Russia and China Are Beating America in the Arctic | Rana Foroohar

[00:00:00] When you look at the world from the North Pole downward, you're suddenly like, whoa, Russia's like 60% of the waterline. Like, what is, what's up? The possibility of any kind of conflict with that amount of presence in the area could rise. Who's discovering these natural resources? Who's claiming them? Who is in this area? America's biggest strategic adversary is really exerting disproportionate power in the U.S. backyard. Well, you suddenly realize why something like Greenland matters.

[00:00:28] Despite having the world's most powerful blue water navy, apparently America has let itself become a third-rate maritime power, and it couldn't have happened at a worse possible time, as the Arctic Circle, which is in America's own backyard, has become the latest front in the great power competition with Russia and China. To explain how we got here and what the current and subsequent administrations might be able to do about it, we are joined by Rana Foroohar from the Financial Times and author of the new book Sea Change. Welcome to this episode of the At the Water's Edge podcast. Let's get into it. Well, good morning and welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?

[00:00:58] I'm really good. How are you? Doing wonderful. It's a pleasure to have you on. So before I forget, because I always forget, you just wrote a book. Let me flash it up here right now for all the good people. Get the plug out of the way. Oh, yeah, I see it in the corner too. Very nice. All right.

[00:01:15] So, sea change. Apparently, something's going on up in the Arctic. America's new great game in the Arctic Circle. So, I guess climate change is actually a thing. It's real. Arctic ice is melting. And because of that, the geography of trade routes is changing. And this all ties into industrial policy and great power competition in some strange way. Am I getting that at a basic level? You got it. You've got it. You've got the macro. Yeah, I like it. All right. So, what's going on in the Arctic? Why'd you write this book?

[00:01:45] Well, you know, my starting point was actually an economic one. I'm a columnist for the Financial Times. I grew up in the rural Midwest. My dad ran factories in Indiana. I kind of lived and breathed the supply chain. And when the Biden administration came in, I knew a lot of people in that administration. I knew that they were going to look at creating more industrial resiliency at home.

[00:02:08] And that they were going to focus on chips, semiconductors, but also ships. And the reason for that has a lot to do with China. Because over the last 20 years or so, China has ring-fenced the global maritime industry. It's one of many industries that the Chinese have captured as the U.S. stopped making things, basically, and sent a lot of jobs and production to Asia.

[00:02:29] And that has become more and more of a thing because we're living in a world of choke points. We're living in a world where trade choke points matter and 80 to 90 percent of trade still happens on ships.

[00:02:41] So that was my starting point. But then as I dug more deeply into the ship's story and, you know, why did America give up maritime power? Because if you look historically, when a country gives up maritime power, not a good thing. Generally, that's when your empire tends to go down the tubes.

[00:03:00] I began to focus on the Arctic because that was one of the places where the rubber was really meeting the road in an interesting way. America has, at the time I wrote this book, only one Coast Guard icebreaker in the Arctic, in the entire Arctic.

[00:03:17] Just as a comparison, at that time, the Chinese and Russians had over 40. Today, America has three icebreakers, although the Healy, the one that I was on, is in the shop right now. I guess, you know, it's kind of like a Jaguar. There's always one in the shop. And the Chinese and Russians together have about 60. So, you know, when I heard these stats, I'm like, this is insane. This is America's backyard.

[00:03:43] And at a time when we are clearly in a new world where there's spheres of power, you know, China is increasingly dominating Asia and the old Silk Route trade paradigm. Europe is starting to re-industrialize and America is looking more into its own backyard westward and northward. I started to explore the Arctic and, in particular, the effort to make icebreakers so that the U.S. could really exert more presence and power in this crucial region.

[00:04:12] Yeah, I think a lot of folks are finally waking up to the importance of choke points with everything going on in the Strait of Hormuz and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait. Interesting to hear that the Arctic might be becoming a new choke point. But something you just said there, you know, empire is giving up maritime power. If you look at the U.S. Navy right now, particularly our Blue Water Navy, if you stack up America's Blue Water Navy against every other Blue Water Navy on the planet, we still wipe the board with them 10 times over and twice on Sunday. So when you talk about America giving up maritime power, what is it that you mean by that?

