Why Is the Trump Administration So Obsessed with Shipping Lanes?

The Trump administration’s focus with shipping lanes and maritime infrastructure has been most visible in the Western media on the Panama Canal and Greenland but is occurring elsewhere as well. Most indications are that the goal is to push back Chinese influence while cementing US naval dominance so as to be capable of enacting a global maritime blockade of China.

As is often the case with Trump, he is only saying more loudly what has been US policy for some time. The US has for years worked to sabotage China’s Belt and Road Initiative. The US Marines shifted their focus to sea control capabilities as part of an effort to maintain naval dominance over China. [1]

So this is not unique to the Trump administration or simply the result of Trump’s reported interest in ships. It is US policy to encircle China, control global shipping, and have the capability to shut down maritime trade routes. Washington is now attempting to take or increase control of key global maritime chokepoints.

Recently introduced legislation from a bipartisan group of senators is illustrative. Its stated aim is to monitor and counter China’s expanding control over strategic ports worldwide. There’s much attention paid to that “expanding control” by American think tanks and politicians, who throw around maps likes this:

What do the numbers say? Here’s the Jamestown Foundation:

While the United States dominates global maritime security, there is a huge disparity in the other direction when it comes to influence over maritime trade. Unlike the PRC, which controls around 12.6 percent of global port throughput through COSCO and CMP, the United States has no state-backed firms among the world’s leading terminal operators. In terms of global port influence, the United States would likely rank behind not only the PRC but also the United Arab Emirates (DP World), France (CMA CGM/Terminal Link), and Singapore (PSA International).

Nevertheless, the US is calling it a “​​direct threat to American national security and economic interests.” More from gCaptain:

The Strategic Ports Reporting Act, introduced by Senators Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Ted Budd (R-NC), and Rick Scott (R-FL), would require the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense to develop a comprehensive global mapping of ports considered vital to U.S. military, diplomatic, economic, and resource exploration interests.

The legislation specifically targets efforts by the People’s Republic of China to build, buy, or control strategic maritime infrastructure around the world.

That’s largely what the US is already doing. Let’s look at a few spots the US has circled as key to its goals.

Panama Canal

On March 4, BlackRock helped fulfill the Trump goal of “taking back” the Panama Canal when it purchased crucial berths on both sides of the waterway that sees about 6 percent of global trade passing through it. An Associated Press article reported that the sale effectively puts “the ports under American control after President Donald Trump [had] alleged Chinese interference with the operations of the critical shipping lane.” Nick Corbishley has more, including on US efforts to revive the Monroe Doctrine in order to squeeze China out of Latin America.

But Panama ports accounted for only four percent of the deal value between BlackRock and Hong Kong-based CK Hutchinson. Other ports are in Mexico, the Netherlands, Egypt, Australia, Pakistan and elsewhere.

While it was a BlackRock-led consortium making the deal, it was largely the result of a US pressure campaign on the seller. From the WSJ:

In the days before finalizing the deal, Fink held calls with Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and national security adviser Michael Waltz, ultimately garnering the administration’s blessing, according to people close to the deal.

It was more than just a blessing:

Behind the scenes, Hutchinson executives had grown uneasy that a hostile Trump administration could make life hard on their sprawling global conglomerate…

Hutchinson executives had weighted selling these and dozens more ports before, but the timing wasn’t right. With Trump applying pressure — and Hutchinson shares trading at a substantial discount to the company’s underlying assets — that changed. …executives were surprised by Trump’s decision to revoke special trade privileges for Hong Kong, and Panama authorities had just announced an audit of Hutchinson’s contract.

The story got more interesting on Thursday when Beijing, late to the party, made clear its displeasure with Hutchinson’s decision to sell to BlackRock. The website of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council, the Chinese ministry in charge of the two special administrative regions, reposted a harsh criticism from the newspaper Tai Kung Pao towards the deal. What does that mean? Here’s more from Zichen Wang at Pekingnology:

It is now crystal clear that Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing’s CK Hutchison never coordinated with Beijing against Donald Trump’s economic coercion…

The Ta Kung Pao condemnation, translated below, reveals Beijing’s concern that BlackRock, a U.S. company, will cooperate with Washington to impose additional costs on Chinese shipping or even threaten Chinese maritime trade…

The condemnation didn’t ask CK Hutchison to unwind the deal but did describe the deal reached so far as “in principle.” The Hong Kong conglomerate has now been asked to reflect which side it is on – Beijing’s or Washington’s.

