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In 2021, Sharon Burke wrote, “The Arctic Threat That Must Not be Named,” where she argued that climate change was the main variable driving geopolitical competition in the Arctic. In the wake of increasing focus on the region, we invited Sharon back to reflect on her article.Read more below.1. In your 2021 article, “The Arctic Threat That Must Not be Named,” you argued that climate change is “the variable that will drive all other calculations in the region.” How has that argument evolved over the last three and a half years?Great question, because the evolving situation is a big reminder that climate change is not the cause of human conflict (not yet anyway), humans are. The variable that’s raising the geopolitical heat in the Arctic right now is Vladimir Putin. In addition to his ruinous military adventures in Ukraine and Syria, Putin is beefing up Russia’s posture, hostile rhetoric, and military activities in the High North, his number two strategic priority. He’s also pulled China’s Xi Jinping into a tighter embrace, including in the Arctic. All that aggression drove Sweden and Finland into NATO and is strengthening trans-Atlantic cooperation more generally, an unintended consequence that certainly reverberates through the Arctic. Climate change is making it possible for the region to be a theater of competition, but it’s Putin who is driving the competition there toward conflict.2. You wrote that China’s and Russia’s actions in the Arctic reflect what is happening in the South China Sea and Ukraine. How does our current understanding of their territorial advances inform that assertion and what can the United States do to mitigate similar attempts in the Arctic?Russia’s attempted conquest of Ukraine and China’s increasingly brazen attempts to dominate its South China Sea neighbors and Taiwan are proving hard to roll back. Part of me