By Siddhanth Ravi, Spring 2026 Marcellus Policy Fellow

A region that is withstanding the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change is the Arctic Circle, warming four times faster than the rest of the planet, as per the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) 2025 Arctic Report Card (ARC). As a resource-rich and geopolitically-significant global commons, the Arctic presents a useful case study in how the United States enacts climate policy on the international stage. Current U.S. Arctic policy misdiagnoses the region’s environmental problems, and there is a mismatch between the nature of the threat in the Arctic and the tools used to address it. U.S. policymakers have recognized the causal chain linking climate change to geopolitical competition. Rising temperatures accelerate ice melt, which increases access to previously trapped resources and shipping routes, thereby heightening strategic interest and potential geopolitical rivalry. However, policy responses overwhelmingly target the final stage of this chain, great power competition, rather than the initial driver, which is climate change. To avoid costly and ineffective security dilemmas, the United States should pivot its Arctic policy away from securitization to restraint-based governance rooted in Arctic exceptionalism and adequately address climate change as the root cause of regional instability.

Current Arctic policy’s misdiagnosis produces three costs that suggest pivoting from military competition to institutional leadership: a security dilemma with climate change as a built-in accelerant, overextension, and misallocation of resources in a new frontier, and an incorrect prioritization of prestige competition over vital interests. Moreover, accelerated securitization of the Arctic further erodes its longstanding status as a zone of exceptional cooperation. By failing to mitigate the underlying environmental transformations that generate instability in the first place, current policy risks creating a securitized Arctic that produces no ‘winners’ with climate change’s universal effects. Conversely, the Arctic should be treated as a global commons—admittedly to a certain extent considering a limited number of states have direct access to the region—where shared environmental vulnerability leads to cooperation rather than competition. Allowing further militarization undermines the cooperative governance needed to address climate change, impeding any future institutional restoration of Arctic exceptionalism.

The United States should adopt a restraint-oriented Arctic strategy focusing on multilateral climate governance. This paper proposes four recommendations on how Arctic strategy should be ameliorated: enhancing scientific diplomacy efforts with both geopolitical allies and competitors, ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas (UNCLOS) to increase American credibility in Arctic governance, expanding the Arctic Council’s mandate to include ‘collective climate security,’ and adopting ‘climate security’ within the National Security Council’s (NSC) and Department of Defense’s (DoD) larger institutional definitions of ‘national security.’ These recommendations reflect how pursuing restraint does not mean accepting passivity while rivals may continue to securitize, but rather a disciplined prioritization of interests (i.e., climate change mitigation versus geopolitical posturing). Moreover, it demonstrates an underlying shift in international politics toward multipolarity and away from a unipolar system led by the United States. Prioritizing multilateral governance in the region is key to countering recent securitization developments, and thus any future steps toward a nonsecuritized Arctic must implicitly acknowledge this changing system.