The embarrassing emptiness of Trump’s America First rhetoric displayed on the high seas

It is a spectacle that would shame a confidence man and confuse a schoolchild: the great vessels of American commerce, the floating cities that carry our countrymen on holiday, the steel leviathans that bear the goods of our daily lives, almost none of them sail beneath the flag of the nation they serve.

They fly the banners of Panama, of Bermuda, of the Marshall Islands—places with fewer taxpayers than a county fair, places whose maritime registry is little more than a post office box and a notary’s stamp.

And this arrangement, we are told by the men in suits who run these affairs, is simply the way of the world. It is the natural order of things. Which is, of course, a polite way of saying it is profitable.

Despite an Executive Order titled “Restoring America’s Maritime Dominance” and promises to rejuvenate U.S. shipyards, analysis indicates that Donald Trump’s “America First” administration’s approach has failed to build domestic capacity, instead accelerating a reliance on foreign-flagged vessels and creating a “pattern of neglect and contradiction.”

The arithmetic is plain enough, if you have the stomach for it. For a ship to fly the American flag, it must be built in an American shipyard.

The trouble is, there hasn’t been a shipyard capable of building a large passenger vessel in this country since the days when men wore fedoras and the world was still in black and white.

Despite talk about a “Maritime Golden Age,” the U.S. currently builds only 0.2% of the world’s ships, while China builds 74%, highlighting the massive gulf between the administration’s claims of maritime dominance and the reality.

The last great American cruise ship, the SS United States, still rusts at a pier in Philadelphia, a monument to what we used to build.

To fly the flag, a vessel must also be crewed by American citizens, who have the audacity to expect American wages and American labor laws.

A foreign crew, by contrast, can be paid a pittance, housed below the waterline, and told to be grateful for it.

The difference in labor costs alone is not a matter of pennies; it is a chasm wide enough to swallow a small nation’s economy.

So the cruise lines, whose headquarters gleam on American soil, whose executives collect their bonuses in American dollars, whose customers pay in American currency, register their ships in foreign capitals.

They call these “flags of convenience.”

It is a term that ought to make you laugh and then, upon reflection, make you see red.

It is convenient for the balance sheet. It is convenient for the shareholders. It is convenient for the gentleman who wishes to pay lower taxes than a roadside diner.

When the ships run aground, or the boilers explode, or the norovirus sweeps through the lower decks, who is it that answers for the safety of the passengers?

Not the post office box in Panama City. No, it is the United States Coast Guard that comes, and the United States Navy that stands ready, and the United States taxpayer who foots the bill.

Here is the rub, and it is a rub that ought to gall any citizen with a sense of fair play: the very same vessels that sail under foreign flags to escape American regulation, American labor costs, and American taxes are protected by the might of the American military.

The United States Navy, the most formidable force the world has ever seen, patrols the sea lanes to ensure these ships can travel in safety.

Our destroyers, our aircraft carriers, our submarines—the product of American ingenuity and American treasure—stand guard over a merchant marine that has, for all practical purposes, abandoned its own country’s colors.

We are told this is necessary for global trade, for the free flow of commerce, for the stability of the international order.

But a citizen is entitled to ask: if these corporations are so devoted to the international order, why do they insist on maintaining their headquarters here?

Why do they want the protection of our flag on the water, but not the responsibility of flying it?

The law itself, the Passenger Vessel Services Act, known as the Jones Act, stands as a relic, a stern old statute that says to fly the American flag, a ship must be American-built, American-owned, and American-crewed.

Rather than meet those requirements, an entire industry simply chose to sail away.

They went abroad for their registries, for their labor, for their construction, and then they came back to sell tickets in Miami and New York and Seattle.

They call it a business necessity. But a necessity is one thing when it is a matter of survival; it is another thing entirely when it is a matter of maximizing the dividend.

And so we find ourselves in a peculiar time, a time when the stars and stripes have become a rare sight in the very industry that once defined American maritime pride.

You can stand on a dock in Florida and watch a parade of floating palaces glide past, each one staffed by a global workforce, each one paying taxes to a country most Americans could not find on a map, and each one relying on the United States Navy to keep the sea lanes open.

It is a tidy arrangement for the men who run the lines. For the rest of us, it is a story as old as the republic: private profit, public cost, and a flag that gets waved at the ballgame but is seldom seen where it matters most.