term, with Greenland in a leading role for the first time in Council history.^[31] The chairmanship program was launched on 11 April 2026 at an event in Nuuk. The cooperative framework that the war in Ukraine narrowed has not been abandoned by the seven non-Russian member states; it has been continued at a lower temperature under Danish-Greenlandic stewardship.

The Inuit Circumpolar Council, an Indigenous permanent participant in the Arctic Council representing populations across the United States, Canada, Greenland, and the Russian Federation,^[32] has continued to function across the 2022–2026 period — across the U.S.-Russia border that the diplomatic framework has not. The Sámi Council has done the same across Norway, Sweden, Finland, and the Russian Federation.^[33] The Indigenous bodies the menus name, that the 2022 NSAR foregrounded, and that the Russian 2020 Strategy 2035 also foregrounded — have outlasted the inter-state cooperation framework.

There is a counter-mobilization in the U.S. Congress. On 13 January 2026, Senators Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), the latter the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced the NATO Unity Protection Act.^[34] The bill prohibits the use of Department of Defense or Department of State funds to “blockade, occupy, annex or otherwise assert control over the sovereign territory of a NATO member state without that ally’s consent or authorization from the North Atlantic Council.” Senator Murkowski’s profile — senior Republican from Alaska, ranking member of Appropriations, long-serving on the Arctic Caucus — is exactly the profile the menu-selection mechanism would predict to align with the procurement track. She is funding the buildout: the Arctic Security Cutter and Pituffik modernization line items move through Appropriations cycles she advances. She is also blocking the annexation rhetoric. The capture is not unidirectional. A senator can fund the buildout-track procurement and block the annexation rhetoric in the same week.

The cooperation framework did not die. It narrowed. The Arctic Council under the Kingdom of Denmark’s chairmanship continues to operate at the working-group level, in virtual format, with Russia keeping its seat and limited participation in the environmental and safety working groups. Ministerial diplomacy is paused. The 2022 NSAR’s pillars — security, climate, sustainable development — are unevenly carried in different fora; security has migrated to NATO Arctic Sentry (the alliance’s enhanced Vigilance Activity for the High North, launched on 11 February 2026)^[35] and to bilateral and trilateral channels (the U.S.-Denmark Defense Agreement, the ICE Pact); climate has migrated to scientific working groups and Indigenous bodies; sustainable development has migrated unevenly across the Council, the Nordic Council, and Greenland’s own institutions.

The Cold Response 26 exercise (9–19 March 2026; 32,500 personnel from 14 NATO nations including Sweden and Finland; Norwegian-U.S. joint headquarters at Reitan near Bodø)^[36] is the visible alliance-level execution of the Davos framework’s NATO Arctic security ramp-up. The 2026 NDS frames the same activity as perimeter defense. The Norwegian and Finnish armed forces frame it as deterrence within the long Russian-border posture both states have managed for decades. The same exercise is described in three different doctrinal registers by three different participants.

Russia’s spring 2026 Arctic activity — Northern Fleet exercises out of Severomorsk on 21–23 April with notices announcing possible missile firings, continued submarine-fleet modernization^[37] — is consistent with what RAND’s Plan Blue 21 anticipated and what CSIS, in its 2020 framing, characterized as “designed primarily for territorial defense purposes and protection of Russia’s second-strike capabilities.” That CSIS characterization is in the same document as the polar-cutter and Pituffik recommendations that have been executed. The political-mobilization layer that filtered CSIS at the recommendation level filtered this particular paragraph out.

X. A Framework of Foreclosure

The cooperative framework that had held in the Arctic since 1996 was narrowed by a non-Arctic war. Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine suspended the cooperative posture that its own 2020 Arctic strategy had named as its operational frame. The seven other Arctic states declined to operate the Arctic Council under Russian chairmanship.

In the vacuum left by the cooperative framework’s narrowing, the United States and its partners moved on a defined set of items, visible in the public record: the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort and its Arctic Security Cutter successor program; Pituffik Space Base modernization; the transfer of Greenland’s military oversight from European Command to Northern Command; Executive Order 14285 and the 21 January 2026 NOAA final rule on deep-seabed mining; the Tanbreez letter of interest; the Davos framework with its four publicly named elements; the alliance-level execution of NATO Arctic Sentry and Cold Response 26. These items are recommended, in one form or another, by every expert menu in the corpus. They are the executable subset of the menus.

