Polar War

To witness those preparations and failings, to observe those efforts to regain America’s place on the arctic world stage, I primarily traveled above the Arctic Circle on excursions over twenty-four months, beginning in September 2022 by embarking with coast guard and fishing vessels, warships and cruise liners, icebreakers and Zodiacs, military aircraft and commercial transports, and on snow machines, electric cars, and electric scooters.

I attended the 2023 NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, at which Finland formally joined NATO, followed soon after by Sweden; I audited classes at the U.S. Marine Corps University, endured a sterile and bureaucratic meeting for icebreaker mission planning in Alexandria, Virginia; received my Merchant Mariner Credentials from the U.S. Coast Guard; and became a certified Wilderness First Responder in Iceland.

During those years, I lived and spoke with those who have experienced the consequences and the impacts of these rapidly shifting north lands. Across the circumpolar north, I befriended those who lived apart from the houses of power, wandered in their mountains, ate in their weather-beaten cabins under feet of snow, and was aboard their vessels gliding through ice, as well as taking part in their celebrations beneath the northern lights, witnessing the arrests of their outlaws, and wading over endless murky tundra. I celebrated Rosh Hashanah with the last Jews of Finnmark in the back of a lingerie shop; was accosted twice in Icelandic bars while living for a time out of a recreational vehicle; participated in close-quarter combat drills on an ad hoc shooting range amid the Arctic Ocean ice sheet; lectured in Fairbanks; reunited with old friends in Anchorage; boarded with soldiers and sailors, scientists and seclusionists.

I’ve supplemented those interviews and personal recollections with publicly available documents, available below. Most interviews with U.S. and foreign government officials were conducted off the record or on deep background, except where noted through direct attribution. Those transcripts are not included below.

Inevitably, the scope for such a book as this is immense, and not all issues have been given equal weight. Entire libraries have been written about subjects that appear only as marginalia here. I make no claim to be an authority on the arctic or its environs; I do not speak the local languages; I own little stake in the region, both personally and professionally; and the only formal studies I undertook of the region were impersonal and brisk. The following is a more detailed record of those efforts.