Why Ships Are the New Chips
24th March 2025
Financial Times, a Voice of the Crust.
The world looks different from the North Pole. Most maps chart the planet from east to west. But look at the world from the top down, and you suddenly see America’s relative position anew. Russia dominates the region. Greenland suddenly seems important, as does Canada. China, a “near-Arctic” nation, is a bit too close for comfort. The US, by comparison, is small. Alaska, its biggest state by territory, is a fraction of the view.
That world view is at the centre of the Trump administration’s new goal to “make shipbuilding great again”, courtesy of an upcoming executive order (which may drop as early as this week). This lays out the most ambitious industrial strategy in the shipbuilding sector since the Americans turned out 2,710 “liberty ships” in the space of four years during the second world war.
It will also be a topic at Monday’s Office of the US Trade Representative hearings on proposed remedies to combat China’s ringfencing of the global maritime, logistics and shipbuilding sectors.
The Financial Times is the UK equivalent of the Wall Street Journal–if the WSJ were run by the staff of Mother Jones.