No bilateral U.S.-Russia rules-of-the-road agreement. No restart of the Arctic Chiefs of Defense forum. No annual eight-nation foreign-and-defense ministers meeting. No operational Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries scientific monitoring program at the scale the menus specify. No coastal-village relocation program at the scale CSIS’s ASSEF named. No ratification of UNCLOS. No Arctic Military Code of Conduct of the type CEPA proposed. No Russian-reintegration scenario of the type Lawrence Livermore named. No “robust diplomatic outreach to Russia within the framework of the Arctic Council and coastal states” of the type CSIS named in the same document that recommended the Pituffik upgrades.

These items are also recommended in the same menus. The filter operates at the level of individual recommendation, within and across menus.

For a stretch in late 2024 and through 2025, the political-mobilization layer’s rhetoric exceeded even the aggressive menus. The President called for the United States to acquire Greenland “the easy way or the hard way,” threatened a 25 percent tariff on Denmark and other European states, refused to rule out the use of force against a NATO ally, and framed Greenland as “key terrain” under a “Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” no menu in the corpus had been willing to write down. The rhetorical excess was not noise. It did political work. It repositioned the buildout-track items as the moderate option. By the time the President walked back at Davos from annexation rhetoric to a framework whose operative element is expanded U.S. military access under the 1951 Defense Agreement, the latter — which is precisely what the most aggressive expert menus had recommended — read as compromise. The “framework” that emerged from the walk-back is the menu’s aggressive subset, presented as restraint. The CSIS “robust diplomatic outreach to Russia,” the LLNL Russia-reintegration scenario, the CEPA Arctic Military Code of Conduct, the 2022 NSAR’s Indigenous-community resiliency commitments — these had already been filtered out. The rhetoric’s excess ensured that no one in the visible policy conversation could ask why.

The Inuit Circumpolar Council’s continued cross-border operation, the Sámi Council’s parallel function, the Greenlandic government’s stated openness to security cooperation on Greenlandic terms, the Murkowski–Shaheen counter-mobilization in the Senate — these are not absent. They are visible in the public record. They are real. They are not in the operational policy frame the assemblage produced. The expert menus’ cooperation recommendations are not in the frame. The 2022 NSAR’s Indigenous-community commitments at scale are not in the frame. The Arctic Council under Kingdom of Denmark stewardship remains an institutional shell but is no longer a U.S. operational venue.

What was executed is what survived the filter and the rhetoric together: the recommendations that authorized military access expansion, procurement, mineral extraction outside multilateral frameworks, and command-structure consolidation. What did not survive: diplomacy with Russia within established Arctic forums, ratification of the legal frameworks the same menus called load-bearing, Indigenous-resiliency investment at the scale the menus specified, the cooperative recommendations of every menu in the corpus. This trajectory and the Indo-Pacific case Assemblage treated before it show the same shape: a U.S. political assemblage seemingly determined to create enemies where cooperation already exists.

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Acknowledgments. The documentary trail for this essay was identified through methodology developed for Assemblage (May 2026) and applied to a fresh case. No single named investigator surfaced the Arctic document set in the way Brian Berletic and The New Atlas surfaced the IndoPacom documents — the trail here was self-derived through standard policy-research search and through reading published menus alongside published doctrine. The U.S. Naval War College’s Russia Maritime Studies Institute translation of Russia’s 2020 Strategy 2035 was load-bearing for §I. The auto-captioned transcript of the March 2026 House Armed Services Committee hearing on the posture of U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command was retrieved via YouTube’s transcript API; speaker attribution was established as documented in footnote ^[23:6]. Donor crosswalks for the Arctic Caucus members named here remain to be completed and may produce a companion piece.

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1. Russian Federation, Foundations of State Policy of the Russian Federation in the Arctic for the Period up to 2035, approved by Decree of the President of the Russian Federation No. 164, 5 March 2020. English translation by the Russia Maritime Studies Institute (RMSI), U.S. Naval War College, available via https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/rmsi_research/. Section 16 (Measures for international cooperation), clauses (a)–(j), is the load-bearing passage cited here. ↩︎

2. Declaration on the Establishment of the Arctic Council, Ottawa, 19 September 1996. https://oaarchive.arctic-council.org/items/85d273ad-2dad-44e1-aab7-d77b3d4ab088. ↩︎

3. For sourcing on the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine and its date, see the references and citations in Assemblage Part I (https://deleuzer.net/research/assemblage-part-1-pipelines/), footnotes ^[13:1]–^[18:1]. The Arctic essay does not re-litigate the invasion’s basic facts; it relies on the prior essay’s source apparatus. ↩︎