[00:04:42] Okay, so it's a great point. Yes, from a military, from a pure Navy standpoint, the U.S. is still absolutely dominant. Although I would caveat and point out some of the messages, you know, the quite right messages we've heard from this administration about how, hey, the Navy can't police the entire world at the same time anymore. You know, if you were to get, say, a blockade in the South China seats of Taiwan at the same time that you've got problems in the Strait of Hormuz,

[00:05:09] at the same time that you've got, you know, Russian and Chinese submarine drills off the coast of Alaska, that starts to be a problem even for the U.S. Navy. But what I was looking at is the way in which after the fall of the Berlin Wall, after the end of the Cold War, there was a splitting apart of the military industrial base from the commercial industrial base in this country.

[00:05:34] And the rubber really met the road in something I'm sure you're familiar with, which is the Last Supper, you know, as they call it, which I write about in the book. It was the big five defense contractors. Love that system. It's been great. Yeah, exactly. It's been great for everybody. It's working awesome for all of us. Yeah, billion dollar ships that are like 10 years overdue. Okay.

[00:05:57] But when you, and I'm the daughter of an engineer, so you look at how do you create nimble, effective, cost effective economies of scale? You don't split out your military from your commercial, which is what America did. And so what happened was after the peace dividend, which is, you know, the idea that, okay, we don't have to have an industrial base anymore in the same way. You know, it's the world is flat.

[00:06:25] Have they mailed the check for the peace dividend yet? You know, I haven't gotten it. I haven't seen it. Gas is $4.40 a gallon, but apparently the peace dividend, that misses $4 million. But things are good. That needs to be a meme. Like, where is our peace dividend check? You know what? We just came up with a great merch idea. We'll launch tomorrow. Yeah. I want the first t-shirt. Bumper sticker. All right. You know.

[00:06:55] Where's my peace dividend? You look, yeah, where's my peace dividend? You look at what happened, not just to the maritime industry, but frankly, so many industries in America. When you divide up state power and commercial power, you know, you break the economies of scale. So basically what happened was all the commercial shipping went to Asia.

[00:07:16] We got stuck with a bloated, slow-moving, very problematic contracting process for the defense industry, which, you know, you've just pointed out. China, meanwhile, went the exact opposite direction. And, you know, I mean, I've been going to China for over 25 years, and you land in China, and frankly, it's just, it's an amazing country. It's incredible. But you're like, they're never going to come into the Washington consensus.

[00:07:46] Like, why anybody would ever think that the Chinese were going to kind of seamlessly follow totally free market American or European-style system is crazy. So they went all in on economies of scale. They do a lot of dual-use ship technology, a lot of dual-use technology in general, where you build a fleet that can go from commercial to military and change and be quite nimble.

[00:08:11] I would also mention one other thing, and this kind of blew my mind when I found it out, that in a time of war, as I'm sure you know, about 80% to 90% of supplies are still delivered by a commercial fleet. So if you don't have a commercial fleet, or if, you know, as it is right now, China has 5,500 ocean-going vessels, America has, if I'm being generous, you know, under 200, it's about under 80, depending on what's out to water. That's a problem.

[00:09:08] It's about crucial supplies because your adversary owns all the ships. I mean, it's just nuts. Yeah. Yeah. So I live in upstate New York, and we're down the street from where Micron's putting in their factory as part of the ships. Right, right, right. So this is, and of course, we're at the edge of the rust belt up here. So this is very impressive for the local community. Yeah.

[00:09:25] So pivoting back to the Arctic, like, so what's going on in the Arctic that now makes this a new, it almost sounds like this is a new area of great power competition, where before it was just this giant white blob on a map that you saw in fourth grade. Good point. Good point. Well, you know, it's funny thinking about maps. When I was on the Healy, which is the, you know, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter that I went on for two weeks, which was a great privilege, amazing experience. All the maps look at the world from the top down.

[00:09:53] And just to start with that, when you look at the world from the North Pole downward, you're suddenly like, whoa, Russia's like 60% of the waterline. Like, what is, what's up? And, you know, you suddenly see the whole, you know, the whole Sarah Palin, I can see, you know, Russia from my backyard. Yes, Alaska and Russia are very close. I mean, Alaska used to be part of Russia. Canada's big. Greenland suddenly matters. So a lot of things that have been popping in the news, you're like, uh-huh, okay, yes, this is a different view of the world.

[00:10:21] Now, add to that the fact that there are three ways across the pole right now. The Northern Sea Route, which is increasingly being militarized by the Russians, as it was during the Cold War, and used as an alternative shipping route for gas and fossil fuels. Russia's been shipping exponentially more year on year over the last three years or so through the Northern Sea Route, and it's increasingly claiming that as its own sovereign territory.

