The power of the shipyards

On July 24, the Pentagon’s North Pacific Aerospace Command detected two fighters, one Russian and the other Chinese, attempting to penetrate the aerial identification zone of the Aleutian Islands, an archipelago of three hundred volcanic islands that extends between Alaska and the Russian peninsula of Kamchatka.

In June 1942, American amphibious forces recovered two of them, Kiska and Attu, which the Imperial Japanese Army had occupied for a few months, in what has been to date the last battle fought in its territory by the United States, which used them to bomb Hokkaido and Honshu, Japan’s largest and most populous islands. The winds of war have once again blown strongly in the area, with North Korean ballistic missiles periodically flying over the Sea of ​​Japan.

Added to the geopolitical tensions created by the relationship between Vladimir Putin and Kim Yong Un are those generated by China’s growing naval power in a region – the Indo-Pacific – in which between 1945 and the end of the Cold War reigned. undisputed the Pax Americana that the US Navy imposed.

In recent months, China has normalized large-scale naval and air maneuvers around Taiwan in what Taiwanese Admiral Tang Hua calls “the anaconda strategy” to demonstrate its ability to blockade and isolate the rebel island. In 2019, China carried out 20 naval air raids in the Taiwan Strait. Since January there have already been almost 2,500, 193 of them in August alone.

The five locks

In 1904, Admiral John Fisher of the Royal Navy wrote that there were five locks in the world’s seas: Singapore, the Cape of Good Hope, Alexandria, Gibraltar and Dover and that all their keys were in the hands of London. He wasn’t wrong. When it lost the Suez Canal in 1956, it also lost what was left of its former empire. But the chokepoints they are still there.

Marine straits ranging from Oresund in the Baltic and the Bosphorus in the Mediterranean to Bab-el-Manded in the Red Sea and Malacca between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, are feeling to some degree the geopolitical tensions of the new cold war between Washington and its European and Asian allies and the emerging Beijing-Moscow axis, which is increasingly drawing Tehran and Pyongyang into its orbit.

As Philip Zelikow writes in the Texas National Security Review, Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have been collaborating for longer and in more fields – defense, nuclear technology, energy… – than Berlin, Rome and Tokyo during the 1930s. With Russian help, he warns, China wants to master the ultra-quiet nuclear propulsion of its Zhou-class submarines.

From Shanghai to Chancay

85% of world trade – raw materials, merchandise, military equipment… – is transported by sea, the vast majority in commercial freighters, container ships and supertankers. In recent months, the vulnerabilities of some trade routes to drone or missile attacks such as the Iranian ones, which in the hands of the Houthis dominate long stretches of coastline on the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea, have been shown.

On a single summer day, the US Navy fired as many Tomahawk missiles in the area as it purchased in all of 2023. Between January 1 and August 7, Russia and China conducted five joint military exercises from the Arctic to the Gulf of Oman, up from just two in 2020, according to CSIS.

In the maneuvers Oceans 2024 From the Russian Northern Fleet, which houses its nuclear submarines in Murmansk, 400 ships and submarines participated. In June, China warned that its Coast Guard – under military command since 2018 and today the largest in the world with 150 ships weighing more than 1,000 tons – will intervene in any ship that enters waters “under its jurisdiction” and its crews will be detained and tried under Chinese laws. The US, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines have replied to Beijing that they will not abide by “arbitrary and illegal” rules.

The dragon’s arteries

Chinese shipping companies such as Cosco finance, build and manage one or more ports in 96 countries, 36 of them among the 100 largest for container management. The Chinese ZPMC supplies 70% of the cranes currently in operation in port terminals around the world, where the Chinese Logink software has become ubiquitous, a platform that aggregates logistics data on cargo shipments.

China distributes them for free, among other things because it allows it to access sensitive information on all types of shipments, commercial information and the vulnerabilities of global supply chains. The dragon is today the world’s largest importer of gas (40% of its consumption), oil (70%), soybeans (85%), bauxite (70%) and producer of 35% of manufacturing, more than the US, Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom and South Korea together.

Between 2016 and 2023, Chinese exports to countries in the Global South quadrupled, up to $800 billion, more than what it sells to the US and the EU combined. Half of the mobile phones that Africans buy are manufactured by the Chinese Transsion – Tecno, Infinx, Itel… – for less than 100 dollars.

