Melting ice is opening new shipping routes and resource frontiers, turning the Arctic and Greenland into focal points of great-power competition.
Jakobshavn Glacier at Disko Bay (Greenland), © Giles Laurent, gileslaurent.com, License CC BY-SA, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Melting ice is opening new shipping routes and resource frontiers, turning the Arctic and Greenland into focal points of great-power competition.
The Arctic returns to the centre of global power politics
Once a remote and largely inaccessible region, the Arctic has become the focus of far-reaching international developments. In recent years, competition among major powers – USA, Russia and China above all – has intensified, threatening to erode the region’s long-standing cooperative model, often summed up by the slogan “High North, Low Tension”. A particularly revealing case is Greenland, which has emerged as a focal point of Arctic competition, as underscored by US President Donald Trump’s stated ambition to secure control of the island.
