The Arctic Gambit
Fortress North America: Why the destinies of Canada and the U.S. will be forged in the Arctic.
“Fortunately we have such a home, a spacious and unsullied home preserved for us by history — the Russian Northeast Let us give up trying to restore order overseas, keep our grabbing imperial hands off neighbors who want to live their own lives in freedom and turn our national and political zeal towards the untamed expanses of the Northeast whose emptiness is becoming intolerable to our neighbors now that life on earth is so tight packed.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, From Under the Rubble (1974)
As Trump, Musk, and Vance proceed with the chainsaw destruction of the bureaucracies that underpinned the American empire from 1945 until today, I can’t help but return to this prophetic passage from Solzhenitsyn. When the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, it was done so willingly by an exhausted and drained Soviet Union which no longer saw the point of maintaining an empire by endless artifice. Today, Russia is turned towards a new future in the Northeast. Perhaps, Trump’s ambitions towards Canada, Greenland, and even the Panama Canal are rooted in an instinct to avoid the fate of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. They form natural, defensible continental borders — which failed Russia in 1991.
With the end of the war in Ukraine now imminent, the retreat of the Globalist American Empire which represented the Western equivalent of the Warsaw Pact is now accelerating. Public support has collapsed beyond repair. There is no longer any appetite by Americans for the twisted projects of the American nomenklatura. Like the Russians in the 1980s, they want a new beginning.
Nations are often the victims of their own success. The Cold War institutions achieved what they were built to achieve. NATO kept the Soviet Union out, the EU kept Europe at peace, and NORAD and NAFTA kept North America safe and prosperous. The time has arrived to recalibrate. With a new political order emerging in the US and the Laurentian elite in Canada on its way out, now is the time to turn towards a new future in the wild expanse of the North.
The Map is not the Territory
President Trump’s proposals to purchase Greenland and “make Canada the 51st state” reflect the recognition that the Earth is a globe, and not a plane, and that control over the Arctic is the key to 21st-century geostrategy. Because the major contemporary geopolitical flashpoints are in the Pacific in Taiwan and across the Atlantic in Ukraine, we tend to imagine China and Russia as Great Powers to the East and the West of the United States. But China and Russia are much closer as our neighbors to the north.
In Canada, although national political media still has yet to catch up, a robust network of international experts — biologists, oceanographers, anthropologists, linguists, and political scientists — is focused on the Arctic.
In 2008, Canada under Prime Minister Stephen Harper launched a National Shipbuilding Programme, including a major Polar Icebreaker Project. 15 River-class destroyers intended for service in the Arctic are planned to be commissioned in the next decade. CCGS Naalak Nappaaluk, a flagship oceanographic and hydrographic research vessel, was launched in 2024 to assist in studying climate change in the Arctic. Meanwhile, Yukon University was elevated in 2020 from a vocational school in Whitehorse to become part of the University of the Arctic, a network of research institutions under the Arctic Council. The institution offers a Bachelor’s programme in Circumpolar Studies training cadres intended to foster economic development.
In 2013, the Nordic Orion carried 73k tonnes of coal from Vancouver to Finland through the fabled Northwest Passage rather than the Panama Canal, shaving 1,000 nautical miles from the usual journey. In 2024, 18 ships took the Northwest Passage. Grays Bay deepwater port project was revived last year to service vessels transiting through the trade route. The facility is situated next to large deposits of copper, zinc, gold, and silver, and is the first deepwater port to connect the Arctic Ocean to the rest of continental North America by road. As global warming causes a retreat of the ice caps, the route will become increasingly practical and traffic will increase.
In 2016, the Chinese government published the Arctic Navigation Guide for ships transiting, not only the Northeast Passage, which runs through Russian territorial waters, but also through the Northwest Passage which runs through U.S. and Canadian waters. The Chinese shipping giant COSCO has declared an interest in opening the route for commercial shipping. Amidst the treacherous waters of the Arctic Ocean, battle lines are being drawn.
