But now, all the Russian tourists are gone and the border traffic has ground to a halt. The Allegro train no longer runs. Finnish media recently called Imatra “the emptying city”. Its sprawling Tsar Outlet Village, which once catered to Russian shoppers, is deserted. Imatra’s economy, already reeling from the pandemic, is seriously ailing. The city has an unemployment rate of 16.4%, well above the national rate of just under 12%. And South Karelia is said to be losing an estimated €1 million in tourism revenue each day.

Many residents say it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The border with Russia has been closed since late 2023, when the Finnish government accused Russia of weaponizing migrants by sending waves of asylum seekers into Finland. Helsinki claimed this was retaliation for the Nordic country’s decision to join Nato earlier that year, a choice made in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish government responded by closing the entire 1,340-kilometer border and announcing the construction of a 200-kilometer border fence. The forbidding metal barrier was finished last month, but the beefing up of security continues. On Monday, the Finnish government announced that it was procuring one million anti-personnel landmines for the border, following a decision by Helsinki and other regional capitals to withdraw from a humanitarian UN treaty banning their use.

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The border region’s economic decline and rapid militarization are emblematic of the entire Nordic region’s radically changed approach to relations with Russia and the United States. During the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, Finland and Sweden managed relations with Moscow through a combination of pragmatic diplomacy, deterrence, and trade. Today, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both diplomacy and trade have been severely downgraded. These two Nordic nations, which touted an enlightened neutrality during the Cold War and maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and the West, have recently joined Nato. Meanwhile, New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.

As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanization, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarized, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness. Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.

Overt dependence on the United States would have been unimaginable not so long ago. During the Cold War, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen saw neutrality as a natural state for his country, a function of both its geography and its history of wars with Russia. Neutrality, Kekkonen said, “is not the product of abstract thought nor is it imported from elsewhere: it has grown out of the soil of Finnish history”. Finland’s neutral position was articulated in the preamble to the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which emphasized the country’s desire “to remain outside the conflicts of the great powers”.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the same agreement also contained a military-consultation clause: if an adversary like Germany were to launch an attack on the USSR from Finnish soil, then Finland was expected to consult with Moscow about a response. The clause was politically sensitive, as it would permit the Soviets to exert diplomatic pressure on Helsinki. Indeed, Atlanticist critics have characterized Finland’s Cold War neutrality as quasi-neutrality, one that supposedly cloaked deference to the Kremlin in neutral garb. There is even a pejorative word for it: “Finlandisation”. And yet, Finland’s foreign policy was also effective. It kept the peace, and by the Eighties, Finland was one of the richest countries by per-capita income in the world, exceeding both Britain and France. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland lost one of its most important trading partners. The effect was immediate and devastating: Finnish economists call the ensuing crisis “The Great Depression of the Nineties”.

Sweden embraced neutrality much earlier, following a succession of wars with Russia, particularly the devastating 1808-9 Finnish War that saw a defeated Sweden lose more than a third of its territory. The country’s longstanding doctrine was “non-alignment in peace, so as to maintain neutrality in war”. Indeed, non-alignment was part of Sweden’s nation-branding as a “moral superpower”, which supporters saw as a “cherished model for the world” ripe for emulation. During the Cold War, the policy was best embodied in the figure of Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme. The late premier, who was assassinated in 1986, presided over what Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has called “a radical independent internationalism”. Over the years, Palme was photographed chomping on cigars with Fidel Castro, protested the war in Vietnam (prompting the US to recall its ambassador on two occasions), and likened the 1972 American bombing of Hanoi to “Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, and Treblinka”.

While Finland’s and Sweden’s decisions to join Nato may have looked like an abrupt decision made entirely in response to the war in Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic integration had actually been a long, gradual process that started soon after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Finland’s choice to purchase 64 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 hornet fighter jets from the US in the early Nineties was a critical turning point. Finland and Sweden joined the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and began participating in military exercises with Nato. The next year, Finland and Sweden joined the EU, unofficially ending their neutrality. Throughout the early 2000s, both countries supplied troops to Nato-led combat and stabilization missions, including in Afghanistan and Kosovo. These steps laid the groundwork for their rapid accession to Nato. All that was required was a trigger that could convert public opinion to Atlanticism en masse, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided it. Nato accession was presented as the only response to the shock of the Ukraine war, and with no alternatives discussed and the public afraid, the final push towards membership was made with a conspicuous lack of debate.

But Nato accession was just the start. Some commentators, including former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, say the recent defense agreements have been even more pivotal than Sweden’s and Finland’s decisions to join Nato. The surge in DCAs actually began shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Norway. In 2021, Oslo and Washington signed an “SDCA”, or Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement, which eventually gave US forces and contractors “unimpeded access” to 12 military bases. After the Russian invasion, the SDCA with Norway served as a template for the entire region. In December 2023, the US signed new DCAs with Finland, Sweden and Denmark, bringing the total number of Nordic military bases granting unimpeded access to the US military to 47. The DCAs also authorize the US to take “necessary and proportionate measures” to protect US forces “within or in the immediate vicinity of” said bases, meaning they give US military personnel and military police power over local civilians in and around these locations. In addition, they grant the US exclusive control over who enters specified military facilities, construction rights to build on Nordic soil, and jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

