When several different sources I trust and enjoy recommend a book it usually gets my notice. I think I first heard of Rosen’s Polar War on The Rest Is Politics podcast just a few weeks ago, when Stewart and Campbell both said they’d read and enjoyed it. The next week a glowing review appeared in the Economist and at that point I ordered a hardback copy from Amazon. For me this is a very short buy-to-read lag. It was easy to slot it into my current winter “general reading” gap before I embark on interwar history from next month. Rosen is a young American journalist, writer, and war correspondent whose previous books have covered Islamic State and the US war on terror. He writes for the New York Times. I hadn’t heard of him before reading this book.

The book features a series of journalistic vignettes as Rosen travels around the Arctic embedding with various military units, interviewing scientists, and attending conferences on Artic governance. These are interspersed with short essays on the history and geopolitics of the Artic. The running thread through the book is aggressive, everything-short-of-war, behaviour of Russia in the far north, backed in many cases by China, and the feeble distracted response of the US, which is belatedly rebuilding its military capabilities in the Arctic, but still trails far behind Russia. The Scandinavians get a look in as resourceful and capable allies, but constrained by their tiny size. In the background is looming crisis, and opportunity, of global warming which is having more impact on the Arctic than almost anywhere else on Earth.

Rosen visits a conference on Arctic security in Iceland and finds more hot air than substance, but enjoys the island’s hot springs. He visits the northernmost town of Greenland that adjoins a US military base. He hears the Greenlander’s hopes of a future independence, but mingled with a fear of abandonment. Obviously the book was written before the recent outburst of imperialist posturing from Trump, so the grievances are mostly aimed at their Danish overlords. He joins a brand new Norwegian coast guard ship on a patrol through the ice pack north of Russia and links up with the US Navy’s only large icebreaker. He contrasts the slick and efficient Norwegians with the under-resourced and rusty Americans. He explores the Norwegian Russian border near Kirkenes with an ecologist who rues the changes of the last few years which prevents him from doing research on the Russian side. Also in Norway he joins a pair of teenage conscripts at the border post where Norway, Russia, and Finland all join. The Russians excel in grey-war tactics; sending waves of Syrian refugees into the forests and over the border to either freeze to death or make never ending work for the Finns processing their asylum claims. Later he embeds with the US military, sailing on the rather dilapidated coast guard cutter that patrols the Bering Sea attempting to assert US control over the vast region. He interviews a US army psychologist who tells him all about the high rates of suicide among the Arctic garisson in Alaska.

Rosen writes very well in a journalistic, story-telling style. It was very easy to sit down for an hour at time and read chunks of 50 pages. I really enjoyed it, although I had to set the thermostat a few degrees higher than usual because one feels the chill from the pages! It’s very clear from the book that the US, rather than making ridiculous claims over Greenland, should really spend more resources and effort on the basics of Arctic security. Rosen makes a strong case for allied partnership in the far north, but with Trump doing everything in his power to alienate Canada and the Europeans, the opposite is happening. Talking of Canada, it’s the obvious gap in the book. It accounts for a third of the Arctic coastline, but is hardly mentioned. Did he have trouble getting the necessary permits to talk to their military? Of course the ultimate answer is for Russia to stop its ridiculous self-harming descent into gangster fascism, but there’s not much chance of that while the evil Putin is in power. All in all an excellent easy read. One of those books that shines a light on a part of the world that’s rarely reported.