The significance of Alaska

On Friday, 15 August Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin will meet in Alaska. The choice of that location sends a very hopeful message to the world.

Update [12 Aug, 2025]: I drew the timeline for the project to connect the US and Russia across the Bering Strait from Matthew Ehret’s Substack (linked below) but neglected to mention the visionary economist and presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, who conceptualized the project already in the 1980s and “made the Bering Strait program the epicenter of his international strategic planning” by 1993. More at this link.

Last week I had the privilege to sit down for some personal education with a seasoned author and geostrategist Admiral Davor Domazet, whom I mentioned here last month in “Defeat of the West’s strategy of chaos.” As we discussed the ongoing geopolitical events, the summit between the US President Trump and his Russian counterpart was just announced.

Admiral Domazet said that the choice of the summit’s location would be extremely important and that it would itself be a message to the world. He was only sure of one thing: it would not be anywhere in Western Europe.

We did not guess that Alaska would be the place, but once that choice was announced, it made perfect sense. It does send a very important message: Russia and the United States are coming together in peace, completing an important but interrupted cycle of history. I alluded to this in an article I drafted in February of this year:

Is a Grand Bargain between US and Russia in the works?

The unfinished history

Alaska is where the United States borders with Russia and where the two powers can and should connect. As Matthew Ehret summarized it superbly in his recent Substack article, the idea of physically connecting the US and Russia across the Bering Strait is an old idea because it’s a rather obvious one. It was first advanced already under President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, but sadly, it died with him. It was revived again in 1890 by William Gilpin, the former governor of Colorado, as his “Cosmopolitan Rail” vision, which included building a tunnel under the Bering Strait.

The importance of this project was not lost on the Russian government under Czar Nicholas II and his Finance Minister Sergei Witte who hired a number of American and French railway engineers in 1905 to carry out feasibility studies for the project. Unfortunately, the Czar was soon forced to abdicate, his Prime Minister was assassinated and the project never saw light of day.

Peace of the future

It was revived once more under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration and discussed in 1942 by his Vice President Henry Wallace and Stalin’s Foreign Minister Molotov. Wallace articulated the importance of physically connecting the United States with Russia as follows:

“It would mean much to the peace of the future if there could be some tangible link of this sort between the pioneer spirit of our own West and the frontier spirit of the Russian East.”

However, Wallace would soon be sidelined and replaced with Harry Truman, the clueless tool of the British oligarchy. Once FDR was safely dead, the project was memory holed again: connecting the two superpowers, whether physically, politically, socially, culturally or commercially, fell into disfavor.

In his “Iron Curtain” speech in 1946, Winston Churchill declared the Soviet Union as the enemy of the West. He delivered that speech in front of Harry Truman and instead of cultivating productive cooperation between the US and Russia, the West opted for the Cold War.

The sun already shines differently

The idea of bringing the two powers and the two continents closer together never died however, and the current leaderships of both Russia and the United States are clearly eager to revive it. In 2008, then Prime Minister Vladimir Putin approved the plan to build a railway to the Bering Strait as a part of Russia's infrastructure development plan to 2030. The development envisioned a 60-miles (almost 100 km) long tunnel between Chukotka in the Russian far east and Alaska for which Russia offered to put up 2/3rds of the required funding.

Russia proposed the project to their “Western partners” in 2011 and in May 2014 but at that time, the collective West had entirely different designs regarding Russia. By now, those designs have all but failed and the American people voted for a radical change of course by electing Donald Trump to the White House.

Whether Trump’s administration proves successful in delivering that change of course remains to be seen, but the will of the American people expressed in three consecutive presidential elections, gives the world a new hope. Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban expressed that hope after Trump’s second inauguration in January when he said that, “sun already shines differently.”

For his part, President Trump did give us some indications that he was interested in connecting Alaska to the mainland by rail when, in September 2020, he announced his approval of the 2,579 kilometer Alaska to Alberta (A2A) rail connection.

A2A project was a private capital initiative and it ultimately failed, apparently due to mismanagement, but in highlighting his approval of the project, Trump gave us an indication of his leanings, which may have informed the agreement between Russia and the US to hold the imminent summit between the US and Russia in Alaska. Undeniably, the message behind that choice is peace; it is building bridges of trust, mutual respect and constructive cooperation.

Importantly, in hosting Vladimir Putin on US territory, the Trump administration is signalling that it doesn’t recognize the Hague tribunal’s conviction of Putin as a war criminal. In that, it is legitimizing Russia’s Special Military Operation in Ukraine.

The question of Canada

Incidentally, connecting Russia with Alaska and Alaska with the mainland US may also be related to Trump’s declared intention to absorb parts of Canada into the United States. If Alberta, British Columbia and Yukon became parts of the US, its territory would connect to Alaska creating a contiguous land bridge towards Russia.

If the United States also added Canada's Northern Territories and Nunavut, they could territorially connect with Greenland and share the Arctic zone with Russia to join the Arctic Silk Road project. In February I wrote as follows:

Could these developments become the object of a future grand deal between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump? I think that’s possible. From today's perspective all that might seem like a radical and dangerous departure from the postwar status quo, but that status quo may simply have been a pause in geopolitical processes that have started to shape up already in the 1800s.

We may be days from finding out. To be sure, if the two leaders already agreed to meet, some kind of a grand bargain has already been concluded between their respective representatives. We’ll know more soon, especially from the way the Canadian, British and European leaders characterize the results of this week’s highly anticipated summit in Alaska.

The significance of August 15

The summit’s date, 15 August 2025 is also significant in a few ways. Agust 15, 1971 was when Richard Nixon temporarily (of course) suspended the convertibility of the US dollar to gold. August 15, 1945 was a pivotal day in Chinese history: it marked the surrender of Japan to the Allies, ending the War of Resistance Against Japan.

August 15 holds deep religious significance for both Catholic and Orthodox Christians as the Feast of the Assumption (or Dormition in Orthodox tradition), commemorating the belief that the Virgin Mary, the mother of Jesus, was taken up body and soul into heaven at the end of her earthly life.

Alex Krainer – @NakedHedgie is the creator of I-System Trend Following and publisher of daily TrendCompass reports which cover over 200 financial and commodities markets. One-month test drive is always free of charge. To learn more about TrendCompass reports please check our main TrendCompass web page. To start your trial subscription, drop us an email at TrendCompass@ISystem-TF.com, or:

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