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    "original_url": "https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2026\/10\/07\/opinion\/military-maritime-america-power.html?emc=edit_nn_20261007&nl=the-morning&segment_id=227657",
    "parsed_content": "AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTOpinionSupported bySKIP ADVERTISEMENTGuest EssayA War America Could WinOct. 7, 2026, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit...Paul RogersListen \u00b7 7:47 min Share full articleBy Rana ForooharMs. Foroohar is a global business columnist and an associate editor at The Financial Times.See more of our coverage in your search results.Encuentra m\u00e1s de nuestra cobertura en los resultados de b\u00fasqueda. Add The New York Times on GoogleAgrega The New York Times en Google The United States might be losing another war \u2014 one that could define the country\u2019s security into the next century.Military and commercial power are intertwined. Maritime power, in particular, has always played a crucial part in establishing and maintaining commercial power. America is learning this lesson the hard way.For hundreds of years, the countries that have ruled the waves have ruled the world, as the 19th-century American naval strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan put it. In an age of drones, we can be forgiven for thinking this time has ended. Yet today, more than 80 percent of global trade is still transported by ships. America has all but lost the ability to build them. A country that manufactured 5 percent of the world\u2019s fleet by tonnage and that dominated the global maritime industry in the 1970s makes 0.2 percent of the world\u2019s fleet by tonnage today.How did we get here? During the Reagan era, U.S. policymakers decided to stop supporting commercial shipping, which quickly migrated to other countries like Japan and South Korea. Meanwhile, the defense arm of the naval industry shrank after the post-Cold War defense cuts of the 1990s. At the same time, the Chinese decided to make shipbuilding and maritime industries a strategic priority, tripling production relative to the United States over the past two decades.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe Chinese now dominate in terms of sheer production capacity and their global market share of shipbuilding, thanks to decades of state support. In 2006, the government named shipbuilding as one of the seven strategic industries over which state-owned Chinese enterprises had to maintain control. By 2015, Beijing identified shipbuilding as one of 10 priority sectors through which China would dominate global commerce.Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.All this was happening as the United States was going in the opposite direction, outsourcing the building of not only ships but many other supply chains in industrial sectors. It was part of a grand bargain in which American capital flowed to China, and U.S. consumers got cheap goods in exchange. But all the while, American jobs, as well as supply chain resiliency and in some cases national security, were sacrificed.Not only do the Chinese have more battleships, but the private-sector fleet it has built, which delivers the bulk of the world\u2019s commercial goods, vastly outnumbers America\u2019s. The United States today has fewer than 200 oceangoing vessels. The Chinese have 5,500. Does anyone doubt that the Chinese could best the United States in any kind of global maritime supply chain gambit, or, say, a military blockage around Taiwan?This is particularly so given that commercial fleets are the way that the U.S. military gets most of its supplies delivered, even in wartime. If China were to pull back ships (as it pulled back P.P.E. supplies for health workers for a time during the pandemic), it could have huge economic and security implications for the United States (or any other nation that depends on Chinese commercial vessels).Even in lieu of something that dramatic, maritime disruptions are becoming more and more commonplace. The Consultative Shipping Group, whose members represent more than a fifth of global trade by tonnage, recently said that the maritime blockages and supply chain disruptions in places like the Strait of Hormuz and the Suez and Panama Canals aren\u2019t \u201cepisodic shocks\u201d but a new normal in a world where ships and shipping routes have become globally contentious choke points. No wonder countries like China and Russia are looking to exploit new, alternative routes that they can control \u2014 like the transpolar route across the Arctic Ocean, parts of which Russia claims control over. A Chinese company recently launched a weekly shipping route across the Arctic, cutting 40 days off the usual pathway.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTThose two countries have around 60 icebreakers (which are necessary for safe passage in the High North) to America\u2019s three in the Arctic. That is one of the reasons the Trump administration is building more with the Finns, an idea that was born during Trump 1 and developed during the Biden administration (which saw a strategic opportunity to \u201cfriend shore\u201d with NATO allies, including Finland and Canada). America needed more icebreakers to navigate an area that had become far more economically and strategically important than it used to be. Global warming has opened the possibility of new commercial channels through the High North as ice melts. The Russians are once again militarizing the Northern Sea Route (as they did during the Cold War), and many nations are in a race to map the region for natural gas and minerals. All of this requires icebreakers.While the Biden administration put meat on the bones of the strategy, signing a memorandum of understanding on the sidelines of the NATO summit in 2024, it was President Trump who later inked the deal to build 11 icebreakers with the Finns during his second administration \u2014 all of which reflects the fact that shipbuilding has become a bipartisan industrial priority.Defense hawks have long warned that while America might still have a lead in areas like nuclear submarines and the highest-tech maritime equipment, its lack of more nimble, dual use vessels that could be turned out more cheaply and quickly would be a huge disadvantage in a world in which supply chain resiliency and spheres of influence are more important. In maritime industries, as in so many others, there is no single global market anymore, but rather fleets owned by groups of countries and companies that might or might not work together in a pinch.During the Biden administration, Jake Sullivan, then the national security adviser, declared that \u201cships are the new chips,\u201d an area in which the United States should, working with allies, become more self-sufficient. While Mr. Trump has boasted about building a \u201cgolden fleet\u201d of battleships, he\u2019s also put a pause on trade remedies based on Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 that would curb Chinese power in shipbuilding. During the U.S.-China summit in late September, the pause was extended until early 2027.Despite the rhetoric, Mr. Trump is no China hawk. But there are many on both sides of the aisle in Congress who are more committed to rebuilding the U.S. maritime sector. In April of 2025, Senators Todd Young, Republican of Indiana, and Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, announced a push for the SHIPs for America Act, a bill that would revitalize America\u2019s shipbuilding industries, putting more money into work force training, and a maritime security trust fund, which, like the national airport and highway trust funds, aims to create a pot of funds that don\u2019t have to be reauthorized every year, making the long-term work of bolstering the maritime industries possible.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTCongress may well punt on the talks until after the midterms, but shipbuilding will remain a big part of the political conversation \u2014 battleground states such as Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania are also big maritime industry states. And the weaponization of maritime choke points \u2014 by Iran, China, the Houthis and others \u2014 isn\u2019t going away. There is little question that America needs to bolster its fleet at a time of rising conflict and global mercantilism.As Trump\u2019s shipbuilding adviser, the former naval officer Jerry Hendrix, wrote in a 2020 book, \u201cPerhaps hearkening back to China\u2019s late-19th-century collapse under pressure from imperial European powers,\u201d Beijing has pursued a maritime strategy that \u201cmirrored the pattern laid down centuries before by the Dutch and British East India Companies,\u201d ruling the world\u2019s supply chains in part by ruling the waves.America has let go of its maritime edge at its own peril. But Congress has an opportunity to bring it back, slowly but surely, with an industrial policy that both right and left want. It\u2019s an opportunity that shouldn\u2019t be allowed to float away.Rana Foroohar is the author of \u201cSea Change: America\u2019s New Great Game in the Arctic Circle.\u201dThe Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We\u2019d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here\u2019s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENT"
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