TL:DR: #USnavy is only able to build a tiny fraction of the warship tonnage the Chinese regime is pushing out annually. American #shipbuilding capacity and its merchant navy are essentially nonexistent due to decades of domestic profiteering, dysfunctional pork barrel politics and shifting business to... China!

The Biden admin managed to take baby steps to reorient US policy, but far too little and far too late. Anyone here thinks the #trump gang is capable of fixing anything...? This is a #longread but genuinely worth reading for those interested.

IMO the Democrat admins should have rallied to build a consentual global democratic alliance to reverse this course ages ago when it wouldn't have been that hard. Now the CCP and russian regimes are counting it to be impossible.

The authors strike me as far too sensible and educated to be actual "always-trumper political MAGA", but as befits a policy suggestion paper it has its flares of overt pandering to the trump 2.0 regime.

As the already widely known but ignored history bits of CCP's own policy maritime domination objectives and actions show, USA and the world's democracies should have acted to pre-empt the Chinese dictatorship's "Dream" of dominating world's industry and trade *decades ago*.

If we hadn't massively empowered the despots through business we could already have been fixing urgent world problems for a generation. Instead we're now having to *worsen* pollution and climate change while spending on military in order to *not lose* to the emboldened dictatorships of #china, #russia and their global autocrat allies... ️

「Just after the PRC’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO), as China was cementing its role as the world’s factory, Chinese strategists homed in on the country’s shipbuilding advantages and the ancillary economic and military benefits of MIB technology. This analy­sis followed the work of Chinese military strategists, who envisioned a seafaring future for the PRC as early as 1987. In that year, PLA Colonel Xu Guangyu wrote about how, as China’s economy and appetites grew, the country would need to become a maritime power to access markets and resources by sea.11 Roughly concurrently, PLA General Liu Huaqing was charting a course for the PLAN to dominate the first island chain by 2000, including waters out to the Japanese archipelago, around Taiwan, and through the South China Sea. His plan sought mastery over the second island chain, which extends out to Guam, by 2020. Consistent with this rough schedule, in 2004, Hu Jintao, then CCP general secretary, assigned the PLA “new historical missions” involving operations in seas beyond the PLAN’s traditional coastal confinement.12

The economic and military cases for maritime dominance came together in the CCP’s fear of blockades. Where Washington has long divorced peacetime economic matters from wartime military activity, Beijing sees these spheres as integrally connected. The greatest threat a CCP strategic planner faced circa 2005 was losing access to the high-technology inputs on which China’s industries depended,13 and given the prevalence of encirclements, sieges, and embargoes in the Party’s history, this threat loomed large.

In line with Zhu’s 2002 goal and Hu’s 2004 missions, the CCP designated shipbuilding a strategic industry in its Eleventh National Five‑Year Economic Plan for the years 2006 through 2010 and promulgated a subsidiary Medium- and Long-Term Plan for the Development of the Shipbuilding Industry (2006–15), along with some $11 billion per year in subsidies. Most of these were delivered in the form of “entry subsidies,” including free waterfront land, fast-tracked free permitting, and productivity-oriented capital shipyard infrastructure. The economist Myrta Kalouptsidi estimates that the CCP spent $90 billion between 2006 and 2013 to build out China’s shipbuilding capacity, turning it into the source of more than half of the world’s gross tonnage built, and in the process decimating Japan and South Korea’s respective order books.

Furthermore, 2013 was the first full year of General Secretary Xi Jinping’s tenure, which has been marked by a shift toward a more aggressive foreign policy, both in the region and beyond it. This is not a coincidence. Xi assumed office as the beneficiary of policies that put the CCP in the driver’s seat vis-à-vis its neighbors and its neighbors’ ally, the United States. If China had not succeeded in becoming the world’s largest shipbuilder, and was not well on its way to boasting more ships than the U.S. Navy, it is hard to imagine that Xi would have felt comfortable intensifying pressure on Japan’s claim to the Senkaku Islands, building and fortifying artificial islands in disputed areas of the South China Sea, or taking over Hong Kong.14 In hindsight, the decade leading up to Xi’s accession was critical to the CCP’s transformation from insecurity to confidence. 」

https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2025/05/a-shining-city-on-the-sea-rebuilding-americas-maritime-industry/