For Christians, the core message of Easter is about hope and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, representing a triumph of life over death. The Easter story shows the faithful that, even during the darkest times, new beginnings and even miracles are possible.
Those of us who work in the maritime sector need more than chocolate eggs to sustain us. Hope in a better future is very much needed in the marine industry right now.
But nothing short of a miracle is required in some of the cases we cover this week.
Last week, we queried whether a country that struggled to produce cars and luxury handbags to an acceptable standard might struggle to revive a shipbuilding industry, especially when an icebreaker that would cost around US$400 million to build in Europe is estimated to cost US$1.9 billion in a domestic Gulf Coast yard in Pascagoula, Mississippi.
Welcome to America, where I rate chances of the resurrection of the domestic shipbuilding industry as less likely than the second coming of Christ in my lifetime.
You would expect that ahead of a report on how to “re-establish American’s maritime dominance” that was authorised with much hullabaloo by an executive order (always an executive order…) by President Trump earlier in the month, the MAGA faithful might be working on a strategy to fund and equip new yards, train a vast, new American workforce of welders and cutters, and stimulate demand by awarding contracts to American companies.
Especially as the president has said that he wants forty new icebreakers to conquer and subdue Greenland enforce his vision of America ensuring its Arctic security. But no.
Readers of the Finnish daily Helsingin Sanomat on Good Friday were treated to a scoop from journalist Petri Sajari under the headline, “Secret negotiations: The United States may order icebreakers worth billions of euros from Finland.” Who needs to be added to Pete Hegseth’s secret Signal chat when you have a competent investigative journalist at hand?
It turns out that the US Coast Guard appears to have as much faith in the American shipbuilding industry as I do, and its leaders seem to have heeded my advice that the best place to go if you want an icebreaker built on time and on budget is Northern Europe.
Rather than tripling or quadrupling the order for the icebreaking polar security cutter at Louisiana's Bollinger and paying billions per hull, it turns out the coast guard has beaten a path to Finland.
As per Mr Sajari’s sources, Rauma Marine Constructions is negotiating with the US Coast Guard over an order for three to five icebreakers at a cost of around €500 million (US$575 million) per vessel. As we expected, the only way to fast-track the programme is to go to an experienced yard in Europe and order against a fixed and proven design.
Rauma has a track record building for the Finnish Navy (all large Finnish Navy combat vessels commissioned since 1990 have been constructed there) and it delivered the Polar Class 5 supply and research vessel S.A. Agulhas II (pictured above) for the Department of Environmental Affairs of South Africa in 2014.
The latter vessel was made famous when researchers aboard it discovered the wreck of explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton’s wooden ship Endurance in the Weddell Sea off the coast of Antarctica in 2022.
One might wonder how South Africa has more reliable and more modern icebreaking capacity than the US Coast Guard.
This is great news for European shipbuilding if the contract is signed either in Finland or with a Dutch, German, Norwegian, or even a British yard. Hilariously, of course, the coast guard will be liable for the newly imposed 10 per cent tariff when the new ships arrive in the United States. Guess what? The importer is liable for tariffs, not the seller!
The tariffs have already proved a major problem for Delta Airlines for its Airbus orders and are a point of contention between Ryanair and Boeing, which is trying to charge the Irish budget airline the extra cost of all the tariffs on imported parts on the planes it has ordered.
Good luck with that, but the irony of Ryanair facing sudden and unexpected charges is wonderful. Of course, such tariffs also push up the cost of American-built ships even more.
For face saving reasons, I would anticipate that some of the fit-out or custom modifications to the polar security cutters vessels will be performed in the United States, just as Burkina Faso modifies the Chinese cars it assembles domestically and claims them as a local triumph of engineering. National pride will require a veneer of local content for the US Coast Guard.
"It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,” as Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping once said pragmatically. In this case, actually building ships overseas and providing a polar presence for the coast guard is more important than building them in a yard at home, paying a fortune, and suffering the interminable delays the Bollinger programme has already experienced since the contract award in 2018.
In the event that America does threaten Greenland, the shipbuilding contract will provide the hulls as hostages for the European Union. There is an excellent historical precedent for this – the Ottoman battleships under construction in the UK and that became HMS Erin and HMS Agincourt in 1914, when the British government confiscated them upon the outbreak of war.
Following the revolution by the Young Turks in 1908, very much the MAGA of their day, the Ottoman Empire made a concerted plan to renew its enfeebled navy (does this sound familiar?).
The Turkish government embarked on a patriotic, public donation drive to collect gold coins, jewels and necklaces from its citizens to raise funds for a mighty dreadnought, to be named Reşadiye, which it ordered at Vickers in England in 1911.
The Ottomans also took over the contract for a second battleship that Brazil had ordered in 1911 as Rio de Janeiro at the British Armstrong Whitworth yard. The ship ended up with the largest number of main guns (14) of any battleship ever built.
Unfortunately, due to the collapse of Brazil's rubber boom, the Brazilian government sold the partially built ship to the Ottoman Empire in 1913. The Ottomans renamed her Sultan Osman I, and the ship was nearly complete when the First World War broke out in August 1914, as well as fully paid for. Five hundred Turkish sailors were in England to take delivery.
They were sent home empty handed after the First Lord of Admiralty, one Winston Churchill, decided that both ships should be seized for service in the Royal Navy, without any compensation.
Let’s hope that the US Coast guard gets its ships from Europe quickly and successfully, and that tensions in the North Atlantic can be reduced.
Unfortunately, security concerns don’t just exist in Greenland. They also exist on the seabed, as we will see in part two later this week, where more corporate miracles are needed.
Background reading
More on the Ottoman Empire’s ambitions to build a fleet of dreadnoughts even as the empire crumbled here and here.
The wonderfully named Malte Humpert has written a piece for Norway’s The High North News on How Russia’s Security Service FSB Gained Control Over the Yamal LNG Fleet Reportedly Setting Up Covert Cargo Operations – a tale of British and other western officers on icebreaking LNG carriers exporting Russian gas even today have been replaced by Russian national seafarers under tight scrutiny from the Russian intelligence services.
The piece hints at all sorts of further furtive and nefarious possibilities on board the LNG carriers, which can also carry three hundred tonnes of cargo on each voyage from West Europe to Siberia.