Anchorage will one day be the port of exchange between Asia, North America, and Europe.
It will become for ship based cargo what it already is for air based cargo. And due to that, it will be the most important American military base in the world.
I don’t think you all are considering how much an ice free Arctic Ocean will change international trade routes.
Heh, I don’t think you considered the first response to the author. To wit:
Anchorage is not the busiest cargo airport in the world, it’s the 4th busiest behind Hong Kong, Memphis, and Shanghai (though the airport’s manager quips “We are the busiest airport in the world that nothing comes from or goes to,” which very well may be true). The reason it’s so busy in the first place was because it was approximately near the great circle route that most airplanes took between east Asia and the US, and was midway through. Planes didn’t have as much range back then (and ETOPS hadn’t been introduced), so they had to stop in Anchorage to refuel. Cargo planes sacrifice range for cargo tonnage, so they still to this day stop in Anchorage to refuel when flying between North America and east Asia.
However, they do NOT stop in Anchorage when flying between east Asia and Europe. That’s the complete wrong direction. For example, flying from Shanghai to London is ~9300km directly. Stopping in Anchorage first adds another 5000km to the route (7000km from Shanghai to Anchorage, 7200km from Anchorage to London). As far as I can tell, most China-Europe air freight flies direct.
If the argument is “Anchorage is near the Bering Strait so it will see a lot of cargo pass through it,” that seems to me silly. Cargo vessels can stay at sea for weeks at a time, even the largest ones, so they wouldn’t need to come into port in Anchorage to resupply like cargo planes do. They would just carry on to China or Korea or wherever. That being said, the proximity to all that shipping makes it an obvious location for a major US naval presence.