Strategy changes gradually before it changes suddenly. Geography, including oceans, does not change; the political weather, and responses to it, do.

The disappearance of the Soviet Union removed the organising threat around which NATO maritime planning had revolved. Russia in the 1990s faced economic collapse, institutional turmoil and a navy struggling to keep vessels seaworthy. Patrol rates fell sharply, maintenance backlogs accumulated, and Western attention shifted towards expeditionary operations elsewhere. Force structures contracted across the Alliance. Escort numbers fell, and maritime focus drifted away from the North Atlantic.

The arithmetic of presence became increasingly stark. Modern warships are far more capable than their predecessors, yet a warship can only be in one place at one time, however sophisticated its sensors or weapons. The operational canvas itself never shrank: the core waters of the Greenland-Iceland-UK corridor cover on the order of six hundred thousand square miles — an area larger than France and Germany combined — far beyond the reach of continuous physical presence by even a substantial escort fleet.

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If you travel on the London Underground you will hear the familiar instruction: "Mind the gap."
It is not theatrical. It is not alarmist. It is a reminder that space exists between platform and carriage, and that inattention carries consequences.
In the North Atlantic there is another gap — between Greenland, Iceland and the United Kingdom — that shaped Cold War strategy and continues to shape European security.
This article sets the historical baseline for a series examining that maritime corridor: how it functioned during the Cold War; how attention to it diminished after 1991; and why it has re-emerged as a strategic concern in an era of renewed great power competition and climate change.
To understand current debate about NATO's northern flank, one must begin when the GIUK Gap was treated not as cartography, but as a strategic fulcrum.

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