What's New? Arctic Geopolitics
Explaining Arctic geopolitics, governance and security.
Supported by the Fridtjof Nansen Institute and the Arctic Institute
What's New? Arctic Geopolitics
Why the Arctic Matters to Canada’s Security
In this episode of What’s New?, Host Serafima Andreeva is joined in Ottawa by Nicholas Glesby, Network Administrator at the North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network and PhD candidate at Trent University, to unpack how Canada views the Arctic from an international and security perspective.
The conversation explores Canada’s new Arctic foreign policy and its four pillars, the growing emphasis on sovereignty and Arctic diplomacy, and why Ottawa increasingly sees the Arctic as shaped by global geopolitical developments rather than as a conflict zone in its own right. Glesby explains how Canada understands emerging threats from Russia and China, how climate change intersects with security planning, and why the Arctic has become central to Canada’s defence priorities.
A major focus of the episode is the role of NORAD, including the history of continental defence, early warning systems across the Canadian Arctic, and the current push to modernize North American defence in response to advanced missile technologies. The episode also addresses Canada–US defence cooperation under the Trump administration, why military cooperation has remained remarkably stable, and how Canada is deepening Arctic cooperation with Nordic partners.
This episode focuses on Canada in the global Arctic — its foreign policy, defence posture, and role in North American and circumpolar security.
A follow-up episode will explore local and Indigenous perspectives in Canada’s Arctic, focusing on governance, lived security, and the priorities of Northern communities.
Serafima: Together with me in Canada today we have Nicholas Glesby, Network Administrator of North American and Arctic Defence and Security Network and PhD student at Trent University. Nick, you are going to help us understand what is happening in Canadian foreign Arctic policy. It's great to have you. Nick: Hi, Serafima Thanks very much for having me. Serafima: And today we are in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. And with that, I want to ask you, how does Canada view Arctic affairs from an international perspective? Nick: So for Canada, the Arctic is anything north of 60 degrees latitude. Obviously the internationally recognized Arctic is 66 degrees, but 60 for Canada because it includes all three of our territories. And these territories are indigenous and Inuit homelands, people who have lived there since time immemorial. It's home to 140,000 people. And it has this long history of colonialism and relocation and given the geopolitical environment today and some of the security investments Canada is making, it's an opportunity for us to kind of right some of those wrongs and reinvest in the relationship between Ottawa and these communities. How does Canada think about the Arctic at an international level? Last fall, Global Affairs Canada, our foreign ministry, released a new Canadian Arctic foreign policy and it has four pillars. So the first is asserting Canadian sovereignty, the second advancing national interests through pragmatic diplomacy, the third leading on Arctic governance in the circumpolar Arctic and multilateral challenges to the region and for adopting a more inclusive approach to Arctic diplomacy. And during that announcement, our Minister of Foreign Affairs at the time, Melanie Jolie, she's now industry minister under the new government, she said that, I don't think the Arctic will be the primary theater of conflict. I see the Arctic as the result of what is happening elsewhere in the world. And in this policy, reflective of that, we're opening two new consulates, one in Anchorage, which closed in 2012, one in Nuuk, which is being spun up any day now, this November. We have a new Arctic security dialogue the minister proposed amongst the foreign affairs ministers, the like-minded Arctic Seven. We have a new Arctic ambassador, Virginia Mearns, from the government of Nunavut, who will be Canada's voice on the Arctic stage. Month in Reykjavik at Arctic Circle Assembly and she's taking Canada's message abroad, recognizing the North Pacific and the Bering Strait as this key approach to the North American Arctic and this idea that even though it's the Pacific, it's still NATO territory. So something maybe we can play with. A little bit there and this Canadian Arctic foreign policy also calls out Russia as undermining the rules-based international order and China as a state competitor and you compare this with our North strong and free which is Canada's defense policy update and it describes three shaping trends that are changing the world order geopolitics. So the first one is the rise of autocracies countering democracies and challenging the rules-based international order and primarily the US ability to protect influence and power abroad. The second one, obviously climate change is an existential threat to the world and to the Arctic. And third, the advancement of advanced strike weapons and delivery systems that can cross the North Pole and strike at North America. And Ansaaf, or our North Strong and Free, describes the threat as existential in the Canadian Arctic and quote, most urgent and important task that the Canadian Armed Forces faces is asserting its Canada sovereignty in the Arctic and Northern regions where the changing physical and geopolitical landscapes have created new threats and vulnerabilities for Canada and Canadians. Serafima: Well, you're mentioning a lot of developing trends. one thing that has developed fairly recently is the second Trump administration and your neighbor, you could say, to Canada. So how is Canada navigating the relationship with the current Trump administration in Arctic issues? Nick: So I don't think at the practical level on the military side much has changed. have NORAD, the Binational Military Defense Command between Canada and the United States with integrated command and control. It's responsible for aerospace warning and aerospace control and maritime warning of Canada and the continental