Move over, Cuba—there are new islands in town. While the prospect of a nuclear crisis over Taiwan remains a genuine and dangerous possibility, China’s activities around the Aleutian Islands should not be overlooked. Brazen Chinese military activities in and around the islands and the Bering Strait could escalate.
The Aleutian Islands are part of the U.S. state of Alaska, so they are part of U.S. vital interests. Failure to enhance deterrence and demonstrate resolve over the chain not only threatens the territorial integrity of the United States in the Arctic, but could also embolden Beijing to intensify military operations in the Taiwan Strait.
The situation in the Arctic is heating up. In recent years, China and Russia have made joint military forays into the region. Now, U.S. President Donald Trump seemingly wants to annex Greenland. “We need Greenland for international safety and security,” Trump said recently. On March 28, he even deployed his didactic sidekick, Vice President J.D. Vance, to the Danish territory.
Meanwhile, the threats to the Alaskan Arctic, northwest of the continental United States, have intensified. Indeed, the most recent annual threat assessment report published by the Office of the U.S. Director of National Intelligence (DNI) briefly mentions Alaska in the context of emerging threats.
The DNI report, published on March 25, is chilling. While it highlights growing concerns over Chinese designs on Taiwan and Russia’s ongoing war in Ukraine, it fails to address the specific threats posed to the Aleutian Islands, an obscure island chain off the coast of Alaska.
This warrants a course correction. While the Trump administration obsesses over Greenland, China’s assertiveness in the Alaskan Arctic should be of major concern to the U.S. military and foreign-policy establishment. Consequently, the United States should make defense of the Aleutian Islands a national security priority to offset the possibility of a nuclear crisis in the Arctic.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has gradually downscaled its military outposts around the island chain. In 1997, a major naval base located on Adak Island was closed. Today, Washington’s adversaries have renewed their interest in the Aleutian Islands. While remote, the chain is not impervious to Chinese and Russian military predations.
Alaskan Sen. Dan Sullivan has recently expressed his concerns about Chinese and Russian incursions around the islands. Last September, Sullivan wrote that “as the world becomes more dangerous, Alaska continues to be on the frontlines of authoritarian aggression. Coordinated activity off Alaska’s shores by the Russians and Chinese is increasing.”
Washington should heed the strategic salience of the Aleutian Islands, if its foreign-policy and military establishment wants to secure its vital interests in the Arctic.
China is not an Arctic nation, yet it has declares itself to be an Arctic power, designating the region to China’s high north as part of its sphere of influence. In Chapter 33 of its 14th five-year plan, a document that outlines Chinese geostrategic policy, Beijing explicitly stated its vision for the region: China “will strengthen the investigation and evaluation of strategic resources in the deep sea” and “participate in practical cooperation in the Arctic and build the ‘Polar Silk Road.’”
Conducting research expeditions in the Arctic deepens China’s economic links to the region. Economic and military resilience is the bedrock of Chinese national security strategy, and both shape Chinese President Xi Jinping’s global ambitions.
Speaking about the Chinese in December, Iris A. Ferguson—the former U.S. deputy assistant secretary for defense for Arctic and global resilience—said that the United States needs “to be clear-eyed about some of their intentions” as well as “thinking about their long-term interests” and “how we can best protect ours.”
To this point, in July 2024, two Chinese H-6 nuclear-capable bombers operating within the Alaska Air Defense Identification Zone were intercepted by American and Canadian fighter jets, indicating that Chinese excursions into the Arctic are not merely done for scientific and economic purposes.
The Chinese aircraft were accompanied by Russian TU-95 nuclear-capable bombers, meaning that the air patrol was the first time that China and Russia have been documented conducting a joint patrol near Alaska. That same month, four Chinese military warships were spotted in the Bering Sea, roughly 200 kilometers (124 miles) north of Amchitka Pass and northeast of the Atka Island, both part of the Aleutian Islands.
According to comments made at the time by Michael Salerno, a U.S. Coast Guard public affairs officer, these encounters have become commonplace since 2021 but were rare before 2017.
In recent years, China has also increased its naval presence in the Arctic—completing extensive round trips across critical strategic areas such as the Bohai Sea and the Bering Sea. Beijing’s increased naval presence in these geostrategic locations puts the United States at a disadvantage, threatening to disrupt its maritime military capabilities and frustrate navigational operations.
As U.S. Maj. Ryan Tice indicated in 2020, “because the Bering Strait lies at the boundary of three geographic combatant commands (GCCs), increased adversary activity around the strait creates challenges for unity of effort among those combatant commands.’
Sullivan, the senator, has raised these concerns with the Senate Armed Services Committee. Following additional Chinese and Russian joint military exercises in September 2024, Sullivan stated, “on five separate occasions in the past seven days, Russian military incursions into our ADIZ [air defense identification zone] or EEZ [US exclusive economic zone] have occurred—both naval and air.”
In response, the U.S. Army deployed its 11th Airborne Division to the Aleutian Islands. Yet as the United States’s strategic environment grows increasingly dangerous, more needs to be done to counter the threat emanating from Chinese forces in the Arctic. By conducting military exercises in places such as the Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands, a region dominated by the United States, China is also demonstrating resolve at the United States’s expense.
As Brandon J. Babin, a senior analyst at the China Strategic Focus Group, has asserted, “[t]his counterbalance seems to require a buildup of China’s means of strategic deterrence.”
