Last year in Rome, I spent five months in the research unit at NATO Defence College (NDC), NATO’s senior educational institution for civilian and military officials. The College is where these experienced officials come to study and debate some of the alliance’s hardest strategic problems. That experience matters now because the Arctic is testing exactly that part of NATO: its ability to build coherence under pressure.

As NATO heads toward its July summit in Ankara, Türkiye, and as European allies prepare for the possibility of less U.S. participation, the High North is no longer a side issue. It has become a test of alliance coherence under pressure. Not because war there is imminent. But because the region brings together several of NATO’s hardest problems at once. Sovereignty. Infrastructure. Ambiguity. Consultation. Internal strain.

Canada sits in the middle of that problem. Its challenge is not just to respond to these shifts, but to align its role within the alliance with how it coordinates security at home. Ottawa is more involved in European security than it was only a few years ago, and it has deepened cooperation with Nordic allies. It is part of the coalition supporting Ukraine. It now speaks more openly about Arctic resilience and information sharing with NATO. The question is no longer whether Canada is involved. It is whether Canada is ready to shape what comes next.

The Arctic as a Test of Alliance Coherence

For years, the Arctic was treated as important but relatively stable. Even after Russia’s 2007 flag-planting at the North Pole, the dominant view in many Western capitals was that the region would remain governed by practical cooperation, low tension, and existing legal frameworks. That assumption is harder to sustain now. Russia’s war against Ukraine has sharply reduced the space for Arctic cooperation with Moscow. China’s role has also become harder to dismiss. It is not a military Arctic power on Russia’s level, but it has shown a sustained interest in Arctic shipping routes, research, infrastructure, and governance. Climate change is changing the region too. In some places, reduced sea ice is making access easier for longer periods. But it is also making conditions more unpredictable and raising risks for infrastructure, communities, and emergency response.

When the United States treats Greenland as negotiable and uses tariff pressure against European allies, the issue stops being abstract. It becomes a test of alliance cohesion. The pressure is not only external. It can come from within.

This matters because NATO has long relied on ambiguity to manage internal differences. Ambiguity buys time. It lets allies preserve unity while avoiding harder choices. In the Arctic, that has meant keeping NATO’s role flexible and politically underdefined. Some allies have wanted a stronger NATO role in the region. Others have been more cautious, worried about escalation, sovereignty sensitivities, or preserving room for national and regional approaches. Canada has often sat between those positions, seeking stronger northern awareness while also remaining careful about sovereignty and domestic legitimacy. That ambiguity helped hold the coalition together. But it is no longer enough. In a setting where disruption is limited, attribution is slow, and decisions cannot wait, leaving NATO’s role undefined risks delay, confusion, and mixed signals. What once preserved unity can now undermine credibility.

That is one reason Greenland matters so much. It is a test of allied sovereignty and cohesion. Greenland sits at the intersection of geography, sovereignty, and alliance politics. For Washington, the island has long had strategic value because of its position between North America and Europe and the role of Pituffik Space Base in missile warning and space surveillance. Trump’s renewed interest made that strategic logic explicit, but in a way that unsettled allies. He framed Greenland less as a shared security space and more as an object of American leverage. NATO’s response was cautious. Rather than directly confronting Washington, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte emphasized stronger alliance security in the Arctic. In practice, the alliance answered the pressure by leaning harder into collective Arctic security. But the episode still exposed how pressure from inside the alliance can be as disruptive as pressure from outside it.

My year at the NATO Defence College changed how I think about this. While in Rome, I was also helping support a Senior Course committee on NATO and the High North. The task was clear enough on paper. What should an ideal High North look like for NATO by 2040, and how could the alliance get there?

I will not disclose private deliberations. But the process itself was revealing. The room brought together civilian and military participants from NATO countries, partners, and others, including Italy, the United States, France, Belgium, Germany, Turkey, Spain, Qatar, and Moldova. Drafts moved back and forth. Language was debated line by line. National perspectives collided, softened, and collided again. Many had come from senior national positions or would return to them. These were not abstract discussions. They reflected the thinking of people already shaping, or soon to shape, NATO policy.

What stayed with me was not just that allies disagreed. It was how differently they approached the problem. Some saw a stronger NATO role in the Arctic as vital. Others were more doubtful, or knew much less about the region, which was understandable. Many focused on the risk of provoking Russia and turning a fragile region into a new escalatory theatre. Some had strong ideas about how to handle the United States. Others pushed harder on Indigenous rights, legitimacy, and the political limits of Western security thinking in the North.

