TROMSØ, Norway — “When we were here two years ago and our chairship began, we knew that it would be special years,” Norwegian Foreign Minister Espen Barthe Eide said standing at a lectern as press bulbs flashed. Next to him stood Silje Karine Muotka, president of the indigenous Sami Parliament. Beside them, a screen projected a livestream watched by the Arctic-interested around the world. “But I am happy that the Arctic Council is well, alive and active.”
It was May 12, 2025, a rain-slick day, when the Arctic Council—a circum-polar political forum between the eight Arctic states and six Indigenous “permanent participants”—convened in a closed virtual meeting, and Norway officially handed chairship to the Kingdom of Denmark.
Two years ago, the council’s very survival was far from certain. When Norway took the helm from Russia, many thought it was teetering on the brink of collapse. In March 2022, weeks after Russia had invaded Ukraine, the council’s activities were suspended. Overnight, more than 130 of its working groups tackling pan-Arctic issues from climate data collection to shipping and Indigenous food sovereignty were put on ice. Russia, the Arctic’s largest geographical stakeholder, became a scientific vacuum, contributing no more data. At the time, it seemed entirely possible the council wouldn’t survive, as I wrote in Foreign Policy in 2023.
“It took decades for the Arctic to develop cooperation, and now we’re back to where we were 40 years ago,” Volker Rachold, director of the German Arctic Office, told me then. “Even worse: At least then it was only a Cold War.”
My attempt to understand the stakes of this historic moment opened my eyes to the council’s singular status in global governance. Founded in a rare post-Cold War moment of optimism, the Arctic Council is the only international agreement of its kind with Indigenous groups as equal stakeholders. Its cross-boundary work powers a massive chunk of Arctic climate science, and the hundreds of projects its working groups tackle—everything from pollution contamination cleanup to search and rescue to Indigenous youth mental health—takes a hyper-regional, transboundary approach to issues singularly affecting the world’s North. In many ways, this is also the work at the heart of my fellowship: tracing the Arctic Council’s unusual origin story and following its uncertain future.
In 2023, when Norway assumed its chairship, it marked the official, if shaky, resumption of council work. And through the last turbulent two years, Norway has managed to keep the fragile circum-Arctic forum afloat. It hasn’t been smooth sailing: In 2024, Russia cut all funding to the group and has repeatedly threatened to leave. Across the high North, tensions are escalating: Sweden and Finland’s inclusion in NATO left Russia the Arctic odd-one-out, and militarization has steadily ramped up on either side of northern Europe’s border with Russia. Just days ago, Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre warned his nation to be prepared for war. And now a new bully has emerged from the West: US President Donald Trump.
So it’s perhaps fitting—and newly challenging—that this year, for the first time ever, Greenland will take the helm of Denmark’s chairship. Indeed, the autonomous nation of Greenland (the population of which is 90 percent Indigenous) has long campaigned to lead Arctic Council activities. After all, along with the Faroe Islands, it’s technically the only part of the Danish Kingdom above the Arctic Circle. In January, Trump’s repeated threats to purchase or forcefully seize Greenland brought global attention to the island and its struggle for sovereignty. And in a likely related move in recent months, it became clear that Greenlandic Foreign Minister Naalakkersuisoq Vivian Motzfeldt, rather than the Danish foreign minister, would become chair.
Back at the news conference, Eide, the Norwegian foreign minister, crossed the stage to a dark-haired woman standing at her own lectern—Motzfeldt—and handed her the wooden gavel. With it, she officially became the first-ever Indigenous Arctic Council chair.
Motzfeldt is taking on an extraordinarily difficult diplomatic position. Today, the Arctic Council is still a last-standing bastion of high North diplomacy, but it may be entering its most treacherous phase yet. As part of its founding principles, its agreements are both consensus-based and unenforceable. That means it requires extreme levels of discourse, cooperation and goodwill to continue its work—all of which remain on thin ice. Today, the future of Arctic climate science, along with projects from search and rescue to contamination clean-up hang in the balance of a forum that, just two years ago, seemed to be reaching its twilight. And some fear Greenland’s rookie chairship is under-prepared for the precarious task of keeping Russia and the United States cooperative in an increasingly (excuse the pun) polarized high North.
“This is not only a question of who leads, but also of how Greenland will handle the diplomatic challenges of chairing the council,” Arctic Council expert Svein Vigelund Rottem wrote in a 2024 paper that explored the possibility of a Greenlandic chairship. “Norway’s transition of the chairship in 2023 was a diplomatic masterpiece, and Greenland will need similar skill.”