[00:10:50] In September, the Chinese launched a weekly shipping route through that area, and they need a Russian escort for it. That's being used as a way around the Strait of Hormuz. Now, this is not the easiest route. It's not the least expensive route, but it is an alternative, and it's going to become a more and more useful alternative, because as climate change creates a greater timeline, basically, during the year where you can ship through this region,

[00:11:20] it becomes more and more important as a way around choke points. Now, the U.S. and Canada typically might use the Northwest Passage, but that route is less well-mapped, less traversed. It's interesting because, you know, you think that there's no part of the world that hasn't been mapped yet, but really only about 15% of the Arctic is well-mapped with sonar, which is what you need to really make sure that you're creating safe passages.

[00:11:48] It's also what you need to find, let's say, you know, a methane-plumed volcano that might be a natural gas deposit, which is one of the things that I saw when I was on the Healy. So this area is becoming an important place for commerce and transport. It is the most important area in terms of unclaimed natural resources like gas, like rare earth minerals.

[00:12:15] Fish, you know, it's one of the few parts of the world that has not been overfished. Largest unclaimed protein resource there. In a world where overfishing is becoming a problem, that's a big deal. And you've got the Chinese with the Russians as a kind of, I think, a vassal state, thinking long-term about this region in a way that America just simply has not.

[00:12:41] So about two decades ago, the Chinese said we're going to make maritime and shipbuilding a strategic sector because we understand that that is the building blocks of globalization, physical globalization, supply chains, export economies. So they started ring-fencing all that. And then in 2016, 2017, they started talking about a polar silk road, building on the one belt, one path road that they had already articulated

[00:13:07] as a way of creating influence through the old silk route trading system. They're now extending that up into the Arctic and saying, hey, we're a near-Arctic nation. We've got skin in the game in this region. Now, it's not so near. But to think that America's biggest strategic adversary is really exerting disproportionate power in the U.S. backyard, well, you suddenly realize why something like Greenland matters.

[00:13:36] You know, and I would say I've been somewhat critical of the Trump administration about the way that they've handled the Greenland topic, but it doesn't mean it's not a real topic. You know, Trump often comes to things, I think, the right things and maybe in the wrong way. Greenland matters. It's a big area for munitions. It's a big area for surveillance. It's an important outpost for NATO power.

[00:13:59] And the worry was that if the Greenlanders declare independence from Denmark in the 2030s, which they may, well, do you suddenly have a country that's kind of open for business and the Chinese are saying, hey, we'll build your infrastructure if you give us all your rare earth mineral deposits. You know, that's a playbook we've seen the Chinese use in West Africa, in Latin America. So I say all of this to kind of sharpen the point that there is this new great power competition going on in our own backyard.

[00:14:28] And I think Americans are not so aware of it. So, I mean, if the Arctic opens up, just thinking this through, talk about methane, plume, volcanoes, natural gas, all that stuff. I mean, America is a net energy exporter. We don't need the gas. You know, hey, if there's another shipping route that gets oil to market that goes past its greater for moves, that could stabilize global oil markets. It almost seems like this could be a positive thing. Do we necessarily need to be worried about Russia and China hanging out in the Arctic?

[00:14:56] Is this really something that we need to care about or just let them have their fun? Well, the idea of letting Russia and China have their fun makes me nervous, personally. Whatever do you mean? What for, possibly? You know, look, one of the things when I was on the Healy, a lot of the officers talked about how you have to meet presence with presence.

[00:15:25] And one of the big challenges that they had on the ship was prioritizing mission. You know, so this was one ship in the Arctic that had to do everything from mapping, where, you know, we were mapping for natural resources. We were mapping to create more certainty about Northwest Passage for ships and tankers. We were policing offshore fishing and drilling.

[00:15:52] We were doing environmental science, which can also be used as fossil fuel exploration research. So there was a lot. And of course, there's, you know, there's a military angle here. There were some Navy folks on board. There were intelligence operations happening. That's a lot for one ship to be doing. You need to meet presence with presence. And if the U.S. only has, at this point, three vessels in the area and the Chinese and Russians have 60,

[00:16:21] well, the possibility of any kind of, for starters, conflict with that amount of presence in the area could rise. It also means, well, you know, who's discovering these natural resources? Who's claiming them? Who's, you know, who is in this area? I mean, I just think that that's something that you have to worry about. You've seen already, for example, as there's been more countries, for example, in the South China Seas arguing over territory.

