Sullivan on Face the Nation: Alaska is the Center of America’s Security, Energy, and Arctic Future

ANCHORAGE, ALASKA—U.S. Senator Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) joined CBS’s Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan discussing last week’s summit in Alaska between President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Senator Sullivan underscored Alaska’s central role in America’s national security, the Trump administration’s reversal of Biden-era policies that locked up Alaska’s economy and responsible resource development opportunities, and provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill that will strengthen U.S. military and Arctic capabilities in the face of unprecedented, escalating Russian and Chinese joint strategic military activity in the North Pacific and the Arctic.

Senator Sullivan rejected reports of potential Russian investment in Alaska’s natural resources, emphasizing the strength of America’s own energy sector:

“We have plenty of American investors and our allies who want to invest in Alaska’s natural resources,” Senator Sullivan said. “We're having a boom here. We don't need Russian investments. We don't need Russian money. They're a competitor of ours when it comes to energy and natural resources and critical minerals... I would not support that.”

Sen. Sullivan emphasized President Trump’s commitment to Alaska’s resource development outlined in his Day One, Alaska-specific executive order to unleash Alaska’s vast natural resource potential:

“The Biden administration put out 70 executive orders exclusively focused on shutting down Alaska, shutting down our resource development economy,” Sen. Sullivan said. “Our own federal government, the Biden administration, sanctioned my state more than they sanctioned Iran. What we're seeing with President Trump and his administration is a complete 180 on that. Unleashing Alaska's resource potential has been a huge focus of the President since day one.”

Sen. Sullivan also emphasized the high environmental standards of Alaska’s resource development sector and positive effects on the health, well-being, and life expectancy on Alaskans in the state’s rural areas:

“Alaska has an incredible record of being able to develop our resources and protect the environment,” Sen. Sullivan said. “You walk around here, you see what a pristine, beautiful environment we have here. But we know we need jobs. We need natural resource development. So, we can do both. The entire North Slope of Alaska, the Iñupiat community, across the board, was against what the Biden administration did, which was lock up the entire National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska, which was set aside by Congress to develop our resources. Then, he had the audacity to say, hey, I did this on behalf of the Native people. That was not true at all. It was an outrage.

“There's no place on the planet that has higher standards on protecting the environment than us. If we need American energy, why would we go, like the Biden administration did, begging from Iran, Venezuela, places that have no environmental standards, when you can get it from America, from American workers, with the highest environmental standards of any place on the planet. Secondly, when you have resource development, particularly in our rural communities, you see life expectancies increasing.”

Sen. Sullivan discussed the recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act and its historic military investments critical to gaining an Arctic edge amid intensifying geopolitical competition:

“We're an Arctic nation because of Alaska,” Sen. Sullivan said. “We’re rebuilding our military. Alaska exudes military might. We're the cornerstone of missile defense, and we're going to be the cornerstone of the President's “Golden Dome” initiative. We are the hub of air combat power. We have over 100 fifth-generation fighters based in Alaska. We have a brand-new U.S. Army airborne division up here. So, we are building up our military, which is great, but also building out our Arctic capabilities.”

“The One Big Beautiful Bill has an almost $26 billion investment in the Coast Guard, which is the biggest investment in the Coast Guard in American history by far: 16 icebreakers coming with that, 22 cutters, 40 helicopters, a bunch of shoreside infrastructure. A lot of that's going to be in Alaska to defend the Arctic. We need to defend the Arctic because, as you and I have talked about, the Russians and the Chinese are in our waters and in our airspace all the time, including doing joint operations up here, which is unprecedented.”

Sen. Sullivan emphasized Alaska as a flash point of great power competition:

“Alaska is already becoming a flash point,” Sen. Sullivan said. “The number of times that the Russians and Chinese are doing joint strategic bomber task forces in our airspace and joint naval task forces in our EEZ, in our waters—it’s happening on a regular basis now. It’s unprecedented. They don't do joint operations anywhere else on America's borders. That's for sure.

“We need to do more and we certainly need to keep [defense spending] above 3 percent of GDP and growing towards 4 or 5 percent of GDP. It's a dangerous world right now. The One Big Beautiful Bill does a lot for our military’s urgent needs. Shipbuilding-- our Navy, our ability to build ships has completely atrophied. Weapons and ammo systems. The Golden Dome. I've been working on this with the Pentagon. This is a layered missile defense. We have the ground-based missile interceptors in Alaska. We have all the radar systems in Alaska that protect the whole country in terms of ballistic missiles. We have new threats. We have hypersonics. We have drones. We’ve seen it here in Alaska-- spy balloons. What we need to do is upgrade the system with what's called a layered defense. Not just the ground-based system here, but you work it more with different systems, Aegis Ashore, THAAD, and then including space-based systems, both for tracking and intercepting. And we do that with an open architecture in terms of software to integrate those systems. Alaska is the cornerstone of all the missile defense right now and will continue to be so.”

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