Shortly after news broke that the US is drawing up plans to get its military on site at the Panama Canal — perhaps a way to keep the pressure on Hutchinson in case it’s thinking about trying to back out of the deal? Here’s NBC News:

U.S. Southern Command is developing potential plans from partnering more closely with Panamanian security forces to the less likely option of U.S. troops’ seizing the Panama Canal by force, the officials said. Whether military force is used, the officials added, depends on how much Panamanian security forces agree to partner with the United States.

The Trump administration’s goal is to increase the U.S. military presence in Panama to diminish China’s influence there, particularly access to the canal, the officials said.

It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

Greenland

“Greenland is growing in importance as we find ourselves in a global competition with China and in a new technological revolution with regards to warfare,” Rebecca Pincus, director of the Wilson Center’s Polar Institute and a former adviser to the U.S. Defense Department on Arctic strategy, told RFE/RL.

“So, Greenland is important from a missile-defense perspective, from a space perspective, and from a global competition perspective, in which shipping and maritime sea lanes are increasingly important,” she said.

For the purposes of this piece, I’ll focus just on the shipping.

The US used Project Ukraine to isolate Russia from the other seven Arctic states (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the US). Finland and Sweden are now, like the others, in NATO, and their Arctic regions are being further militarized. As a result, all Arctic states except Russia are NATO members.

Greenland, as a self-governing territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, is by default part of NATO, but there has been talk about independence, and it has in the past flirted with a closer relationship to Beijing — although China has largely abandoned most of its interest in in recent years.

Some background there from the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs:

China has shown interest in Greenland’s mineral wealth and proximity to potential shipping routes, but in recent years its presence on the island has dwindled. In 2018, China released a white paper detailing its Arctic strategy, including its intention to build a “Polar Silk Road,” in parallel with its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure investments in other regions. During the 2010s, Greenland courted Chinese mining companies to invest, but subsequent mining projects involving Chinese partners have stalled or failed. Pressure from the United States also helped quash Chinese bids to construct new airports and convert an abandoned Danish naval base into a research station. Though Greenland has expressed openness to working with international partners, China has not renewed its overtures.

Greenland occupies a key position along two potential shipping routes through the Arctic: the Northwest Passage, along the northern coastline of North America, and the Transpolar Sea Route, through the center of the Arctic Ocean. As Arctic sea ice melts, these routes could reduce shipping times and bypass traditional chokepoints like the Suez and Panama Canals.

These routes are economically unfeasible at the moment, but that’s expected to change, which means more stuff to fight over. From Antiwar:

The extent of Arctic Sea Ice is now “more than two million square kilometers less than it was in the late twentieth century,” and “reductions in the amount of Arctic sea ice that survives summer melt have resulted in more newly formed ice (first-year ice) and less of the relatively thick, old ice that makes up the perennial ice cover.” Computer models suggest that by 2060, “the oldest ice will have completely disappeared and the sea ice will reach an irreversible tipping point,” suggesting that the Arctic Ocean will be “seasonally ice-free” by the end of the 21st century, which may even allow for opening of new Trans-Arctic shipping routes that completely avoid Canadian and Russian territorial claims sometime in the next century. The changes to ice cover in the Arctic are expected to increase use of the NWP and NSR for shipping, and to open more areas of the Arctic for efficient resource extraction and export thereof.

South Africa

We wrote last month about the Trump administration’s pressure campaign against South Africa and how it’s likely that shipping and naval base considerations are playing a large role. Just to recap: in South Africa this focus means a lot more attention for a small outpost in the Western Cape called Simon’s Town, which is home to the South African Navy’s largest base. 

Why would Simon’s Town help explain US pressure on South Africa? Here are Dr Frans Cronje, head of the Washington DC-based Yorktown Foundation for Freedom, and Rear Admiral Robert Higgs (Ret), who commanded the Fleet of South Africa from 2008-2010 and served as Chief of Naval Staff from 2011 to 2016 (he was also the first SA Navy officer to attend the US Naval War College), writing at Real Clear World: 

Simonstown’s contemporary importance is best understood as one of three points of a triangle that determines the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific.

That triangle is formed by drawing a 5,000 mile line northwards from Simonstown to Djibouti on the African east coast where the Bab al-Mandab Strait narrows the gateway into the Red Sea (and the Suez Canal beyond) to just 20 miles. The balance of power around that gateway shifted in 2016 when China was granted a lease on a naval base just more than a decade after the United States had secured a similar lease.