The DCAs have not passed without controversy. In 2022, the top military and civilian prosecution authorities in Norway expressed concern that the Americans’ threat perception might differ from that of Norway’s. Some fear that US forces might therefore drag the country into a confrontation without its consent. Others worry that an enhanced American military presence in Nordic countries would make them obvious targets in a war between the US and Russia. These concerns grew more acute after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when American allies in the Middle East found themselves on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have warned that a US decision to deploy missiles to Nordic bases close to Russian assets could provoke a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The agreements were signed with an initial duration of 10 years. Researcher Joel Linnainmäki, at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, notes that this 10-year duration “somewhat cushions against political turbulence in the transatlantic relationship”. The DCAs were drawn up at a time of both deteriorating regional security and uncertainty over trans-Atlantic security guarantees. With the specter of Donald Trump omnipresent, the Nordic states sought stronger bilateral defense relations with the US outside of Nato. The DCAs also reflect the belief that even the Nordics’ accession to Nato is insufficient to counter the Russian threat.

“The underlying idea has been that Nato alone is ultimately not enough,” Markku Kangaspuro, professor and research director at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, tells me. “Rather, the commitment of the United States is indispensable for a military deterrent that, in the final analysis, rests on nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, Sweden and Finland are doing away with their long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons, another dramatic transformation. During the Cold War, Finland championed disarmament and nonproliferation, hosting the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki from 1969 to 1972. Over in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme joined a 25,000-strong anti-nuclear protest in 1983; demonstrators formed a four-mile human chain linking the American and Soviet embassies to protest against the planned deployment of 108 American missiles in Western Europe. The Stockholm protest was part of that year’s Europe-wide demonstrations against the stationing of US “Euromissiles” on the continent, which drew up to five million people.

The mass mobilization of the Eighties contrasts with the comparative silence that reigns today. In June, Finland lifted its blanket ban on nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Energy Act, on the books since 1987, had criminalized the import, transport, and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil; amendments passed this summer have lifted those prohibitions. Kangaspuro tells me: “Finland is now signaling in many ways that its priority is no longer to promote international control and limitation of nuclear weapons, or nuclear disarmament, as it has done until now.” While there was political opposition to the decision and some small protests, it did not prompt demonstrations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

Similar changes have been floated in neighboring Sweden. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said that Sweden should consider allowing nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory in wartime. It was a pronounced shift from even just a few years prior, when both then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and conservative leader Ulf Kristersson agreed that Sweden’s decision to join Nato should not change its prohibition on nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. Earlier this year, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were also among the first countries to join France’s Forward Nuclear Deterrence Initiative, while Finland became a member in mid-December last year. The war in Ukraine and Trump’s unpredictability have again made the unthinkable thinkable.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries have dramatically increased their defense spending in recent years. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have more than doubled their spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Finland has nearly doubled it. In Finland, the government has tied brutal austerity measures in part to wartime necessity. Campaigning in 2023, Riikka Purra, the chair of the nationalist Finns Party and current minister of finance, declared culture “a luxury service, which unfortunately costs too much money in present-day Finland”. As the Nordic countries have adopted a more US-dependent security policy, their economies have also grown to resemble the American one. The marketization of education and health care, rising inequality, and beefed-up military budgets are bringing once strong welfare states more in line with American free-market orthodoxy.

The Atlanticization of the Nordic states’ security policies occurred in tandem with the liberalization of their economies, and with direct and indirect influence from the United States. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson describes it, during the late Sixties, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) began to “actively promote international neoliberal ideas”, with the aim of changing attitudes towards the welfare state within Swedish society. Meanwhile, the neoconservative Swedish think tank Timbro, founded in 1978, “was directly modeled on the American Heritage foundation”. In 1982, SAF director Sture Eskilsson initiated the Market Economic Alternative for Sweden (MAS), adopted from the Heritage Foundation’s own Mandate for Leadership, a vast policy program prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration during the early Eighties. One of the activists for MAS was Sweden’s uber-Atlanticist former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was a young MP at the time. In Finland, meanwhile, the adoption of economic liberalism was directly tied to the notion of “joining the West” — liberalization and free markets were always bound up with geopolitical alignment with Nato.

Today, between Trump’s demand that Europe spend more on its own defense and the threat of war with Russia, Nordic social welfare is being squeezed out of existence. The remnants of Cold War Nordic distinctiveness in both security and the economy are disappearing. These nations are gambling that all the breakneck changes are worth it. But by allowing the US armed forces unimpeded access to their military bases, the Nordic countries have sacrificed some of their sovereignty in pursuit of security. This has been presented to the public as an unambiguous good, with little discussion of the risks. But in tethering their fates to Washington’s whims, Nordic nations have reduced their own ability to act autonomously and painted a target on their own backs.

Yesterday, as a result, the Finnish government sealed its entire border with Russia, with Estonia threatening to do the same. Meanwhile, the European Union’s border agency Frontex has pledged to deploy personnel to Finland’s border.

Predictably, Russia has denied any foul play, but few are convinced. Moscow’s actions are doubtless linked to Finland’s recent entry into Nato and its new defence pact with the United States, negotiated earlier this month. In response, a number of media outlets have interpreted this latest episode in Russia’s hybrid war as an act of revenge: threaten Russia’s security periphery, and face chaos on your own frontiers.

But, though deeply tied to its security calculus, Russia’s motivations go much deeper than that. Nearly two years into his war in Ukraine, these actions play a key role in supporting Putin’s fear-based domestic propaganda narratives. By pitting the encroaching threat of Nato against the livelihood of Russia’s public, he can justify the gradual reorientation of its society and economy towards a semi-permanent war-footing. At the strategic level, the move is also part of a broader vision of Russia’s geopolitical future, and its conception of competing hegemonies in northern and eastern Europe.