[00:16:51] You see the possibility for more accidents, more conflict, you know, either planned or not. So I think that's something people need to worry about. Yeah. So we saw the Biden administration, you know, have the CHIPS Act. They're building this huge factory up here with Bicron. Trump administration, you know, you talked about how they come to the right things the wrong ways. I think that's a fair observation in many cases. So they're worried about Greenland.

[00:17:17] You know, do you think we're going to see some push from the Trump administration to go from three icebreakers to 30 icebreakers? How do we increase presence in the Arctic? Yeah, well, this is something I actually would give the administration credit for. It's kind of a not very well-known fact. Trump, during Trump 1, was the first American president to say, you know what? Let's build some icebreakers with the Finns. The Finns, at that time, we were going to build them with the Finns and the Canadians.

[00:17:45] So you had these two countries that were looking to increase their own strategic importance within NATO. The Finns design 80% of the world's icebreakers. They build 60%. And I spent a lot of time in their shipyards. It's incredible. They're very similar to Asian shipyards. Smaller, but similar in the sense that they have an entire ecosystem. Everybody knows everybody else. You know, the machine tool guy knows the materials guy, knows the design guy.

[00:18:13] You know, and it's the sort of industrial ecosystem that makes things work quickly and well and efficiently and at cost. At, you know, right sized and right priced. So Trump said, yeah, let's do this. Then the Biden administration comes in and they kind of do what Democrats do, which is like big think. And they start to put meat on the bones of this idea. And, you know, they kind of push it forward and say, well, this is interesting.

[00:18:40] This could be a way to create a new foreign policy and trade paradigm. We know we're living in a world where the world is not flat and the history hasn't ended. And maybe we don't want to send our entire industrial base to China. You know, so let's work with friends. Let's friend shore, which was a I don't know if you remember that word. It's a word that Janet Yellen first used. Actually, with me. Let's take neoliberalism and water it down in the most meaningless way possible. Friend shore. Yeah. Sorry. Sorry. That was my that was me projecting my apologies. OK, that's all right.

[00:19:10] We'll we'll forgive you. Yeah. I mean, it's like we didn't know what it meant, but I will I will give the Biden team and the national security team credit. They were trying to find an experimental way to actually define what that means. And so on the sidelines of a NATO conference in 2024, Jake Sullivan, who was national security advised at the time and his team, cut a deal with the Fins and the Canadians to build 11 icebreakers.

[00:19:34] And that was called ice packed. And the idea was, hey, let's get the let's get the Fins to teach America how to build, in this case, icebreakers again. And if we do it well, if it works, this will be a little experiment that we could use to broaden out the shipbuilding industrial base in a bigger way. You know, maybe we'll start working with the Koreans and the Japanese and the Italians. And then if that goes well, well, what else can we do? You've talked about chips. This is happening in your backyard.

[00:20:04] We've already seen that experiment, I think, at least in Arizona. I don't know how it's going upstate New York, but it's gone pretty well. Slowly. Slowly. OK, slowly. It's New York. Well, that's very true, actually. Arizona v. New York. That's that's 100 percent true. But we can build things again. But here's the rub. So Democrats and Biden in particular, he had two core loves in terms of interest groups, American workers, but American allies.

[00:20:32] And so there was a lot of discussion about, like, who's going to get what? What do the steelworkers get? What do the Finns get? You know, and so they couldn't really bring the deal over the finish line. So Trump comes in and Trump, too. And he does what what Trump does and frankly, what the Republicans do, which is he's just like, we're just going to do this deal. And he did actually get the building process started. And so we are now going to make 11 icebreakers, not with the Canadians, but with the Finns. What happened to the Canadians? You know, we were besties.

[00:20:59] Mark Carney and Donald Trump kind of, I don't know, frenemies, like not maybe not even just just just opposites and not attracting. So you're saying that America currently doesn't have the best of relations with their closest Arctic neighbor and I guess supposedly ally, depending on who you talk to. Yeah, I'm kind of bummed about that. I got it. I think, you know, as that seems bad. It was really just unnecessary.

