Time to restore U.S. shipbuilding?
The Taxes-are-Theft crowd are the Makers-and-Takers crowd are Entitlement-Reform crowd are the Government-Never-Created-a-Job crowd. Somehow, 25 percent of U.S. food grown on an inland desert just gets watered and manifests in the local supermarket (along with foreign produce; we’ll get to that). Somehow, the national system of interstate highways over which they travel just appeared overnight. Somehow, water appears out of their taps and what they shit disappears just as magically.
Entitlement? There’s a whole lot goin’ ’round. We used to call it taking things for granted. Like bank deposits being safe.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren Monday night reminded Rachel Maddow’s viewers how banking should work. It should be boring. Something that, like those other things, we hardly notice. That was the point of Michael Lewis’ “The Fifth Risk.” When government works as it should, it’s almost unnoticeable. We take it for granted. We don’t know a fraction of what it does.
On that, retired Navy captain Jerry Hendrix reminds The Atlantic readers how much of global trade depends on freedom of the seas. That didn’t just happen either. In our lifetime, Hendrix writes, freedom of the seas “has seemed like a default condition, it is easy to think of it—if we think of it at all—as akin to Earth’s rotation or the force of gravity: as just the way things are, rather than as a man-made construct that needs to be maintained and enforced.”
Temporary shipping disruptions such as the Suez Canal blockage or a global pandemic disrupting global supply chains remind us, but our awareness fades quickly. Shipping should be boring too. But what if?
Imagine, though, a more permanent breakdown. A humiliated Russia could declare a large portion of the Arctic Ocean to be its own territorial waters, twisting the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea to support its claim. Russia would then allow its allies access to this route while denying it to those who dared to oppose its wishes. Neither the U.S. Navy, which has not built an Arctic-rated surface warship since the 1950s, nor any other NATO nation is currently equipped to resist such a gambit.
Or maybe the first to move would be Xi Jinping, shoring up his domestic standing by attempting to seize Taiwan and using China’s anti-ship ballistic missiles and other weapons to keep Western navies at bay. An emboldened China might then seek to cement its claim over large portions of the East China Sea and the entirety of the South China Sea as territorial waters. It could impose large tariffs and transfer fees on the bulk carriers that transit the region. Local officials might demand bribes to speed their passage.
Once one nation decided to act in this manner, others would follow, claiming enlarged territorial waters of their own, and extracting what they could from the commerce that flows through them. The edges and interstices of this patchwork of competing claims would provide openings for piracy and lawlessness.
The great container ships and tankers of today would disappear, replaced by smaller, faster cargo vessels capable of moving rare and valuable goods past pirates and corrupt officials. The cruise-ship business, which drives many tourist economies, would falter in the face of potential hijackings. A single such incident might create a cascade of failure throughout the entire industry. Once-busy sea lanes would lose their traffic. For lack of activity and maintenance, passages such as the Panama and Suez Canals might silt up. Natural choke points such as the straits of Gibraltar, Hormuz, Malacca, and Sunda could return to their historic roles as havens for predators. The free seas that now surround us, as essential as the air we breathe, would be no more.
Walmart would be dead in the water (pun intended) if international shipping were disrupted by such moves. (The blueberries for my morning cereal come from Chile, for one.) Hendrix argues that freedom of the seas “has depended on sea power wielded by nations—led by the United States—that believe in such freedom.” But is he being alarmist?
I’ve written multiple times that the Malacca Strait that gives access from the Indian Ocean to the South China Sea is a strategic chokepoint for global shipping. The South China Sea over which China is attempting greater control is “the most important body of water for the world economy.” A third of global trade transits its waters. Shipping disruption there would be … bad.
The United States and England emerged from World War II as the predominat sea powers and helped establish the current regime of global trade. That war, the retired Navy captain argues, “was won not by bullets or torpedoes but by the American maritime industrial base.”
Our commitment to maintaining free navigation since then has created the world we know (and hardly notice) just as assuredly as the rest of the boring infrastructure we take for granted. But the U.S. has allowed its navy and, concomitantly, its shipbuilding capacity, to shrink for decades.
“Meanwhile, both China and Russia, in different ways, began to develop systems that would challenge the U.S.-led regime of global free trade on the high seas,” Hendrix warns:
Russia began to invest in highly sophisticated nuclear-powered submarines with the intention of being able to disrupt the oceanic link between NATO nations in Europe and North America. China, which for a time enjoyed double-digit GDP growth, expanded both its commercial and naval shipbuilding capacities. It tripled the size of the People’s Liberation Army-Navy and invested in long-range sensors and missiles that could allow it to interdict commercial and military ships more than 1,000 miles from its shores. Both Russia and China also sought to extend territorial claims into international waters, the aim being to control the free passage of shipping near their shores and in their perceived spheres of influence. In short: Autocratic powers are trying to close the global commons.
As if you needed something else to worry about. Hendrix is already there.
For 40 years, we have watched domestic industries and blue-collar jobs leave the country. Now we find ourselves locked in a new great-power competition, primarily with a rising China but also with a diminishing and unstable Russia. We will need heavy industry in order to prevail. The United States cannot simply rely on the manufacturing base of other countries, even friendly ones, for its national-security needs.
What Hendrix argues for is a new industrial policy of the sort President Joe Biden advocates. With the U.S. Navy at its heart, of course. But quite frankly I never gave freedom of the seas much thought until China began militarizing artificial islands in the Spratleys.