By Matthew Ehret Originally published on Pluralia
I sincerely believe that humanity has reached a dramatic crossroads in our collective evolution, and the choices that we make (or fail to make) in the coming months will affect not only the lives of our children and grandchildren but the lives of countless future generations for centuries to come.
Certainly, the danger of chaos and unbounded thermonuclear war has never been greater. But inversely, the potential to apply the fruits of human ingenuity to the cause of protecting our species, ending world hunger and expanding our consciousness into the cosmos has also never been greater. As such, the opportunity to recapture the dream of a world of win-win cooperation driven by scientific, artistic and technological progress is so important. And nowhere is this opportunity as immediately ripe and nowhere are the historical precedents as powerful as they are in the great Arctic frontier.
While some war mongers envision long-range missiles across the Arctic — and Golden Domes expanding the NATO-led Full Spectrum dominance agenda into the Arctic, other, more constructive ideas, provide a happier solution for US-Russian friendship and peace for the entire world.
Not only did Presidents Putin and Trump most recently share a dialogue around cooperation in Alaska, where only 4 miles separate Russian and American territories via the Big and Little Diomede Islands in the middle of the Bering Strait, but additionally, the Polar Silk Road led by China has emerged as a great force of Eurasian and world economic collaboration since it was first announced in 2018.
Trump’s repeated message that the “USA, Russia and China together could solve the world’s problems” admittedly still remains only words, but it is the absolutely correct line of thinking, if only concrete policies can be built accordingly.
Many people do not realize this, but President Putin in fact called for the construction of the Bering Strait rail connection in 2008, and again in 2011, in both cases offering to pay $60 billion to start this project, representing 2/3 of the estimated cost. In both instances, his offers met deaf ears among George Bush and Barack Obama. In 2014, China’s major news platform China Daily and Beijing Times gave an official endorsement of this initiative.
And in 2020, President Trump gave executive support for a long overdue railway connecting the lower 48 states to Alaska via Alberta.
But even here, these modern calls for arctic development did not emerge out of a vacuum. In December 1864, President Abraham Lincoln delivered a State of the Nation address to Congress outlining federal support for extending telegraph lines through the Bering Strait, stating:
“The proposed overland telegraph between America and Europe, by the way of Bering’s Straits and Asiatic Russia, which was sanctioned by Congress at the last session, has been undertaken, under very favorable circumstance… Assurances have been received from most of the South American States of their high appreciation of the enterprise, and their readiness to cooperate in constructing lines tributary to that world-encircling communication.”
Russian Alaska would be sold to the USA in only three years later explicitly around the notion of facilitating this program.
The USA had just suffered a grave civil war and had much reason to trust Czar Alexander II’s Russia, which had intervened to protect the Union against the aggressive intervention by English and French imperial powers supporting secession. In 1863, Czar Alexander II sent Russian battleships to NY and San Francisco as a message of solidarity with Lincoln and a threat to imperial forces of Europe.
Describing his motive for sending the Russian fleet to America, Czar Alexander II said:
“In the Autumn of 1862, the governments of France and Great Britain proposed to Russia, in a formal but not in an official way, the joint recognition by European powers of the independence of the Confederate States of America. My immediate answer was: ‘I will not cooperate in such action; and I will not acquiesce. On the contrary, I shall accept the recognition of the independence of the Confederate States by France and Great Britain as a casus belli for Russia. And in order that the governments of France and Great Britain may understand that this is no idle threat, I will send a Pacific fleet to San Francisco and an Atlantic fleet to New York… All this I did because of love for my own dear Russia… I acted thus because I understood that Russia would have a more serious task to perform if the American Republic, with advanced industrial development, were broken up and Great Britain should be left in control of most branches of modern industrial development.’”
This fact has been literally erased from American history books, but it is better understood in Russia, which has today a statue featuring the two martyred patriots and great emancipators: Czar Alexander II and Lincoln holding hands in Moscow.
In 1890, Lincoln’s friend and first governor of Colorado, William Gilpin published his book “The Cosmopolitan Railway,” outlining his dream of a world of rail networks, industrial progress and cooperation.
Echoing the win-win philosophy of Xi Jinping’s New Silk Road today, William Gilpin stated:
“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow, and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”
Gilpin noted the common cultural and geographic properties of both American and Russian societies with Russia’s Manifest Destiny calling forth a pioneering spirit to “go east,” while America’s Manifest Destiny envisioned a westward expansion. Gilpin wrote: “It is a simple and plain proposition that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of 2 or 3 hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations threw their now waste places, add a hundredfold to their wealth and power and influence.”
In 1905, Czar Nicholas II following the sage advice of Sergey Witte, gave national support to the Bering Strait tunnel and funded a team of American engineers to carry out feasibility studies. Again, Russia had good reason to trust the USA as the Trans Siberian railway built between 1890 to 1905 benefited immensely through Baldwin Locomotives made in Philadelphia and the support of hundreds of American technicians and engineers.
Sadly, history unfolded in another direction from the beautiful vision laid out by Czar Alexander II, Abraham Lincoln, William Gilpin and Czar Nicholas II. An age of bankers wars, anarchist assassinations, and economic turmoil disrupted this new age of progress and cooperation among civilizational states.
Despite small valiant efforts by patriots such as President Franklin Roosevelt, Vice President Henry Wallace and President John F Kennedy to revive the spirit of Lincoln and Czar Alexander, the enemies of humanity kept the world subdued into a trap of Game Theory, Mutually Assured Destruction, Exploitation and zero sum logic.
Today’s Belt and Road Initiative and the strategic alliance established between Russia, China and Iran have re-awoken the forgotten vision of a world of cooperating sovereign nation states.
Hopefully, the current systemic breakdown crisis finds a population and a leadership capable of recognizing its historic responsibilities and a moral sensibility, capable of throwing out the old world thinking of Empire in favor of a new paradigm, more befitting of a species destined to explore the universe, create, love and problem solve together.
Bio: I am the editor-in-chief of The Canadian Patriot Review, Senior Fellow of the American University in Moscow and Director of the Rising Tide Foundation. I’ve written the four volume Untold History of Canada series, four volume Clash of the Two Americas series, the Revenge of the Mystery Cult Trilogy and Science Unshackled: Restoring Causality to a World in Chaos. I am also co-host of the weekly Breaking History on Badlands Media and host of Pluralia Dialogos (which airs every second Sunday at 11am ET here).