[00:21:28] I mean, come on. You know, the Canadians have so much to offer here and not just in ships. I mean, I would and I think we will, frankly, whenever we get the next administration, be it Democrat or Republican. I do think we're going to start to see more regional integration again. Now, I will say something that I don't love during Trump, too, is that I think we've just lost a lot of goodwill capital with allies. I was in Europe recently giving a talk about the book to a bunch of continental Europeans.

[00:21:59] And I said to them, OK, let's say that you got a friendly administration in 2028, an administration that's saying, hey, we do want to work together again. China is a mutual adversary. How likely do you think it is that we could reset the relationship? And only about 40 percent of the audience thought that it could be reset. So that kind of shows you where your Europeans feel kind of twice burned, you know, very shy right now.

[00:22:27] And I think Canadians are just sort of furious. So that's going to take a lot of repair work to fix. Yeah. Has there been any pushback that you've seen or heard about from the traditional defense industrial base about increasing U.S. shipbuilding or purchasing ships abroad? Because I got to imagine the folks at Huntington Ingalls Industries probably feel some way about shipping contracts going overseas. They do. And this is a this is a big rub.

[00:22:54] And one of the problems is that there's been mixed messages. So there's been both under Biden and certainly under Trump, a lot of pressure on foreign investment into the U.S., physically into the U.S. So a great example of that would be Hanwha coming into Philly and really building out that old that old shipyard. And, you know, they're doing some good upgrades.

[00:23:17] But then there's also a push to, say, use shipbuilding as a chip in a larger trade negotiation with, say, the South Koreans or the Japanese. And in some of those negotiations, there's discussion of, OK, well, let's do more trade and you guys build the ships there because you have speed, you have larger facilities. I mean, it is true that you could build multiple numbers of ships in South Korea faster and more cheaply than you could at Hanwha.

[00:23:47] And I hear different things from different stakeholders in the U.S. about how they feel about it. Certainly the defense industrial base is skeptical. Within the military itself and within, you know, when I talk to military people, security folks, they kind of just want, they want resiliency. So they do want some geographical diversity, but they also want ships in the water fast. And that sometimes argues for doing things with allies in other places.

[00:24:14] And in fact, that's how the ice pack deal is going to break down, that the Finns are going to build the first four ships. But they will then do some tech transfer into like Gulf shipbuilding facilities, you know, other other places so that there will be learning from Finland that comes into American shipyards. That's that's the plan. We'll see how it goes. Gotcha. So I'm with the Gulf of Mexico, not Gulf of Persian Gulf.

[00:24:43] Yeah, exactly. Gulf of Mexico or Gulf of America. That's true. That's true. As you as you like. I live down the road from Lake America. So no one here calls it that. Really? Maps are fun. Maps are fun. Maps are political.

[00:25:00] So so there seems to have been this prevailing bipartisan win back in, you know, 1980s, 1990s about embracing neoliberalism, the power of markets, consulting the defense and justice for base, having this big peace dividend, which I'm sure will arrive any day now, along with the Trump refund checks. Yeah.

[00:25:19] Do you think that there is a shift in the American political establishment or amongst key stakeholders that this old model of approaching politics of approaching industrial policy needs to change inevitably? Or are there still holdouts here? Because it seems from the outside looking in that the status quo can't hold. It would be catastrophic to try to keep this going. Is there enough momentum to actually meaningfully change how we're addressing industrial policy in this new era of great power competition?

[00:25:49] Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, as somebody that has lived this, like I literally lived it because my I'll give you a good example. My dad, when I was in let's see, this would have been about 1990. I was in college going into my junior year.

[00:26:05] My dad, who had run factories for United Technologies, he was working for a big Japanese company that was rolling out U.S. production at that time, lost his job because there was so much pressure on the industrial base and everything was going to Asia. And he then started a small manufacturing company, which he grew into a mid-sized business. But seeing that pressure, I've lived this story and I've seen multiple iterations of, yeah, we should build things again.

[00:26:34] And then it kind of dies. Yeah, we should build things again. And then it kind of dies. This time around, I am cautiously optimistic that things are different for a couple of reasons. I think COVID and the war in Ukraine and the inflation and the supply shocks that resulted from that really gave Americans, individual Americans, a felt experience of, wow, the physical world matters. Like we think we're living in a totally digital world.

[00:27:03] But if you if there's nothing on your shelves in the grocery store that like that matter, ships matter. We still live in a physical world making things matters. So I think that message got through to the voting base. And then I also think that both parties in different ways have responded to this. You know, the Democrats tend to think of it more from a jobs orientation. We've got to, you know, win back the rust belt.