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Before last year, Finland had been dependably neutral towards Russia for decades. But Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a national reckoning in the country, and support for Nato membership among Finns jumped to nearly 80% in late 2022. Despite never being part of the Soviet Union, Finland is no stranger to Russian aggression. It was under Russian occupation for over a century until 1917, and famously repelled a Soviet invasion during the Second World War.

Finland’s reorientation has thus predictably been utilised by the Kremlin as an opportunity to play the victim, presenting the current situation on the Finnish-Russian border as an attack on Russians, rather than a crisis of its own making. “They have to keep up the appearances, to make up these kinds of narratives, for themselves, for the population in Russia,” Pentti Forsström, a senior researcher at Finland’s National Defence University, and a retired lieutenant colonel in the Finnish Defence Forces, told me. “Now they are using every bit and piece of what we are doing, [like] closing the border, [to argue] that we are the ones to blame.”

In response to the border closures, the governor of Russia’s Murmansk region that borders Finland has already introduced “a heightened state of readiness… to ensure the security of our residents”, while Russians living in Finland have staged protests accusing the Finnish government of disrupting cross-border family ties.

This type of rhetoric aligns perfectly with Putin’s claims regarding a Russophobic West that infringes upon “the Russian world” and threatens communities in its near-abroad. Though the West used to take them less seriously, such claims have now become part of a longstanding narrative to validate Russian expansionism: protecting ethnic Russians was a large part of Moscow’s official justification for its invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as well as that of Georgia in 2008.

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Not only that, but a crisis like the one along Finland’s border provides fresh “evidence” for the Kremlin to keep everyday Russians convinced of Nato’s aggressive presence. And this propaganda fodder is more necessary now than ever. Russia is quietly transitioning its economy and defence industry to a long-term war posture, and is facing a resurgence of political pushback from its people as it tries to recruit more troops for its fight in Ukraine. It is crucial that ordinary Russians continue to see the conflict as an existential threat to their way of life, for which it is worth sacrificing livelihoods — and lives.

Finland’s growing military co-operation with the US, and recent promises of support from Poland — a regular focus of Kremlin propaganda — make Finland a perfect place to roll out this strategy. For this reason, talking heads in the Russian media are already hinting that this is only the beginning of Russia’s hybrid war against Finland. In one notable clip, TV host Tigran Keosayan (who is married to the infamous head of Kremlin propaganda outlet RT, Margarita Simonyan) laid out the logic of this rhetorical campaign. “Dear Finns,” he said recently on his programme, “first you banned us from entering by car, now by bicycle” — a reference to the bicycles Russian authorities had allegedly given to migrants on their way to the Finnish border. “You leave us with no choice,” he finished, as a cartoon of a tank appeared onscreen.

However, there is a further element to Russia’s strategy that often gets lost in our feverish news cycle. Finland’s position in the north-eastern Baltic Sea and its proximity to Russia’s strategically important Kola Peninsula have made it critical for Russia’s naval ambitions for more than a century.

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For Russia, access to warm-water ports is a permanent objective, essential for projecting global power. A neutral Finland had meant that St Petersburg — which Peter the Great originally built as the country’s navigational and cultural gateway to the West — could provide Russia with a secure maritime corridor for a naval presence in the Baltic. But since the shifting of alliances over Ukraine, this has changed. With Finland now joining Estonia within Nato’s embrace, the military alliance could conceivably blockade the entirety of the Gulf of Finland, reducing Russia’s sea access to its militarily significant (but territorially microscopic) Kaliningrad exclave.

For years now, Russia has been laying the groundwork to capitalise on warming temperatures in the Arctic Sea, which, in addition to opening up new trade networks and oil and gas reserves, present an opportunity to literally circumnavigate this hypothetical Nato blockade via its northern coastline. And this goal is intimately connected to the security of the ice-free Arctic port of Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula, which hosts a significant Russian nuclear-deterrence force just a stone’s throw north-east of Finland.

By this ominous logic, however, Russia’s geopolitical interests in the region are driven by the same strategic impetus as Russia’s seizure of Crimea in 2014 and its push to cut Ukraine off from the Black Sea in 2022: a desire to control crucial waterways that allow Russia to escape the prison of the Eurasian landmass. Presumably with such considerations in mind, the Russian military confirmed earlier this year that it would be splitting its Western Military District in two and creating a new locus of military activity right along Finland’s borders, reviving the Leningrad Military District that had been dormant since 2010.

Well before this month’s escalation, it was proof that the escalating hybrid war playing out on Finland’s border is only the beginning of a broader Russian campaign against the country. For Putin, this is the culmination of his twin desires: to bolster his jingoistic narrative at home; and to reinvest in a neglected theatre of great-power competition. For Finland, though, this all means only one thing — the period of quiet rapport it enjoyed between Nato and Russia has come to a definitive end, replaced by an anxious new world of menace and instability.

In 1947, the mercury here plummeted to -62.8ºC, so cold that reportedly frozen droplets of moisture in exhaled breath tinkled to the floor like shards of broken glass. In the summer of 1915, meanwhile, temperatures reached 37.8ºC, a record that stands to this day. Over the past 40 years, as the Arctic has warmed at a rate anything up to four times faster than the rest of the planet, the Yukon Flats, which straddle the Arctic Circle, have recorded the biggest temperature increases of all. Winters here are now on average 4.9ºC warmer than they were in the Fifties. In summer, the vast forests of spruce which span the Gwich’in territory are routinely ablaze.