United States, so Alaska and the lower 48. And Canada and the US have this enduring commitment to defend the continent, including Antarctic, as premier partners. That goes back to Rob Hubert and Whitney Lockenbauer's piece from about 2014. But functional logic still dictates that our defense is intertwined because of geography and our airspace is indivisible. Operation Nanook, Canada's series of training exercises in the Canadian Arctic, includes American partners as it does NATO partners and non-Arctic, but non-Arctic friends maybe we could say. and the US is still there participating. General Guillaume, Commander Guillaume of NORAD and US Northern Command said in a spring testimony to the US Senate that North America has a distinct advantage in working together and that we are quote, linked by history, collaboration and a shared commitment to defending North America, end of quote, for more than 85 years. The militaries are so professionalized and the bureaucratic links have become... not necessarily institutionalized, but depended upon by both sides that political rhetoric to a point is political rhetoric and that sure, trade fissures and trade relationships may change, but on the security side, nothing has. We're not seeing more integration, you know, that's sensitive for Canada, obviously, given Trump's rhetoric about... the 51st state and putting our sovereignty into doubt, especially when you take the maybe academic definition of sovereignty being territory and recognition from other sovereign states and autonomy to make your own foreign defense policy decisions and then control of your jurisdictions. None of that's changed for Canada, obviously. And even saying that just kind of gives into Trump's rhetoric alone. But again, not... Any further integration, but on a practical day-to-day level, it's maybe quieter, but nothing has really changed. Serafima: This reflects kind of the broader trend of stability in the Arctic, that even when you would expect that things are turbulent, it's often a little bit more stable than you would believe. But one thing that has happened since the US new Trump administration is that at least in the Nordics, there's been more talk about the Nordics cooperating or cooperating with Europe more. Has Canada had kind of this increased relations with the Nordic state? Nick: I think absolutely, I think that goes back to, you know, middle powers working together and bandwagoning together. Maybe a bit of a focus on mini-lateralism, right? Canada and Norway and Denmark working together like the events we just did this week here in Ottawa, rather than large multinational governance forums. I think Canada and Norway in particular are realizing they're very similar in lots of different ways. Serafima: It's great, we're actually at a seminar right now, Canada and Norway, cooperating, Gauntlet seminar, so it's great. Nick: Thanks for the shout out. The third annual Gauntlet seminar. And we share similar threat environments, but different perceptions of what the threat is. You know, in Norway, you're right there on the land border with Russia. GPS jamming is a regular occurrence. see zone activity against your citizens. Not so much in Canada because we're further away. We just had this workshop today about hybrid threats. But... trying to... make Canadians aware that the world is changing and that we're not completely apart from it, that we have to be vigilant and resilient at home and... Serafima: Okay, but it's great. mean, but in terms of if we go back to North America and we go back to NORAD, I mean in terms of defense, these hard security questions, where does the Arctic actually sit within NORAD's priorities? Nick: So Canada and the US have long cooperated in defending the approaches to North America together. You have to go all the way back to 1919, but I'll go back to just after World War II. So the legacy of strategic bombing in World War II, we know that the allies forces and the Axis forces used it to terrorize citizens and strike major population centers and centers of industry, supply lines, and the same logic kind of applied after World War II. So in the late 40s and early 50s, Canadian planners and American planners were really worried that the Soviet Union would take bear bombers across the North Pole, it's the shortest avenue of approach from Russia to North America, fly through the North American Arctic and strike... rehabilitating attacks in Washington or Ottawa or major major centers of strategic importance. Canada and the US were both forming air forces coming out of the Second World War. and it was realized that this airspace, like I mentioned earlier, was indivisible. It didn't really matter that there was a land border at the 49th parallel, or between Alaska and Yukon, because if the threat was in Washington or Chicago or elsewhere, you had to launch your forces further north to intercept before they could get all the way south. So what this means is the development of early warning systems. So first was the pine tree line, which is at the 50th parallel. very close to the border, but that was quickly realized, hey, we don't have enough time to send our fighter jets northward. This is in the early 50s. And then the Mid-Canada Line is kind of built at the same time as a further tripwire north of the 55th parallel. And for reference, most Canadians live within an hour of the 49th parallel, which is the main border. And that still didn't provide enough time, mid-Canada line. So in the late 50s, mid to late 50s, 56 to 58, the distant early warning line was built along the Canadian archipelago way up north, probably about 68, 69 degrees latitude. And this would allow Canada and the US, which are now integrated within NORAD and Colorado Springs, the North American Aerospace Defense Command in 1957, politically agreed to in 1958. So you'll see two different years of its origin there. The threat at the time was Soviet bear bombers, but come the late 60s with the advancement of advanced missile technology, it then became ballistic missiles and then later intercontinental ballistic missiles and then in the 1980s cruise missiles was the major technological development from the Russians and those could be sea launched