Welcome to the Northern Brief

Introduction

It is June 2014, and I am at Nalukataq, the summer whaling festival in Utqiaġvik. I am a Regional Field Director for Mark Begich’s reelection campaign, eager and out of my depth, and I have just said something foolish. I mentioned my candidate’s name to a couple of people in a way that would have been normal practice where I come from. An elder approaches me, kindly but firmly. “We don’t talk politics at Nalukataq,” she says.

That sentence marked the beginning of my actual education in Arctic politics. I have thought about that conversation at least weekly since then.

Twelve years later, I am watching the inaugural Lord Fisher Lecture on Sea Power and Naval Transformation at the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank. General Sir Gwyn Jenkins, First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, is explaining what the 2025 Strategic Defence Review will mean for the Royal Navy.

“Our Hybrid Navy,” he says, “will be geared towards the North Atlantic and High North, reflecting the priorities of the SDR (Strategic Defense Review) but also, more fundamentally, our geography.”

I think of Ian Morris’s title: Geography Is Destiny. Morris wrote about Britain. He could just as easily have been writing about Alaska.

The elder at Nalukataq and the First Sea Lord at RUSI have never met. But they are speaking, in different vocabularies, about the same century, where the Arctic with be at the top of policymakers’ minds.

The Admiral’s “our geography” sits atop a geography that, for two centuries, has often overridden what the elder’s grandparents wanted. Indigenous Arctic peoples have long understood this. They hold their allies loosely because they know, better than most policymakers, that governments, businesses, and even nonprofits do not consistently hold their interests in mind. The United States may yet decide that strategic competition with Russia and China justifies tradeoffs the Iñupiat themselves would not choose. The elder at Nalukataq does not need anyone to explain this to her.

About The Northern Brief

The Northern Brief is a publication for readers who think the rooms in Utqiaġvik and the rooms on Whitehall should know more about each other than they currently do.

This is not only a matter of fairness. It is a matter of competence. The next decade of Arctic policy will be shaped in those rooms, and too often they are still operating with only a partial understanding of one another.

I bring three things to this project.

The first is North Slope experience. In 2014, I ran the North Slope region for Mark Begich’s reelection campaign, working out of Utqiaġvik and the villages of the borough. The operation was built and run alongside Iñupiat volunteers and staff who taught me, daily, how much I did not yet understand. The campaign lost. The relationships that came out of it have shaped much of my work in the Arctic since.

The second is a career in data and organizing infrastructure for political and nonprofit organizations, including Faith in Action, Indivisible, and Enroll America. Much of that work involved the institutional plumbing that rarely receives public attention: how data moves, how coalitions coordinate, how organizations function across jurisdictions and competing priorities. The Arctic, with its overlapping patchwork of tribal councils, borough government, regional corporations, village corporations, and federal agencies, benefits from this kind of institutional analysis more than it currently receives.

The third is a professional background that sits somewhat uncommonly at the intersection of the Arctic, maritime, and policy worlds. I am a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Society of Arts, and a member of several British and American professional societies focused on maritime affairs, navigation, statistics, and strategic studies, including RUSI and the U.S. Naval Institute. I hold an MA in rhetoric and composition, a discipline well-suited to reading strategic communications and institutional language. I also serve in the U.S. Coast Guard Auxiliary, which informs much of the maritime side of this publication.

Taken together, those experiences shape the perspective this publication brings to Arctic policy and maritime affairs.

What The Northern Brief Will Cover

The Northern Brief covers Arctic policy at three scales, and the relationships between them.

The first scale is the North Slope itself: the civic infrastructure of the borough, ICAS, ASRC, the village corporations, the Mayors’ Conference, and Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat. How those institutions make decisions, where coalitions form, and how outside campaigns around Willow, NPR-A, and ANWR are absorbed, resisted, or adapted locally. Too often, the political analysis of the Slope is treated merely as background for someone else’s argument.

The second scale is the U.S. Coast Guard and the American maritime Arctic: the expanding polar fleet, the Port of Nome project, the unresolved homeporting decisions still pending in 2026, and the question of how civilian maritime institutions — the Auxiliary, the Marine Exchange of Alaska, and Iñupiat coastal communities themselves — fit into an Arctic operating concept the active-duty service cannot resource alone.

The third scale is the UK and NATO’s northern flank: the Joint Expeditionary Force, Arctic Sentry, Camp Viking, the 2025 Strategic Defence Review, and the institutional politics shaping British Arctic policy.