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The idea of “polar peace” was, in fact, dreamed up by the Soviet Union’s last leader. On October 1, 1987, Mikhael Gorbachev stood on a stage in Murmansk, Russia, and called to end the Arctic era of spies and nuclear submarines, and form a unified front of “peace, science and prosperity.”
In what is now considered a key prelude to the fall of the Iron Curtain, he outlined six goals: to de-militarize the Arctic, ban high North nuclear testing, facilitate research exchanges, peacefully collaborate over resource development, safeguard the interests of its Indigenous peoples, and protect its ever-more fragile environment. For Gorbachev, the collective need to better understand and protect the high North environment represented a rare opportunity.
“The main thing is to conduct affairs so that the climate here is determined by the warm Gulfstream of the European process and not by the Polar chill of accumulated suspicions and prejudices,” he said at the time. “Let the North of the world, the Arctic, be a zone of peace.”
At the time, the Euro-Arctic region was one of the world’s most militarized regions. At the top of the planet, where “the frontiers come close to one another,” as Gorbachev said, the sheer physical proximity of enemy territories had turned the region into a concentrated military theater. By the 1970s, extensive radar networks dotted frigid scapes from Greenland to Siberia, and the Barents Sea swarmed with ballistic missiles, bombers and battleships. In the 1980s, both Soviet and American navies introduced a potentially destructive high North fleet: nuclear submarines built to pass under ice caps, armed with missiles capable of reaching targets on opposite sides of the planet.
In September 1996, representatives from the eight polar states and six Indigenous organizations convened a first-of-its-kind forum in Ottawa to make Gorbachev’s vision a reality. Two structural mechanisms make the Arctic Council unique:
First, it began as a research and data collection effort, and became the first international monitoring initiative to also include strong policy recommendations. Its data-to-policy connection has helped set global agendas: From pollution regulation to shipping codes, legally binding international conventions have built their foundations on its work.
Second, because the group is not treaty-based, it is the sole international body of its kind that includes Indigenous stakeholders. That has enabled a still-singular diplomatic forum that gives Indigenous leaders an equal seat at the table.
Science precedes, and undergirds, the council’s work. In 1991, just after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Arctic states convened for the first-ever Arctic Environmental Protection Strategy, a non-binding agreement to identify and prevent contamination from nuclear waste to persistent organic pollutants. In 2005, the scientists of the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme (AMAP) contributed the first-ever “Arctic Assessment” section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report—which established for the first time that the Arctic is changing faster than the rest of the world. Five years later, the success of that scientific cooperation led to the Ottawa meeting.
Paradoxically, high North climate change has also attracted growing geopolitical competition. Just as this melting region becomes more vulnerable, it’s opening up resource extraction, shipping and other economic opportunities—and global superpowers are jockeying for control. In 2007, the Arctic sea ice shelf collapsed. The same year, Russian explorers planted their national flag in the North Pole seabed, widely taken as a symbolic claim to Arctic energy. Back in 2009, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that high North melt would expose up to 40 million new tons of oil and gas by 2020.
The developments sparked new interest in the Arctic Council, too. It was once an obscure organization, the kind of place you put aging diplomats out to pasture, experts have told me. In the past decade or so, however, non-Arctic states have vied to be added as “observers” that offer funding and attend meetings. In 2013, the Arctic Council added six new “observer states”: China, Japan, India, Italy and South Korea. Over nearly three decades, this research-focused forum became a key diplomatic stage, and, because influence can be gained through funding research, geopolitical interests actually benefited scientific aims. In 2022, the council was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Weeks later, its suspension went into effect.
Judging the success of the council’s past two years is a matter of perspective. Compared to most other chairships, very little work was done. Yet many call Norway’s real work a masterclass in diplomacy. But because Russia is half of the geographical Arctic, and still isn’t allowed to collaborate on most of the science, others contend the so-called “Arctic Council” isn’t truly “Arctic.”
Science powered the diplomacy that formed the Arctic Council. Now, the future of crucial climate science depends on the strength of diplomatic agreements. It’s not just about sharing data; to use another team or nation’s data for your own models, you need a lot more information, including the instruments used, how they were calibrated and even the way you decide to input values in a spreadsheet. All that requires the kind of open channels of communication the Arctic Council’s projects simply haven’t had. Under Norway’s chairship, things were moving in the right direction, however: Just two months ago, AMAP published its first-ever report since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The data was incomplete, but the science, at least, wasn’t entirely halted by geopolitics.
