COLUMN | Little sign of logic in US disruption: delving deeper into Donald Trump's shipbuilding ambitions [Grey Power]

How does anyone make any sense of what is going on in the inner workings of the Trump administration? It has been likened to a hurricane approaching a built-up land mass, with complete uncertainty about its force and direction.

Will it weaken to a mere storm, or strengthen to a building-flattening, ship-wrecking disaster? Will it recurve before it reaches a city desperately battening itself down against the worst, or bend its course across a less populated coastal area?

Or might the worst happen, and its full force of nature be wreaked against the hapless inhabitants?

And as with most of these natural disasters, the best meteorological experts will be indecisive – despite their huge computers and wonderful models, they really don’t know what will happen next.

These provide an appropriate analogy of the torrent of measures and counter-measures, growing and receding threats emerging from Washington. What on earth is a huge tax on Chinese-built or owned ships in US ports going to do to world trade, the freight markets, and consumers in the US and elsewhere?

There are plenty of guesses being made, but no certainty, with something being expected in the next six months. The US Trade Representative office, tasked with implementing something that is currently so fluid and amorphous, is expected to offer some suggestions this week, but whether this will actually happen is anyone's guess.

These are supposed to energise US shipbuilding and make maritime America great again, which might seem very positive to a chap in a blue boiler suit in a run-down American shipyard. But there seems to be complete inability to comprehend the practicalities of reviving a niche industry which has had no global impact whatsoever for at least two generations.

And rather than beginning cautiously, with the slow assembly of the necessary skills, which are in such short supply, in a local niche sector building tonnage protected by the Jones Act, there is an assumption that all can be done in the short term, simply re-allocating the huge sums of money taken from visiting foreign tonnage to the new gleaming shipbuilding industry that will magically arise from the ruins of the old.

People of a certain age might recall an earlier attempt to revitalise uncompetitive and inefficient US shipbuilding in the 1970s, with a splendid plan to resurrect the defunct Brooklyn Navy Yard from which the US Navy had long evacuated.

From the very best motives of attempting to produce employment opportunities in a run-down New York suburb, a commercial operator was persuaded to take on the project, with ambitions to build, not something small and simple, but very large crude carriers (VLCCs), which at that time were internationally flavoursome.

But how does one go about producing expert shipbuilders from a largely unskilled workforce, hired from the adjoining area?

To give them their due, and employing what was described as a “buddy” system, a cadre of experienced technicians set about training this unskilled workforce on the job, in the basic techniques of large-scale steel fabrication.

To their credit, and the astonishment of the many sceptics, they succeeded in building a VLCC on the site. It was not, perhaps, a very good VLCC, built in conditions far less ideal than the competing European and Japanese “tanker factories” were churning out in three times the speed and half the cost, but it worked and one can only imagine the pride of that workforce as they saw it leave for its trials.

Alas, the global need for speedily built tankers was to evaporate like the morning dew after 1973, leaving a legacy of maritime depression that was to last well beyond the lifetimes of those huge ships.

Perhaps there are Trump advisers who have some vestigial memory of this surprising project and from some very dubious facts about shipbuilding technology, have generated this enthusiasm for US maritime in their President’s fertile brain.

As with several of the wilder ambitions, there are some signs of a more pragmatic attitude emerging. It could be that the snail-like progress on icebreaker replacement, along with feverish activity in Canadian shipyards, has prompted the President to the reality of fulfilling any Arctic ambitions.

It will be necessary to get the experts involved and buy icebreakers fast, from abroad. It has been suggested that Finland could do the necessary, producing five in short order, probably before the specification for the US Coast Guard's sole remaining big 'breaker has been finally agreed.

President Putin, notably busy on the icebreaker front, could have probably offered to cement his friendship in such a fashion, but that would be surely a step too far.

Next week, all will have probably changed again. I am told that if you are looking for precedents in all this disruption, you should study post-revolutionary France and the translation of Napoleon from First Consul to Emperor.