An important lesson for life, which transcends the generations and is doubtless available in multiple translations, is “do what you are good at – but avoid trying to do what you obviously cannot”.
It is about “playing to your strengths” and while it can be applied to every conceivable situation, it is also a basic principle of commerce.
With teams of strategists, economists, modellers, psychologists and armies of international experts attempting to guess what is going on in US President Donald Trump’s mighty brain, it is well above my pay grade to suggest why he thinks that the US should turn itself into a major shipbuilding nation.
Even more puzzling is why he thinks that requiring Chinese-built ships to pay a US$1 million fee/fine/duty/ (the exact term is unclear) will galvanise US shipbuilders to such an extent that they will be churning out 24,000TEU containerships in numbers from their yards.
It is, I am told, all the “art of the deal,” a strategic move to punish the Chinese for their efficiency, although it might equally be applied to the other eastern shipbuilding giants who have pretty well cornered the market.
The record of governments interfering with the buying and selling of ships has not been one of success.
We have been here before, with the United States complaining bitterly about “unfair” competition from both Japan and South Korea, before China was mobilised to build ships. In the 1980s, there was furious lobbying from American shipbuilders, attempting to prop up an obviously uncompetitive and under-invested industry, by suggesting all sorts of skullduggery in the Far East yards.
They had an absolutely brilliant lobbyist in Washington called John Stocker, but he was up against the reality of US government indifference, while far eastern governments, by contrast, were taking their industries very seriously. That and the fact that, regardless of support for training and capital investment, etc, the workers in the Asian yards seemed far more motivated and were hugely more productive than those elsewhere in the world.
That might be a history lesson that has eluded the present incumbents of the White House, who do not believe in looking anywhere other than “forward,” but the record of governments interfering with the buying and selling of ships has not been one of success.
You are dealing with mobile customers, who will not pay over the odds in a world where there is all the choice you can wish for. And if you use the law to promote protectionism as with the US Jones Act or the daft regulations that were designed to prop up Brazilian shipyards in the past, you end up just punishing your own users of ships, to no effect whatsoever.
It is just possible to see a trace of logic in the US President’s thinking; pressure from the MAGA hat-wearers in the unions, a touch of Sinophobia, simple envy, perhaps, in the satellite imagery of huge efficient far eastern shipyards with banks of big ships building and fitting out. There might be impatience with the inability of the domestic industry to build the warships at the pace the admirals say they need.
Just this week there were demands from the military for 20 “second-hand” ships to be bought to replenish the ageing fleet of the Military Sealift Command (some are half a century old). This apparently would be a faster strategy that actually trying to build them in US yards.
There are plenty of things that the US is very good at, but building commercial ships is no longer one of them
There are the president’s Arctic ambitions, currently frustrated by the snail-like progress on icebreaker construction, while Russia and Trump’s “51st State” to the North show how it can be done. There is no point in buying Greenland if you can only reach it by sea in summer.
There are plenty of things that the US is very good at, but building commercial ships is no longer one of them and it is no shame to admit this. The world, and shipbuilding, has moved on and attempting to apply some sort of artificial respiration to a corpse is a losing battle.
Look at the “lost” shipbuilding industries of other nations and learn from the UK and northern Europe, where only specialists survive. Look and learn from companies like Damen, or the Australian fast ferry builders, if you want to get good examples of sensible commercial practice and brilliant design. There are indeed fine US designers – but locally bashing steel to put their ideas into practice may be less of a good idea.
One fears that all advice will be ignored and the disruption pouring out of Washington will not stop in a hurry, but one might suggest that Rudyard Kipling’s verse on the “Gods of the Copybook headings” might offer some useful hints to wheeler-dealers trying to do politics.