Phantom Peril in the Arctic

By Robert David English and Morgan Grant Gardner

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Accurate threat assessment is vital to the formulation of foreign policy. Across centuries of political and technological change, the giants of strategy—from Sun-tzu and Thucydides to Carl von Clausewitz and George Kennan—warned against exaggerating threats and ignoring their geopolitical context. Still, ideologically driven threat inflation—from a phantom Vietnamese attack in the Gulf of Tonkin to nonexistent Iraqi nuclear and chemical weapons—has repeatedly led the United States into costly quagmires. Despite this history, the country is again on the brink of an ideologically driven blunder—this time in the Arctic.

For over a decade, defense hawks have been sounding an alarm over Russia’s supposed military superiority and incipient aggression in the region. Previous U.S. presidents resisted the bait, avoiding confrontation and embracing cooperation through the multinational Arctic Council established after the end of the Cold War. They knew that Russia’s forces in the region were defensively structured and weaker than they were before the Soviet collapse in 1991, despite efforts to rebuild them that began in the mid-2000s. Previous U.S. presidents also knew that U.S. and NATO forces had the clear upper hand in the Arctic and that predictions of Russian aggression were mainly threat-mongering by armchair analysts and vested political interests.