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This year, the Arctic Council is grappling with yet another problem child, the United States. That isn’t exactly new, as I’ve learned talking to Nordic experts. From the George W. Bush administration to Trump’s first term, Arctic states have previously seen themselves caught between two unpredictable superpowers.
“Nothing happens if the United States and Russia don’t want it to, and neither of them feel the rules apply to them in the same way,” Michael Paul, senior researcher at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs, told me.
The council’s first existential threat came from the West before Russia invaded Ukraine. It was in 2019 at the Arctic Council Assembly in Rovaniemi, Finland, when US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo went off-script by calling his own news conference. He proceeded to deliver a fiery speech about the rising threat from China, and refused to sign onto a joint declaration that listed climate change as a key priority. Typically, council work can’t move forward without all stakeholders co-signing. In an act of improvisation, then-chair Finland salvaged the situation by publishing the intended “joint declaration” as a statement from the chair. It was unconventional but managed to keep the council afloat.
Still, such moments reveal the Westphalian assumptions undergirding the council. Technically, Indigenous “permanent participants” are considered equal stakeholders to nation-states. But the political jockeying between the states often overshadows the interests of Indigenous peoples. (As one Sami politician who asked not to be named told me, “We have a seat at the table. That doesn’t mean we have a voice.”) When the seven non-Russian Arctic states agreed to suspend council activities rather than cooperate with Russia in 2022, the six Indigenous permanent participants said they had not been consulted about the decision. But the suspension deeply affected them because many of their challenges transcend state borders and often rely on the council’s transboundary work.
Greenland’s chairship may herald a new era that actually centers Indigenous peoples. Of its five stated priorities, the rights and wellbeing of Indigenous peoples are named first.
“Our people must be meaningfully involved in how sustainable development is interpreted and advanced,” Motzfeldt said at the news conference. “We will therefore prioritize the genuine integration of Indigenous knowledge on an equal footing with Western science in all aspects of the Arctic Council’s work.”
It’s possible an unprecedented chair may be exactly what’s needed for these unprecedented times. The next two years will present a new test for the forum as a tiny, majority-Indigenous nation assumes leadership over two of the world’s most powerful states to steer decisions about the future of the planet’s fastest-changing region.
“The global interest [in Greenland] is not just a signal of awareness, it is a message for responsibility, and it is a message for cooperation,” Motzfeldt said, cupping the chair’s wooden gavel in two hands. “In a world facing complex and difficult circumstances, the Arctic Council must rise to the moment by showing that even now, through cooperation and dialogue, we can live up to a higher responsibility.”
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As I write today, it’s Friday May 16, the eve of Norwegian Independence Day. In just a few hours, I will board a Danish research vessel, the Dana, that will sail for three weeks on the ice-edge west of Greenland. This Danish expedition, which will also pass the Norwegian-claimed island of Jan Mayen, is another intentional symbol of the chairship hand-off between the two Nordic states and their claims on high Arctic territories.
The expedition will represent another strange symbol for me. I will sail close to the very island to which my own president has made imperialistic claims—partly for the resources exposed by its rapid melt. But I will be there alongside those studying the melt’s dire climate consequences. Aboard the Dana, an international, interdisciplinary team of scientists with the European Union-funded SEA-Quester project will be studying the “novel ecosystems” emerging as the sea ice disappears.
It’s not an Arctic Council project. But one could argue that it wouldn’t have been possible without the precedent set nearly three decades ago in Gorbachev’s vision of a high North “zone of peace.”
Considering President Trump’s recent threats, whether the “zone” around Greenland remains peaceful is still an open question. But for the next three weeks, I will get to see firsthand what that vision of the Arctic has helped create, many times over: a diverse and interdisciplinary group of people, uniting in a shared commitment to better understand an extraordinary, and extraordinarily fragile, high North ecosystem.
More on that to come.
Top photo: Norwegian Foreign Affairs Minister Espen Barthe Eide passes the Arctic Council gavel to his Greenlandic counterpart Naalakkersuisoq Vivian Motzfeldt. Greenland is leading the council on behalf of the Kingdom of Denmark for the first time (Minetta Westerlund, Arctic Council)