4. Arctic Council, “Joint Statement on Limited Resumption of Arctic Council Cooperation,” and the antecedent 3 March 2022 statement by Arctic 7 foreign ministries pausing Council work under Russian chairship. See https://arctic-council.org/news/. Background: Arctic Council (Wikipedia), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Council. ↩︎

5. White House, National Strategy for the Arctic Region, October 2022. https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/National-Strategy-for-the-Arctic-Region.pdf. Implementation Plan released October 2023; final Implementation Report January 2025. ↩︎ ↩︎

6. U.S. Department of Defense, 2024 Arctic Strategy, July 2024. https://media.defense.gov/2024/Jul/22/2003507410/-1/-1/0/DOD-ARCTIC-STRATEGY-2024.PDF. ↩︎

7. U.S. Department of Defense, 2026 National Defense Strategy, January 23, 2026. https://media.defense.gov/2026/Jan/23/2003864773/-1/-1/0/2026-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY.PDF. The “key terrain from Alaska to Greenland” enumeration appears in Line of Effort 1. ↩︎ ↩︎

8. RAND Corporation, Insights from the Plan Blue 21 Game: Strategic Competition with Russia in the Arctic, RR-A970-1, 2023. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA970-1.html. Sponsored by the U.S. Air Force. The quoted findings are from the report’s Summary and from the Insights section. ↩︎

9. Andrea Kendall-Taylor and Jim Townsend, Navigating Russia in a Changing Arctic, Center for a New American Security (CNAS), November 2021. https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/navigating-russia-in-a-changing-arctic. ↩︎

10. Heather A. Conley and Matthew Melino, America’s Arctic Moment: Great Power Competition in the Arctic to 2050, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Rowman & Littlefield, 2020. The five-category recommendation structure and the “robust diplomatic outreach to Russia” clause are in the volume’s concluding chapter. ↩︎

11. Heritage Foundation, Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise, 2024 edition (the “Project 2025” volume), Arctic and Department of Homeland Security chapters. https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/report/mandate-leadership-the-conservative-promise. ↩︎

12. Center for Global Security Research, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Polar Power Play: Charting a Geostrategic Course in the Arctic, May 2025. https://cgsr.llnl.gov/. The Vienna-1814 reintegration analogy is in the concluding section. ↩︎

13. Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA), Up North: Strengthening the Allied Arctic Presence, November 2024. https://cepa.org/comprehensive-reports/up-north-strengthening-the-allied-arctic-presence/. The Arctic Military Code of Conduct proposal and the “not securitize the debate” caveat are in adjacent sections of the recommendations chapter. ↩︎ ↩︎

14. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Coast Guard: Action Needed to Improve Polar Security Cutter Acquisition,” and successor reports on the program; U.S. Coast Guard public program updates. The PSC program has been documented across multiple fiscal-year DHS budget submissions; see https://www.uscg.mil/Acquisition/Programs/. ↩︎

15. Department of Defense contract announcements, Pituffik Space Base modernization, August 2024 ($323 million Serco LLC contract) and 2025 supplemental tender; reported by Reuters, Defense News, and High North News. https://www.defense.gov/News/Contracts/. ↩︎ ↩︎

16. Department of Homeland Security, “Joint Statement on the Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE) Pact,” 13 November 2024. https://www.dhs.gov/ice-pact. The MOU text itself was extracted via Canada.ca and is preserved in this project’s raw/ICE-Pact-MOU.txt. ↩︎ ↩︎

17. The White House, Presidential Memorandum authorizing construction of Arctic Security Cutters abroad, 2025; U.S. Coast Guard contract announcements for up to six Arctic Security Cutters in partnership with Finnish shipbuilders. See “DHS Hosts Icebreaker Collaboration Effort Pact Ministerial Meeting to Advance Arctic Security and Maritime Dominance,” DHS, 19 November 2025, https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/11/19/dhs-hosts-icebreaker-collaboration-effort-pact-ministerial-meeting-advance-arctic. Federal Register, “Request for Information: Icebreaker Collaboration Effort (ICE) Pact,” 6 April 2026, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/04/06/2026-06648/request-for-information-icebreaker-collaboration-effort-ice-pact. ↩︎