from the GIUK Gap, the Greenland-Iceland-UK Gap in the North Atlantic coming out of the Russian Bastion, out of the Kolva Peninsula, which is a threat again today, and I can get into that a little later on. But that leads us to the North Warning System developed in the mid-1980s to counter these cruise missiles. And the North Warning System still can't see cruise missiles, but it can't see today this wide proliferation of advanced strike weapons that the Russians and the Chinese have developed over last 15 years or so. So these are... things like hypersonic vehicles, hypersonic vehicles that fly between aerospace domain and the space domain. So in addition to those hypersonic missiles, new advanced cruise missiles, new advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles, so this has put pressure on Canada to really modernize its early warning system. And because of the trajectory of a missile launch that would fly through the Canadian Arctic to strike at the US, we've received a lot of political pressure to do so. So NORAD talks, you would have heard yesterday General McKenna from one Canadian Air Division or Canadian NORAD region in Winnipeg talk about the approaches to the North American Arctic being the 10 o'clock. on the northwest through the Beaufort Sea to the 12 o'clock right in the center of the continent to the 2 o'clock out east kind of the North Atlantic, not quite the North Atlantic but North of Labrador let's say. So Canada's received this political pressure to do so. In 2019-2020, the then NORAD commander General O'Shaughnessy declared that the homeland is no longer sanctuary, that we can't defend and detect and defeat against these advanced delivery systems and this leaves the homeland vulnerable, the North American continent vulnerable. So in 2017, Canada had its defense policy, Strong, Secure, and Gauge, which is now being supplanted with Strong and Free last year. And in Strong, Secure, Engaged, it described further commitment between Canada and the US from NORAD modernization, but no money was attached. And it wasn't until July 2022 after Ukraine's invasion, after then Minister of Defense Anand described the world's getting darker, Canada put forward $38.6 billion over 20 years. Part of that package is new early warning radar systems. The Arctic Over the Horizon radar, the second will be a polar over the horizon radar which will be based somewhere in the Canadian north and look kind of out into the central Arctic Ocean. It's trying to give the NORAD commander more time to respond with a variety of different flexible options. Another part of that investment package was new fighter jets, whether that's the F-35 or the Saab Gripen remains to be seen. Those could be based at forward operating locations which can be renewed throughout the Canadian North in Anuvik and Iqaluit and Yellowknife and Goose Bay and that will allow NORAD to project fighter interceptors further north. And with that comes Northern Operational Support Hubs and all this investment in dual use infrastructure in these communities. So it's really an opportunity to work with communities. It's not an opportunity, it's actually... entrenched that communities have a say in how this money will be spent and used. Another part of that 2022 package is the development of a sensor network called Crossbows, this classified Canada-US sensor network. And that kind of feeds into this idea about a system of systems for all domain awareness. So you have sensors from the ground, sea base, air, space, and they're all fed into this data network that the NORAD commander or senior decision makers can pull from. So they have a sense of what's happening. In the approaches to North America, they can use artificial intelligence and machine learning. Commander Van Hurk, was NORA commander from 2020 to 2023, called it his decision superiority objective. He wanted to know literally anything and have computer systems kind of... take all that information, ingest it, analyze it at the speed of relevance, then ssss, provide him with options that might not be kinetic either. They might be in the messaging domain. they might be a civilian or constabulary response because the NORAD commander is the US Northern Command commander within the US Geographic Command. They're also responsible for, not just NORAD forces, so US Fleet Forces Command or US NAV North, and they can deploy different assets elsewhere. They're also responsible for, in the US context, disaster support civilian authorities. So he can't order civilian authorities, but there are tools at his disposal that can provide a non-flexible response. Canada is investing in NORAD because the Arctic is a place of greater geopolitical attention. For the Binational Defence Command though, it's oriented to look for threats through the North American Arctic. So again, using Whitney Lock and Bauer's framework, these are threats that originate from outside the Arctic, pass through it. on its way to strike something else south. So in this example, a a Russian sea-launched cruise missile from the GIUK gap would come from outside the Arctic, fly through it and strike an economic center, an industrial center, or population center, or some sort of strategic target. So for NORAD, it's about putting their early warning systems, their surveillance systems within the Canadian Arctic or the North American Arctic. Essentially just to give yourself domain awareness and more time Alaska as well I know this is about Canada, but Alaska is really really important for NORAD's mission It has the highest concentration of fifth generation fighter power in the world with f-35s at Eielson and Elmendorf Richardson And it hosts a lot of critical infrastructure for US expeditionary forces This is some of Ryan Dean's work to deploy into the Indo-Pacific. So defending that critical infrastructure defending those those sites of coalesced military buildup is really important and NORAD is consistently working now on defending critical infrastructure as well and its ability to then deploy forces elsewhere. Serafima: Thank you so much for that, Nick. And thank you for teaching us about the Canadian foreign Arctic policy. Nick: Thanks very much for having me, Serafima.
