How Trumps bold Finland Model strategy is actually reviving Americas military fleet

This month, a national newspaper reduced a major national-security and industrial initiative to a round of golf, a presidential “fixation” and billions in “no-bid” contracts.The New York Times on Aug.1 published a fake-news caricature of President Donald Trump’s plan to significantly boost America’s Arctic icebreaker fleet.But The Times got the story exactly backward. America’s real problem is that Washington spent decades allowing our Arctic capability and shipbuilding industrial base to atrophy — while our adversaries kept building.And this president has decided to reverse that decline.On Aug.

13, he took the US-Finland icebreaker partnership far beyond the Arctic, directing the Pentagon to use it as a model for rebuilding additional classes of American ships.The White House has given that strategy a name: the “Finland Model.”Under this new policy, a foreign shipbuilder may build two ships at its parent yard overseas — but only if it simultaneously invests in or takes control of an American shipyard, hires and trains American workers, licenses its shipbuilding technology to the US operation and develops a US supply chain to bring in needed materials.Then, every follow-on ship must be built in the United States.This is not outsourcing, contra the media’s biased critique.It is onshoring through alliance.The timing could hardly be clearer — and it makes the urgency apparent.This month a Chinese operator launched the first regular cargo service to Europe through Arctic waters along Russia’s Northern Sea Route.According to Russia’s Rosatom, seven Chinese transit vessels have permits to sail to Europe via the Arctic this season.By Aug.11, Russia had already sent about 6 million barrels of crude toward Asia through the Arctic route — nearly half the volume moved during all of last year’s navigation season.The Arctic is becoming a shipping corridor, an energy route and a strategic theater, all at the same time.Trump’s icebreaker pro...