18. Department of Homeland Security, “Historic: Trump Administration Commissions First Arctic Icebreaker in Quarter of a Century,” 11 August 2025. https://www.dhs.gov/news/2025/08/11/historic-trump-administration-commissions-first-arctic-icebreaker-quarter-century. ↩︎ ↩︎

19. Executive Order 14285, “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources,” 24 April 2025. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/04/29/2025-07466/unleashing-americas-offshore-critical-minerals-and-resources. Legal analysis: “Understanding Executive Order 14285,” ASIL Insights, https://www.asil.org/insights/volume/29/issue/9. ↩︎

20. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, “Deep Seabed Mining: Revisions to Regulations for Exploration License and Commercial Recovery Permit Applications,” final rule, 21 January 2026. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/01/21/2026-01044/deep-seabed-mining-revisions-to-regulations-for-exploration-license-and-commercial-recovery-permit. ↩︎

21. Export-Import Bank of the United States, letter of interest for the Tanbreez rare-earth project in southern Greenland, $120 million, June 2025; press coverage in Mining Weekly, Reuters, and Arctic Today. https://www.exim.gov/. ↩︎

22. U.S. Northern Command, “Greenland Now in U.S. Northern Command Area of Responsibility,” 17 June 2025. https://www.northcom.mil/Newsroom/Press-Releases/Article/4218865/greenland-now-in-us-northern-command-area-of-responsibility/. Background: “DOD approves new Unified Command Plan, transfers Greenland to NORTHCOM,” Inside Defense; “Pentagon Puts Greenland Under US Northern Command,” Air & Space Forces Magazine, https://www.airandspaceforces.com/pentagon-puts-greenland-under-us-northern-command/. ↩︎ ↩︎

23. House Armed Services Committee, posture hearing on the Department of the Air Force and U.S. Northern Command and U.S. Southern Command, March 2026, chaired by Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL), with Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA) as Ranking Member. Witnesses: Joseph Humire (performing the duties of Assistant Secretary of War for Homeland Defense and the Americas’ Security Affairs); Gen. Gregory M. Guillot (USNORTHCOM/NORAD Commander); Gen. Alvin Holsey (USSOUTHCOM Commander). YouTube auto-captioned transcript: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PeWXOtk6Co. All cited quotes are from this transcript; the auto-caption stream does not include speaker tags, so speaker attribution in this essay is established by context, by chair-recognition statements (“the gentleman from Indiana,” “the gentle lady from Maryland yields back”), and by self-identifying statements (“the United States Naval Academy that I proudly represent” — which establishes the speaker as the representative for Maryland’s 3rd Congressional District, the district that contains Annapolis; Rep. Sarah Elfreth, D-MD-3, was elected in 2024 to that seat and serves on the House Armed Services Committee). The hearing transcript is preserved in this project’s raw/youtube-transcript-6PeWXOtk6Co.txt. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

24. CBS News, “JD Vance blasts Denmark in visit to Greenland with wife Usha as Trump administration eyes territory,” 28 March 2025, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/jd-usha-vance-visit-greenland-most-greenlanders-dont-want-to-join-america/; NPR, “Vance tells Greenlanders they’d be better off being part of the United States,” 28 March 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/03/28/nx-s1-5343555/vance-greenland-visit. U.S. Space Force release: “Vice President visits Pituffik SB,” https://www.petersonschriever.spaceforce.mil/Newsroom/News/Display/Article/4140629/vice-president-visits-pituffik-sb/. ↩︎

25. ABC News, “Commander of US base in Greenland fired for email critical of Vance visit,” April 2025. https://abcnews.go.com/International/commander-us-base-greenland-fired-email-critical-vance/story?id=120705531. ↩︎

26. Al Jazeera, “Trump’s Greenland ‘framework’ deal: What we know about it, what we don’t,” 22 January 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/22/trumps-greenland-framework-deal-what-we-know-about-it-what-we-dont; CBS News, “What’s in Trump’s ‘ultimate long-term deal’ on Greenland?” https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-greenland-davos-deal-nato-rutte-whats-in-the-agreement/; Council on Foreign Relations, “Trump Claims Greenland Compromise,” https://www.cfr.org/articles/trump-claims-greenland-compromise. ↩︎

27. Defense Agreement between the United States of America and the Kingdom of Denmark Pursuant to the North Atlantic Treaty, signed 27 April 1951, governing U.S. defense activities in Greenland; Supplementary Agreement of 2004 modernizing the 1951 framework. The 1951 Agreement is the legal floor for all U.S. military activity in Greenland and is the basis for the Pituffik Space Base presence. ↩︎