Edward Alexander, a 46-year-old co-chair of the Gwich’in Council International, grew up in Fort Yukon and now lives in the Alaskan city of Fairbanks. For the past eight years, the father-of-four has worked as a volunteer firefighter, helping to tackle the devastating wildfires ravaging the Arctic and boreal north. This year, Canada has already registered its worst wildfire season on record, which has destroyed more than 52,000 square miles of the country — an area greater than the size of England. In Alaska, meanwhile, the frequency of wildfires exceeding one million acres in size has doubled in the past 30 years.

Alexander estimates that wildfires have claimed around four million acres of Gwich’in land since the Fifties, and in summer a thick band of smog often blankets the Yukon Flats. “We have had a front row seat to the beginning of the Pyrocene, as they are starting to call it,” he says. “The burning of the world.” Rain now falls instead of snow, caribou herds on which the Gwich’in rely have changed their patterns of migration, the rivers have warmed and salmon populations collapsed. And as the ice recedes, outside interests have started eying up the natural resources underneath the melting permafrost. After a deal was struck in 2019, oil and gas prospectors are currently scoping out the Yukon Flats.

A similar story is being recorded right across the High North. “Arctic amplification” is the term meteorologists use for the accelerated rate of global warming. But the same amplification is occurring with the geopolitics of the region. The Arctic is melting — one scientific study, published in June, claimed that the first summer in which all sea ice disappears could occur as early as the 2030s — and, from China to the US to Putin’s Russia, suddenly everyone wants a piece. The era of “Arctic exceptionalism” declared by Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987 is resolutely over, his entreaties for the Arctic to remain a “zone of peace” free from conflict and exploitation forgotten. As climate change accelerates and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has cleaved apart the international order, the Arctic has emerged as the potential theatre of the next global conflict.

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Alexander, who also represents the Gwich’in on the Arctic council (which includes the eight Arctic states, Canada, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the US and Russia) warns that the global race to plunder the Arctic could have devastating consequences. “If you don’t co-operate on the Arctic and we don’t get these things right, then I’ll tell you this, my friend: the world can change very rapidly.”

Russia, whose territory spans around 53% of the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and China are rapidly developing plans to expand the Northern Sea Route. The maritime passage between the east and west of the Arctic Ocean is regarded by the Kremlin as vital to avoid Western sanctions. It is already possible to navigate the route for anyone with several briefcases full of dollars to pay for the mandatory Russian ice breakers which accompany any transit as patrol vessels. In 2024, the Kremlin is planning to commence year-round navigations of the route, through which it hopes to increase the amount of cargo shipped from around 30 million annually to 80 million.

China — which has ominously declared itself a “near-Arctic state” — also harbours ambitions to transform the passage into a silk road of the far north, while in March, a Russian delegation to India held talks over new co-operation over the route. The West is similarly flexing its muscles, with Finland (and the expected accession of Sweden) extending Nato’s borders into the Arctic. In June, the US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken announced that the US would be opening an outpost in the far-north Norwegian town of Tromsø, stressing the need to have “a diplomatic footprint” above the Arctic Circle. “The war in Ukraine has really torpedoed this idea of Artic exceptionalism,” explains Dr Neil Melvin, Director of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI). “The whole focus of northern Europe has basically now shifted to building security against Russia.”

As Melvin points out, the heavy losses sustained by Russia’s land army in Ukraine will force it to become increasingly reliant on its nuclear forces stationed in the Arctic, where the UK and US have also long operated their own attack submarines. Russia’s Northern Fleet comprises of a dozen or so nuclear-powered attack submarines as well as surface vessels, including two heavy nuclear-powered missile battle cruisers. In recent years, Russia has also reoccupied old Cold War-era Arctic bases to bolster its presence. “They will feel more vulnerable as a result of not having a strong army, and I think we are likely to see them threaten nuclear options much more as part of national defence,” Melvin says of Russia’s designs in the Arctic. “They are going to be much more explicit and threatening.”

Beneath the ice, the Arctic possesses untold riches. The region is estimated to contain a fifth of the world’s undiscovered oil and gas reserves and rare earth elements such as gold, nickel and zinc. While most of these are present within the largely undisputed land borders of the Arctic nations, it is the increasingly navigable international waters that present the most likely flashpoint. An ongoing process led by a United Nations commission is considering sovereignty rights to the central Arctic Ocean between Russia, Denmark and Canada. While Putin is cooperating with the process so far, he has also planted a flag in the most literal sense — dropping a titanium standard of the Russian Federation two miles beneath the ocean on the North Pole seabed in 2007. Fishing rights are also key; as southern oceans heat up, species will migrate ever further north, causing estimated catches in higher latitudes to increase by up to 20 per cent by 2050.

According to Professor Klaus Dodds, an expert in geopolitics and ice studies based at Royal Holloway and author of the recent book, Border Wars, the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard could prove another area of conflict. Under a treaty originally signed in 1920, a host of countries including China and Russia have rights to engage in commercial activities across Svalbard. Moscow conducts coal mining operations on the island of Spitsbergen (and insists on referring to Svalbard by the same name, to emphasise its historic claim on the land). In settlements such as Barentsburg, Russian is the predominant language.

