The Arctic Institute 'The Midpoint' Series 2025
President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the concluding session of the Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement and Resilience (GLACIER) in Anchorage, Alaska, on August 31, 2015. Photo: U.S. Department of State
The Arctic Institute The Midpoint Series 2025
Ten years ago, I attended an improbable meeting in downtown Anchorage.
Improbable because the United States had earned the regional reputation of a reluctant Arctic nation, hesitant at best and negligent at worst of its circumpolar commitments. And yet, in the summer of 2015 the President of the United States decided to convene foreign ministers, scientists, policymakers, and stakeholders at the edge of the American Arctic to discuss the very polar leadership that America had abdicated for more than a century.
It was a moment pregnant with potential and charged with crisis.
The White House recently released its first-ever National Strategy for the Arctic Region, and in 2015 assumed the Chair of the Arctic Council. Together, these offered a chance for renewed engagement that could not have come at a more critical time. Back then, the Arctic was warming at twice the rate of the global average, triggering record-breaking heat waves, vanishing sea ice, and sparking a geopolitical reckoning. It seemed that the High North, so often cast as a backwater of global geostrategy, had taken center stage through headlines of emerging shipping routes and humanitarian catastrophe. The United States, finally, seemed on the cusp of shedding its reputation of polar mediocrity.
So, on a brisk August day, I traveled to Alaska with cautious optimism—hopeful that America would at last embrace its responsibility as an Arctic nation and lead the region toward a secure, sustainable, and just future.
Throughout the course of the summit, some 400 attendees made commitments to collective action on climate change and forged multilateral partnerships to address mounting challenges. At its conclusion, President Barack Obama made history by becoming the first sitting U.S. President to visit the Arctic—if only just and briefly.
In his closing remarks of the conference, President Obama promised to lead on climate and collaboration.
“We are eager to work with your nations on the unique opportunities the Arctic presents and the unique challenges it faces. None of us—not a single one—can solve them alone. We can only solve them together.”
I remember being moved by his now renowned rhetoric of hope, by how he chose to wield it so well in support of a geography that rarely merited presidential remarks. Soon after his speech ended and the convention center resumed its lonesome cold of empty chairs and dimmed lights, I said as much on Skype with CNN in the abandoned room. “America,” I reported, “is becoming the Arctic nation the region needs.”
It has been a decade since the Arctic policy community gathered in Alaska on the doorstep of realizing that promised potential.
In that decade, the Arctic has transformed in ways once unthinkable. The region is now warming at nearly four times the global average, creating an everyday emergency of flooding, erosion, and wildfires for the four million people that call the Arctic home. The Arctic Council, a beacon of cooperation for nearly 30 years, was paused for the first time in its history following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Arctic, previously a rarity in the news cycle, now commands headlines on polar shipping, rare earth minerals, rising geopolitical tensions, and preposterous propositions to purchased territory.
And the United States? What came of its promise a decade ago to realize its potential as an Arctic nation? Over the next 12 months, I’ll interrogate that question in a new commentary and webinar series for The Arctic Institute, The Midpoint.
In 2025, the United States finds itself at a milestone—halfway between its last Arctic Council Chairmanship and the next opportunity for an American President to stand before the world and reaffirm, as we do every 12 years, that America is an Arctic nation. More than that, America’s next Arctic Chairmanship coincides with the 5th International Polar Year. IPYs provide a vital opportunity to close outstanding major knowledge gaps through targeted attention and globally coordinated research. These monumental scientific undertakings stand to achieve major breakthroughs in the knowledge required to protect the global environment and develop effective national and local strategies to mitigate and adapt to environmental changes.
As I look back on the last eight years and forward to the next seven, each month The Midpoint will examine how America has—and has not—lived up to its own vision of Arctic leadership. It will explore the results of America’s commitments to economic development, climate resilience, military presence, Indigenous sovereignty, and the wellbeing of Arctic communities. And through virtual roundtable discussions with Arctic Institute authors, together we’ll take stock of political promises, energy investments, and the shifting Arctic policy landscape.
Above all, The Arcitc Institute’s ‘The Midpoint’ Series 2025 is about that day in Anchorage, the decade that followed, and the decade to come. It’s about promises kept and promises broken, rhetoric and reality, and the stark realities of a region that bears the brunt of global change. I’ll sift through the rhetoric to uncover what’s been left in the cold—and what can still be brought into the light before America’s time in the sun comes again.