From Djibouti extend the line 8,000 miles eastward to the Solomon Islands off the east coast of Australia. The Japanese, after crippling the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, sought to occupy the islands to isolate Australia and their retaking was a key allied objective in the liberation of South-East Asia. However, in April of 2022, eight decades after the defeat of Japan, China signed a security pact with the Solomon Islands. As the islands lie east of the confines of the two major “island chains” around which John Foster Dulles’ Pacific containment strategy was conceived at the end of the Second World War the Chinese pact is the starkest challenge yet to the idea of the Pacific as “America’s lake”.

Extend the line from the Solomon Islands back to Simonstown to complete the triangle and territory within sees the passage of more than half of all sea-borne global trade with the triangle’s three points determining access to the Red Sea, the South Atlantic, and the Pacific.

Fight for the Red Sea

On Feb. 1, President Donald Trump ordered the first airstrike of his presidency, against alleged senior Islamic State commanders in northern Somalia. That has continued:

The US launched two airstrikes against Al Shabab in Somalia within a few days of each other. Not good. pic.twitter.com/4Ex3QMxqru

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) March 2, 2025

Why is the collapsed Horn of Africa country the recipient of so much violence from the “America First” administration? There are a few explanations.

One could be found in friend of Trump Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, which right on cue after the Feb. 1 airstrike was out with a story, “The Islamic State has regrouped in Somalia — and has global ambitions.” That would mean that the result of US counterterrorism strategy is that terrorism continues to magically spread like wildfire and that the US must bomb Somalia to smithereens in order to prevent ISIS from continuing to spread.

The other explanation is that the US is in the process of increasing its presence in Somalia with an eye towards a battle over Red Sea shipping. Samar Al-Bulushi and Dr. Ahmed Ibrahim writing at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft believe this is the case:

It is a clear indication of the growing geopolitical significance of the Horn of Africa, and comes at a time of mounting concerns (mostly attempts by Yemen’s Houthis to disrupt global shipping in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza) about securing the flow of international commerce via the Red Sea.

There is also the issue of China’s military base in Djibouti. The US, Germany, Japan, and Italy all had military presences in Djibouti, but it became a problem when China opened its first foreign military base there in 2017. Beijing’s stated interest — like the others — is to protect its shipping. And according to Responsbile Statecraft, “Djibouti is also important for China’s Belt and Road Initiative as a key maritime stop and a new railway line to Ethiopia’s capital Addis Ababa that connects the countries. China is the largest investor in Djibouti, with a total of $14.4 billion in infrastructure being built, a huge sum for an economy that is only worth $4.67 billion.”

For the US, however, it is unacceptable, and Washington became more determined to do something about it when Djibouti denied the US request to use force against the Houthis targeting ships trading with Israel. The US blamed China for Djibouti’s decision.

Under Trump, we’re getting a renewed focus on Somalia and Somaliland:

Rather than accept Djibouti’s position, foreign policy experts have sought to escalate tensions, blaming Djibouti for being pro-Houthi and pro-China. Hoping to find a more reliable partner, many propose that the United States recognize and work with Somaliland instead. Somaliland is an unrecognized state that asserted its independence from Somalia in 1991. Close to Yemen and next Somalia, it seems Somaliland offers everything Djibouti has with no strings attached. Project 2025 recommends “the recognition of Somaliland statehood as a hedge against the U.S.’s deteriorating position in Djibouti.”

Again, the Trump administration is just ramping up existing US policy. Last year, the US signed a deal with the government of Somalia to construct up to five military bases for the Somali National Army in the name of bolstering the army’s capabilities in the ongoing fight against militant groups. The bases are intended for the Danab (“Lightning”) Brigade, a U.S.-sponsored Special Ops Force that was established in 2014.

The US at first funded Danab from the State Department, which contracted with private security firm Bancroft Global. More recently, funding comes from the Pentagon’s proxy war fund called the 127e program, which bypasses congressional oversight by allowing US special operations forces to use foreign military units as surrogates in counterterrorism missions. Fun stuff.

Across the Gulf of Aden, escalation with Yemen is now taking place.

