Climate Change in the US Arctic: A Growing Concern for Homeland Defense?

Dec 21, 2020 | Agata Lavorio
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Is climate change shaping U.S. Arctic posture? For much of its modern history, the U.S. has been considered a reluctant Arctic state, given its limited interest in the High North. In 2015, a survey by the Arctic Studio conducted in the U.S. found a greater affinity among Americans for the Rocky Mountains, the Great Plains, and the Pacific than the Arctic. Anecdotes such as the Seward’s icebox, or the answer sent by President Taft to the discoverer of the North Pole, Robert Peary (“I do not know exactly what I could do with it”), or the “Forgotten War” fought in the Aleutians, are usually quoted as proof of the minimalist US posture towards the Arctic.

For centuries, the remoteness and inhospitable nature of the Arctic (the “inaccessible bulwark” according to British geographer Halford Mackinder in the 1940s) has granted the U.S. continental defense in the Northern hemisphere, and has represented a bulwark in geopolitical planning. Today, this assumption is melting away.

Climate change is presenting totally new geostrategic scenarios in the Arctic. On the basis of a review of major defense documents, it can be argued that climate change is acting not only as a “threat multiplier” – a successful term coined by Sherri Goodman, former U.S. Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security) and (full disclosure) Senior Strageist at the Center for Climate and Security – but also as a growing concern for homeland defense.