On July 29, 1881, Navy Lt. Cmdr. George Washington De Long raised the U.S. flag on a desolate, snow-capped rocky island in the far northern Arctic Ocean. “I take possession of it in the name of the president of the United States,” he proclaimed. For the decades that followed, this roughly 60-square-mile windswept patch of land in the East Siberian Sea bore the name Bennett Island on official maps of the U.S. Geological Survey.
Today, it is known as Ostrov Bennetta and is only accessible with special permission from the Russian military.
In 1926, the U.S. yielded the land in the face of aggressive Soviet maneuvers to annex it. This was shortly after the last time a U.S. president tried and failed to invade Russia, including parts of eastern Ukraine.
Just over 100 years ago, in the waning months of World War I, Woodrow Wilson directed 13,000 U.S. troops into Russia to restore the territorial integrity of Imperial Russia by challenging the Soviet Red Army. It was an unmitigated disaster. Fighting stretched on for two years after the Armistice. In 1920, when our last troops straggled home from Russia’s frozen Arctic north and from deep within its Siberian interior, most had no idea why they had been there in the first place.
Today, the heroic tale of the USS Jeannette and the cautionary story of The Polar Bear Expedition are all but forgotten. Even Princeton has stripped Wilson’s name from its school of foreign affairs. But you can still find the graves of some of the former U.S. Army 339th regiment in White Chapel Cemetery outside Detroit, where they encircle the statue of a menacing polar bear.
Recalling these parts of our nation’s obscure history in Russia is important, and no less today. As President Biden and the foreign policy establishment push for America to defend Ukraine’s borders, we must consider our own. And no, not the one with Mexico.
Far east of Ukraine’s eastern front and far west of Washington, D.C., the United States and Russia meet today along a line that slices some 1,600 nautical miles through the Bering Sea, forming the world’s longest maritime border. At its closest point (not Sarah Palin’s backyard) it divides settlements on the Diomede islands — one Russian, the other American — that lie only two miles apart.
I follow such things because I’ve spent 30 years doing business throughout the countries of the former Soviet Union and representing U.S. interests as a senior official in the U.S. Treasury. I had a unique start. As a seventh...