“The concern is we know we have potential flashpoints like Svalbard which, having caused agitation and tension in the past, might be escalated very quickly,” Dodds says. Aggression could be anything from attacks on underwater cables (last year, a Russian trawler was linked to the severing of a sub-sea fibre-optic cable which linked Svalbard to the Norwegian mainland), to an outright attack on oil and gas infrastructure. “The Norwegian European Arctic will be the space where, if anything, this is most likely to happen,” Dodds says. “That would also be the ultimate opportunity for Russia to test Nato’s resolve.”

Regardless of the potential for nuclear conflict, a burning Arctic poses grave threats for humanity. The Arctic permafrost contains peatland soils which are the world’s most vital carbon sink. Globally, peatlands store twice as much carbon as all the forests combined. When this burns, it releases the carbon back into the atmosphere creating something of a doom loop. According to the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service, wildfires across Canada have released 290 megatons of carbon into the atmosphere between January and August, more than 25% of the global total for 2023 in the year to date. 

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Thawing permafrost is also exposing chemical and radioactive waste and millennia-old “zombie viruses”. In 2016, around 100,000 reindeer were culled in the Russian far north after an anthrax outbreak that killed a 12-year-old boy. Plague bacillus, smallpox and other historic diseases are also feared to soon re-emerge from the melting earth. The discovery earlier this summer of 46,000-year-old roundworms lying dormant in Siberia, which are happily reproducing once again, may hold clues for adapting to climate change — but they also raise questions about what else might venture forth in a thaw. And herein lies the great lesson of the far north, Professor Dodds explains: nothing here ever happens in isolation — there will be wider ramifications across the globe. “Change in the Arctic is never restricted to the Arctic itself,” he says. “It is almost as if the Arctic strikes back.”

The time is long gone where we could think of the Arctic as a great pristine wilderness. Instead it has become the burning crucible of our climate crisis. But, as the towering glaciers melt and the seas of the Earth’s fifth largest ocean are revealed to us at last, their future looks even darker still, reanimating the biological threats of our deep past, and providing yet another site for human competition and conquest.

After all, this war is nothing less than a godsend for Western elites. Domestically, it is a well-known fact that periods of international crisis or war tend to bolster the popularity of a country’s government or political leaders (the rally-around-the-flag effect) — especially if the country in question doesn’t actually have boots on the ground, and therefore coffins returning home, in which case it’s all gain and no pain.

You might remember the eerily prescient 1997 satire Wag the Dog, in which the US president enlists the help of a Hollywood producer to fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract voters from a sex scandal in which he’s involved. Every major Western leader could do with a similar booster shot. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau have all been performing abysmally in the polls, due in no small part to their disastrous (if not outright authoritarian) handling of the pandemic and its social and economic fallout.

The latest data shows that the rally-around-the-flag effect is already working its magic: approval ratings for all Western leaders have registered a significant bounce since the beginning of the war. Biden has enjoyed the best makeover of all, going overnight from Sleepy Joe — the embarrassing grandad known for farting at parties — to “leader of the free world”, as he self-styled himself in his State of the Union address last week.

But there’s more at play here than a few percentage points in the polls. On a deeper level, we seem to have entered a particularly decadent stage of Western capitalism. Today, ruling elites are increasingly unable to generate societal consensus or hegemony in either material or ideological terms — due to neoliberalism’s innate tendency towards ever-growing levels of capital concentration and its disdain for democratic participation and empowerment — and are therefore forced to rely on repressive and militaristic measures in order to remain in power and stifle any challenges to their authority.

Hence their need for a more or less permanent state of crisis or emergency capable of justifying such measures. Which might help explain why the West seems to have been mired in a perennial state of “crisis” for much of the past 20 years: the post-9/11 global terrorism crisis, the post-2008 financial-economic crisis, the pandemic crisis and now, just as the latter seemed to be waning, the military crisis in Ukraine. All this against the background of a worsening climate and ecological crisis. Indeed, “crisis” no longer represents a deviation from the norm; it is the norm, the default starting point for all politics in the West.

In this sense, the framing of Covid as a “war” — the ultimate state of exception — was no accident. But nothing beats a real war when it comes to rallying people around the status quo. This moment is bound to exacerbate the worrying trends that have emerged during the pandemic: the consolidation of the media, the blatant resort to crude propaganda, the shutting down of any meaningful form of public debate, the “cancelling” of dissenting voices, and the demonisation and criminalisation of whomever happens to be the public enemy of the moment — yesterday the unvaccinated, today the “pro-Russians”.

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At the international level, the weaponisation of the suffering of the Ukrainians might prove even more beneficial to Western elites. Their order isn’t merely in an internal crisis but externally as well. It’s threatened by the rise of new regional powers — first and foremost China but to some extent Russia as well. In the US, they still struggle to accept that the “unipolar moment” is over. Our world is multipolar, whether the State Department in Washington likes it or not. The crisis in Ukraine is in many ways a result of this collective denial, of the West’s inability to conceive a new order, and of its foolish dream of somehow turning the clock back to the Nineties.

By meddling in Eastern Europe, and ignoring Moscow’s security interests, the West invited conflict in Ukraine. It’s worth noting that the US is now adopting against China the same strategy of military encirclement that ended up triggering Putin. When a similar crisis breaks out with China at some point down the road nobody should be surprised.