In November, during the APEC summit in Lima, Xi Jinping will inaugurate a megaport built by Cosco in Chancay, about 70 kilometers north of the Peruvian capital. Evan Ellis, a professor at the US Army War College, told The Telegraph that, following the script of other projects of the Belt and Road initiative, Chancay could become a civil-military naval base that would allow Beijing to support operations against the west coast of the United States.

The empire strikes back

In The influence of sea power upon history (1890), Alfred Mahan recalled that a large merchant navy is essential for any naval power. In fact, the hymn of the body of Marines mentions the intervention of the US Navy in the first Barbary war (1801–1805) in defense of freedom of navigation and against the pirates who violated it from Oran and Algiers.

Its Navy’s dense network of naval bases that supports global maritime trade is a key strategic asset for Washington, which since the Russian invasion of Ukraine has continued to add allies. One of them is Finland, where 900,000 of its 5.5 million inhabitants have some type of military training or training and one of the few EU countries that maintains compulsory military service. Helsinki has purchased 64 fifth-generation F-35s and the Israeli David’s Sling anti-missile system.

Pirates and privateers

According to Guy Platten, secretary general of the International Chamber of Shipping, when Financial TimesSince 1945, there have not been so many threats to maritime trade. Since the last Gaza war broke out, naval traffic through the Suez Canal – which carried 30% of global container trade – has fallen by half and in terms of tonnage, even more, he says.

Many of the ships that previously crossed the Red Sea are now diverted towards the Cape of Good Hope, a journey that lengthens the journey between Shanghai and Rotterdam or Genoa by between nine and 14 days.

The sanctions against Russia, for their part, have created a new black hole in the seas, increasingly infested by so-called ghost fleets –Russian, Iranian, Venezuelan, North Korean…– who navigate without insurance and turning off their RAT transponders to avoid their geolocation.

According to the Kyiv School of Economics, Russia today transports almost 90% of its oil, about 75 million barrels per month, in one and a half thousand old tankers in whose purchase and renovation it has invested 10 billion dollars. The conditions in which they navigate turn them into floating time bombs.

Only 7% of the oceans enjoy any type of formal protection. According to the Outlaw Ocean Project, 80% of the fish and seafood consumed by the US is imported, most of it from obscure conglomerates that act as intermediaries between the legal and illegal markets. The Chinese fishing fleet, he denounces, devastates populations of orcas, sharks, dolphins, turtles and other protected species.

According to the Environmental Justice Foundation, in West Africa supertrawlers The Chinese fish about 2.35 million tons of fish a year worth $5 billion, with devastating effects for artisanal fishermen in Senegal and the Ivory Coast. A third of illegal fishing incidents recorded between 2000 and 2020 were linked to Chinese ships and companies.

Faced with protests from the Peruvian fishing sector, the Lima government had to reinstate the obligation for foreign vessels to use transponders and GPS. Another threat lurks on the seabed: the eventual sabotage of the 600 submarine fiber optic cables with a length of 1.4 million kilometers that cross the world’s oceans and seas carrying 95% of global digital traffic and 10 trillion dollars a day. in financial transactions.

The industrial front

The industrial side of the new cold war is played out in the shipyards. In 1975, the US naval industry was still number 1. Today it is in 19th place on the list of shipowners with less than 1% of world shipping production.

According to Business Insider, the productive capacity of Chinese shipyards is today 232 times greater than that of American ones. In 2022, China manufactured almost half of the world’s ships, compared to 0.13% for the US. The China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) builds almost 20% of the cargo ships and China as a whole almost half of those sailing today, compared to 12% in 2004.

In 2002, Beijing reduced foreign investment in the sector to a minimum (5%). The State assumes, through China Exim and the Bank of China, between 13%-20% of the construction costs of an average freighter. Between 2010 and 2018, they granted the sector $127 billion in soft loans.

According to the consulting firm Drewry, due to subsidies, a Chinese merchant ship costs an average of about 247 million dollars, compared to 265 million for a Japanese or South Korean one. The project Made in China 2025 established that shipbuilding was one of its 10 priority strategic sectors, along with semiconductors, renewable energies and electric vehicles.

In it New York TimesRahm Emanuel, Washington’s ambassador in Tokyo, remembers that the US only has four state shipyards and seven in total, compared to more than 20 in China. Even Adam Smith believed that the shipping industry was one of the few that deserved state support so that it would not be at the mercy of market forces.