Freedom of navigation is a critical factor in ensuring the United States can maintain its mission to deter adversaries in the Arctic. While Beijing’s interests appear to be ostensibly economic, Chinese access to important geostrategic locations carries significant national security implications for the United States and its allies across the Pacific.
Specifically, Chinese efforts to bolster military operations in U.S. strategic buffer zones undermine regional deterrence capabilities. Indeed, such activities are a direct challenge to the United States’ vital interests and could potentially obstruct Washington’s extended deterrence operations from the Arctic and northern Pacific regions, with potential implications rippling down to the western and southern Pacific as well.
Furthermore, the U.S. has multiple interests in the Arctic, which overlap with the interests of NATO member states such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. As tensions intensify between the United States, China, and Russia, the importance of strategic choke points such as the Bering Sea will only increase.
While Washington’s extended nuclear deterrence mission against China focuses on dissuading aggression against Taiwan, coercion of Japan and South Korea, and the potential targeting of strategic positions such as the U.S. territory Guam—all concerns located farther south in the vast Pacific Ocean—the threats that the United States and its regional allies face from China in the Arctic are just as severe.
Attempts to undermine long-standing territorial boundaries in the form of provocative activities can also lead to increased tensions and could escalate even further, turning critical island chains into theaters of crises—or worse, war.
For example, there are indications that China perceives the Aleutian Islands as part of what is known as its first island chain. As Adm. Liu Huaqing, the former commander of the Chinese Navy, stated in 1987, “the first island chain refers to the Aleutian Islands, the Kurile Islands, the Japanese archipelago, the Ryukyu Islands, Taiwan Island, the Philippine archipelago, and the Greater Sunda Island in the Western Pacific that form an arc-shaped arrangement of islands akin to a metal chain.”
To put Liu’s claims into context, the Aleutian Islands comprise 14 main islands and 55 smaller ones. These islands continue to host U.S. Naval and Coast Guard forces. The distance between the westernmost island in the archipelago, Attu Island, and the eastern coast of mainland China is 4,000 kilometers (nearly 2,500 miles).
Yet in the aforementioned incident in July 2024, four Chinese military warships were spotted in the Bering Sea. Such activities could lead to a tense standoff in the United States’ backyard. By expending unnecessary foreign-policy attention in Greenland, Washington risks being caught off guard. Being prepared in the Alaskan Arctic would enhance Washington’s ability to deter conflict across the first island chain—including the East Sea, the Taiwan Strait, and the South China Sea.
Taiwan has long been a focal point for analysts and policymakers alike, and rightly so. However, as Sullivan warned in September, “authoritarian regimes are testing the United States. … Congress and the President should do more to deter further aggression. … We must continue to send a strong message to Xi Jinping and [Russian President Vladimir] Putin that the United States will not hesitate to protect and defend our vital interests in Alaska and beyond.”
Joint Chinese and Russian military naval and air patrols around the Aleutian Islands should deeply concern the United States’ military and foreign-policy establishment. Permanently reopening the naval base on Adak Island would certainly be a vital first step in enhancing deterrence around the region.
When nuclear weapons states are involved, miscalculations can prove to be gravely consequential. As RUSI analyst Jamie Kwong wrote in 2018, “the Arctic remains an important region in the global nuclear security complex.” The United States operates the North Warning System, an early warning system intended to detect threats in the Arctic. Deliberate or accidental Chinese actions that are perceived to be threatening could trigger these U.S. early warning systems, and detection could lead to defensive military action.
In the fog of uncertainty, U.S. nuclear command and control would have to make a decision that could precipitate a standoff—and a standoff between nuclear powers always carries with it the inextricable risk of nuclear escalation.
With tensions already running high, a deep distrust between China and United States underpins the strategic environment. An incursion into U.S. territory could compel the United States to militarily engage with Chinese assets. For example, should a Chinese jet fly into U.S. Arctic airspace, or should a vessel stray into regional territorial waters, the United States could opt to strike.
Accidental or inadvertent escalation also poses a risk. In September 2022, a Type 055 Nanchang guided missile destroyer came within 160 kilometers (about 100 miles) of the Aleutian Island of Kiska. It was armed with up to 112 cruise missiles. The accidental launch of a Chinese missile could push the protagonists to the nuclear brink. After all, the strategic environment in the Arctic is already febrile, and costly accidents can happen.
The threshold for U.S. military action in the Arctic remains unclear. A Chinese crossing of a trip wire could also lead to escalating tensions and trigger a nuclear crisis. The United States should establish a clear threshold in the Arctic in order to signal to its adversaries which activities are tolerable and which would prompt a military response. Trump stated in January that “you don’t even need binoculars—you look outside. You have China ships all over the place. You have Russia ships all over the place. We’re not letting that happen.”
The United States should respond to the growing Chinese threat by communicating red lines in the Arctic. Should the United States fail to issue clear red lines to Beijing over military activities in the Bering Strait and the northern Pacific, then Washington stands to unwittingly encourage Beijing to take greater geopolitical risks close to U.S. territorial boundaries.
Beijing may perceive a lack of resolve as a source of encouragement to escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Or worse, U.S. inaction might be seen as a sign that Taiwan is there for the taking. If deterrence isn’t restored in the Alaskan Arctic, then the Aleutians could be next in line to join Cuba and Taiwan in the annals of crisis history.
Instead of obsessing over Greenland, the Trump administration should focus on securing a part of the Arctic that already belongs to the United States—lest the Alaskan frost turn into Arctic fire.
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