The icy cold war America is busy losing

TO REACH THE strange, remote island of Adak, be patient. Such is the summer fog over the waters of the Aleutian Islands that it took this reporter four attempts in four days, including two aborted landings, before a gap appeared in the vapours. Arrival reveals snow-topped volcanoes, green slopes, salmon runs—and the wind-flung detritus of an abandoned military town.

Adak also reveals the contradictions in President Donald Trump’s contest with Russia and China for dominance in the Arctic. He talks of absorbing Canada as the 51st state and annexing Greenland. Astonishingly, he does not rule out taking the Danish-ruled island by force, claiming America needs it for “international world security” because Russian and Chinese aircraft-carriers and gunships are “going up and down the coast of Greenland”.

The more acute Arctic challenge to the American homeland lies not on the North Atlantic side but, rather, on America’s more exposed flank on the Pacific. There, American forces are increasingly scraping against Russian and Chinese ones, at times operating in unison. Russian and Chinese research and coastguard vessels, warships and even nuclear-capable bombers regularly buzz the seas and airspace close to Alaska.

Foreign military aircraft have increasingly been testing the air-defence identification zone (ADIZ, an airspace buffer) around America and Canada—virtually all of them around Alaska and none around Greenland. In late September two Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers with two fighter escorts were intercepted 30 miles off an American island in the Bering Sea.

Instead of fixating on Greenland, Mr Trump should look at the speck that is Adak, on the chain of volcanic islands that stretch between the Alaskan and Siberian land masses. His generals are already doing so. The heads of both INDOPACOM (Indo-Pacific Command, in charge of planning for any war with China) and NORTHCOM (Northern Command, responsible for homeland defence) want the old military base on Adak to be revived. That would improve America’s ability to defend the homeland and help it to project power.

Some of Mr Trump’s fellow Republicans agree. Adak is the “gateway in the Arctic”, Dan Sullivan, a senator for Alaska, insists. “It flanks China and Russia. It makes a lot of sense to reopen that base.” Though dilapidated, Adak still has two runways, a deep-water harbour and fuel storage. It lies close to great-circle shipping routes between America and Asia, and to new Arctic shipping routes that promise to cut sailing times between Asia and Europe. In a war with China over Taiwan, Adak would be a good 1,000 nautical miles (1,852km) closer to the action than big bases in continental Alaska.

The town of Adak was born in war and died in peace. A base was built in 1942 to expel the Japanese from Attu and Kiska, farther west along the Aleutian chain. In the cold war Adak was a listening post and a base for tracking Soviet submarines. The naval air station was abandoned in 1997. A fish-processing plant shut in 2020; the high school in 2023. Homes, the church, McDonald’s: all have been left for the elements to shred. A 6,000-strong community has shrunk to two-dozen.

The renewed interest in Adak—and in upgrading dual-use infrastructure in Alaska more broadly—is a sign of sharpening geopolitics in the Arctic. Powers long regarded the polar region as a zone of semi-neutrality, where the main debates concerned global warming, fragile ecosystems and the well-being of indigenous populations. In 2009 Canada’s top general joked: “If someone were to invade the Canadian Arctic, my first task would be to rescue them.”

Now priorities are geopolitical, intensified by Russia’s war in Ukraine. With its emphasis on security, the Trump administration has slashed funding for polar science, including crucial satellite data to monitor snow and ice cover. In July the US Arctic Research Commission, an advisory body, recommended that studies henceforth focus on security in whatever form.

On conventional maps of the world the Arctic looks marginal. But adopt a polar perspective of Earth, and the Arctic becomes the crossroads of great powers.

The NSR is largely ice-free in summer and shaves 2,500 nautical miles off the 10,600 nautical-mile journey from Shanghai to Rotterdam via the Suez Canal. The Centre for High North Logistics, a research outfit at Nord University, counted 52 full transits along the NSR between June and August this year, up from 45 in the same period last year—mostly carrying Russian oil, gas and other bulk cargo to China. The Istanbul Bridge, an ice-strengthened container ship, set off from Ningbo in China on September 22nd and docked at Britain’s Felixstowe on October 13th, inaugurating what Chinese boosters say will be a regular “Arctic Express”.

That will thrill Russia, a giant in the Arctic, where it is revamping facilities and bases. China has invested in some of them, seeing Russia as key to creating a “polar silk road” and affirming itself as a “near-Arctic” nation. China had five research vessels in and around the Arctic this summer. America suspects they serve both civilian and military purposes—surveying the seabed for mining opportunities and to enable submarine operations. “Science is the precursor to everything you want to do in the Arctic, including hybrid attacks” such as cutting submarine cables, says Heather Conley of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.

America’s Arctic ambitions are growing, too. In a quest for energy and minerals dominance, the Trump administration is simplifying regulations on the oil industry, most controversially by reversing a ban on drilling in the vast Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. That Alaska will produce much more crude is questionable, given the costs of extracting it, says Jeremy Kasper of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Similar challenges confront those who hope for an Alaskan gas pipeline and a minerals bonanza.

Meanwhile, Alaska’s fishing grounds are changing. Populations of cod and king crab are moving north. A warming Arctic increases pressure to end a fishing moratorium in the central Arctic Ocean.