Suddenly an ambitious vision of Canada’s future in the Arctic has emerged from an obscure network of institutions, think tanks, universities, and government bureaus. The most vocal proponent of the project has been Irvin Studin, a widely respected geopolitical scientist. Studin has outlined a vision that resembles speculative fiction. In particular, he has repeatedly called to move the Canadian capital from Ottawa to Whitehorse in order to place Canada “within Asia through the Arctic.” Whitehorse would become the Singapore of the North, a convenient meeting point where huge deals could be hammered out by mutually interested parties. Whitehorse is 8 hours away from St-Petersburg, 7 hours from D.C., and 8 hours from Beijing.
Just as vast fortunes were made in the Yukon gold rush 150 years ago — including the Trump family fortune — new fortunes will emerge from the Arctic. According to Studin, cities like Whitehorse will become the culinary, artistic, cultural and technological engines of the next two centuries. He calls for a settlement of 10 million inhabitants in the Canadian Arctic circle along with a further 20 million in the periarctic — a huge increase from the 140,000 residents it has today comparable – given the extremely inhospitable climatic conditions — to a project for settling Mars.
The Strategic Situation in the Arctic
Speculative visions notwithstanding, Canada passed through a lost decade under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, crippled by overregulation, procurement screwups, nonsensical deference to UNDRIP, and a chronic shortage of capital, manpower and political will. Meanwhile, on the other side of the North Pole, Russia deepened its position.
In the 1980s the Soviet Union already built large installations, even cities in the Arctic in line with a doctrine of maintaining an aggressive strategic presence in its northern region. But modern Russia has surpassed the Soviet posture. The Northern Fleet, based in Murmansk in the Arctic Circle, is Russia’s most powerful naval force, incorporating nuclear submarines, icebreakers, hypersonic-armed frigates, squadrons of naval aviation and flagshiped by a Kirov-class battlecruiser, the largest surface combatant in the world. The fleet symbolizes Russia’s strategic understanding as a global power extending from Europe through Central Asia, to the Far East, and above all in the Arctic. The Northern Fleet is unparalleled in power projection — neither the U.S. nor Canada have any comparable opposing forces in the Arctic. (The Royal Canadian Navy for its part is currently a de facto brown water navy incapable of launching major operations without the assistance of the U.S. Navy.)
The comparison between Canada and Russia is instructive: Canada is dwarfed on every measure. The Grays Bay deepwater port project may have finally been restarted after a decade of environmental reviews, but Russia already boasts numerous deepwater ports all across its Arctic territories. Together with the Murmansk port, equipped to handle 24 million tonnes of cargo per year, Russia has the port of Arkhangelsk which handles 6.6 million tonnes per year, with a planned expansion to enable 50 million tonnes per year. Murmansk and Arkhangelsk are complemented by three major commercial ports — the Sabetta LNG export terminal (a joint venture with the French Total and the China National Petroleum Corporation), the port of Pevek with a new terminal slated to be operational in 2026 to handle year-round traffic, and the port of Dudinka which is used to ship the product of the nearby Norilsk Nickel combine, the world’s largest producer of refined nickel. In total, Russia has 13 deepwater ports servicing the Northern Sea Route.
Russia’s most significant advantage is its massive fleet of nuclear icebreakers operated by the state-owned Atomflot. No other nation has nuclear icebreakers. The USSR operated at its height 4 Arktika-class nuclear icebreakers, Russia currently operates 8, with a further 4 set to enter service by 2030. These enormous investments in shipbuilding are directed towards practical and expansionist commercial goals. Atomflot announced that 37.9 million tonnes were shipped through the North Sea Route in 2024 with the help of its nuclear icebreaker fleet: the highest figure ever. Even with the Western sanctions on Russia linked to the war in Ukraine, Dutch Shell, French Total, and Spanish Naturgy continue to receive shipments from the Sabetta LNG terminal thanks to Atomflot: 77% of shipments from the port were escorted by nuclear icebreaker. In a technological marvel, Atomflot’s parent company, Russian state-owned Rosatom, launched Akademik Lomonosov in 2019, the world’s only floating nuclear power plant. It was sent to Pevek, to replace the local decommissioned power plant.
