Money and votes matter. Alaska doesn’t have that much of either. Money will buy you resources. Geopolitical strategic locations aren’t in the middle of nowhere. They are where economic and population centers are. Russia and China don’t need to transit the Bering to get to the US.
If you think money will buy you resources you’re going to be screwed. Resource nationalism has become an enourmous problem since the escalation of commodity prices in the early part of this decade. We are now competing with China and Russia for energy, base, strategic and precious metals and losing badly. Ask Royal Dutch Shell how their billions were stolen from them by Putin at Sakhalin. Most of the world’s remaining large oil and gas and metals deposits are located in areas western companies simply do not want to go and are no longer welcome. Or, they may be welcomed in but once they’ve sunk billions into engineering and development the projects are nationalized.
Deposits in geopolitcally stable locales are extremely tough to come by. Alaska is in that respect possibly the best location on the planet for large deposits in a politcally stable environment.