If President Trump is going to be talking land swaps with Vladimir Putin later this week, maybe he can get some American land back, too?
Friday’s talks in Alaska offer a historic and welcomed opportunity for rapprochement in our bilateral relations with Russia. We should try to get along with our neighbors, difficult though they may be. Trump is right to do so in attempting to broker peace in a war that should never have started.
However, the prospect of establishing neighborly relations again while negotiating over Ukrainian territory also raises long-frozen but now relevant issues between us in the very place where these leaders, and indeed our own two countries, meet — the Arctic. Acknowledging and working to resolve them will go a long way towards laying the groundwork for a better future between our nations.
Yesterday marked the 144th anniversary of the discovery and claiming of Wrangel Island by the US Coast Guard on August 12, 1881. Wrangel is a large island located in the Arctic Ocean about 270 nautical miles northeast of the coast of Alaska, about the size of Delaware and Rhode Island combined. It was discovered that day by a landing party from the USRC Corwin, a patrol cutter of the Bering Sea Patrol — then the U.S. government authority in the young territory of Alaska.
The landing party, which included famed naturalist John Muir, hoisted the American flag and claimed the island in the name of the president of the United States. The island was surveyed later that month by the the USS Rodgers, and subsequently incorporated into official U.S. government documents and records.
Four decades later, however, on August 20, 1924, Wrangel was seized by Bolsheviks aboard the Soviet icebreaker Red October. The American settlers were arrested, hauled off and taken prisoner in Vladivostok. The leader of the Nome-based settlers died in custody.
The U.S. didn’t have diplomatic relations with the Soviets until 1933 and has never acknowledged Russia’s claim to ownership.
The same goes for the De Long Islands further west, which had been discovered months earlier by the crew of the USS Jeannette, which was lost in high Arctic when the Coast Guard Cutter Corwin was dispatched to rescue it.
Today, Wrangel is the “Gibraltar” of the Northern Sea Route, providing a key choke point on its eastern entry and hosting a modern naval base from which Russia projects force over the Arctic and American interests. As the leaders discuss demilitarizing Ukraine, perhaps Wrangel could also be demilitarized and made a joint U.S.-Russian scientific area and monument to peace between our nations?
Alternatively, if the U.S. is going to continue acquiesce to Russian control, perhaps it is time Russia should compensate us for what their Soviet predecessors took by force. One way they might do so would be to sign over their frozen sovereign assets to the U.S. — roughly $210 billion. This would go a long way toward American taxpayers recouping the $350 billion we have lost, greatly increasing our national debt, to finance a deadly war that never should have happened.
To those who would consider such history trivial and say Americans don’t have skin in the game in these islands, a visit to Annapolis, Md. should help. There, they might climb up to the highest point on the highest hill, in the cemetery overlooking the US Naval Academy. Standing there is a monument that dwarfs every other surrounding it on this hallowed ground – it’s to the USS Jeannette Arctic Exploring Mission of 1879-1881, and the 20 men who perished in their discovery.
Although remembered by few today, the story of the USS Jeannette and its rescue party was an epic story known across America at the time, heavily chronicled in the thousand-page reports of Congressional investigations that followed.
Back then, things were also very different between our countries. America’s discovery of new islands north of Russia was welcomed with excitement there, with Tsar Alexander III extending to the survivors a lavish reception in St. Petersburg.
As Trump works to secure our hemispheric defense, America’s outermost islands matter. This is especially so in the Arctic, certain to see increased trade, commerce and geopolitical rivalry in the decades to come. If we do not secure our periphery, we put our homeland at risk.
And others take notice. Just this past week, five Chinese Arctic research vessels sailed easily through the Bering Sea and past the Aleutian Islands, where former defense installations at Attu and Adak — sites of WWII combat and American sacrifice — today sit abandoned or disused.
In U.S. history, the story of America’s lost Arctic islands holds a very dubious distinction: It’s the only time America has yielded land in the face of a hostile force that it has subsequently failed to recover.
Today, however, a recovery through negotiation and dialog may yet be possible. Finding a peaceful solution to Wrangel and the De Long Islands would be a very positive step in establishing a new relationship between the Russian Federation and the U.S.
Thomas E. Dans is CEO of American Daybreak, a former U.S. Treasury official member of the U.S. Arctic Research Commission.