‘If we lose the Arctic, we lose the globe’: Former Finnish President on how environmental cooperation gave way to security concerns

Sauli Niinistö’s dozen years as Finland’s president spanned a remarkable transformation in the High North. When he took office in 2012, cooperation on the environment – from research to setting coming goals – still provided common ground among the Arctic states. By the time he left, the region was increasingly characterized by security concerns and Finland had joined NATO.

Now, in a recent book Kaikki tiet turvaan (All Roads to Security), Niinistö looks back on those years and the changing relationships between Finland, Russia and the U.S. Speaking to Arctic Today at his office in central Helsinki, he also returns repeatedly to the issue that first drove much of his Arctic diplomacy: climate change.

“If we lose the Arctic, we lose the globe,” Niinistö says. Despite the wars in Ukraine and Iran and today’s heightened security concerns, he argues that climate change remains the greater threat. And the Arctic, he points out, is warming far faster than the global average.

Niinistö’s two-track diplomacy

During his tenure, Niinistö became closely associated with Arctic diplomacy through the work of the Arctic Council. “While understanding very well the global or geopolitical importance of the Arctic, my own interest in the region was primarily environmental,” he says.

In stark contrast to today’s Arctic, which is so heavily discussed in terms of NATO, Russia, defense, shipping routes and political rivalries, Niinistö makes the point that the original premise of the Arctic Council was to establish a forum for environmental matters.

“From the beginning, the Arctic Council had a tradition not to speak about geopolitics,” Niinistö says. “That was an unwritten rule.”

When Finland took over the rotating chairmanship of the Arctic Council in 2017, geopolitical tensions had increased, and Niinistö was looking for an opportunity to bring the two strands together. The idea began to take shape after he hosted Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin for their summit in Helsinki in July 2018. In the months that followed, Niinistö began pushing for another high-level meeting, this time bringing all the Arctic leaders together.

He came up with what he calls a “two-floor” Arctic summit, whereby the Arctic Council leaders would formally discuss environmental issues, while a parallel informal meeting could tackle security and geopolitics separately.

Niinistö hoped the summit might also help to ease growing tensions among the leaders who would attend. “On the security side, I wanted or thought that it might be possible to enlarge the discussion, not just discussing Arctic security, but trying to, in a way, find some détente among the great powers.”

The summit that never happened

The summit was targeted to take place in Helsinki in early 2019 before the end of Finland’s Arctic Council Chair period in May 2019. The proposal had got quite far, Niinistö recalls, with the Kremlin indicating that Putin would participate if Trump came.

Plans were taking shape. Then geopolitics got in the way. In November 2018, Russia unexpectedly seized Ukrainian naval vessels in the Kerch Strait on the Sea of Azov, and John Bolton, Trump’s then National Security Advisor, called Niinistö to say that a Trump-Putin meeting had become impossible.

Black carbon campaign

On environmental issues, Niinistö continued to press both Washington and Moscow throughout his presidency. Niinistö says he chose black carbon, which is accelerating Arctic warming, because it was simple, visual and easy to explain, and both Russia and the U.S. were flaring huge quantities of gas in the region.

He recalls explaining the problem to Trump during a visit to the White house in very practical terms: black carbon, or soot, released from their gas fields travels north landing on the Arctic ice and snow and darkening it, which causes it to absorb more heat from the sun. Niinistö also gave Trump the business case for capturing rather than flaring the gas.

Trump’s response surprised him. “He said, ‘This is the best environmental argument I’ve ever heard.’”

And then? “Nothing happened,” Niinistö says.

Looking back, Niinistö had more success finding common ground with Trump on security matters. In his book, Niinistö recalls linking Finland’s interest in U.S. fighter jets with Washington’s need for Finnish icebreakers.

“Your fighters don’t break ice and our icebreakers don’t fly,” he told Trump in one meeting. The approach may have been prescient as nearly a decade later, the U.S. has turned to Finland to help rebuild its icebreaker fleet as part of its expanding Arctic security capabilities.

Russia, NATO and ‘leaving nothing loose’

Relations with Finland’s eastern neighbor, meanwhile, moved in a very different direction. During Niinistö’s second term, Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Finland’s subsequent accession to NATO brought a turning point.

“This changed our whole security architecture. Including in the Arctic. And was when we saw the Arctic becoming more and more a hotspot on security issues, in geopolitics.”

In the book, Niinistö recounts the phone call to Putin telling him Finland would apply to join NATO. He took the news better than expected. When Putin suggested the Americans would take over military command, Niinistö replied that he would still be appointing Finland’s generals. And Putin laughed.

Through the decades of changing relations with Russia, Finland has always maintained its focus on military deterrence, including compulsory conscription, large army reserves and artillery stocks. The country also has a history of promoting whole-of-society preparedness. With a small smile Niinistö quotes the old Finnish maxim, “The Cossack soldier will take everything that is loose,” he says. “That is why Finland has always made sure that nothing’s left loose.”

Climate still the existential threat

Yet for all this heightened focus on security, the former president still sees climate change as the greater threat to the Arctic and the world. While melting sea ice might open up new shipping routes and economic opportunities, Niinistö warns that these also carry big environmental risks. Still, the collapse of cooperation that characterized the Arctic during his presidency hasn’t entirely extinguished his hope that Arctic countries might once again find common ground.

Sooner or later, he believes governments will realize that humankind has a common enemy in climate change, and that confronting it will require countries to work together. He cites the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of creative destruction. “When things are bad enough, people wake up.”

“It’s more a dream than maybe a realistic hope,” Niinistö says. “But someday it must happen. The question is whether it will happen too late.”