War at the Edge of the World
Russian spies. Nuclear submarines. Sabotaged pipelines. Undersea communications severed in the dark of night. The fastest-warming place on earth, where apartment buildings, hospitals and homes crumble daily or are wiped away by rising seas, the Arctic stands at the crossroads of geopolitical ambition and environmental catastrophe. As climate change melts ancient ice, opening once ice-bound shipping lanes and natural resources, the world’s military powers are rushing to stake their claims in this increasingly strategic region. We’ve entered a new Cold War, and every day it grows hotter.
Drawing on hundreds of interviews and three years of reporting from the frontlines of climate change and great power competition, Rosen blends incisive analysis with the vivid immediacy of a travelogue reminiscent of Denis Johnston and Ryszard Kapuściński. Rosen’s deeply researched and personal accounts capture the diverse landscapes, people, and conflicted interests that define this complex northern region. The result is both an elegy for a vanishing landscape and an urgent warning about how the race for Arctic dominance could spark the next global conflict. ➔
A gripping blend of travelogue and frontline reporting, War at the Edge of the World reveals how climate change, military ambition, and economic opportunity are transforming the Arctic into the epicenter of a new Cold War, where a struggle for dominance between the planet’s great powers heralds the next global conflict.
BIO
Kenneth R. Rosen travels the world to write in-depth stories about the impact of major geopolitical issues and conflict on individual lives. He is a 2025 Ira A. Lipman Fellow at Columbia University.
Rosen received the 2022 Kurt Schork Freelance Award for his reporting from Ukraine, Syria, and Malta, which the judges called “courageous multifaceted investigative work.”
He is a two-time finalist for the Livingston Award in international reporting and, among other honors, he received the 2018 Bayeux Calvados-Normandy Award for War Correspondents for his reporting from Iraq and was a finalist in 2019 for his reporting from within Syria.
He is the author of Troubled: The Failed Promise of America’s Behavioral Treatment Programs (Little A, 2021), which The New York Times Book Review called “a searing exposé” and a “public service.” Troubled was a Times Editor’s Choice, one of Newsweek’s most highly anticipated titles of 2021, and was optioned separately as a feature film and a docuseries. ➔
