Op-ed by Lloyd Axworthy, former Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1996 to 2000. He is former Chair of the World Refugee and Migration Council.

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For nearly three decades, the [Arctic] Council helped insulate the Arctic from great-power rivalry. It created a space where Arctic states — including Russia and the United States— and Indigenous Peoples could collaborate on science, environmental protection, and sustainable development. It proved that sovereignty could be strengthened through cooperation, not diminished by it.

Today, that same bargain leaves us exposed.

The renewed U.S. focus on Greenland brings this tension into sharp relief. Washington insists it respects Greenland’s sovereignty, yet its actions—special envoys, strategic rhetoric, and policies framed in terms of “national security necessity”— point to a more assertive, unilateral understanding of sovereignty.

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What troubles me equally is the response of other Arctic states, Canada included. We have rightly affirmed Greenland’s sovereignty but have said little about how to protect it through collective mechanisms. There has been scant appetite to think creatively about strengthening Arctic cooperation as the old rules strain. We have not yet rallied the Arctic Council or imagined new forms of collaboration to reinforce decades-old norms.

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The answer is not to abandon the Council, but to build alongside it. Canada should lead a diplomatic initiative with the Nordic states—Denmark (including Greenland), Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and Finland—to create a complementary forum focused on strategic stability, civilian security, and reinforcing norms. This would not be a military alliance or a NATO substitute.

It would be a platform where Arctic states committed to a liberal international order can speak with one voice, name destabilizing actions, and reaffirm a foundational principle: that sovereignty in the Arctic is best protected through cooperation, transparency, and law—not through pressure and rhetoric.

Crucially, this new forum must carry forward the Council’s seminal innovation: institutionalized Indigenous participation as Permanent Participants. If we learned anything in Luleå, it is that legitimacy in the Arctic flows from inclusion. Narrowly defined state security misses the point. Human security—the safety, rights, and voice of Arctic peoples—is what gives sovereignty its enduring meaning.

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