28. 2025 Greenlandic general election, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Greenlandic_general_election. CNN, “Greenland’s center-right opposition wins closely watched election dominated by Trump’s annexation threat,” 12 March 2025, https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/12/europe/greenland-election-polls-close-demokraatit-intl-hnk/; High North News, “Greenland Election: Demokraatit Emerges as the Island’s Largest Political Party,” https://www.highnorthnews.com/en/greenland-election-demokraatit-emerges-islands-largest-political-party. ↩︎

29. Coalition agreement of 27 March 2025, including Demokraatit, Inuit Ataqatigiit, Siumut, and Atassut; excluding Naleraq. Wikipedia, “2025 Greenlandic general election,” op. cit. ↩︎

30. Polling commissioned by Berlingske and Greenland’s Sermitsiaq in early 2025; reported across NPR, CBS News, and Al Jazeera coverage of the election. The 85 percent figure is robust across multiple polls in the January–March 2025 window. ↩︎

31. Arctic Council, “Kingdom of Denmark’s Chairship, 2025–2027.” https://arctic-council.org/about/kingdom-of-denmarks-chairship-2025-2027/. Launch event: Arctic Portal, “Kingdom of Denmark takes over Arctic Council Chairship! Greenland in Prominent Role,” https://arcticportal.org/ap-library/news/3758-kingdom-of-denmark-takes-over-arctic-council-chairship-with-greenland-in-prominent-role. Cross-cutting analysis: Foreign Policy, “Can the Arctic Council Survive the U.S.-Danish Rift Over Greenland?”, 16 April 2026, https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/04/16/arctic-council-trump-greenland-denmark/. ↩︎

32. Inuit Circumpolar Council, official site. https://www.inuitcircumpolar.com/. The ICC’s status as a permanent participant in the Arctic Council is established under the 1996 Ottawa Declaration; the ICC’s continued cross-border function across the U.S.-Russia border 2022–2026 is documented in the Arctic Council’s working-group reports. ↩︎

33. Sámi Council (Sámiráđđi). https://www.saamicouncil.net/. Permanent participant in the Arctic Council under the 1996 Ottawa Declaration. ↩︎

34. Murkowski–Shaheen NATO Unity Protection Act, introduced 13 January 2026. Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), press release: “Murkowski and Shaheen Introduce Legislation to Cement NATO Unity,” https://www.murkowski.senate.gov/press/release/murkowski-and-shaheen-introduce-legislation-to-cement-nato-unity; Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democratic press release: “Ranking Member Shaheen Pushes for Congress to Prohibit Taking Greenland by Passing the NATO Unity Protection Act,” https://www.foreign.senate.gov/press/dem/release/ranking-member-shaheen-pushes-for-congress-to-prohibit-taking-greenland-by-passing-the-nato-unity-protection-act; Al Jazeera, “US senators introduce bill to stop Trump seizing Greenland,” 14 January 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/1/14/us-senators-introduce-bill-to-stop-trump-seizing-greenland. ↩︎

35. NATO, Arctic Sentry enhanced Vigilance Activity, launched 11 February 2026; covered in NATO press releases and in CEPA, “NATO Awakens in the Arctic,” https://cepa.org/article/nato-awakens-in-the-high-north/. ↩︎

36. Norwegian Armed Forces, “Cold Response 2026.” https://www.forsvaret.no/en/exercises-and-operations/exercises/cr26. High North News, “Cold Response 2026: Over 30,000 From 14 Nations Exercise Defending the Northern Nordic Region,” https://en.highnorthnews.com/politics/cold-response-2026-over-30000-from-14-nations-exercise-defending-the-northern-nordic-region/1106150. ↩︎

37. TRADOC G2 Operational Environment Enterprise, “Russia Conducts Arctic Naval Maneuver and Propaganda Tour Along Northern Sea Route,” https://oe.tradoc.army.mil/product/russia-conducts-arctic-naval-maneuver-and-propaganda-tour-along-northern-sea-route/; The Arctic Institute, “The Arctic This Week — Take Five: Week of 20 April 2026,” https://www.thearcticinstitute.org/arctic-week-take-five-week-20-april-2026/. On longer-arc submarine modernization: Bloomberg, “As Putin Ramps Up Russia Submarine Fleet, NATO Returns to Cold War Readiness,” https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-russian-arctic-submarines-nato-response/. ↩︎