Events in Ukraine make such a conflict increasingly probable. And that is because they offer the West and its military-industrial apparatuses the perfect excuse to whip up a new Cold War and militarise Western foreign policy, under the guise of defending the “free world” from a new Russo-Chinese Evil Empire. It also helps that billions of dollars are waiting to be made in the process. Indeed, arms manufacturers are licking their lips at the prospect.

The consequences for Europe will be profound. From the perspective of the US, it prevents the strengthening of Russian-European relations and the rise of a Eurasian geopolitical reality. It allows the US to reassert its hegemony over Europe, in particular Germany. Indeed, several commentators have argued that the crisis in Ukraine was partially manufactured by the US in order to torpedo the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

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That pipeline was vehemently opposed by every element of the US establishment, from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. It’s no secret that thanks to the “shale revolution” the US is now a direct competitor of Russia in the field of natural gas exports. But even more importantly, the US feared that stronger, friendlier relations between Germany — and with it the rest of the EU — and Russia would have chipped away at Europe’s reliance on the United States’ security umbrella.

Well, as a result of recent events, the pipeline has been shelved once and for all. In fact, the talk in Europe is how to “decouple” once and for all from Russian gas (that’s if Putin doesn’t decide to turn off the tap beforehand). This is a double win for the US. Europe is likely to pivot towards the US for its gas imports as relations with Russia grow colder. And tensions with Russia have already boosted European support for Nato, which had become lukewarm in recent years. The result: the US maintains its military stranglehold over Europe.

It’s worth remembering that not too long ago Macron diagnosed Nato as being “braindead” and called for Europe to build its own common defence system. Both France and Germany reacted with the diplomatic equivalent of disgust to the new security pact between Australia, the US and the UK (AUKUS). That’s a thing of the past: now European leaders are once again lining up to pledge their unconditional allegiance to Nato — and to bolster their military spending and thus their contribution to the Alliance.

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Consider Germany’s foreign policy pivot — the announcement that it will be increasing its military spending to over 2% of its GDP in direct response to the situation in Ukraine. Sweden and Finland have reportedly given consideration to joining Nato; Switzerland is ending its neutral status and joining the EU’s sanctions on Russian assets. Even Ireland, neutral for a century, is considering joining Nato. Increased military spending in Europe means more US military hardware entering the continent. Moreover, the crisis along Europe’s eastern flank, should it be prolonged, will inevitably hamper trade relations with China. For America the geopolitical view looks cloudless.

The EU’s political autonomy will be reduced, to the extent that military considerations — determined in Washington — will trump other concerns. It will now be far harder for the EU to punish countries like Poland and Hungary for alleged deficiencies in their “rule of law” given their strategic importance for Nato. As Wolfgang Streeck writes: “In short, as Western Europe is returned to “the West”, the EU is reduced to a geoeconomic utility for Nato, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help “the West” encircle Russia on its Western flank… The implication for von der Leyen and her crowd is to confirm their subordinate status”.

That’s not to say that the crisis is not an opportunity for EU elites as well. It offers them a chance, at last, to push ahead with plans for a “common defence policy”, something Macron has been advocating for a long time. The issue had been contentious, both in Washington — where it was feared that a militarily independent Europe would be less reliant on the US – and in Berlin, which was sceptical of helping France use the EU as a cover for its global ambitions. Public opinion in Europe never embraced the idea.

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However, the conflict in Ukraine has swept away any doubts. For the first time ever, the EU is supporting member states as they supply military equipment to embattled Kyiv, mobilising €500 million under the European Peace Facility. This is a classic example of the EU’s long standing integration-through-crisis strategy: exploiting moments of public fear and disorientation to surreptitiously deepen an integration process that lacks popular support.

From the US perspective, such plans don’t represent a direct threat at the moment, so long as Europe’s military machine remains under the effective command of Nato. Whether they will create transatlantic tensions down the road remains to be seen. For the peoples of Europe, neither option is particularly appealing. Either a European army under the aegis of the US security establishment or one under the aegis of France and a remilitarised Germany? Whatever happens, arming the EU — an institution as undemocratic and oligarchic as they come — remains a bad idea. But war is a racket, as US Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler famously claimed, and no one wants to be left out.

“I have given everything to an attempt to find a compromise that can take this country out of the European Union while maintaining our economic strength and political cohesion. I accept that I have failed. I have failed chiefly because my party refuses to compromise. I regret, therefore, that I can no longer sit for this party.”

To advocates of a ‘hard’ Brexit or indeed no Brexit, any compromise on the issue (including the Prime Ministers deal) would leave Britain ‘half-in and half-out’ of the European Union. Technically, they’re wrong – a country is either a member of the European Union or it isn’t; but leaving that aside, would being half-in, half-out be such a terrible thing?

History is full of compromises, some of them permanent, some which collapse, and others which can be seen, in retrospect, as a staging post to something else. Here are 10 of the most interesting examples.

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1. The Crown Dependencies

There are three ‘Crown Dependencies’ – the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey (which together form the Channel Islands) and the Isle of Man.

Though the three territories are included within the British isles and their inhabitants are British citizens, they are not part of Great Britain (i.e. England, Scotland and Wales) nor are they part of the United Kingdom (i.e. Great Britain and Northern Ireland). The UK is responsible for their defence and foreign policy, but otherwise they are direct dependencies of the Crown, with their own legislatures and legal systems – in fact the Bailiwick of Guernsey has three legislatures (one for Guernsey itself, one for Alderney and one for Sark). So, I hope that’s all perfectly clear.

