Polar Geopolitics - Arctic and Antarctic analysis

Geopolitical rupture has been a reality in the Arctic since February 2022, but not all forms of Arctic governance have been equally affected. While the Arctic Council has struggled to function since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Central Arctic Ocean Fisheries Agreement has remained resilient, representing perhaps the last bastion of the otherwise defunct idea of Arctic exceptionalism. What can thes...

Situated near Russia’s Kola Peninsula—home to the Northern Fleet and a core component of Russia’s sea-based nuclear deterrent, including ballistic-missile submarines—the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard lies within the perimeter of Moscow’s Arctic bastion defence and has become an increasingly important potential flashpoint in the context of heightened NATO–Russia tensions. In this episode, Prof...

The strategic location of Greenland within the proposed Golden Dome missle defense system has been one of the Trump Administration’s main arguments for acquiring the massive Arctic island. To explain how the futuristic system would work, and why Greenland and the Arctic are crucial for protecting North America against ballistic and hypersonic cruise missles, Dr. Troy Bouffard, director of the University of Alaska-Fairbanks Ce...

Greenland’s substantial reserves of rare earth elements and other critical raw materials have become a prominent aspect of geopolitical posturing in the Arctic. For many observers, the Trump administration’s interest in acquiring Greenland has been driven in large part by a desire to secure access to strategic minerals and reduce U.S. dependence on Chinese supply chains. The European Union likewise sees Arctic natu...

The emphatic European response to the Greenland Crisis has made clear its growing interest in the Arctic at a time when the European Union is working on an updated Arctic policy. How will a radically altered geopolitical environment influence EU policy, what role does the Arctic play in Europe’s relationship with the United States, and has the crisis created an opportunity for the EU to reassert itself in a region sometimes s...

From the definitive end of Arctic exceptionalism to the long-term implications of the Greenland Crisis, Prof. Klaus Dodds and Dr. Gosia Smieszek-Rice engage in a big picture discussion on Arctic megatrends that are shaping the geopolitical future of the circumpolar North. Has the “Global Arctic” of a decade ago been replaced by a new era of Great Power Competition in which Europe finds itself in a “crush zone&rdqu...

Two prominent Greenlandic voices join this special episode of the Polar Geopolitics podcast,

recorded on location at the Arctic Frontiers conference in Tromsø, Norway. Aaja Chemnitz is one of the two Greenlandic members of the Danish Parliament, and Dr. Sara Olsvig is a former minister of the government of Greenland and the current chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council. They discuss a range of topics including the place of Greenla...

This is a REPRISE of an episode of Polar Geopolitics originally published on 28 March 2025

Jeppe Kofod, Denmark’s foreign minister during Trump’s first Greenland gambit, joins the podcast to analyze the current situation and share insights from his central role in resolving the previous U.S.-Denmark-Greenland crisis in 2019.

Polar Geopolitics has now started a Substack where we will provide edited episode transcrip...

This is a REPRISE of an episode of Polar Geopolitics originally published on 15 April 2024

“Greenland is the most dynamic piece in the new Arctic security jigsaw puzzle”, according to a new book that applies the international relations theory of securitization to analyze the security and geopolitics of Greenland and the Arctic. Marc Jacobsen, Ole Wæver and Ulrik Pram Gad, co-editors and authors of Greenland in Arctic Se...

What geopolitical reasoning is driving Donald Trump’s incessant pursuit of Greenland? As Deputy Assistant to the President and Chief of Staff of the White House National Security Council during the first Trump administration, Alexander B. Gray was closely involved with the initial U.S. attempt to acquire Greenland in 2019. In this episode of the podcast, Mr. Gray, who is today CEO of the strategic advisory firm American Globa...

Several weeks into the latest, most acute, phase of the ongoing Greenland Crisis, a Danish strategy for keeping the Kingdom intact in the face of the Trump administration’s unwelcome advances can be discerned. Jon Rahbek-Clemmensen from the Center for Arctic Security Studies at Royal Danish Defence College joins the podcast to provide his analysis of Copenhagen’s approach to managing the crisis, and to discuss dynamics ...

With transatlantic ties and the future of NATO at stake, security policy analyst Maria Martisiute from the European Policy Center in Brussels joins the podcast to discuss the role of the EU, NATO and member states in attempting to mitigate the Greenland Crisis. She also presents six recommendations for potentially turning the crisis into an opportunity to enhance Arctic security and foster greater cooperation between Denmark, Green...

The appointment of Jeff Landry as special envoy reflects the Trump administration’s increasingly assertive pursuit of Greenland – what Prof. Steven Lamy of the University of Southern California sees as a strategy of coercive diplomacy directed towards the Kingdom of Denmark. In an interview recorded in late December, Prof. Lamy, a scholar of political science and international relations, joins the podcast to explain how...

What might the future of the Arctic look like, and in what ways has the optimistic Arctic future of 15-20 years ago taken a different path than expected at that time? Mia Bennett, associate professor at the University of Washington and producer of the Cryopolitics blog, joins the podcast to discuss the new book she has co-authored with Klaus Dodds, Unfrozen: the fight for the future of the Arctic (Yale UP 2025). The conversation co...

Perceptions of massive economic opportunity have propelled Arctic geopolitics for almost two decades, and the late Scott Minerd estimated the region required over $1 trillion in infrastrucutre investments to realize its full potential. On this episode, Mads Qvist Frederiksen, executive director of the Arctic Economic Council, discusses the Arctic’s business environment, the array of opportunities and challenges faced by would...

Greenland has for good reason gotten most of the attention, but what other emerging trends can be seen in US interest and activities towards the Arctic and Antarctic during the current Trump administration? On this episode, Evan Bloom, a former senior diplomat who for over two decades helped shape American polar policies at the State Department, discusses concerns over funding cuts for polar science, proposed US investments in iceb...

The United States, due in large part to Donald Trump’s renewed ambition to acquire Greenland, has this year dominated discussions on Arctic geopolitics. A timely new book, America in the Arctic: Foreign Policy and Competition in the Melting North (Columbia University Press 2025), analyses the long-term evolution of U.S. Arctic engagement across an array of issue areas. The book’s author Mary Thompson-Jones, a retired di...

In the wake of the recent 47th Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in Milan, Alan Hemmings, Adjunct Professor at Gateway Antarctica at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch and veteran of many a ATCM, joins the podcast to provide a comprehensive, somewhat sobering, analysis of the current state of Antarctic governance, and the changing geopolitical dynamics within the Antarctic Treaty System. Among the range of topics disc...

Two major international crises of recent years, Covid-19 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, have had profound effects on Arctic governance. American interest in acquiring Greenland has meanwhile complicated relations between key Arctic countries. With Greenland now leading the newly-launched Kingdom of Denmark chairship of the Arctic Council at a time of great geopolitical uncertainty, this episode explores the evolution of Green...