All this, together with the overlapping claims about extended continental shelves, will lead to disputes. America’s coastguard struggles to monitor the increasing activity and has few resources to deal with high-latitude accidents and spills. This year it acquired a second (medium-size) icebreaker in the Arctic. In contrast, Russia has scores of icebreakers, several of them nuclear-powered. Even in Trump-coveted Greenland, America relies on a Canadian icebreaker to resupply Pituffik. In 2012 an ice-strengthened Russian tanker had to be used to deliver emergency fuel to the Alaskan harbour of Nome, near the Bering Strait. The strait, the essential conduit for all polar shipping routes, lies partly in American waters. Yet America’s nearest American deep-water port is Dutch Harbour, more than 700 nautical miles away.

When a Chinese-Russian patrol entered America’s EEZ in the Bering Sea in 2022, just a single coastguard cutter was able to monitor it. Last year the Pentagon was unnerved when a joint strategic-bomber patrol came within 140 nautical miles of Alaskan territory—probably the closest Chinese bombers had ever come to America. To add to concerns, the Chinese planes had taken off from a Russian base to reach the Arctic. That this is evidence of an emerging alliance, however, is debatable. “I’ve seen co-operation. I haven’t seen anything that shows they have the capability to integrate,” as NATO does, says General Gregory Guillot, head of both NORTHCOM and NORAD, America’s joint aerospace command with Canada.

NORAD has counted 95 Russian and Chinese intrusions in the North American ADIZ since 2020. Staff at General Guillot’s headquarters in Colorado Springs look at the map like a clock. The two o’clock position, towards Greenland, is the quietest: no incursions since 2020. A bit busier is 12 o’clock, beyond Canada, with four. The most acute probing comes from ten o’clock, around Alaska, with 91 incursions.

Intercepting forays is a challenge. America’s and Canada’s main Arctic air bases are deep in the interior. In a typical mission to monitor incoming aircraft, fighters must fly 1,500 nautical miles or more and refuel several times in mid-air. The encounters take place in international airspace, and most are uneventful, though in one instance last year a Russian jet swooped alarmingly close to an American fighter plane. Other threats are multiplying, from China’s use of high-altitude balloons in 2023 to its development of long-range cruise and hypersonic missiles. These are hard for North America’s ageing early-warning radars to spot.

Monitoring the seas is harder still. The Chinese navy, the world’s largest, operates ever farther from its home. Russia, though under pressure in Ukraine, has deployed seven new submarines in the Pacific since 2022—more than all the subs America built over the same period. China and Russia appear also to have conducted their first-ever joint submarine patrol. Another American concern is the scant coverage of communications and other satellites at high latitudes, and their vulnerability in war.

Will it prove enough? Iris Ferguson, a former defence official, says the Arctic lacks a strong advocate in the Pentagon. Three combatant commands abut the Arctic, she notes, but none controls all of it. EUCOM (European Command, whose head is also the top NATO military commander) focuses on Russia yet has nearly no role in the Pacific; NORTHCOM is taken up with the southern border and the Caribbean; and INDOPACOM, which controls most forces in Alaska, thinks about a possible war in the western Pacific much more than one in the north. By contrast, Ms Ferguson argues, “Russia and China recognise the Arctic’s strategic value. They are investing and moving fast. America has a lot to lose if we cede that ground.”

It ought to be obvious that Western allies should work closely together in the Arctic. After all, seven of the eight members of the Arctic Council, a forum to discuss regional issues, are NATO members. (Co-operation with Russia, the eighth member, has come to a near-standstill.) Yet Mr Trump thinks otherwise.

Denmark, which emphasises that Greenland is not for sale, has protested over American spooks stirring anti-Danish sentiment on the island. This month Denmark announced plans to spend $8.8bn on military equipment, not least for the Arctic, as European leaders and military units have stepped up visits to Greenland. The aim is both to show America they take the Arctic seriously and to warn it off seizing the island. To many allies, the threat in the Arctic comes not just from Russia or China, but from an America that often looks like going rogue.

In August Mr Trump welcomed Mr Putin in Anchorage, Alaska’s biggest city—a symbolic venue, given that America bought Alaska from Russia for a song in 1867. Both sides have dangled the promise of lucrative joint projects in the Arctic if relations improve (right now they are prickly). As Mr Trump applauded his guest, Russian and Chinese warships were conducting a joint naval patrol near the Aleutians. An American warship sent to monitor them dropped anchor at Adak so that senior crew could fly in to rejoin their vessel.

Even in its decrepit state, Adak still acts as a hub in the Aleutians, serving fishing crews, researchers studying volcanoes and wildlife, and vessels servicing more distant military facilities, such as a missile-tracking radar on an old oil rig in the Pacific.

Tucked in the big budget bill is $115m “for exploration and development of existing Arctic infrastructure”. That’s a euphemism for Adak, says Senator Sullivan, who hopes it will be used to start making improvements, such as refurbishing the fuel facility for the navy. As for Adak’s remaining residents, the best hope of reversing their decline rests on the base coming back to life. Just possibly, some say, the town will be able to justify a grocery store.

Still, some top brass remain Adak sceptics, saying the weather is too poor to justify the investment. Native Aleuts called their home the “birthplace of the winds”. As if to make the point, on the day this correspondent arrived in Adak, a plane with military grandees and a pair of F-35 jets on exercise cancelled a planned visit because of fog. Feisty or foolhardy, the Alaska Airlines flight touched down where military pilots dared not go. For Mr Sullivan, a former marine, the qualms are “bullshit”. Those who fought the Aleutian campaign, the “thousand-mile war”, operated just with compasses, he says. The “warrior ethos”, now loudly promoted by the Pentagon, has yet to return to Adak. ■