[00:27:33] We've got to make the Democratic Party the party of working people again. Again, that involves like making sure there's a strong demand signal for steel workers or electrical engineer or electrical technicians, etc. Republicans tend to come at it from a little bit more of a security and economic nationalism, maybe angle where it's about. We have to have resiliency in the face of, you know, great power conflict with China. But both parties, I think are.

[00:28:03] I feel heading in a more resiliency oriented direction. I think it would be very hard for me to imagine somebody running on a let's go back to 1993 or 1994 platform in 2028 and winning. I mean, I just don't see that happening. Yeah, it seems like as someone who, you know, was in grade school in the 90s, you know, we're talking to people in my generation that there's a sense of like, well, globalization was supposed to make shit cheap. Yeah.

[00:28:33] But everything's so expensive right now anyway. Why not just do it here at home if we're not going to be able to reap the fruits of this anyway? Right. And there's I mean, there's there's something very important there because you're you know, that was the bargain. We're going to send our jobs to Asia and they're going to send us back really cheap stuff at Walmart. And it's all going to somehow balance out.

[00:28:55] And by the way, when I was writing my my third book, Homecoming, which was basically about this very trend that we're talking about from from globalization to regionalization. I had a really interesting conversation with Rich Trumka, who was at that point the head of the AFL-CIO. And I was asking him, I said, when China came into the WTO in 2001, like what was the conversation that you were having with policymakers at that point, you know, in the run up to that?

[00:29:21] And he said, well, somebody from the Clinton administration in the 90s had come to him and said, you know, don't worry. We know we're going to lose some jobs, but we're going to get a lot of cheap stuff. There's going to be you know, it's it'll be disinflationary. And then eventually everybody's wages will equalize and, you know, it'll all be one big happy world. And he's like, well, how long is that going to take? And the policymakers said two to three generations.

[00:29:46] And it's like, whoa, to me, that that is so telling, frankly, about how Democrats lost working people. Because if you're going to tell somebody in Buffalo or in Indiana, where I grew up, you know, I'm really sorry we're selling you down the river for the next two to three generations. But after that, it's going to be OK. Of course, in the meantime, you're going to have an opioid crisis, deaths of despair, like hollowed out communities. But don't worry. Eventually it's all going to be fine.

[00:30:17] Like, what kind of disconnection does that show between our leadership and the population? That's a real problem. And so I agree with you that there is now a felt experience that that's not OK, that we do need a more balanced economy. I mean, we're living in a world in which Wall Street is still kind of up here, although the tech bubble is, I think we all know, going to burst at some point. It's been amazing watching the S&P 500 continue to tick up despite the war and the straight up for movement. Because like, this is like, hey, I'm happy.

[00:30:47] Like, I got stock. But like, this does not make sense. This is nonsensical. This does not make sense. No. And we all kind of know. I mean, you know, my friend Andrew Rost-Sorkin, who wrote 1929, there's a reason he's writing about 1929 right now. Look, you know what? Bitcoin might be a better investment at this point. I'm not sure. I'm open to possibilities. I'm a gold girl. I don't do crypto. Yeah. Yeah. You know, people think about the Arctic.

[00:31:13] And you mentioned, you know, the conversation about bringing China into the World Trade Organization. There is this idea that there is ostensibly this form of global governance through United Nations, Security Council, global institutions. We've seen that under strain. When it comes to something like the Arctic, is the solution, do we need, you know, three times as many icebreakers as China and Russia combine, the old British model facing off continental Europe?

[00:31:39] Or is it something where we need to develop some sort of enforceable or auditable treaty relationship with Arctic or, as China described himself now, a near Arctic state? What does the approach need to be? It's a really great question. I will give the not very sexy answer of like, yes, yes and. You know, I think we're going to need some of both.

[00:32:06] I don't believe that we can or should try and compete ship for ship with China. There's, you know, they are going to be the world's export engine. But do we need to sit down in a thoughtful way, as we did with semiconductors and say, you know, this is the life in the case of semiconductors, this is the lifeblood of our economy, our digital economy. We're going to need some production. How do we get there? And you start to fit those pieces together.

