Russian Jets Over Alaska: Cold War Reboot Sponsored by Melting Ice and Human Folly
Bears, Bombers, and the Bering Strait: Russian Jets Over Alaska Remind the World the Cold War Has Excellent Brand Recall
By Our Correspondent Who Once Mistook a MiG for a Migrating Goose
ANCHORAGE—Somewhere between the salmon canneries and Sarah Palin’s former backyard, NORAD’s radar operators had a moment of déjà vu this week: four Russian Tu-95 “Bear” bombers—propellers churning like Soviet-era egg-beaters—cruised into the Alaskan Air Defense Identification Zone, or ADIZ, that 200-mile polite-fiction of airspace where sovereignty is asserted by sternly worded press releases. NORAD scrambled F-22 Raptors, the Air Force sent a KC-135 tanker (because even interceptors get thirsty), and somewhere in Moscow a duty officer updated the Excel spreadsheet titled “Things That Still Make Washington Twitch.”
The incident itself was routine in the same way root canals are: painful, expensive, and scheduled every few months. Russian long-range aviation has been poking the ADIZ since 2007, ostensibly to remind everyone that Russia, too, owns maps. What keeps the exercise eternally fresh is the global context: a planet simultaneously on fire, under water, and over-leveraged, yet still finding time to play aerial tag across the 53-mile-wide Bering chokepoint.
Consider the cast list. On one side, the United States—recently shocked to discover that its Arctic strategy was mostly a PowerPoint deck titled “Maybe Later.” On the other, Russia, whose economy is roughly the size of Italy’s but with significantly more permafrost and nuclear warheads. Watching from the mezzanine: China, taking notes for its own “near-Arctic state” cosplay; Norway, politely mortified; and Canada, wondering whether anyone remembered to thaw the poutine before the next sovereignty exercise.
The broader significance, if you squint, is that geography has become the last bipartisan issue left. Whether you’re a MAGA enthusiast or a Nordic social democrat, everyone agrees that melting sea ice is an open bar for resource extraction and militarization. The Russian fly-by is less a territorial threat—nobody’s landing bombers on Juneau’s cruise-ship dock—and more a quarterly earnings call for the military-industrial complex. Raytheon stock bumps; think-tanks dust off their “Great Power Competition” bingo cards; journalists practice spelling “Kamchatka” without autocorrect.
Meanwhile, the Arctic itself is busy auditioning for Mad Max: On Ice. Record heatwaves have turned Siberia into a peat-bog barbecue; Greenland’s meltwater is politely requesting property rights in Miami-Dade. Into this infernal slush stride the Tu-95s, burning 15 tons of aviation fuel per hour to demonstrate—what, exactly? That carbon footprints are now measured in machismo? One can almost hear the polar bears filing a class-action lawsuit for reckless endangerment.
The international audience views these Alaskan cameos with the weary amusement of adults watching teenagers egg each other’s houses. Europe, distracted by its own energy divorce from Russia, offers the diplomatic equivalent of “there, there.” Japan remembers the time Bears circled Hokkaido and quietly orders another two F-35s. India checks the price of Urals crude and decides this is somebody else’s circus. Only TikTok gets genuinely excited, pumping out lo-fi clips of F-22s doing barrel rolls set to vaporwave music, because nothing says existential dread like retro synths.
There is, of course, the obligatory arms-control footnote. New START limps along on life support, and the Open Skies Treaty has gone the way of the dodo and balanced journalism. Each intercept thus becomes a pixel in a larger image: a world dismantling the guardrails while congratulating itself on the quality of the crash. The optimists insist these encounters are “professional” and “safe,” which is comfort-speak for “nobody’s been nuked yet.” The pessimists note that accidents love bravado the way moths love flames, and the Arctic now has both in abundance.
So what does it all mean, dear reader? Simply that the Cold War was never really won; it was merely outsourced to the weather. As the permafrost thaws and the bombers circle, humanity continues its grand tradition of turning remote wastelands into geopolitical catwalks. We’ve traded Berlin checkpoints for polar routes, Checkpoint Charlie for Charlie’s Ice Floe. And somewhere, shivering on a radar screen, the blips spell out an ancient truth: proximity does not equal understanding, but it does guarantee an invoice.
In the end, the Russian jets turned back, the F-22s landed, and the only casualty was another chunk of sea ice—now drifting south to die. Until next month, when the Bears will undoubtedly return, because history, like rust, never sleeps. And neither, apparently, does the billable hour.
