The Arctic camp where troops are training for war with Russia

CAMP VIKING, Norway — In the deep snow of the Arctic mountains, Britain’s Royal Marines are readying for war with Russia.

The elite troops are introduced to the wilderness by camping in the snow in temperatures below minus 20C. They finish by jumping through ice holes and shouting their name, rank and number before they can be pulled out of the water. Then they roll in the snow, drink a tot of rum, and toast King Charles III.

Britain’s extreme weather training in this area dates to the Cold War, but Camp Viking — its facility in Skjold, northern Norway — is new and growing. It opened in 2023 after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and is due to reach a peak of 1,500 personnel this spring, followed by 2,000 next year. Britain is “effectively doubling” the number of its Royal Marines in Norway over three years, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told POLITICO in an interview.

Exercises mirror missions the troops would conduct if NATO’s Article 5 on collective defense was triggered — reflecting the reality that “we are no longer at peace,” Brigadier Jaimie Norman, commander of the U.K. Commando Forces, told Cooper and her Norwegian counterpart Espen Barth Eide on a visit to the site Thursday. “We see ourselves on a continuum that has war on one end to peace on the other, and we are somewhere on that continuum.”

Yet this is only one hemisphere of the Arctic. On the other, U.S. President Donald Trump is stoking a very different crisis by pushing for ownership of Greenland.

The risks that link the two regions — which have shipping lanes busier than ever with Russian and Chinese vessels as the polar ice caps melt — are similar, albeit less immediate for Greenland than Norway. Yet Greenland is consuming huge global bandwidth.

It is little wonder that Eide, greeting Cooper after he spent two days in Ukraine, lamented that they could not focus more on Ukraine and “less on other things.”

Trump has left them with no other choice.

Fire up the ‘Arctic Sentry’

Cooper and Eide’s response is to publicly back the idea of an “Arctic Sentry” NATO mission, a military co-operation that would aim to counter Russian threats — while reassuring Trump of Europe’s commitment to the region.

Details of the mission — including the number of troops it would involve and whether it would comprise land, sea or air deployments — remain hazy.

It could mean that exercises like those in northern Norway are deployed in Greenland too, as well as the shipping lanes around them. Lanes in northern Europe have seen a rise in shadow fleets carrying sanctioned oil and alleged sabotage of communications cables.

But as with so many issues, they have yet to discover whether Trump will take heed. Cooper’s intervention came one day after U.S. Vice President JD Vance met Danish and Greenlandic representatives at the White House amid growing tensions over Trump’s repeatedly stated intention to take control of Greenland.

Cooper’s message to Trump, and everyone else, was to insist there is no real division between the eastern and western Arctic. “The security of the Arctic is all linked,” she said — citing Russia’s northern fleet, shadow fleet, oil tankers, non-military assets, spy ships and threats to undersea cables. 

“Look at the map of the Arctic and where you have the sea channels,” she added. “You can’t look at any one bit of Arctic security on its own, because the whole point of the Arctic security is it has an impact on our transatlantic security as a whole.

“Some of the Russian threat is through its Northern Fleet and into the Atlantic. That is a transatlantic threat. That is something where clearly you can’t simply revert to Europe’s defense on its own.”

Yet in parts of Britain and Europe, there are plenty of people who fear Trump is asking Europe to do exactly that. European allies have long pushed the U.S. president to nail down commitments to Ukraine.

A mere hint of this frustration is visible in Eide. He was keen to point out that the risk to his end of the Arctic is more immediate.

“Just to the east of our eastern border, you come to the Kola Peninsula and Murmansk,” he said, standing on a snowy outcrop. “That region has the largest conglomeration of nuclear weapons in the world — and particularly, the second strike capability of Russia is there. They need access to the open oceans, and in a wartime situation, we don’t want them to have that access.”

He added: “If there is a crisis, this area will immediately be a center of gravity because of the importance of the nuclear capabilities of Russia, the submarine base and so on. It will go from low tension to being in the midst of it in a very short time. That’s why we need to plan for rapid reinforcement, for rapid stepping up, and also to have a constant military pressure presence in this area.” 

Managing this Trump reassurance is a tricky balance. Rachel Ellehus, director general of the non-partisan foreign affairs think tank RUSI and a former U.S. representative at NATO, said: “You want to signal solidarity and presence and engagement, and send a message that Europe is stepping up for this alleged Russian and Chinese threat in and around Greenland. 

“But you don’t want to kind of stick your finger in the eye of the United States or signal that you’re looking for some sort of confrontation.”

Perhaps for this reason, Ellehus suggested NATO itself is holding back. “The one voice that has been quite silent is that of NATO,” she said. “It’s quite odd that Mark Rutte has not issued a secretary general statement expressing solidarity with Denmark and underscoring that any security concerns that the United States might have could legitimately be addressed through the NATO alliance, because both Denmark and Greenland are members of their territories covered by the Article Five guarantee.

“I think it does have consequences in terms of the credibility of the alliance, and I think we could see an intensification of the practice whereby allies are turning to bilateral or regional relationships, score and meet their security to meet their security needs, rather than relying on multinational alliances like NATO.”

A new era

A reminder of how fast multilateralism is changing hangs on the library wall in the quaint, pink and white British embassy in Helsinki.

The photo, dated July 1975, shows British Prime Minister Harold Wilson in the embassy garden with U.S. President Gerald Ford, Henry Kissinger and others on the cusp of signing the Helsinki Accords. The agreement, emphasizing the rights of sovereignty and territorial integrity, was part of a drumbeat toward the end of the Cold War.

Across the street in Helsinki is the fortress-like embassy of the U.S. — where Trump is one of those calling the shots on territorial integrity these days. As well as his designs on Greenland, the president recently said NATO “would not be an effective force or deterrent” without American military power and said he did not need international law.

Britain and many of its allies are loath to accept any suggestion of any cracks in the alliance. Asked by POLITICO if NATO was in crisis, Finland’s Foreign Minister Elisa Valtonen insisted: “NATO is stronger than it’s ever been.”

Cooper, too, said NATO is “extremely strong” — and argued that those who describe his administration as a destabilising force are being too simplistic. She pointed to the presence of Marco Rubio, a more traditional Republican than Trump who Europeans have found easier to work with than the president, along with work on security guarantees for Ukraine, collaboration on “Five Eyes” intelligence and the plan for Gaza, much of which was led by the U.S.

“Of course, everyone can see this administration operates in a different way,” she said, but “in every discussion I’ve had with … Rubio, there has always been a really strong commitment to NATO.” The Gaza plan, she added pointedly, “was actually drawing on international law, the UN framework.”

But one U.K. official, not authorized to speak publicly, said there were three schools of thought about Trump’s comments on Greenland. The first is the president’s stated aim that he is concerned about security threats to the Arctic; the second is that he is seeking business opportunities there.

And then “there is one school of thought that ultimately, he just wants to take it … he just wants to make America bigger,” they said.