Routine exercises?

As the world remains focused on the war in Ukraine and the recent coup d’etat in Niger, a recent event in our own hemisphere has gone somewhat underreported. You may have read about the Chinese-Russian naval exercises that took place in the Bering Sea, as well as the US reply with two destroyers and an assortment of reconnaissance aircraft. Both sides have downplayed the incident, saying that the flotilla of 11 powerful warships never entered U.S. waters and no harm was done. That is all true, but the gesture is far more loaded than news stories suggest.

The easy math is that the Russians are frustrated by our active support of Ukraine, and the Chinese don’t look kindly on our backing of Taiwan, so they are all too happy to join together in a collective flex of military muscle in our backyard. That much is valid and should be enough to cause discomfort, but there is a larger context to be considered.

The show of force is one of a series of moves made in the diplomatic chess game unfolding in Southeast Asia. As China has ramped up its rhetoric about claimed ownership of Taiwan, we have substantially increased our supply of arms to the democratic republic while strengthening our military presence in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Australia, and New Zealand. We have also made efforts to strengthen ties with India, Singapore, and Vietnam. Meanwhile, the Chinese are bolstering their sphere of influence, including North Korea, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, but they are also courting Indonesia, Malaysia, and Bangladesh.

Our friends in Australia also have renewed cause for concern. Knowing that they will inevitably be drawn into any action that requires the defense of Taiwan, they are understandably unsettled by Bejing’s 2022 military security agreement signed with the Solomon Islands, creating a Chinese military foothold in their immediate neighborhood.

Given all of that tit-for-tat diplomacy, the positioning of the 7th Fleet in the South China Sea, and our occasional run through the Taiwan Strait (just enough to maintain our right to use those waters), it’s not hard to understand why China might wish to flex a bit of muscle near our Aleutian Islands.

On the Russian side of the equation, yes, our arms, training, and intel are helping to make their army look ineffective in Ukraine. It’s an out-of-the-closet proxy war like we have never seen, but there’s another strategic side of that story too. Given the wealth of untapped natural resources around the Arctic Circle and the increased availability of technology to drill in cold, remote waters, defense hawks have been predicting a conflict for supremacy in the extreme north for years. It took the war in Ukraine to motivate our Scandanavian allies to join NATO, but it’s the strengthening of the Arctic alliance that makes those memberships pivotal in the longer term.

Here’s another consideration. The classic Mercator projection map that appeared in most of our school books puts western Alaska and eastern Russia on opposite ends of our two-dimensional worldview, which makes it easy to forget that the distance between Cape Dezhnev in Russia and Cape Prince of Wales Alaska is only about 55 miles, or as few as two miles if we count Little Diomede Island. Saturday Night Live had great fun quoting Sarah Palin as having said that she could “see Russia from her house,” but that was comedy. It is not comedy, nor is it an exaggeration to say that Alaska is physically closer to Russia than we are to North Platte.

While that settles in, consider this: As recently as 2022, a member of the Russian Duma called for the return of Alaska to Russia. A faction of nationalist hardliners believes that when we acquired Alaska from Russia in 1867 for a mere $7.2 million, it wasn’t Tsar Alexander’s to sell. That may sound like the position of a fringe minority within Russia, but remember that Mr. Putin cited “historical claims” as his rationale for invading Ukraine

Last, let’s not forget the history of the Aleutian Islands. One sad little chapter that preceded Alaska’s statehood took place between the summers of 1942 and 1943. The Japanese took Attu and Kiska Islands. United States soil was occupied in our hemisphere, and as insignificant and indefensible as those Islands were, it was a blow to our national posture. If we thought the Doolittle raid was worth the loss of 16 planes and 11 men just to affect morale in Tokyo, it’s not hard to imagine why a humiliated Putin and his fringe elements might poke us in the eye by threatening westernmost Alaska.

Overall, I’m mildly discomforted by the isolationist voices I’m hearing from extreme elements of our political right. Historians debate just how strong our public sentiment toward isolation was in the 1930s and the run-up to our entry into the second world war, but all agree that the attack on Pearl Harbor changed those attitudes decisively. Today, the louder voices who wish to appease Putin in Ukraine may want to consider that lesson in history before dismissing Chinese-Russian demonstrations of strength as only routine military exercises.