No Arctic war.

Most of America’s historic foreign policy blunders were driven by threat inflation. From fake attacks on ships in Havana Harbor or the Gulf of Tonkin, to falling dominos in Southeast Asia and WMD in Iraq — the response to these “dire threats” is often a costly quagmire. In the Cold War it was phony bomber and missile “gaps” that sparked a precarious and ultimately pointless nuclear confrontation. Today a new “icebreaker gap” could fuel an Arctic arms race.

For over a decade, defense hawks have been sounding the alarm about Russia’s supposed “militarization” and “dominance” of the Arctic. More recently, China has joined the list of “aggressors” allegedly threatening vital Western economic and strategic interests in the High North. The Obama administration resisted calls for a major Arctic buildup coming from a mix of armchair analysts, defense contractors, and special political interests. Notably, the U.S. Navy has never joined this chorus. Nobody denies , but these are for Coast Guard missions — not the remote warfighting scenarios hyped by Arctic hawks. Theirs is classic threat inflation, built on equal parts exaggeration and ignorance, that makes it irresistible to a Trump administration happy to overturn yet another Obama legacy. And so, with a recent series of provocative words and deeds, America’s Arctic policy has taken an abruptly belligerent turn.

This is another historic mistake, not only because it could lead to costly and dangerous confrontation in an extremely fragile region, but because its entire premise is false. Once a superpower rival in the High North, Russia’s Arctic presence imploded after the Cold War leaving America and its NATO allies militarily dominant. Retreating from rivalry, Russia joined other regional states in a new Arctic Council that has proved a model of shared global governance, fostering cooperation in areas from environmental protection and search and rescue to commercial shipping and fisheries. Importantly, Arctic Council members agreed over a decade ago to settle any territorial disputes through the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea framework — and have scrupulously kept to that agreement. It is simply false that Russia threatens to seize the North Pole seabed or other Arctic territory, or that China, a nonvoting observer at the Arctic Council, threatens to undermine the independence of regional states through its so-called “.”