Stoltenberg insisted, however, that NATO has no intention of mirroring what Russia is doing in the North.

“But of course, we need to make sure that we are able to protect all allies, also those allies who have territory in the North, in the Arctic,” he said. “And we have to make sure that we are able to keep the sea lines of communications open over the North Atlantic from North America to Europe.”

NATO has increased its presence in the Arctic with more modern maritime capabilities and patrol aircraft, and by strengthening the alliance’s anti-submarine warfare capabilities, he added.

“We do a lot to make sure that we are able to deliver credible deterrence … in the Arctic,” Stoltenberg said.

U.S. Admiral James G. Foggo, commander of Allied Joint Force Command Naples, said Trident Juncture demonstrated that NATO would have no trouble fielding forces further north – even beyond the Arctic Circle and close to the Russian border, if the need ever arose.

However, he said he doubts NATO forces would ever be called upon to do that, and downplayed the argument for moving more NATO resources into the Arctic.

“It’s nobody’s intent to militarize the Arctic,” he said. “The Arctic is an area where there is a lot of transit, there is a lot of tourism, it’s something that we have to pay attention to and the intent is to keep a safe and secure environment out there for all nations that border on the Arctic seas.

“Nobody is out to challenge anybody else’s particular claims or interests in the Arctic.”

For Norway, Trident Juncture offered proof that, if the Cold War returns and starts overheating in the Far North, Norway can cope – and it won’t have to cope alone.

“First, we can show that we can receive help from our allies if needed,” Norwegian Defence Minister Frank Bakke-Jensen told Radio Canada International.

“The other part is that we can test our total defence concept, which means that our civil authorities – our health authorities, road authorities, police – everyone is able to support the troops if we need to receive such an amount of people.”

Still, Bakke-Jensen – who represents Norway’s northernmost region, Finnmark, on the border with Russia – said he doesn’t believe the alliance is heading for a replay of the bad old days following the end of the Second World War.

“I grew up during the Cold War. Then, the Soviet Union was something dark, cold beyond the border,” he said. “Today we know that beyond that border there are people like us. We know that Russian authorities are something but the Russian people are something else.”

While Norway can’t accept Russia’s behaviour in Ukraine, Bakke-Jensen said, it also doesn’t see Russia as an imminent military threat and tries to cooperate with Moscow in other fields.

“We cooperate in managing the fish stocks in the Barents Sea, we have a search and rescue agreement, we have some science projects, we have a lot of people-to-people projects crossing the border in the north.

“We try to keep as good a relationship with Russia as possible, but at the same time we need to signal that we can’t accept breaches of international law we see in Ukraine.”

A challenging relationship

Relations with Russia preoccupy Knut Hauge. As director general of the Security Policy Department at the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it’s part of his job to advise the government on its Russia policy. And as a former ambassador and consul general to Russia who spent years in Moscow and at the Norwegian consulate in Murmansk, Hauge has some unique insights into that complex relationship.

Norway and Russia have been neighbours for centuries. In fact, the first border agreement between Norway and Russia’s Novgorod Republic was signed back in 1326, Hauge said.

“We, of course, realize that we are in an asymmetric relationship to Russia, Norway being a small Atlantic country and Russia being a huge Eurasian country,” Hauge said, speaking in his office overlooking downtown Oslo.

“So there has always been this inherent challenge in our relationship.”

Over the years, and even during the Cold War, Norway has based its relations with Moscow on respect for legitimate Russian interests, Hauge said.

That has meant, for example, not deploying large numbers of troops close to the Russian border, since Russia’s Kola Peninsula is the main staging base for its strategic nuclear submarine fleet and home to some of its key military installations.

“On the other side,” he said, “it is very, very important to show the necessary firmness, or you can call it deterrence, towards the Russians.”

“You can say that a prerequisite for being able to engage with Russians as a small country in our neighbourhood is that we have the backing of our allies and that our defence is credible. And (Trident Juncture) shows that we are within a credible alliance with a capacity to reinforce us if and when needed.”

The terrestrial part of Trident Juncture took place in central Norway, nearly 900 kilometres from the border with Russia, although its air and maritime aspects came much closer to the Russian border. Holding the exercise any closer to Russia would have been a “completely unnecessary provocation,” Hauge said.

Still, Russia has only itself to blame for NATO’s show of force, he argued.

“There is absolutely no doubt that there was a major change within NATO after 2014 and the Russian aggression towards Ukraine,” Hauge said. “In a way, what we have been engaged in since then is to try to bring NATO back to Europe from its engagement in Afghanistan.

“For us it has been extremely important to underline the need to focus on the Trans-Atlantic links, both in the political sense but also very concretely when it comes to keeping the sea lines of communications open in a crisis or a conflict.”

Having lived for many years among Russians, Hauge said he understands that they can feel threatened.

“We feel, of course, objectively that there is absolutely no reason why they should be,” Hauge said. “The whole idea that 29 more or less democratic countries should come together to wage a war of aggression against Russia is ridiculous. That would never happen.”

Still, Russians feel that they are under constant “hybrid attack” by the West, which has tried for many years to export its system of liberal democratic governance to Russia, Hauge said.

