Posted on February 2, 2026
Alice Rogoff is publisher of Arctic Today and co-founder of the Arctic Circle Assembly
Alaskan Alice Rogoff Argues for dredging the Port of Nome and other Alaskan coastal ports as part of enhanced defensive US perimeter
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The United States faces serious security vulnerabilities in the Arctic. The region’s strategic positioning and critical mineral deposits make it essential that we control it. That means making use of key territory to secure our defensive posture.
That territory, however, is not Greenland. It lies across the Arctic Circle — in Alaska.
Greenland is a long-term security priority. Following the meeting between President Donald Trump and NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in Davos, positive progress is being made, with Trump declaring that he would scrap planned tariffs on Europe. But the relentless focus on Greenland risks drowning out the calls for bolstering U.S. defenses in Alaska and leaving us open to arguably more immediate threats from Russia and China.
With decisive government action, the U.S. could start building a true Arctic fortress on its own territory tomorrow, without any blowback from Denmark or NATO or anyone else. It’s a process we cannot afford to delay.
The Arctic region is on its way to becoming a giant ocean beltway. Its summer ice surface area has shrunk to just 50 percent of what it measured in 1980. Just as automobiles travel circular asphalt roads to save time and speed travel, huge ocean-going tankers are already cutting across the Arctic to shave weeks off travel time and vastly reduce costs. Decades from now, once the Northwest Passage across the top of Canada becomes more reliably ice-free, we’re likely to see the greatest revolution in international shipping since the opening of the Suez Canal.
But there are only two ways to access the Arctic Ocean by sea. One is through the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom, or GIUK, gap in the North Atlantic. The other is the Bering Strait, above the Pacific Ocean.
Alaska sits next to the Bering Sea, across from Russian Siberia. Russia and China already recognize the value of these seagoing routes and have conducted joint naval exercises near Alaskan waters. In the summer, the Northern Sea Route is heavily trafficked, with 50 ships headed both east and west making more than 100 transits all the way through it in 2025. Crossings through the Bering Strait alone were more than 600. These are cargo and container ships as well as tankers running the busy liquefied natural gas trade between Russia and China.
The North Atlantic route to the Arctic is already well-protected by NATO assets. In contrast, the Bering Sea is vulnerable. Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) recently warned that the U.S. is “woefully underinvested” there.
One solution to this involves expanding our surface fleet — a major priority for Trump — by developing and building a new generation of icebreakers and security cutters to patrol and escort ships in the American North Pacific and regularly show presence in the face of Russian and Chinese incursions.
Additionally, dredging and building a network of deepwater ports along the Western Alaskan coastline, starting with the Port of Nome, would provide not only bases for naval ships but friendly harbors for American and allied commercial shipping taking advantage of future Arctic routes.
