Arctic: The Next Cold War
“You have Russian destroyers and submarines and China destroyers and submarines all over the place,” President Donald Trump said in January, referring to the Arctic.
Hostile powers are just about everywhere at the top of the world. In late summer 2015, five Chinese warships, after participating in a drill with Russia, sliced through U.S. territorial water in the Aleutian Islands as they headed south out of the Bering Sea. The transit, permitted by international law as an “innocent passage,” was nonetheless a warning to the U.S. that China intended to dominate Alaskan waters.
China has continued provocative activities there. In 2024, for instance, China and Russia flew military patrols near Alaska over the Bering Sea for the first time. Chinese bombers took off and landed from a Russian air field. “Such ‘access transfer’ accelerates and extends China’s ability to threaten North America in the air domain and raises the specter of coordinated military operations in the event of a strategic conflict,” U.S. Air Force Gen. Gregory Guillot, commander of U.S. Northern Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command, told the House Armed Services Committee last April.
