BRUSSELS — NATO is beefing up its Arctic presence in a move designed less to deter Russia than it is to deter Donald Trump.

As the alliance rushes to increase its activities in the Arctic ahead of a defense ministers’ summit in Brussels on Thursday, diplomats and experts said the effort is mostly a rebranding exercise aimed at mollifying the U.S. president — in response to a largely exaggerated threat.

POLITICO spoke to 13 NATO diplomats, alliance officials and military analysts, some of whom were granted anonymity to speak freely about sensitive matters. They pointed to a significant shift inside NATO toward the region thanks to intense U.S. pressure prompted by Trump’s threats to annex the island, but one that is primarily driven by politics rather than immediate military necessity.

With NATO officially framing its new “Arctic Sentry” mission as critical, the diplomatic effort shows the intention by U.S. allies to keep Washington onside amid concerns that failing to appease Trump on Greenland could be disastrous. 

“In the face of Russia’s increased military activity and China’s growing interest in the high north it was crucial that we do more,” NATO chief Mark Rutte told reporters on Wednesday.

Trump’s Greenland threat in January was a breaking point for many European countries, cementing their view of the U.S. as a permanently unreliable ally. The issue hangs over this weekend’s Munich Security Conference, where U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will meet with many allied leaders. 

Experts say any security fears are largely overblown, with NATO more than capable of handling Russia in the Arctic.

“I hope they will just rebrand some ongoing activity,” said Karsten Friis, a research professor and Arctic security expert at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. “If there’s a lot of manpower … especially if it’s in Greenland, then it will come up expensive.” 

“The threat is more hypothetical than real,” acknowledged one NATO diplomat, who added the initiative has a clear “symbolic and communications aspect to it.”

A Public First poll conducted for POLITICO across five countries found that a majority of people in the U.S., Canada, France, the U.K. and Germany said Trump was serious about his effort to take over Greenland, with most saying he was doing so to gain natural resources and to increase U.S. control of the Arctic. Only a minority felt he was motivated by any threat from Russia and China.

Idle threat

After repeatedly refusing to rule out the use of force to take Greenland, the U.S. president finally walked back his campaign to acquire the Danish territory last month. The climbdown was helped by a pledge from Rutte and allies that NATO would take Arctic security more seriously. 

But experts remain deeply skeptical about the military need for such a venture.

“I do not think that NATO has a capability gap in the Arctic … the United States has the ability to deploy its capabilities to Greenland to defend the alliance,” said Matthew Hickey, an analyst and former official at the U.S. government-affiliated Ted Stevens Center for Arctic Security Studies.

With the U.S. able to dispatch “thousands” of troops to Greenland from Alaska “within 12 to 24 hours” and experience operating in the region from its biannual Ice Exercises, “it’s really more of a communication gap,” he said.

Washington has cited various future threats to the Arctic island: Moscow’s outsized icebreaker fleet and its hypersonic missiles that could one day fly over Greenland undetected, growing Russian and Chinese collaboration and thawing sea ice opening up new shipping routes for suspicious vessels. 

But in practice, “the threat hasn’t changed since the Cold War,” said Friis, the professor. 

The U.S. can easily upgrade its early-warning missile radar system in Greenland, he argued, while melting ice will only boost the very marginal commercial shipping route in the Northern Sea Route near Russia — nowhere near Greenland. Icebreakers have few military uses and and are easy to track, Friis added.

Chinese and Russian collaboration in the Arctic, meanwhile, will remain “largely symbolic,” said Marc Lanteigne, a political science professor and China expert at the Arctic University of Norway, as Moscow is “nervous” of Beijing’s long-term designs on the region and is unlikely to grant it extended access.

If there is a threat, it’s in the European Arctic. There, Russia’s Northern Fleet based in the Kola Peninsula includes six operational nuclear-armed submarines, according to Ståle Ulriksen, a university lecturer at the Royal Norwegian Naval Academy.

Even so, Russia is “significantly outmatched” by NATO, said Sidharth Kaushal, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank.

Since its full-scale war against Ukraine, Moscow has lost two of the three brigades that had been stationed in the far north, with their replacements expected to take “half a decade or more” to train. Meanwhile, Norway, Germany, Denmark and the U.K. are all buying Boeing P-8 maritime patrol aircraft to better surveil the region. Sweden and Finland both joined NATO as a result of Russia’s war, further beefing up the alliance’s Arctic muscle.

As a result, an additional Arctic mission focused on Greenland looks “a bit pointless,” said Ulriksen, the military expert.

However, the official alliance line is that this is a needed force projection. A NATO official told POLITICO the initiative “will further strengthen NATO’s posture in the Arctic,” including with joint exercises  “involving tens of thousands of personnel and the equipment … to operate successfully in Arctic conditions.”

Polar problems

Initially, the Arctic Sentry mission will bring existing exercises such as the Danish-led Arctic Endurance in Greenland under the auspices of NATO’s Joint Command in Virginia. Eventually, it could mean dispatching planes and maritime patrols, according to two NATO diplomats, or setting up a permanent command.

Inside the alliance, the thinking is also that the mission could provide an early-warning signal to Russia and China to stay clear of Greenland in future, the NATO diplomats said, in particular if the Arctic island decides to become independent, and then decides to leave NATO (something its leaders insist won’t happen).

“If Greenland were to become independent, you have … a country [that] would become therefore outside of NATO and could be subject to influence from our adversaries,” U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker said Tuesday.

An alliance mission should therefore “make sure we know who is there and or who is transiting through there,” he told POLITICO.

In fact, some further measures could be helpful, said Kaushal, the naval analyst, deploying more unmanned surface vessels to keep track of Russian submarines and filling the shortage of sonar operators at sea.

But a standing maritime presence in the Arctic would be “entirely superfluous” and even dangerous, Kaushal said. “That places vessels potentially in very difficult climates near Russian-held territory, where the only support infrastructure is Russian.”

The U.S. currently has about 150 troops at the Pituffik Space Base in northern Greenland. Both Denmark and Greenland have stressed they are open to the U.S. stationing more forces on the island under existing arrangements.

However, basing more troops in Greenland would be wasteful, according to Rose Gottemoeller, a former NATO deputy secretary-general and U.S. under secretary of defense. “Permanent deployments are expensive and not warranted by the current circumstances.”

Nevertheless, for some allies, forking out cash and equipment is a fair trade to prevent the alliance from collapsing. “Perhaps it’s not … the best way to use the limited resources we have,” said a fourth NATO diplomat, but “letting the alliance disintegrate is the alternative.”

“If the price to pay is sending two ships to Greenland and 500 troops to do occasional joint exercises, then perhaps it’s worth it.”

Jacopo Barigazzi and Chris Lunday contributed reporting.