The Crown Dependencies inhabit a half-way house between sovereignty and non-sovereignty. It obviously suits them well. They also inhabit another half-way house – Jersey, Guernsey and Man are not part of the EU but are part of the Customs Union. Looks like the UK might be joining them.

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2. The Irish Free State

Next up is the most commonly cited ‘precedent’ for a compromise Brexit. It’s not an especially happy one, at least not in its early stages.

After years of struggle, the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 granted independence to Ireland. Or did it? The Treaty was full of compromises – not least the fact that Northern Ireland was granted the power to opt out and remain in union with Great Britain, which of course it did. Furthermore, the Free State was still part of the British Commonwealth. George V remained king in Ireland and Irish legislators were required to swear fidelity to him as part of the deeply divisive Oath of Allegiance.

Even Irish supporters of the Treaty called it “the freedom to achieve freedom”. For opponents of the Treaty this was not enough and Civil War broke out in 1922. The pro-treaty side (which became Fine Gael) won the war, but the largest part of the anti-treaty side won the peace – emerging as Fianna Fail (Ireland’s dominant party from 1932 to 2011).

Ironically, it was the party’s founder Eamon de Valera who used “the freedom to achieve freedom” – leading Ireland to full independence in 1937.

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3. The Dominions

Independence came to America in 1776; but what if the American revolution had never happened? What if the American subjects of King George Ill had been granted representation in return for their taxation? Would we have the Honourable Members for Boston Central and Manhattan Upper Westside sitting in the House of Commons? Unlikely. Rather self-governance would have evolved as it did in America’s northern neighbour. In 1867, Canada was granted Dominion status – though quite what that meant took decades to work out.

By 1907 Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Newfoundland – were all recognised as Dominions i.e. self-governing states within the British Empire. The date for full Canadian independence is usually given as 1931, but some powers were not transferred from Westminster until 1982! It was a similar story with slightly different dates in Australia and New Zealand too. The outlier was Newfoundland, which had its own Dominion status separate to that of Canada. In the 1930s, however, its government ran out of money – and self-governance collapsed. The British stepped in for a while until 1949, when Newfoundland became the tenth Canadian province.

So, in Canada, Australia and New Zealand, independence was evolutionary not revolutionary. I’ll leave you to decide whether America would have been better off following the same path.

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4. Françafrique

Ok, enough about les Anglos for now. Let’s look at the decolonisation of another European empire – the French one in Africa. Whereas the British disengaged from sub-Saharan Africa with barely a backward glance, the French had trouble letting go.

Despite the formal independence of the successor nations, Paris remained deeply involved in their internal affairs – for instance, there were 19 military interventions between 1962 and 1995. The term Françafrique was originally a positive one, but became a byword for an uncomfortably close and murky web of political and business relationships. A notable episode was the so-called ‘Diamonds Affair’ when the French President, Valery Giscard d’ Estaing was accused of having received a gift of diamonds from the Bokassa I, the self-styled Emperor of Central Africa (in reality, a brutal and deranged dictator). Giscard vigorously insisted he’d done nothing wrong, but the allegations contributed to his electoral defeat in 1981. It didn’t help that little diamond stickers kept appearing over his eyes on election posters across the country.

It’s not that France is alone in having behaved badly in the developing world. But in the post-war period, there’s been nothing else quite like Françafrique, which encompassed over 20 African countries. What was the point of this postcolonial empire? Francois Mitterrand, who defeated Giscard in 1981 had this to say in 1957: “without Africa, France will have no history in the 21st century”.

Complete rubbish, of course – and, now that we are in the 21st century, it’s obvious Françafrique is not the force it used to be, for either France or its former colonies. That’s for the best, but let’s hope that the unhealthy neo-colonial relationship isn’t replaced by an even worse one with China.

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5. Finland

Finland knows all about half-way houses. In 1917, it escaped the Russian Empire only to be repeatedly invaded by the Soviet Union in the Second World War. The Russians kept attacking because the heroic Finns kept fighting back. By the end of the War, Stalin had imposed his rule over half of Europe and some nations were absorbed into the USSR. Finland was unique among Russia’s neighbours in remaining free. There was a price, however: territorial losses, reparations and a position of enforced neutrality.

Though postwar Finland wasn’t on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain, it wasn’t really on the western side either. Political scientists coined the word ‘Finlandisation‘ to describe the process by which a large country strongly influences a smaller neighbour while leaving it formally independent. That’s somewhat unfair on Finland, which did what it had to do to maximise its room for manoeuvre. In time, Finland learned how to benefit from its obligatory cooperation with the Soviets – developing close economic ties while remaining sufficiently capitalist to profit from them.

Before the war, the Estonians were richer than their Finnish cousins across the Baltic Sea. But Estonia was one of the nations annexed by the USSR. By the end of the Cold War, when the Estonians regained their independence, it was clear that they’d fallen a long way behind their once poor relations.

Whatever the sacrifices and compromises, the freedom to be yourself is usually worth it.

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6. Taiwan

In one way, Taiwan’s situation resembles post-war Finland: it’s a small capitalist democracy next to a giant communist neighbour. Of course, the parallels are not exact. Most importantly, Taiwan is fundamentally Chinese. Indeed, the official name of the Taiwanese state is the Republic of China (RoC)

Up until 1971, it was the RoC government in Taipei (the Taiwanese capital) that controlled China’s seat in the United Nations, not the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government in Beijing. While both governments claimed to be the legitimate government of all of China – mainland and islands – the rest of the world had to recognise the reality that it was the communist PRC that controlled almost all the land and people.