It is easy to make the mistake of analyzing Russian power by metrics set by Sovietologists half a century ago. But the dimensions of Russian power are distinct. Russia’s ability, in particular, not just to withstand punitive international sanctions without much pain, but also to coordinate a complex strategic choreography in the Arctic where it is growing a technological, commercial edge, reveals Russia’s strategic imagination — an imagination that the West in general lacks.
One key divergence from Soviet geostrategy is that Russian-Chinese collaboration in the Arctic is now a dominant dynamic. China has officially declared itself a ‘near-Arctic’ nation. Joint Chinese-Russian bomber patrols buzzing NORAD and forcing the U.S. and Canada to scramble for interceptions is now a standard feature of global military activities. That relationship is deepening rapidly: in 2024 the Chinese Coast Guard entered Russian waters to conduct joint exercises in the Arctic for the first time.
Russian and Chinese military cooperation follows an economic relationship where Russia becomes the main partner in supplying the Chinese industrial base with energy and minerals. In this context, the Northern route is not merely advantageous because it is shorter, but also because, unlike the Straits of Malacca or the Bay of Bengal, it cannot be blockaded. In any great power confrontation naval power and commercial shipping ability are critical measures of power. China has 232 times the shipbuilding capacity of the United States.
Studin, for his part, breaks down the situation in the Arctic from the perspective of Canada along four vectors: America, China, Russia, and Europe (ACRE) whose interplay and inherent contradictions define the geospatial state of play. Canada, for its part, is functionally dependent on the United States to the extent that it already constitutes a de facto vassal. As long as the U.S. supplied favorable trade terms and shouldered Canada’s defense, it also took control of Canada’s strategic commercial autonomy. With the USMCA agreement dictated by Trump, it is already implicitly agreed to annexation.
Although Canada’s Liberal elite may seethe at Trump’s proposal of a 51st state, it is the next natural step to the policies they’ve explicitly championed. If a state’s security and economic prosperity depend upon a foreign state, that state is no longer sovereign.
If annexation finally takes place, the United States will inherit Canada’s strategic framework and commitments to managing the Arctic Ocean global space and countering the unfavorable and dangerous interplay of interests on its ‘Northern Front’. Significant resources will be required to secure it. The United States will also inherit the best of Canada’s personnel involved in its Arctic ambitions, who spent the last two decades quietly building a ramp for North American dominance in the region.
The Merger of the Century
Canada is a difficult place for Americans to grasp because of how seemingly similar the countries appear. Fundamentally, Canada and the US are both ‘propositional’ nations, except the proposition in the US is for the American people, and in Canada, it is for the elite. Canada in truth is about 500 families, and everyone else is a foreigner. Canadian culture only exists in its elite institutions (the crown corporations, the CBC, the civil and foreign services, the parliamentary complex, the universities — all three of them) where a bilingual elite rules through a variety of masquerades designed to keep the Anglo and French hicks away from power. The largest obstacle in Canada’s future annexation is accordingly likely to be psychological.
The most pathological impulses of its current elite were always present in the DNA of the Canadian state. Canada has always been, fundamentally, a nation of losers and nostalgics, whose founding national consciousnesses are rooted in defeat. In the case of Quebec, the foundational moment is the defeat of 1759, on the plains of Abraham, to the British. The motto of Quebec to this day — plastered on every license plate — is “Je me souviens” (“I remember [the French abandonment of Quebec]”). Anglo-Canada, for its part, was founded by American Loyalists anchored in a concern to avoid another insurgency that would dispossess them and a concomitant sense of subservience to the Empire – first British, then American.
The arrival of British parliamentary democracy in the 1830s following a revolt in Quebec was accompanied by an early attempt at population replacement of the French through mass immigration from the British Isles. Similarly, the founding of the Canadian Confederation in the late 19th century was built around the suppression of the Métis Rebellion in the prairies and mass immigration from Central Europe to lay a lasting claim to Western Canada against American ambitions in the region.
