In 2007, two Russian submersibles descended from the ice at the North Pole to plant a small Russian flag on the sea floor more than two miles down. While the aquanauts were greeted as heroes in Russia, the reaction of other Arctic nations was somewhat less positive. ‘This isn’t the 15th century,’ complained the Canadian foreign minister. ‘You can’t go around the world and just plant flags.’ In response to the protests, President Putin – then Time magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’ – reassured the world: ‘Don’t worry. Everything will be all right.’

Kenneth Rosen is an award-winning journalist whose work has taken him to geopolitical hotspots such as Iraq, Syria and Ukraine; in Troubled, his first book, he explored the unregulated wilderness boot camps for ‘troubled teens’ in America. In his timely, provocative new book Polar War, he turns his attention further north.

The Arctic was once a byword for international cooperation and scientific collaboration; but, Rosen argues, after 400 interviews and two years spent exploring the region, the melting sea ice is fuelling a growing military contest between an expansionist Russia, an opportunistic China and an ill-prepared United States and its allies for control of the new shipping routes and resources that an ice-free Arctic will unlock. Rosen believes Russia and China are winning a struggle that will only end in war.

Into this tinderbox comes President Trump, with his apparent plans to ‘get and secure’ Greenland. Rosen is clear that while the United States’s ‘desire to control Greenland has existed nearly as long as America itself’, Trump’s apparent plan to annex the Danish territory is naive and dangerous gamesmanship that will alienate America’s allies and undermine the international cooperation it needs for the growing confrontation with Russia and China.

Worse – and Rosen’s frustration is impossible to miss – it is a distraction for a country that needs to shore up or replace its decaying Arctic defences, some of which are breaking apart as the permafrost melts. Nor does it seem able to equip its soldiers to fight in still extreme conditions, let alone build the fleet of icebreakers that the President has called for since 2018. The US currently has a handful of ageing vessels, compared with Russia’s fleet of more than 40 icebreakers, including several nuclear- powered ones.

Rosen is a talented writer. He deftly distils his research into vignette-like chapters filled with show-stopping adventures and small, intimate moments, bringing to life pickups racing along the Russian border or Alaska’s famed ice road, Swedish conscripts preparing for war, US paratroopers on manoeuvre and a myriad of icebreakers, coastguard cutters and trawlers. He vividly evokes the apparent panic when the US ship he is on is followed by a Russian warship and buzzed by a Russian helicopter – an American Poseidon spy plane arriving long after the Russians, ‘the rulers of the Arctic’, have gone. He also describes a drinking session he has with a likely Russian spy in a border town in Norway’s far north, where, ‘like in a John le Carré novel, everyone is a suspect’.

There’s a clever use of mundane details to tell the bigger stories. These include finding cloudberries for the first time growing relatively close to the North Pole; how a winch on an American icebreaker is frozen solid but on a Norwegian ship isn’t, leaving the crew with little option other than to hack away at the ice with ‘a piece of flotsam’; and the need for US Army medics to buy their equipment at Home Depot in Alaska.

But, frustratingly, Rosen struggles to consistently address the historic origins of the growing conflict in the Arctic. For example, the complex history of the strategically important Svalbard archipelago is given short shrift, even though the decision to exclude Russia from future decisions over the islands after the first world war has fuelled Russian resentment ever since.

That said, in less talented hands, a book such as Polar War might easily have turned out to be a dry, US-heavy affair. But Rosen gives us a series of gripping stories about a region that may be the next site of global conflict. It will appeal to a wide audience, even if its somewhat opaque structure doesn’t always do justice to the research, and it runs the risk of being rendered outdated by fast-moving events.