On the brink of the "white war"

Journalist Marzio Mian’s book offers the relaxed reading experience of a travelogue (with many of its hallmarks: first-person narration, descriptions of the places he visit the people he meets, finding a completely unknown and particularly evocative landscape...) alongside the pressing prospect of a catastrophe, both in the realm of international relations and the natural world. Mian’s journey through the Arctic—one of the founders of The Arctic Times Project and a frequent visitor to the territories of the Far North (from Greenland and Iceland to the Norwegian and Finnish fjords, the northern coast of Siberia, and the white bays of Alaska and Canada) serves as a warning about the geopolitical struggle that has already begun in that part of the globe, over whose dominance—now that melting ice is opening ports and trade routes—Russia, the United States, and China are vying.

When the book was originally published in Italian in 2022 (the Spanish translation Spanish in late 2025), the maneuvers carried out by the various powers had already begun a few years earlier; since then, that dynamic has only accelerated. Putin is implementing an ambitious plan to modernize port infrastructure along the Siberian coast, from Murmansk on the Kola Peninsula to Wrangel Island at the entrance Arctic via the Bering Strait. For its part, the United States is pressuring Canada to increase its military deployment in its Arctic territories and is pressuring Greenland to block Chinese projects on that large island (China operates some mines there, but other mining concessions and its plan to build two airports have not been rejected).

As Mian explains, the Arctic is of dual interest to the major powers. The primary interest lies in geography, as it represents the shortest distance between Russia and the bulk of U.S. territory; it is, therefore, the main route in the event of potential ballistic missile attacks between the two countries (Russian nuclear launchers are stationed along the Siberian coast, while the U.S. maintains early warning stations in both Alaska and at its Greenland base). This gives Greenland essential strategic value: it is like an aircraft carrier anchored in the Arctic; whoever controls it will have a forward outpost from which to strike at a potential enemy (in the case of China, its presence there would give it access to a geographical area to which it does not naturally belong).

There is also interest in the raw materials hidden beneath the permafrost or Arctic ice, such as hydrocarbons and strategic minerals. The difficulty of extracting them has made their exploitation unprofitable until now, but climate change and new technologies are spurring financial initiatives for the development future projects.

The melting ice itself, along with the growing mining activity and the logistics associated with expanding trade routes, are bringing about a drastic transformation of the Arctic environment and the living conditions of its traditional inhabitants. The anxiety surrounding the challenge these changes serves as the central theme of the personal accounts that tie together all the chapters of this book.

This is precisely where the main value of *White War* lies (in addition to the firsthand account: the extraordinary feat of an author who has traveled so extensively through a region largely closed off to outsiders), which, while presenting all the elements that make up the “Arctic front of the global conflict,” as the subtitle states, and thus offering a geopolitical perspective, never loses sight of the people and communities already affected by today’s struggle and, perhaps, by a future confrontation between powers.

One shortcoming worth noting is the lack of a general map—or a map for each section of the book—that would allow readers to pinpoint the locations mentioned in the story. Since this is a generally unfamiliar coastline, interested readers are forced to put the book down at every turn to look up the various places online.