The real difficulty, in other words, was not whether the Arctic mattered. It was whether allies could agree on what kind of problem it was, how much NATO should do there, and how to act without making the region less stable in the process.

The committee made one thing clear. The High North is unlikely to become NATO’s main theatre in the way the eastern flank is. But that does not make it secondary. The region shapes transatlantic lines of communication, early warning, maritime access, infrastructure resilience, and the credibility of allied presence in a space where distance and ambiguity can magnify even limited disruption. Strategic consequences can emerge there before governments have fully agreed on what they are seeing. Short of a full Arctic strategy, the alliance needs at least a roadmap with clear priorities.

One sign of that is Arctic Sentry, a new NATO effort to coordinate allied activity and improve monitoring and response in the Arctic and High North. It is meant to bring allied exercises, forces, and capabilities there into a more coherent operational approach. That matters. But visibility is not enough.

The real test is whether Arctic Sentry can help allies move from visibility to coordinated action when events are still unclear. In plain terms, that means moving faster from detection to shared assessment, then to precautionary action and recovery. In practice, that also means showing—through coordinated action, communication, and repair readiness—that ambiguity will not translate into leverage. In the Arctic, credibility will rest less on dramatic statements than on whether governments and allied institutions can do those things in order and in time.

That is the core problem in the region. Not large-scale war, but uncertainty. It is the kind of uncertainty created by incidents involving subsea cables or other critical infrastructure, where most damage is routine or accidental, but where ambiguity around cause and intent creates opportunities for strategic exploitation.

From Ambiguity to Action

At the Defence College, Arctic debates rarely began with escalation. They began with uncertainty. How quickly could allies agree on what was happening? When did uncertainty justify action? How could they reassure without overreacting? How could they deter without turning the region into a stage for theatre?

Those questions matter because in this environment credibility is not just about ships and speeches. It is also about whether governments, operators, local authorities, and Indigenous partners can detect, coordinate, communicate, and restore before ambiguity turns into leverage. That is where NATO still has work to do.

Canada should care because Ottawa has already moved closer to the centre of this debate. It is no longer operating at a distance from Europe’s northern security architecture. Canada has crossed the line from observer to participant. But it has not yet fully defined what kind of NATO role in the Arctic it wants to support. That gap is becoming harder to ignore, both for Canada and for its allies.

Canada has an obvious interest in a more coherent alliance posture in the High North. It needs NATO to be credible there. Canada cannot push for greater allied coherence in the High North if it is not improving coordination at home.

Domain awareness matters, but not in a narrowly military sense. It means knowing more quickly what is happening across a vast northern space, and ensuring that federal agencies, territorial governments, Indigenous authorities, operators, and local communities can share information and act on it. Without that coordination, even well-intentioned responses risk appearing fragmented, which can reinforce uncertainty rather than reduce it. This is not about expanding surveillance or militarizing northern life. It is about improving coordination and preparedness in a region where infrastructure is sparse, distances are long, and delays can have serious consequences. Canada has made progress, but it still has a long way to go in building that kind of shared security culture.

What Canada Should Push for at NATO

This is why Canada should push NATO in a practical direction. Canada should push NATO toward a more practical Arctic posture—one that clarifies priorities for situational awareness, interoperability, resilience, and consultation, and ensures that initiatives like Arctic Sentry move beyond visibility into coordinated action. It should also place critical infrastructure resilience at the centre of that posture, while bringing something many allies lack: in the Canadian Arctic, security is inseparable from governance. Territorial, local, and Indigenous authorities are not peripheral to resilience. They are part of how disruption is detected, interpreted, and managed. A serious Arctic posture cannot rest only on military presence. It also depends on whether governments, communities, and local authorities are prepared to work together when pressure comes.

Canada Should Arrive Ready to Shape It

The NATO Defence College is not where policy is made. But it is where you can see how hard it is to make it. You see how much effort it takes to align different national instincts into something an alliance can act on. You also see how fragile that process becomes when pressure builds.That is why the Arctic matters now. It brings together exactly the kinds of problems that test whether NATO can still work well.

Canada should not arrive in Ankara ready only to support allied adaptation in the High North. It should arrive ready to shape it. That means pressing for a clearer High North roadmap, helping define how Arctic Sentry should work in practice, and strengthening coordination at home so Canada can bring a more coherent approach to Arctic security into allied discussions.

Canada’s credibility in the Arctic will not be measured by how often it speaks about sovereignty, but by whether it can translate that into coordinated action at home and clear positions within NATO. Canada is already contributing to that effort—and can do more to shape it.

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