The Obama administration's conduct in the international community is once again under the critical scrutiny of the political right. This time, attacks on the president's foreign policy have come from Alaskan attorney and former Republican senatorial candidate Joseph Miller.
On Friday, February 17, Miller reported on his blog at WND.com that the Obama administration, acting in compliance with the State Department, officially signed over several "strategic, resource-laden Alaskan islands" to the Russian government. Miller expressed concern over the loss of territory, in addition to - potentially - "billions of barrels of oil" in the seabeds surrounding these islands.
Several conservative blogs and online news outlets have reiterated Miller's story, virtually all of them citing the entirety or substantial portions of the original blog post. In light of the backlash against the Obama administration this latest information has provoked and may continue to foment, it is necessary to investigate some of the claims made by Miller in order to determine the validity of his reporting.
Most of the islands in question belong to a large coastal chain called the De Long Archipelago. Geographically, the De Long islands all lie within closer proximity to Russia's northeastern border than to the Alaskan mainland. Additionally, all of the islands cited by Miller are located on the western - or "Russian" - side of the US-Russia maritime boundary, a division established via a 1990 treaty between the US and former Soviet Union. While the Soviet Union was dissolved before its leaders could make the agreement official, the United States was quick to ratify the treaty.
Though both Russian and American explorers have visited the islands and claimed them for their respective governments, the primary occupants of the islands have historically been Russian/Soviet explorers, researchers, and fishermen. The US State Department does not officially recognize any US claim to these territories, and a 1994 ruling by the Alaskan Supreme Court determined that the De Long islands Wrangel, Bennett, Jeannette, and Henrietta (all of which Miller mentions), as well as several others, were not Alaskan territories.
Barring the possibility of a war with Russia or Canada (or between Alaska and the rest of the United States), Miller's claim that the islands are strategically significant is dubious at best. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union found no militaristic purpose for the islands; instead, they devoted their energies to building meteorological and astronomical observatories on them. Regardless of the future potential for hostilities, occupying and constructing military outposts so close to non-US sovereign territories would do little to ease extant international tensions; indeed, such a foreign policy move would likely serve to exacerbate them.
As for the resource-richness of the islands and surrounding coast, Miller's anxiousness over the possibility of losing out on oil reserves reflects a fundamentally narrow view of energy independence given that he also expresses his displeasure with Obama's decision to strike down the Keystone oil pipline project. The abilities of Alaska's politicians and economists might be better spent further developing the state's hydroelectric power facilities, or exploring other alternative energy sources for which Alaska's environment is uniquely suited.
Considering the dual effort between Russia and China which successfully struck down a US-backed Security Council resolution to intervene in Syria earlier this month, ending the dispute over these islands may gain the US another ally in its policy toward events in the Middle East. Ultimately, however, the Obama administration's decision to formally cede geopolitical control of the De Long Archipelago and a few smaller islands to Russia represents but another shift away from international Cold War dynamics, a symbolic gesture intended to do away with a vestige from a period of history branded by threats, tension, violence, and fear. While the world still contends with the consequences of that ideological battle to this day, Miller's assertion that America "won the Cold War and should start acting like it" is not new and ignores years of violent post-Cold War history marked by that very same attitude.
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