When you picture a tense international border dispute, you imagine warships and tanks, not two NATO allies aggressively leaving bottles of schnapps and whiskey on a barren Arctic rock. Yet that is exactly how Canada and Denmark fought a decades-long standoff over Hans Island.

This episode unpacks the absurd but completely true Whiskey War over a 1.3-square-kilometer rock in the Nares Strait. It's a master class in sovereignty, the ridiculousness of invisible lines on a map, and ultimately a landmark example of peaceful conflict resolution that arrived at exactly the right moment in history.

• The strait is only 35 kilometers wide, so the roughly 22-kilometer territorial claims of both nations overlap, leaving the kidney-shaped limestone rock legally claimed by both
• A 1973 treaty deliberately left a gap in the boundary, not  ...