The Republic of China therefore languishes in diplomatic isolation, unrecognised by most countries despite the obvious existence of the Taiwanese state. It’s a deeply strange situation and yet this non-nation nation has prospered. It transitioned to democracy in the 1980s and has a per capita GDP of about $25,000 – that of the PRC is around the $10,000 mark, despite the years of rapid growth.

Though the PRC continues to regard Taiwan as a rebel province, and responds to the pro-independence movement with threats of invasion, it has also moved to deepen trading relationships and other forms of cooperation. Even more than Hong Kong, Taiwan provides a living model of what a democratic, free market China would look like. It would take the most blinkered Beijing ideologue not to see the interest in that.

It would be nice if the EU saw the benefit of an island neighbour free to do things differently.

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7. Singapore

The British view of Singapore’s history is full of gaps. We recall the colonial past; commemorate the wartime occupation; and admire the hyper-modernity of the present. However, that leaves out a lot – not least the tumult of the post-war years.

Today, Singapore may be the very image of an orderly society, but in the 1950s and early 60s, Singapore was teetering between multiple opposing forces: between the British Empire and the independence movement; communism and capitalism; and, most significantly, between union and disunion with Malaya/Malaysia.

Look at Singapore on a map. See how small and vulnerable it looks – a tiny island, barely separate from the Malay Peninsula. It’s easy to understand why Singapore’s leaders chose semi-autonomy within the Malaysian federation as a path to independence (achieved in 1963). However, the ethnic, religious and political divides between Singapore and rest of Malaysia proved unbridgeable. Feeling threatened by Singapore’s economic power, Malaysia’s leaders moved to expel the island from the federation. And thus in 1965, Singapore found itself independent and alone – a city state without a hinterland.

One half-way house having collapsed, Singapore built another one – a system of government somewhere between a liberal democracy and a benign(ish) autocracy. That’s true of both the political and economic system, because contrary to what you might have heard, Singapore is not a capitalist free-for-all. A small state and low taxes is balanced against strict government control of the land supply and massive state-led investment programmes.

There’s no such thing as a ‘Singapore model’ for other countries to follow. The city state’s singular history and geography means that it is a model for nowhere else but itself. However, what Singapore’s story does show is that a hard-working nation, with a strong sense of identity and a competent government can overcome isolation, division and hostility to succeed in a competitive world.

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8. The mixed economy

The Crown Territories, Ireland, the Dominions, Françafrique, Finland, Taiwan and Singapore: seven case studies in the complex relationship between sovereignty and reality. There are many others, but I’m going to conclude with three non-territorial examples of a historic compromise. First of all, in economics.

The 20th century was a fierce and often violent contest of ideas, not least between the free market and the centrally-planned, state-led economy. But in nation after nation, the eventual outcome was a half-way house between capitalism and socialism.

The social democracies of Scandinavia were once said to have pioneered the ‘mixed economy’, but the truth is that all industrial democracies are mixed economies. The precise division of the cake between the state and the market varies between nations and historical eras, but there is no example of either the public or private sector being reduced to insignificance.

The same is increasingly true of the developed and developing non-democracies. The only places left on the planet with an economically all-powerful state are pitiously poor – something they have in common with the only places on the planet where the state is powerless.

Ideological purity has its limits.

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9. The Church of England

If the 20th Century was a contest between economic ideas, the 16th and 17th century was all about religion – in particular the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism.

In different parts of Europe there were different outcomes – and one of the most interesting was in England. Rather than choose between the rival forms of Christianity, the English created a mash-up of the two and called it the Church of England.

That, of course, is a huge over-simplification and overlooks the persecution of Catholics and dissenting Protestants – not to mention the long years of conflict, war and atrocity in England, Scotland and Ireland. And yet the middle way of Anglicanism came to provide a model of co-existence: a roof under which High Church and Low Church, conservatives and liberals, worked out a way to live with one another.

That this became true of the most important spiritual institution in what would become the world’s most powerful nation, is surely not without wider significance.

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10. Theoretical physics

From religion, to science – and, specifically, the foundational theories of modern physics.

On the one hand we have General Relativity, which describes the fundamental forces of reality at the scale of planets, stars, galaxies and ultimately the whole universe. On the other, there is Quantum field theory, which does the same, but at the opposite end of the scale – atoms, subatomic particles and the general weirdness of the very small. Both theories are theories in the proper scientific sense, i.e. they’re not just hypothetical, they have real predictive power confirmed by experimental observation.

However, despite the evidence that backs both of them up, there’s a fundamental problem: they contradict one another. The mathematics by which we can explain the very big and the very small cannot be combined into a single theoretical framework. We’ve proved them both and yet they disprove one another. Awkward.

Many of the most brilliant minds of the age have devoted their careers to finding a Theory of Everything that can reconcile Relativity with the quantum stuff. So far, they’ve failed. One might reasonably wonder whether they’ll ever succeed; or whether they even need to. As long as they stay in their lane, the apparently irreconcilable theories both work – surely, the ultimate in agreeing to disagree.

Perhaps we just need to accept that there’s a fundamental contradiction woven into the fabric of creation. If nothing else, it puts our disagreements over Brexit into perspective.

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