Some ideas never die as talk of a Bering Strait tunnel returns

By Cary O'Reilly October 21, 2025
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Credit: J. Craig Thorpe

A Russian proposal to build a “Putin-Trump tunnel” under the Bering Strait is just the latest plan for a rail link between Russia and Alaska. From Gilded Age visionaries to Cold War schemers to today’s Kremlin envoys, the idea of physically linking Asia and North America across the Arctic passage keeps resurfacing — usually with eye-popping price tags and even bigger geopolitical caveats.

1904: A grand rail scheme
At the dawn of the 20th century, a syndicate of U.S. railroad magnates floated a Siberia-Alaska railway plan that imagined a tunnel under the Bering Strait and a trans-Siberian connection onward to Irkutsk. The concept built on 1890s “Cosmopolitan Railway” thinking and early bridge proposals by engineer Joseph Strauss of Golden Gate fame. None advanced beyond paper, but they planted a durable notion: rail could shrink the world by piercing the Arctic.

Cold War flirtations and the ‘peace bridge’ idea
The notion of a symbolic U.S.-USSR link percolated during the 1960s. Recent reporting by Reuters cited a Soviet-era map labeled a “Kennedy-Khrushchev World Peace Bridge,” with an annotation urging that a crossing “could and should be built… at once.” While the provenance and intent are still being debated, the document underscores how the Bering link has long doubled as a metaphor for détente rather than a concrete project.

2007: Russia revives the megaproject, China lurks
The modern high-water mark came in 2007, when Russian officials touted the TKM-World Link: a 6,000-km (3,700-mile) corridor with a 100-km tunnel under the strait and an overall price tag of almost $65 billion. In 2008, then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin approved building a railway line deeper into the Far East as part of a long-range development plan, and in 2011, senior officials again expressed support at a Yakutsk conference. The strait segment alone was projected to cost in the $10 billion–$12 billion range, before counting thousands of kilometers of feeder rail, ports, and power. Later, China said it is was considering a route that would start in that country’s northeast, thread through eastern Siberia and cross the Bering Strait via a 125-mile long underwater tunnel into Alaska. Neither plan moved forward.

    Alaskan champions and American ambivalence
    No U.S. administration has adopted the idea as policy, but Alaskan boosters led by Wally Hickel – a two-time governor and former U.S. Interior secretary – spent decades promoting an “Intercontinental Peace Bridge” or tunnel. Hickel’s sketches captured imaginations, though federal buy-in never arrived.

    2025: Dmitriev’s $8 billion “Putin–Trump Tunnel”
    Kirill Dmitriev, Putin’s investment envoy and head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, this week proposed a 112-km undersea rail and cargo tunnel to be completed in less than eight years for $8 billion, funded by Moscow and unnamed international partners. He suggested Elon Musk’s Boring Company could slash costs. The pitch, cast as a symbol of unity and Arctic opportunity, drew a cautious “Interesting” comment from U.S. President Donald Trump and pushback from Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky.

    Why critics have said previous plans wouldn’t work

    Skeptics tend to agree on three major impediments:

    • Scale beyond the strait. The tunnel is the cheap part on paper; the expensive parts are thousands of kilometers of new rail, power, and roads through Chukotka and western Alaska—some of the most remote, seismically active, permafrost-ridden terrain on Earth.

    • Thin trade flows. U.S.–Russia commerce is small and, under sanctions, shrinking. Without massive, reliable freight volumes, a trans-Bering rail cannot service its debt or operating costs.

    • Politics and sanctions. Even before war-related sanctions, cost and governance hurdles stalled the 2007–2011 wave. In today’s climate, financing, insurance, export controls, and permitting present a wall taller than the ice ridges the tunnel would avoid.

    For 120 years, the Bering crossing has been less an engineering problem than a systems issue: markets, governance, and logistics don’t line up. Dmitriev’s cut-rate price tag may spark headlines, but until the economics beyond the tunnel add up and geopolitics thaw, this dream may remain where it’s spent most of its life: on the drawing board.