Nato ‘launches’ new Arctic mission — but so far it only exists on paper

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Finnish and Nato soldiers training in Lapland, in Finland’s High North, on 6 February 2024 (Photo: Nato)

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Nato ‘launches’ new Arctic mission — but so far it only exists on paper

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By Andrew Rettman,
Brussels
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Nato has launched a new Arctic mission — but on paper only, as Western allies try to mop up the mess left by US invasion threats against Greenland.

“Allied Command Operations … began Arctic Sentry today,” Nato said in a press release on on Wednesday (11 February).

The mission came after a “meeting between US president Donald Trump and Nato secretary general Mark Rutte last month in Davos, Switzerland, where the two leaders agreed that Nato should collectively take more responsibility for the defence of the region, considering Russia’s military activity and China’s growing interest there,” it added.

The US Air Force general in charge of Nato’s military command, which is based in Belgium, Alexus Grynkewich, also said: “Arctic Sentry underscores the alliance’s commitment to safeguard its members and maintain stability in one of the world’s most strategically significant … areas”.

Danish defence minister Troels Lund Poulsen said he was “extremely pleased” about the new “concrete activity”.

And Danish defence chief Michael Wiggers Hyldgaard said it “strengthens our overall combat power that under Arctic Sentry we train together with allies and are present in a larger area in the Arctic and the North Atlantic”.

But nothing new actually happened on the ground on Wednesday.

Two projects, one name

Instead, Arctic Sentry became a new name for two existing Nato projects — Arctic Endurance and Exercise Cold Response — which allies aim to use as research for any future ‘sentry’ deployments, the Danish Defence Command confirmed to EUobserver.

“Today’s announcement was a message that Arctic Sentry is in action and what goes on in the Arctic High North and Greenland is not just a matter for Denmark — it’s Nato behind it now,” a Danish spokesman said

Any concrete details of the new sentry mission will be decided in the “next weeks and months”, he said.

But the new “message” itself also changed nothing, as Danish territories and forces in the region were covered by Nato’s Article V on mutual defence anyway.

Looking at Arctic Endurance, a Danish-led mission launched on 15 January, the spokesman said it was “still going on” and would continue for the rest of the year.

It involved “training exercises, patrol exercises, guarding infrastructure exercises, some in Nuuk and some … north of Nuuk, in south-western Greenland”, he added.

He declined to say which countries were taking part or how many troops it involved, noting it was for individual allies to publicise their participation and that different Nato states would rotate in and out of it over the next 10 months.

The original mission consisted of some 200 Danish troops and a small handful of soldiers each from Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, and the UK.

Cold Response

Exercise Cold Response is a Norwegian-led drill in Norway, Sweden, and Finland, involving 25,000 troops, including US ones, to last from 9 to 19 March, designed to help integrate Finland and Sweden into Nato after they joined in 2023 and 2024 in response to Russian aggression in Europe.

Meanwhile, the Nato press release’s mention of the Trump-Rutte meeting served as a reminder of Trump’s threats to invade Greenland in the run-up to the Davos talks.

Denmark and its ‘coalition of the willing’ launched Arctic Endurance to counter the threat, prompting Trump to impose trade tariffs on the group in revenge.

He lifted the tariffs after Davos and claimed Rutte had agreed to give him “total control” of Greenland in return for not seizing it by force.

But Rutte has not yet made clear what deal he made, other than to say it wouldn’t affect Denmark or Greenland’s sovereignty.

And future US deployments in Greenland are currently being discussed in three-way US-Denmark-Greenland talks.

Arctic Sentry is to be run out of a Nato base in Norfolk in the UK, but has no designated commander at this point.

And for its part, the UK has also signalled it will play a bigger role in the High North in future.

British defence minister John Healey said on Wednesday Britain would join Arctic Sentry, along with France and Germany who said the same.

Healey also said he was sending 1,500 soldiers to Exercise Cold Response and would double the number of UK troops permanently stationed in Norway from 1,000 to 2,000 later this year.

He echoed Trump’s concerns about Greenland, saying: “Russia poses the greatest threat to Arctic and High North security that we have seen since the Cold War”.

“We see [Russian president Vladimir] Putin rapidly re-establishing military presence in the region, including reopening old Cold War bases,” he added.

China missing-in-action

And Nato defence ministers will discuss Greenland security at a meeting in Brussels on Thursday.

Trump had also claimed China posed a threat to Greenland.

But if Wednesday’s ‘Arctic Sentry’ announcement was designed to give an impression of “concrete” developments to make him happy while changing nothing on the ground for now, then his China vision was equally nebulous.

“We haven’t had a Chinese warship in Greenland for a decade or so,” said Danish foreign minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen in Washington in January.

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Finnish and Nato soldiers training in Lapland, in Finland’s High North, on 6 February 2024 (Photo: Nato)

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Author Bio

Andrew Rettman is EUobserver’s foreign editor, writing about foreign and security issues since 2005. He is Polish, but grew up in the UK, and lives in Brussels. He has also written for The Guardian, The Times of London, and Intelligence Online.

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