Part 4

The opening of the new frontier can be traced to a calm morning in August 2007, when a pair of Russian submersibles dropped 14,000 feet to the bottom of the Arctic Ocean and planted a flag made of titanium at the North Pole. Images broadcast around the world of the Russian tricolor on the seabed drew quick condemnation in the West.

It had been one of the hottest years on record, and just a month later scientists monitoring the ocean by satellite announced that sea ice had shrunk to the lowest extent ever witnessed. “It was the largest Arctic ice loss in human history and was not predicted by even the most aggressive climate models,” said Jonathan Markowitz, a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California. “This shock led everyone to suddenly understand that the ice was rapidly disappearing, and some nations decided to start making moves.”

Today Russia has become, by most measures, the dominant power in the Arctic. It has the world’s largest fleet capable of operating year-round in extreme northern waters and maintains dozens of military bases above the Arctic Circle. The U.S. maintains one base in the Arctic, an airfield, on borrowed ground in northern Greenland.

Russia has stationed new troops in the north, increased submarine activity, and returned warplanes to Arctic skies, where they now routinely buzz NATO airspace. But Markowitz and several other researchers told me Russian activity in the north was a mirror more of internal plans than of global ambitions.

Two million Russians inhabit the country’s Arctic territory, which has several large cities, including Murmansk and Norilsk. The combined Arctic populations of Canada and the U.S. equal less than a quarter of that number. In the U.S., the largest Arctic town, Utqiaġvik, formerly Barrow, is home to just over 4,000 people.

Russians depend heavily on extracted resources, Markowitz explained. They view the Arctic “as their strategic future resource base.”

According to Yun Sun, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, in Washington, D.C., Chinese expansion into the Arctic follows a similar resource-focused strategy, not a territorial one. Beyond its investments in Russian oil and gas ventures, she said, China is specifically interested in gaining access to new sea-lanes that could reduce transit times between Asian ports and European markets by as much as two weeks.

Last January the Chinese government published a white paper that outlined its northern intentions. In it, China described itself as a “near-Arctic state” that hoped to collaborate with other nations to build a “Polar Silk Road” dedicated to commerce and research. “It’s something to watch carefully,” Sun said. “I will give you the literal translation of what the Chinese said to me: ‘We know that we don’t have claims in the Arctic, but if there’s anything in the Arctic that we can get, we don’t want to be left out.’ ”

During my travels along the new frontier, Cold War analogies always fell flat. Easier to grasp was the Arctic’s overall absence from the North American mind. Over decades the U.S. and Canada had never bothered to develop their northern territories or invest in their people. Even Pompeo’s speech, with language of opportunity and marketplaces, felt more like a warning than a plan—the protest of a player arriving late to the game.

Savikataaq listed several categories in which northern communities lag behind southern ones—health care, job creation, technology, college graduation. Then he listed a few where the north was ahead: loss of ice, cost of living, rate of warming, rate of suicide. Whatever’s coming this time, he said, it will hit us first. “I can’t speak too much about what Russia or China or the U.S. want to do or might do. We’re so small and our resources are so limited that we’re just a bystander,” Savikataaq said. “All we can do is adapt as best we can.”