Of Whales and Windmills
By Patrick Theros - January 10th, 2026
Trump’s maritime crusade proves that obsession and strategy are not the same thing.
Donald Trump has launched another crusade to make America what it was in 1950; a self-sufficient industrial giant that dominated maritime commerce. He promises to restore manufacturing capacity to Cold War levels, repatriate millions of factory jobs, and rebuild a merchant marine that once carried U.S. trade across every ocean.
In reality, American factories already produce more in real terms than they did in the 1960s and 1970s; what vanished were the jobs. Automation means fewer hands turn out more goods. To recreate that workforce would demand astronomical subsidies; and a president who could focus long enough to understand what he is asking for.
Trump’s latest adventure, Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance (April 9, 2025), instructs the government to rebuild shipyards, ports, and a US-flag merchant fleet. It orders penalties on foreign-built vessels—especially Chinese—and a plan to train shipyard workers and mariners. The intent may be patriotic; the execution is fantastical. Like so many of Trump’s initiatives, it was announced with fanfare and no feasibility study, another flash of impulse from a leader who ricochets from project to project Without discernible direction.
Is there no one in the White House to tell him that he cannot will industries into existence? Reindustrialization takes years of design, planning, and capital formation. Trump thinks all it needs is a presidential decree. Foreign affairs, defense, and industrial policy all seem to operate as a one-man show.
The maritime plan would be ruinously expensive and impossible to execute. The United States once dominated global shipbuilding—turning out hundreds of merchant hulls a year and employing more than a million workers at sea and ashore. Today, according to Forbes, it ranks thirty-ninth, producing less than one-half of one percent of the world’s oceangoing tonnage. China alone controls roughly 53 percent of new-build capacity; South Korea and Japan most of the rest. Not even a well-organized president could undo decades of neglect.
The structure of modern shipbuilding has left port. Modern yards are automated and vertically integrated. The domestic supply chain that once made hull plates, turbines, and marine electronics is gone. Rebuilding it would take decades, not years. The only clear winners would be the contractors hired to build the new yards—whether or not any ships were launched
The human problem is worse. The maritime journal gCaptain warns of a “critical shortfall of licensed and unlicensed mariners” even for today’s tiny U.S.-flag ocean-going fleet of 90 ships. Life at sea is hard; months of isolation and instant turnarounds in port. Pay is decent but cannot compete with shore-side work, and the seafaring tradition that once animated coastal America has faded.
Abroad the industry adapted. The world’s largest merchant fleet, Greek-owned vessels controlling about 17 percent of world tonnage, learned generations ago that success at sea depends on steady navigation, not rage against the tide. Greece’s shipowners crew their vessels with Filipinos, Ukrainians, Indians, and Egyptians. More than 229,000 Filipino seafarers now crew merchant ships worldwide, the single largest nationality bloc at sea. When even Greece, a nation with the sea in its veins struggles to convince its youth to serve aboard, it is delusional to expect that young Americans will rush to join the merchant marine.
An old captain from Chios, my mother’s island and the most maritime place in the world, once lamented that his son refused to follow him to sea. The boy preferred to stay ashore, see friends, chase girls, and work at something modern. “Who wants a life without nightlife?” he asked. Multiply that answer by a generation of Americans and one sees how futile Trump’s call for a new maritime age truly is.
Even in naval shipbuilding, America‘s one technology lead, the record is grim. The Government Accountability Office reports that Navy programs “consistently produce cost growth, delivery delays, and underperforming ships.” The new Constellation-class frigate is already three years late, with first delivery pushed to 2029. The Congressional Budget Office estimates a price of $2.5–2.7 billion per ship, more than triple Japan’s Mogami-class frigate. China’s shipyards roll out 230 times (by tonnage) more hulls per year. The bottleneck here is scale: only a handful of American yards remain, all overloaded with Navy and Coast Guard work.
China’s dominance rests on massive state subsidies, cheap credit, and what Beijing calls “military-civil fusion.” Korea and Japan also provide loan guarantees and R&D funding to their shipyards. Europe treats shipbuilding as a strategic industry eligible for public aid. Only the United States pretends that free markets alone can deliver a fleet.
If Trump truly wished to strengthen America’s position, he would study how our partners do it, or better still, co-produce. His boast that the United States will now build nuclear submarines with South Korea accidentally points the right way: if you need subs fast, build them in Korea.
Even the best-run government could not rebuild a lost maritime empire overnight. Every credible audit, from GAO to CBO, shows a Navy behind schedule and a merchant marine sector nearly extinct. Penalties on Chinese-built ships may raise freight costs and satisfy nationalist rhetoric, but they cannot conjure welders, draftsmen, or mariners out of thin air. The dream demands exactly what globalization erased: a mass industrial workforce and a culture of the sea.
We will never match the 2000 merchant ships built in 1943, nor recreate a massive merchant fleet. Better to subcontract maritime requirements to staunch allies like the Greeks and the Koreans and spend taxpayer money where we have a comparative advantage.
Trump’s maritime order, like so many of his crusades, reveals a president in thrall to nostalgia and allergic to process. The problem is not ambition but distraction. Governing requires discipline, patience, and the humility to listen to experts, not qualities that characterize this one-man government.
Even the Greeks, who have never abandoned the sea, know you cannot command it by decree.