What connects them is the opening argument: that several constituencies are confronting the same century in different vocabularies, and too often without meaningful contact with one another.

The Northern Brief is an attempt to carry ideas between them. Translating without flattening. Reporting on developments in each sphere with an ear for what the others would need to hear.

What The Northern Brief Is Not

A few things this publication is not.

It is not a vehicle for speaking on behalf of Iñupiat institutions or Iñupiat people. The North Slope has its own organizations — the Borough, the Iñupiat Community of the Arctic Slope, Arctic Slope Regional Corporation, Voice of the Arctic Iñupiat, the village corporations, and the tribal councils — staffed by people who can speak for themselves and routinely do. When The Northern Brief writes about the Slope, my role is to amplify, translate, and report. To prioritize Iñupiat-authored sources where possible. To co-author when appropriate. To disclose relationships with institutions under discussion. Where I overstep, I expect to be corrected.

It is not a partisan publication. I have a Democratic campaign background, and that background is part of why I know the Slope at all. But Arctic politics in Alaska often align differently from the political order familiar in Washington. During the 2014 campaign, it was common to see family photographs of both the Murkowski and Begich families, sometimes spanning several generations, hanging in the same home. The Northern Brief will try to reflect that reality rather than impose national assumptions on it.

Nothing published here is written on behalf of the U.S. Coast Guard or the Coast Guard Auxiliary. My Auxiliary service informs the maritime analysis, but it does not authorize it. Views are my own.

Nor is this publication intended as a primary source on Russia, China, or the Nordic states. I do not read Russian, Mandarin, Norwegian, or Danish. When writing about those actors, The Northern Brief will rely heavily on analysts and reporters who do, including Mathieu Boulègue, Marc Lanteigne, Andreas Østhagen, Whitney Lackenbauer, and the journalists of the Barents Observer.

I write from Texas, with upcoming periodic visits to the Slope and in London. The desk work is honest about what it is. The trips are honest about being intermittent. Neither is hidden.

Arctic Policy in 2026

The Arctic policy environment in 2026 is changing faster than much of the analytical infrastructure around it.

The security architecture is shifting. NATO launched Arctic Sentry in February 2026. The Royal Navy is increasing its presence in the High North, including expanded operations at Camp Viking. In May, the U.S. Coast Guard finalized a $3.5 billion contract for five Arctic Security Cutters, bringing the planned polar fleet to eleven vessels. The Port of Nome expansion is underway but is unlikely to host cutters before roughly 2030. Many of the homeporting decisions, operating concepts, and civilian-maritime partnerships that will determine whether any of this works are likely to be settled over the next eighteen months.

At the same time, Indigenous political institutions are asserting themselves with increasing confidence. Across the North Slope’s borough government, tribal councils, village corporations, regional corporations, and advocacy organizations, the work of defining the post-Willow political environment is already underway in multiple forums and vocabularies. Whatever else 2026 may be, it is not a year in which Iñupiat institutions are waiting passively to be consulted.

The public analytical bench remains relatively small. Arctic policy writing is still weighted heavily toward retired flag officers and tenured academics and remains comparatively thin in two areas: ground-level analysis of North Slope civic infrastructure and work that can move fluently between Alaska, Washington, and Whitehall. Those are the gaps The Northern Brief hopes to occupy.

The Northern Brief’s Structure

The publication will generally appear biweekly, with additional pieces when events warrant additional attention and occasional pauses when they do not.

The work will largely take five forms:

Briefs (600–800 words): concise analysis of a single development.

Translations (1,200–1,500 words): one Arctic story unpacked for another capital. Likely the publication’s signature format.

Field Notes (1,500–2,500 words): essayistic and observational pieces, usually written after travel.

Long Reads (3,000–5,000 words, twice yearly): questions that require more room.

Q&As (twice yearly): conversations with people whose work this publication should be in dialogue with.

The Northern Brief will remain free for the foreseeable future.

This publication is intended for Senate staffers trying to understand why a North Slope village has passed a resolution. For the Royal Navy officer whose operating area now includes a coastline he has never seen. For the Anchorage attorney, the Whitehall civil servant, the foundation program officer, the academic, the journalist on deadline, and the reader on the Slope who wants to know what is being said about home in rooms far away.

If you are one of those readers, subscribe. If you know one of those readers, forward this. If I have misunderstood something — and inevitably I will at times — write back.

Carrying ideas between Utqiaġvik and Whitehall is not work that can be done alone.

Welcome to The Northern Brief.