Milan is about 16,000 kilometres, as the albatross flies, from McMurdo Station, the main US outpost in Antarctica. But from late June to early July, representatives of 58 nations gathered in the Italian fashion capital for discussions about the remote continent’s present and future.
Difficult questions hung over the meeting. Will Antarctica become another object of territorial competition among great powers? And so on. Antarctica is governed by the Antarctic Treaty, in force since 1961, stipulating that it is a refuge for peace and science, with military activity prohibited and the environment protected. The document promotes international collaboration and lays aside the territorial claims of seven countries, which have all agreed not to act on their claimed ownership.
Ever since the treaty was signed, conflict has stayed farther north. “It was known as Antarctic exceptionalism,” said Jeffrey McGee, a law professor and Antarctic Treaty expert at the University of Tasmania in Australia.
Recently, though, that precedent has started to face strain. The world, McGee said, is turbulent, and its big players — the US, Russia, China — are also the big players near the South Pole. “We’d be a little bit naive to think that this isn’t going to affect the Antarctic Treaty system and the Antarctic region,” he added, referring to the dynamics that shape the rest of the world coming to Antarctica.
China and Russia are working on expansions to their own scientific facilities in Antarctica, and some experts suspect the countries’ infrastructure could have nonpeaceful uses. And a committee of the British House of Commons has questioned the purpose of Russian seismic surveys, suggesting they represented potential oil prospecting rather than scientific exploration.
(China and Russia’s treaty representatives did not reply to emailed requests for comment). With President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, the US approach to Antarctica may also shift.
The National Science Foundation — the primary agency that funds and oversees activities in both Antarctica and the Arctic — is proposing iceberg-size research cuts to polar science in 2026. Around 70 per cent of the money currently in that pot for both poles could vanish. Given that science and civilian presence are the primary ways the US exerts power in Antarctica, pulling back on research leaves some treaty partners feeling nervous about the future.
In the 1950s, the US brought together the original signatories of the Antarctic Treaty, and it has since been a leader in the region. It has the biggest research station and is the only country with a base at the geographic South Pole. “The US has the largest presence in Antarctica,” said Bill Muntean, who was the head of the US delegation to the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting in 2022 and 2023, and is now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington D.C., US.
But even before this most recent budget proposal, the US was flagging in its investments. “The US has been doing a steady retreat from activities in Antarctica,” Muntean said. “It’s not closing any stations but it’s not repairing them or building them in an expeditious manner, and it has been reducing some of its logistics capacity.” The National Science Foundation’s proposed 2026 budget includes further cuts to its Office of Polar Programs, which administers activities in the Antarctic.
Those budget cuts, according to Muntean, demonstrate “that this administration considers science in the polar regions at the same level of interest as it does science in any other sort of area.” Proposed cuts to infrastructure spending are less sharp than for research, but would delay planned upgrades and expansions to facilities and would decommission the last dedicated US research ship for the continent.
“That just slows down the entire scientific process,” said Joanne Padrón Carney, the chief government relations officer for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, referring to research cuts.
Asked about the president’s budget proposal, Cassandra Eichner, a spokesperson at the National Science Foundation, said in a statement that the agency remained committed to ensuring that the programme “maintains an active and influential US presence on the Antarctic continent that enables cutting-edge scientific research”.
The proposed budget doesn’t provide confidence in that scientific commitment, Muntean said. Geopolitically, he adds, it also sends a worrying signal — because decreased presence means decreased influence, leaving a vacuum for other nations to fill.
“Over time, if China is rising and the US is either standing still or decreasing its capabilities, then that will be read as China taking our place,” said Evan Bloom, an adviser for the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition and a former state department official who led the US delegation to Antarctic treaty meetings from 2006 to 2020.
At the treaty consultative meeting in Milan, representatives discussed issues including the protection of emperor penguins, the effects of plastic pollution, tourism policies to manage the more than 1,00,000 people who go to Antarctica annually for rugged vacations, and the status Canada and Belarus should be granted in the treaty — discussions that have dragged across several gatherings.
“Those decisions have been held up by the wider geopolitics influencing the meeting,” McGee said.
Still, the focus remains on issues that fall within the existing treaty, not hypothetical military risks that lie beyond it. Where the future US will fit into Antarctica, and the treaty’s internal and external politics, is uncertain.
Those who work on the continent, and those watching from outside, can’t see what the future holds. They just know it involves less money and less science. “It’s going to take a while for the US to develop its approach and policies,” Bloom said. “But every administration does, because they have to.”
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