[00:32:35] You can do the same thing with ships and logistics. And this is something I followed it pretty closely under Biden that Gina Raimondo, the then commerce secretary, was doing a decent job about starting to track supply chains and create just enough resiliency that you're not in a total crisis the next time there's a pandemic or a trade war or, God forbid, a hot war. So, yes, more resiliency, but also, yes, more work with allies.

[00:33:04] And, you know, one of the things that I would like to see happen when we have a new administration is a repair of the relationship with Canada, for sure, but also, ideally, some brokering of new alliances with the Nordic countries. You know, the Arctic Council, which was seven Arctic nations, used to operate pretty well. Then when Russia, of course, went into the Ukraine, it became more difficult for that to hang together.

[00:33:30] But you could imagine without Russia, those Nordic nations, the U.S., Canada coming together and saying, we're creating a trade and security block. We are together going to pool resources and create a front that makes sure that the Chinese and Russians are not, as you put it earlier, having too much fun, you know, up there taking all the gas, the oil, the, you know, the fish.

[00:33:56] That's really important. And I think I would also like to see the U.S. ultimately sign on to the Convention of the Seas. Like, I think that it would be it would be better for there to be more collaboration in the Arctic. Right now, I'm a little worried it's becoming a kind of a Hobbesian race to the bottom, which is, of course, going to just put adversaries closer to to one another in a way that, you know, could be dangerous. I guess that's an interesting point.

[00:34:26] What do you think would change if the U.S. did sign up for the United Nations Convention on the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea? Is that what it's called? Yeah, Law of the Sea. Law of the Sea. OK. What would actually change in U.S. behavior? Do treaties like that even matter in an era where we have more regionalism and more overt great power competition? Are we are we past the point where that matters?

[00:34:48] It's a good question. I think it still matters in the Arctic because it is one of these places where there's just a lot of unclaimed territory, a lot of unclaimed resources. People are trying to start claiming Russia kind of kicked off the latest round of that in I believe it was 20 2007 that they planted a titanium flag on the bottom of the sea around. I mean, if we can do it to the moon. Right. Exactly. Exactly. Right. And we know less about the bottom of the seabed, you know, than we do about the moon.

[00:35:18] So there you go. But there is, you know, there is a kind of a race now. And it's important, I think, in a more regionalized world. I think it's important for America's Americans to be a little more humble, a little bit more collaborative, a little bit more. Yeah, we are a great power, but we're even greater if we can get Europe and the Canadians to sign on to the things that we would like to do in this area and provide a truly united front against the Chinese and the Russians.

[00:35:46] I think that's particularly important when you're dealing with the Europeans because their hair is a little bit on fire right now. You know, they they're getting the sharp end of Chinese mercantilism at the moment. You know, they're getting all the cheap stuff that used to get dumped in the U.S. is now getting dumped in Europe.

[00:36:04] So they are under threat. And it would be, I think, a great time to say, let's team up and have a collaborative approach to China rather than as I'm worried about seeing, OK, maybe the French and the Germans are going to try and fight back. But you're going to see parts of Southern Europe get pulled into the Chinese trade orbit. You know, you might see countries like Greenland or, you know, even some of the, you know, Finland, Norway, you know, some of these these countries get pulled as well.

[00:36:34] And you wouldn't want that. Yeah. You talked about folks claiming resources in the Arctic. Now, there are some people that actually do live in the Arctic. Yes. Have they chirped up about this at all? Are they claimed any of these resources? Like, it seems like there's already a geographic presence there if it is sparse. Yes. Right. And, you know, it's look, it is a sparsely populated region there in Greenland.

[00:37:02] I think there's more penguins than people. But but that just sounds amazing. Yeah. Penguins are cool. Penguins are super cool. There are a lot of native peoples. And one of the interesting things that I discovered when I was on board the Healy, there was actually a climate scientist who was also a native observer, as as they called her. Clarissa Zeller. She was had been raised in the Inuit and Yupik tribes that are quite populous in Alaska and Canada.

[00:37:29] And there's a collaboration. There is a collaboration, particularly in the U.S. and Canada with these native tribes. There's a lot of sharing of information. They have tremendous oral histories that actually, in some ways, create wonderful maps and understanding of the natural world in these regions. These native peoples have actually helped both the Canadian and U.S. military and, you know, in operations and finding capsized ships and, you know, working their way through different sea pathways.

[00:37:59] So it's a pretty cool collaboration. Clarissa was on board the Healy when I was there and she was trading information about, say, whale migratory patterns and what the native fishermen were seeing in the salmon population with the climate scientists on board who were also giving them information.

