Since the end of the fifteenth century, seafaring explorers have searched for a westward route around the North American continent from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean. The Northwest Passage—and its promise of regular commercial ocean traffic that could ship the wealth of nations—was not crossed until the beginning of the twentieth century. Today, because of climate change, the often ice-choked passage some 500 miles north of the Arctic Circle is increasingly accessible.

　　The opening of northern sea routes and the emerging reality of a future transpolar route will, however, create new challenges. Those challenges are the subject of Rana Foroohar’s new book, Sea Change: America’s New Great Game in the Arctic Circle. The book is a thoughtful, far-reaching discussion of maritime history, sea power strategy, global economics, and national defense that takes readers far beyond the Arctic. Foroohar is a journalist and global business columnist for the Financial Times with decades of experience covering economic issues. With that background, she draws on interviews from a broad network of current and former senior US officials, labor leaders, corporate executives, and international experts in various fields to add meaningful context to this book.

　　Sea Change is also informed by Foroohar’s time aboard a United States Coast Guard Cutter, the icebreaker Healy. Her first-person account of the ship’s scientific and mapping voyage from homeport Nome, Alaska, to waters deep inside the Arctic Circle is a deck plate narrative, a result of almost unprecedented access for a journalist to a US Arctic mission. As a result, the book offers readers an inside look at the challenges of negotiating both daunting Arctic and geopolitical waters in “one of the world’s most important theaters of global commerce, statecraft, and military competition.”

　　Geoeconomics and Statecraft

　　Sea Change examines an Arctic region, once a place of collegial scientific inquiry and climate change research, that is now “like the rest of the world: fraught, uncertain, and vulnerable.” Foroohar notes that increasingly ice-free summers in the Arctic have opened what promises to be a viable commercial shipping route in the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere. This route avoids both the Panama and Suez canals and can save millions of dollars in shipping costs. As a result, the author predicts the Arctic region will become an area for reinvestment and rearmament and for rethinking existing policies.

　　In a chapter aptly titled “Cold Realities,” Foroohar argues that geoeconomics—the ability to use trade, investment, logistics, and natural resources to achieve national security goals—is essential to modern statecraft. The stable era of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union in this region has given way to a “free-for-all” among nations now competing in the Arctic. After decades of international cooperation, relations between Arctic coastal nations are fraying. Russia, Canada, the United States, and Nordic nations have all increased their military presence in the region. Moreover, the eight-nation Arctic Council—once a forum for consensus-building and collaboration—fractured in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Even China now includes the polar regions in its broader national security strategy, a policy change the author sees as “important and unusual.”

　　“Both Russian and Chinese maritime efforts,” Foroohar argues, “must be understood as part of a larger geoeconomic strategy in which the world’s shipping lanes must be controlled to secure the natural resources that their production-oriented economies need to survive and thrive.” In the Arctic region, some experts believe there are vast untapped offshore reserves of natural gas, natural gas liquids, and oil. Huge new fishing grounds are also opening as the polar ice retreats. To access these resources and secure its national security interests, Foroohar argues that America will need to establish a lasting military presence there to safeguard these newly opening sea lanes of communication.

　　“Near Arctic” China

　　Throughout Sea Change, the author repeatedly makes the case that China (which since the late 1990s has claimed to be a “near Arctic” state despite being blocked by the Russian Siberian landmass) is now engaged in an uneven competition in the region. This is a contest for presence, territorial dominance, and resources she believes the United States can ill-afford to lose. “A win for China in the Arctic,” she writes, would be “particularly devastating for the United States.”

　　The United States today has 185 oceangoing commercial vessels. China has more than 5,000. For Foroohar, this alone dispels any notion that the US can be the security guarantor of East Asia.