“This is perceived as a threat because they believe, rightly or wrongly, that this would undermine the whole Russian state.”

A constantly growing alliance

Glenn Diesen, a Norwegian expert on Russian foreign and security policy, said the real source of the friction between NATO and Russia is a fundamental disagreement over the nature of the alliance.

“I would argue that NATO has three functions,” Diesen said in a Skype interview from Moscow, where he teaches at the Higher School of Economics, one of the leading Russian universities founded by prominent Russian market economy reformers in 1992.

“The first would be that it’s a traditional defensive military alliance, which tends to deter any aggression against any of its members. This was its Cold War function. And then you have a second function, which is that NATO is also a community of values, a club for liberal democracies.”

But the alliance also has a third function it doesn’t publicize, Diesen said.

“The third function is that it’s also an expansionist and offensive military alliance. We can’t get around that fact because NATO does continuously expand and refuses to set any limitations. It demonstrated that it is willing to meddle in elections and even topple governments in order to continue to have governments that want to join NATO.”

The Kremlin has a very different public interpretation of the events of 2014 in Ukraine. It argues that it was actions by the West – which actively sought to topple the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych – that eventually forced Moscow to take over Crimea and intervene in eastern Ukraine, said Diesen.

Over the last two decades, NATO also has used force in violation of the UN Charter in the former Yugoslavia and effectively dismembered Serbia with its de facto annexation of Kosovo, Diesen said.

When Russia opposes NATO’s expansion up to its borders, it’s not because it’s paranoid or it opposes liberal democracies, he added.

“You can’t ignore that NATO has this third component, this very aggressive, expansionist element to it.”

But NATO couldn’t simply turn away former Soviet satellites who were seeking protection under its security umbrella, Hauge said.

“Should we have said to the Baltic countries that you are doomed to be in this kind of a grey zone between Russia and the West? That you have to check out with Moscow if it’s OK to join NATO? Because that is the flip side of the medal for people who are criticizing NATO for expanding too much.”

Increasingly, it’s not just former Russian or Soviet Union satellites gravitating towards NATO. It’s also neutral nations like Sweden and Finland, which sent a combined military force to take part in the exercise.

The participation of Sweden and Finland in Trident Juncture underlined how both countries are seeking closer defence cooperation with NATO despite their nominal neutrality, Hauge said.

“This would have been unthinkable during the Cold War. It is something that has developed at least to the level that it is today after 2014.”

Cooperation in defence and security policy areas between the five Nordic countries – Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden – is much closer today than at any time during Cold War.

In 2009, they came together to create the Nordic Defence Cooperation (NORDEFCO), a cooperative arrangement on defence and military procurement that falls short of a formal military alliance. Sweden and Finland also have stepped up their cooperation with NATO.

“What we are all striving for, being it the Norwegians, Finns, Swedes or the Baltic states, is stability and predictability in a world which is in constant change,” Hauge said.

Joining NATO would simply be the logical conclusion of a process that began after the Cold War, with Sweden and Finland gradually drawing closer to the West and joining the European Union, Hauge said.

Others argue that a NATO straddling Russia’s northwestern frontier, from the Gulf of Finland to the Norwegian High North, would unnecessarily inflame tensions in the region and create a new strategic problem for the alliance, Hauge said.

Diesen said that while he understands very well why Sweden and Finland might feel nervous about this resurgent Russia, joining NATO would not solve their security dilemmas – and might even have the opposite effect, forcing Russia to deploy even larger forces to protect its border.

“The idea that, if you just put enough troops on Russia’s border … they’ll somehow take orders and do what they’re told is a fantasy,” Diesen said.

Embracing China

It also would push Russia further into China’s embrace at a time when Beijing is displaying growing global ambitions, including an interest in the Arctic, said Diesen.

“China has its own format now for integrating the Eurasian continent, essentially taking over these geoeconomic levers of power,” said Diesen, who touched on the Russia-China dynamic in his book, Russia’s Geoeconomic Strategy for a Greater Eurasia. “This is done by taking over a lot of strategic industries, developing new transportation corridors, and constructing new financial instruments.”

Russia has always tried to limit China’s Arctic ambitions but its conflict with the West has forced the Kremlin to pivot to the East, he said.

“Now, you’re actually seeing Russia accommodating China in the Arctic.”

China has poured billions of dollars into the development of Russian liquefied natural gas production on the Yamal Peninsula and has been working with Moscow to develop trans-Arctic shipping along the Northern Sea Route off Russia’s Arctic coastline.

In January of 2018, China officially released its Arctic White Paper. The policy document refers to China as a “near-Arctic state” and calls for the development of a so-called Polar Silk Road as part of its grandiose project Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project, a $1 trillion plan to upgrade transport infrastructure between Asia and Europe being promoted by Beijing.

“Russia and China can assert a lot of geoeconomic influence over the Arctic by developing it as a transportation corridor outside U.S. control, which would be the only major waterway outside U.S. control,” Diesen said, adding that region is also home to significant hydrocarbon and mineral resources.

For this strategy to work, however, Russia and China need partners in the West.