Not so long ago, the Arctic—a remote and thinly populated region stretching from Alaska to Siberia—seemed immune to the kind of conflicts that beset so many other parts of the world. Scholars even had a phrase for it: Arctic exceptionalism. Territorial disputes were virtually nonexistent. Until recently, Finland and Sweden still served as buffers between an expanding NATO alliance and the Russian federation, which takes up more than half of the Arctic coastline. Over the last couple of decades,