　　Rare earth minerals, for example, are high on the list of Chinese priorities as Beijing seeks to corner the market on mining and refining these ores. These valuable minerals, Foroohar claims, will become increasingly accessible in the Arctic region. She cites one study that puts the commercial value of undersea minerals at $20 trillion. Thawing permafrost in Greenland, the relatively shallow waters of the Arctic seas, and more open sea lanes to offshore Alaskan and Canadian waters in the Western Hemisphere are likely to create opportunities to secure and ship in bulk rare earth minerals, energy, and other commodities. In this context, the author asserts that the Trump Administration’s Greenland deal is clearly a preemptive geoeconomic move, forestalling future Chinese alignment with that island’s government and access to its resources.

　　Foroohar is also clear-eyed about the maritime threat posed by China and notes that Beijing has made shipbuilding a strategic national priority. As such, the Chinese maritime industry benefits from massive subsidies, below-market-priced steel, preferential loans, and low-cost labor. This state support is the reason, the author explains, that the Chinese industrial base can produce both commercial and military vessels and achieve the economies of scale that allow Beijing to control 50 percent of the world’s entire shipbuilding capacity. Chinese ships dominate the sea lanes, and 90 percent of global trade moves by sea. The United States today has 185 oceangoing commercial vessels. China has more than 5,000. For Foroohar, this alone dispels any notion that the US can be the security guarantor of East Asia:

　　It’s also a key reason that the United States would be unlikely to win any hot conflict in the region. Not only does the U.S. Navy not have the capacity to police the entire world, but the U.S. maritime industry doesn’t have the commercial might to support either military efforts or the military capacity that would be needed … The idea that America can take on China in its own backyard is folly.

　　The White House knows this, and the Navy has known it for many years now.

　　Beyond the Arctic

　　Foroohar understands the global shift in the maritime balance of power and argues that this calls for significant changes to American policy and priorities. Chief among these is the adoption of hard-headed practices that minimize the “vulnerabilities of the old neoliberal systems of economics and trade (that are) impossible to ignore” in a world where “it has become more widely understood that some measure of resiliency must replace a total reliance on laissez-faire, globalized markets.”

　　For example, the author recommends a whole-of-government effort—with subsidies, regulatory waivers, tax incentives, and other measures—to ensure “public and private shipbuilding are reconnected … historically the only way any country has managed to build a strong navy, commercial maritime sector, and ocean defense capability.” Foroohar explains such an effort would send a strong and persistent demand signal if it were to underwrite naval and merchant construction, boost the shipyard trades with job training, encourage growth (especially among nimble and innovative subcontractors), and promote partnerships among friendly nations with shipbuilding skills, technology, and capacity.

　　Foroohar acknowledges this is a tall order. It would, at the outset, require massive reform of defense spending and other federal acquisition hobbled by an “antiquated and highly bureaucratic procurement process … unbelievable regulations … large and inefficient corporate monopolies.” It would also require broad support for the administration’s Executive Order “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance,” which calls for the development and funding of a national Maritime Action Plan. Foroohar is also a proponent of bipartisan action to pass the SHIPS (Shipbuilding and Harbor Infrastructure for Prosperity and Security) for America Act, and endorses plans to “friendshore” the construction of oceangoing vessels, such as the administration’s current agreement to build five US Coast Guard icebreakers in Finland.

　　After decades of inaction and atrophy, however, rebuilding the US maritime industry will be a fraught task. American shipbuilding faces a perfect storm of diminished capacity, lost capabilities, and low-cost foreign competition. Foroohar notes that in 1975, US shipyards ranked number one in the world in terms of capacity; today US yards rank nineteenth. As demand for American-built ships fell off, so too did the demand for skilled maritime trades labor including welders, electricians, pipefitters, and naval architects. It will take years to rebuild this workforce. Then too, innovative and technologically advanced shipbuilders in Japan, South Korea, and especially in China are highly cost-competitive and pose a stiff barrier to reentry into the market. 

　　The policies the author recommends extend far beyond Arctic waters to embrace the whole of America’s ocean-going presence. That’s because Sea Change tackles a broad and challenging range of today’s maritime issues. Readers will find this book to be a balanced, accessible, well-researched, and thoughtful discussion of US interests in the global commons on the high seas. These are issues of strategy, natural resources, world trade, and national security—and of existing American maritime practices that are in immediate need of a sea change.