The significant waves of immigration to Canada were largely composed of the defeated and reactionary elements from every unfortunate corner of the world: French royalist émigrés after the French Revolution, White Russians after the Russian Revolution, stateless Poles, former Ukrainian SS fighters (there is a coterie of monuments to the SS 1st Galician all over Canada), KMT associated Taiwanese in the 1960s and 1970s, Lebanese Maronites in the 1970s and 1980s, British Hong Kong émigrés in the 1990s, Khalistani separatists, etc. Canada has always been the country where lost causes found a second life — a propositional nation where defeated elements from all over the world could come together and be absorbed into a prosperous and peaceful country ruled by a broadly neglectful, intermittently brutal oligarchy.
Canada is a deeper country than the US where the opportunity to reinvent oneself is God-given. Catholic or Protestant, French or English, Indigenous and non-Indigenous, Quebecker or Albertan all have levels of significance in Canada that are misunderstood in the US. The desire of the reactionary elements propping up the Canadian polity was always that they continue living as they always had, maintaining their sense of hierarchy and distinction. The end result of this Chestertonian sleepy apple-pie conservatism is the obnoxious Trudeau oligarchy.
The psychological dimension of this reality makes Trump’s proposed annexation a challenging project. Canada is the second largest landmass in the world — spanning three oceans. It has two official languages, two distinct legal systems, 70 different indigenous languages, a variety of treaties between the Crown and the bands (and an absence of treaties as well), 10 provinces and 3 territories, with 13 different ministries of education and health, a strange railway system linking East and West to the center but not each other, an economy dominated by natural resource exports, crown corporations and quasi-state banks, with 40 million people who live mostly 100 km from the US border. The inherent heterogeneity (and dysfunction) of the Canadian state is a hard obstacle to overcome for annexation, especially with an imminent race to the Arctic.
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The Trudeau oligarchy, which has led the country to the edge of dismemberment, is now in its death throes, and more brittle than ever. The decades-long hold of the Laurentian elite over the country could now in principle be shattered at any moment, and, unfortunately, Canada could go with it. Annexation would be a dream come true compared to the nightmare scenario of 13 dysfunctional rump states.
The entire structure of the Canadian state was designed to shovel power and wealth from the periphery to the center in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal. For this reason, it is unlikely that the country could survive a serious challenge in its current form. A trade war with the US would be the most serious political crisis since WWII, and Liberal Canada is a regime without loyalists. The choices facing 40 million Canadians are simple: reinvent the country or disappear.
The essence of the matter is that Canada as a state has had no raison d’être since the 1940s with the end of the British Empire. The Laurentian elite attempted to engineer a Frankenstein state from the ’60s to ’90s with an artificial culture which failed spectacularly. Trudeau is merely the final iteration of this failed project. Canada still has no raison d’être. It needs one.
The Arctic provides an answer. With the impending crisis about to sweep the country from shore to shore, the opportunity for political entrepreneurship is here, and the Arctic is key. A reaction against the Trudeau coalition (and its subsidiaries at the provincial level) is already building. The current arrangement consists of aging Canadians and government sinecures extracting wealth from Canada’s youth through the housing crisis, an unsustainable debt burden, and uncontrolled immigration used to crush wages and confiscatory taxation which takes away what little is left. This reality is running out of road.
The Arctic as a national project stands against everything this coalition represents. It requires building instead of exploiting. It requires strategy and coordination instead of inertia. It requires a spirit of adventure instead of fear and subservience. It throws Canada back to the best of its historical consciousness. The figures of the coureur des bois, the Hudson’s Bay Company adventurer, the Yukon miner, the settler in the prairies and the mariner of the Atlantic, all find new expression in the Arctic national project.
The Arctic is the answer to the future of Canada’s relationship with the United States. A powerful, prosperous Canada, capable of defending and asserting itself, holding the ‘Northern flank’ of the United States, is a much more attractive vision to the emergent political order in America than the vestigial remnant of British North America.
The opening of the Northern frontier will create new opportunities for deepening the US-Canada relationship and ultimately lay the foundations of a new continental consciousness. The taming of the Arctic is an enormously-ambitious technical, political, and aesthetic challenge in which life will need to be reinvented from the ground up. Massive nuclear icebreakers will have to be built, entire cities will have to be dreamt up, ports and maritime installations will need to be erected, and wells will need to be dug deep into the Arctic ice. American capital, engineers, scientists and adventurers will have to be part of this Promethean effort. Here is the fork in the road.