Volume I · No. 1 · July–August 2026

Chokepoints, Corridors, and Concessions

China's Structural Statecraft Across Eurasia, the Americas, and the Indo-Pacific

Editor's Note. Volume I gathers seven essays that, on the surface, span disconnected geographies and domains: a nickel supply chain in Indonesia, a Politburo economic doctrine in Beijing, an AI standards body in Geneva, the Clarion-Clipperton seabed, the cold and complex strategy of the Arctic, humid Latin American jungles, and the political volatility of Balochistan. What tethers them is a single structural logic rather than a shared region — that China's approach to great power competition is built less on direct conquest than on architecture: the mines, ports, cables, processing facilities, and technical standards through which commercial access is subtly converted into strategic alignment. A port financed today becomes a naval consideration tomorrow; a processing monopoly becomes a bargaining chip; a technical standard becomes a dependency. — Jack M. Lindstrom, Founder & Publisher
In This Issue
No. 01

The Clarion-Clipperton Convergence

7,000 miles east of China, and 4,000 miles south of Alaska, an intersection is made not by contested islands or naval bases, but instead by something much more valuable, and equally as…

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No. 02

Dual Circulation: A Study in Junmin Ronghe

12 As such, major Western institutions understand this policy through a macroeconomic lens. This analysis serves a different purpose, as it believes such understandings and the present…

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No. 03

Infrastructure as Leverage: Chinese AI and Its Consequences

In November 2025, as the world was swept up in the AI revolution, Singapore made a unique decision, relinquishing Meta’s Llama and instead building it’s sovereign AI model on Alibaba’s…

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No. 04

Ruso-Sino Relations: An Arctic Approach

Alliances between opponents are seen through a fearful lens by great powers; the enemy of an enemy is, in theory, a friend. It is this logic that leads to concern about rising alliances…

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No. 05

The Southern Reach

Expansion in geopolitical terms is not simply domestic production or military growth; it is a network of allies or colonies, historically. It is the establishment of power that fuels a…

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No. 06

China in Pakistan: How Instability and Resources Ousted the West

Leverage in geopolitics equates to power, both in retaining it and in gaining more. Great powers grapple with each other for chokepoints, hoping to box in a rival or expose a rival's…

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No. 07

The Butterfly Effect: Vulnerability in Indonesia's Nickel Supply Chain

The heat of an explosion cannot be written accurately. The intensity of a sound felt more than heard, the walls of fire which engulfed the furnace they were born from, the workers whose…

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About the Contributors

Jack M. Lindstrom — Founder & Publisher, Arctic Ledger. Master of International Affairs candidate, UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy. Junior Researcher under Leonard Hochberg, The Mackinder Forum.

Arthur Thorson — UC San Diego School of Global Policy and Strategy / Rady School of Management.

Samuel Oren Tustin — Communications & Researcher, The Eurasia Center; Managing Editor for Europe, The World Mind; American University.

Liam Albert — Field Engineer and Researcher; EPICS, Arizona State University.

Alexandra Jingsi Ni — Researcher, Chinese technology policy and AI governance.

Zaryab Nutkani (Zaryab Baloch) — MPhil, Defense & Strategic Studies, Quaid-i-Azam University, Islamabad.

Afrina Rifan (Afrina M.R.F.) — BSc (Hons), Urban Informatics and Planning, University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.

Kevin Thow — Contributing Reviewer, The Australian National University.

Suggested citation: Lindstrom, Jack M., ed. Arctic Ledger, Vol. I. July–August 2026.
© 2026 Arctic Ledger. All rights reserved. Views expressed are those of the individual authors.