Trump is forfeiting the Arctic to Russia and Exxon.
We were out on the lake last weekend, and the ice was gone earlier than we’ve ever recorded. The notebook I keep — a private ledger of spring thaws — showed the walleye spawn already finished, the loons back before their usual date, the water temperature what it used to be in mid-May. Lake Petenwell has lost ten days of reliable winter ice over the last decade. The same thermodynamics that are melting the permafrost in Svalbard are thawing the frozen ground behind the shop.
An all-women delegation of senators — four Republican and four Democratic — led by Lisa Murkowski and Jeanne Shaheen, is flying north to try to hold together the alliances the Trump administration is taking an axe to. Murkowski made a point of noting the all-woman makeup — the staff and the military liaison officers included — as though the gender of the emissaries matters more than the retreat they are covering for. They’ll meet with officials in Canada, Greenland, Iceland, and Svalbard, observe military operations and the hangars that keep aircraft from being destroyed by overnight cold, and visit Indigenous communities that have lived up there for generations. They are going to see the hangars that keep the aircraft from freezing solid overnight. They will visit Indigenous communities that have lived in the region for generations, promising that the United States is still looking at the High North. The Pentagon announced it was pausing participation on the joint defense board with Canada that dates back to World War II. The administration pulled the actual defense architecture, and the Congress sent the senators to perform the diplomacy. What they’ll see is an administration that talks tough and walks away, leaving the field to Russia’s Arctic brigades and the same multinational oil companies that left the wells on the south side of the county too contaminated to drink.
This is the Nationalist Shell Game in its purest form: the rhetoric of holding the North American line while the underlying multinational interests get exactly the unregulated open water they have been buying with campaign contributions for forty years. The thinning ice is not a diplomatic challenge for the senators to manage in a press conference. It is the clearing of the deck for shipping lanes and rare-earth mineral access. The carbon that is clearing the Northwest Passage for the mineral extraction fleets is the same carbon that brings the mosquitoes in March and leaves the walleye spawn out of sync with the hatch. The extractive mind is nothing if not consistent. The same corporate logic that closed the Sand Hill mill, consolidated the bank where my mother worked, and put three Dollar Generals in Friendship but no grocery store is now mapping the Arctic seabed for rare-earth minerals and undersea cable routes. That extractive logic, the one that hollowed out our main street, is the same one the administration is unleashing on the High North. The pause on the joint defense board isn’t a diplomatic oversight; it’s a signal to drillers and to the Kremlin that the northern frontier is open for business, and the U.S. military will not be the one holding the line.
Wendell Berry writes in The Unsettling of America about the extractive economy that treats a place as a resource pool rather than a membership. An economy that maintains the membership keeps the water clean and the soil intact for the next generation, because the people living there have to drink the water and eat the food. An extractive economy runs on a different clock. It mines the resource and exports the profit, leaving the cleanup for the people who cannot afford to move. The Arctic is the ultimate test of this model. Aldo Leopold writes in the January essay of A Sand County Almanac that the land relationship only works when the land is treated as a community to which we belong, not a commodity that belongs to us. The Arctic is currently being treated as a commodity. The Chinese and the Russian operations are already moving in on the mineral access, and the undersea cables are already being laid.
The senators say they want to stabilize relationships and see what more Congress can do to support Arctic defense. That’s the right impulse. It is also, at this point, a rear-guard action. The administration didn’t just pause a defense board; it’s been dangling the possibility of pulling out of NATO, and the same legislative vehicle that funds the military is now a recurring hostage negotiation over whether the United States will keep its treaty word. Murkowski and Shaheen have already pushed language that would bar the administration from attacking a fellow NATO member. The fact that such language is necessary tells you how far the rot has spread.
There is a particular kind of insult in watching the administration’s men preen about American strength while a group of women senators flies north to do the actual work of holding the alliance together. The rhetoric of masculine self-reliance — the chest-thumping that is supposed to reassure the voters back home — ends, this week, in a quiet abandonment of the High North, and the people who pick up the pieces are, again, the women. That’s the contradiction we all recognize: the ones who talk the loudest about strength are usually the first ones to cut and run, and the ones who fix the motor are the ones who never got the microphone in the first place. The gender of the delegation does not change the trajectory of the extraction any more than the local ice-out records care which party signs the CAFO permit.
Up here, when the lake ice goes out early, it does not just mean a longer fishing season. It means the water gets warm, and the weed line dies back, and the lake changes its chemistry. The Wisconsin DNR data and the Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department reports show the exact same local cost of that global carbon load. The administration can pause the continental defense cooperation and open the routes to the resource scramble. It cannot pause the thermodynamics that are changing the water levels. The folks in Friendship and the folks in Svalbard are both watching the ice melt while the administration pulls the actual infrastructure and ships the cleanup crew. The notebook records the ice-out dates, and the dates are moving earlier. What real Arctic policy looks like is not a reassurance tour or an apology for the retreat; it is maintaining the defense architecture and holding the extraction industry to the same water-quality standards the Adams County Land and Water Conservation Department is trying to hold the CAFOs to. The extraction companies get the shipping lanes they bought, and the rest of us get the warm water.
We in this county know what extraction looks like. We know what it is to have a corporate operation come in, take what it wants, and leave the land and the water worse than it found them. The same companies that left our wells undrinkable are now looking north, and the administration is clearing the path. The ice is melting, the drillers are coming, and the only people who seem to notice are a handful of women senators and a mechanic in Wisconsin who reads the ice on a lake every spring.