In 1949, the Soviet Union parachuted two scientists, Vitali Volovich and Andrei Medvedev, onto the surface of the North Pole in a bit of Cold War one-upsmanship with Canada. Next spring, Russia plans to celebrate a belated 60th anniversary of the event by conducting a paratroop drop at the North Pole.

The entire Arctic region is tense these days with competing national claims to the seabed (full of oil) and the fate of the waters within the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, the fabled Northwest Passage. Should the waters of the passage melt, a new shipping route will be opened up, one that is cheaper and faster, in terms of the North American and East Asian markets, than the Panama Canal. The question of who owns the waters, then, becomes crucial

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David Bromwich has published an article in the New York Review of Books that is ostensibly a comparative review of two recent works on American imperialism. The first is Leslie H. Gelb's, Power Rules: How Common Sense Can Rescue American Foreign Policy; the second is Obama's Cairo speech.  Each lays out a model for American foreign policy and, therefore, says Bromwich, American imperialism.  

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