America in the Arctic: Foreign Policy and Competition in the Melting North

As climate change accelerates, the Arctic has become a frontline of global competition. Melting ice, rising temperatures, and swelling seas have made remote regions at once newly accessible and rife with new dangers. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has embarked on a substantial military buildup in the Arctic, and China has also turned its attention northward. The United States, however, has only recently begun to reestablish its Arctic presence after many years of waning influence.

America in the Arctic offers a timely and compelling case for why the United States must deepen its commitment to a region threatened by climate change and geopolitical rivalry. Mary Thompson-Jones surveys past and present U.S. relations with the Arctic lands: Canada, Iceland, Greenland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Russia. She traces the history of the U.S. presence in the far north from the purchase of Alaska through the Cold War, arguing that lessons from the past should inform America’s relationships with its Arctic neighbors today. At its best, U.S. Arctic policy balanced security interests with residents’ needs and international cooperation on environmental and regional issues. In recent years, many policymakers scrambling to reassert U.S. leadership have framed their goals solely in security terms. Thompson-Jones argues that climate change now poses the greatest challenge, calling for a new approach that is inclusive of all the Arctic’s inhabitants. Bringing together national security expertise and historical insight, this book charts a course for American Arctic policy in a warming world.

Mary Thompson-Jones is a professor of national security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a former minister-counselor in the U.S. Foreign Service. She is the author of To the Secretary: Leaked Embassy Cables and America’s Foreign Policy Disconnect (2016). Her diplomatic experience spans more than two decades as a foreign service officer in the Czech Republic, Canada, Guatemala, Spain, and Washington, DC.