[00:38:18] So it's a good thing to have that collaboration. And, you know, one of the things that I found very heartening, actually, is I thought that native peoples would be kind of universally negative about what was happening in the Arctic because climate science or climate change and more commerce in the area can threaten their fishing. It can threaten their livelihoods. But, you know, they were also looking at the upside of, well, yeah, we've always had to deal with change.

[00:38:46] We've always been migratory. Warming is difficult in some ways, but it also could open up new opportunities for things like agriculture in certain areas. So it's not all bad. And I go back to this idea that there should be collaboration. There's some, you know, that's a strength for the U.S. because guess what? The Chinese and Russians do not have native observers on board and they don't care what these people think.

[00:39:10] And so that's good. That's a that's a way for the U.S. and Canada and other countries to come in with soft power and, you know, exert some influence. Soft power is a competitive advantage in great power competition. So we seem to treat the Canadians as well as we're treating the locals. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. We need to we need to treat both of them better. Is there actually like any sort of state structure in the Arctic with native tribes? Like are they recognized anywhere?

[00:39:37] They are not recognized as individual, you know, Arctic nations, but they are definitely included in conversations by previously the U.S. Not not as much under Trump, too, I got to say. But certainly the Canadians, you know, have allow native people to have a really big say in what in what's happening up there.

[00:39:59] OK, yeah. If you had some advice to give to the Trump administration for the last two years that they're they're going to be in office, assuming Steve Bannon doesn't figure out that third term plan that he's got going on. Who knows? He's come up with creative ideas before. What advice would you give them if they wanted to push forward with a effective Arctic policy? And this is actually happening.

[00:40:25] Quietly remind them that it's a great thing to cut deals and it's a cool thing that Trump came in and really made that icebreaker deal happen in Trump, too. But we have to partner. We can't do it alone. And you can't humiliate other countries and expect them to do your bidding. You know, it's great that we're making icebreakers of the Finns. It would be even better if the Canadians were on board, too.

[00:40:49] It would be even better if the Italians were pouring more money into shipbuilding and and we could create alliances that roped all those countries in with Asian nations like Korea and Japan. That's what power is about. It's about creating those partnerships. It's always been an American strength. You know, soft power is a big deal and we have not done it well during either Trump administration. And that's exacted a big cost. And I think it's something we need to repair.

[00:41:19] And then for, you know, supposedly Democratic administration coming in in 2028. You know, what what talking points do you give them or advice you give them so that they could continue this good Trump policy? But now they got to sell it to a new base, new demographic. So I think there there needs to be some realism around what can and should be made in the U.S. versus what can and should be made abroad.

[00:41:47] You know, this going back to the very first question. One of the ways I got interested in the story was because the steelworkers had brought a big what's called a 301 trade case against China and shipbuilding. It basically means that the Chinese have been breaking WTO rules, ring fencing the industry in unfair ways. And when you read that case, it really is. It's kind of a it's a good read. It's like a Harvard Business School case study in Chinese mercantilism. And that's important. And the steelworkers have have a great case, as do the other unions.

[00:42:16] But we can't go it alone. And there is going to have to be a tradeoff between jobs at home, jobs for allies, shared supply chains. And everybody's going to have to make some compromises along the way. Well, you've been so generous with your time. Really appreciate it. Is there anything else that I haven't asked you about that I should have while we're still here? Oh, my gosh.

[00:42:40] No, I would just say that I guess one thing I would say is I as I often do, I come from a military family. My brother was in the Navy. My father served in the Turkish Navy, actually. And he's from the Black Sea. So apparently they put everybody from the Black Sea like you get your choice of, you know, which division that you want to go in when you do military service. But if you're from the Black Sea, you're going in the Navy. So they stuck him in there.

[00:43:09] But I think that there is something about service that we need to remember again as a country. And when I was on board the ship, I thought, as I often do, we need a year of service. We need to have some kind of mandatory service. It doesn't have to be military necessarily, but some kind of service in this country. I think it would be a great way to bring people together across geographies, across socioeconomic divisions,

[00:43:37] and consolidate and reintegrate our politics. I think that would be a really cool thing. I could not agree more for a whole bunch of reasons. So fingers crossed we can get some folks on board with that. But, Rhonda, thank you so much. The book, Sea Change, people go buy it. Link will be in show notes. I'll find the sales. I can throw it in there. Thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.