The Houthi movement (Ansarallah) announced on Wednesday that they will resume attacks on Israeli ships over Israel’s refusal to allow into Gaza what the Western media calls “aid”:

It’s not aid. It’s water. It’s electricity. It’s food. It’s medicine. It’s the stuff of life.

— Eman Abdelhadi (@emanabdelhadi) March 3, 2025

And so the Trump administration is upping sanctions pressure and issuing threats to Yemen (and Iran with belief that will restrict Houthi weapons) and has redesignated Ansarallah as a “foreign terrorist organization” but is also saying that should sanctions fail to achieve their objectives, they will take military action. And so they are.

Still Going After Georgia

Elsewhere, the US hasn’t forgotten about Georgia.

NEW! A bipartisan legislation calling for sanctions against those undermining Georgian democracy, known as the MEGOBARI ACT, has now made its way to the U.S. Senate and the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee is expected to take up in a matter of days

1/3

— Alex Raufoglu (@ralakbar) March 7, 2025

What’s MEGOBARI really about? Former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs James O’Brien was blunt in a July Subcommittee on Europe and Regional Security Cooperation hearing: allow the US to control the country with money pouring into media and NGOs and no China port. Here’s what he said:

Two things. One is it should be clear to the governing party in Georgia that there is a path back, that having free and fair elections without violence against civil society, making whatever transparency requirements they want. This Foreign Agent Law, make it compatible with EU law rather than compatible with Russian law, and not have China develop a deep water port in Anaklia. These are steps that are really important for Georgia to take.

The deep water port at Anakalia refers to China’s deal to build one there on Georgia’s Black Sea coast. So, once again US policy remains the same despite the turnover in government in Washington.

China Counter Strategy

Would the US really be so crazy to retry its Russia “isolation” strategy against China? That would  inevitably mean a collapse of the global economy and a contest of who could withstand the pain longer. China, which is striving for autarky and would, barring future developments, have direct land connections to Russia and Central Asia for minerals, natural resources, and other needs, might not get as hurt as some like to believe. The US, meanwhile, would face product shortages — including in a defense industry reliant on China — and inflation that would make recent years seem quaint by comparison.

More likely is that the bright minds in the bowels of the Blob envision a return to the China of 20 years ago when it helped enrich American oligarchs with its low-wage manufacturing but knew its place. China has other plans and has been preparing for years to withstand US containment efforts. The West’s failed attempt to collapse Russia turned out to be a major gift to China as Moscow and Beijing doubled down on their economic ties.

Here’s a glimpse of the latest Beijing strategy courtesy of Kyle Chan at High Capacity:

Chinese companies are racing to build factories around the world and forge new global supply chains, driven by a desire to circumvent tariffs and secure access to markets. Chinese companies have been building manufacturing plants directly in large target markets, such as the EU and Brazil. And they’ve been building plants in “connector countries” like Mexico and Vietnam that provide access to developed markets through trade agreements. Morocco, for example, has emerged as a surprisingly popular destination for Chinese investment tied to EV and battery manufacturing due to its trade agreements with both the US and the EU.

While tariffs and trade relations may change over time, an expanding global production network creates more robust channels of market access for Chinese companies, particularly as local jobs become attached to Chinese factories. One might see this as the third phase of China’s development of global supply chains more generally. The first phase was about securing access to resources. The second phase—the Belt and Road Initiative—was about building the infrastructure for global production and shipping. And now the third phase is about securing access to markets.

How can the US reasonably be expected to hold back this wave? It’s impossible — at least by peaceful means. That’s why China and Russia continue to insist on “strategic interdependence.” The only other option for the US, in attempting to be the lone actor that can determine global outcomes, burns the world down rather than accept others having a seat at the table.

Notes

[1] Background from The Forge:

Aspects of the global order are being challenged by rising powers such as China, whose economic development and military evolution mean that even a superpower such as the United States can no longer assume Sea Control in contested areas.

This reality manifests itself in General Berger’s guidance, where he is directs the Marine Corps to restructure in order to support Sea Control operations designed to maintain the Navy’s freedom of action.  He sees a return of the Fleet Marine Force concept that was used to good effect during the Pacific Campaign of World War 2 where Marines were integrated into Navy Sea Control operations – in effect working directly for the Navy – rather than being the main effort with the Navy supporting them.

Berger foreshadowed the release of a new concept – the Stand-in Forces – to support the US National Defense Strategy and the US Navy’s Distributed Maritime Operations (DMO) concept.  The Stand-In Forces are designed to generate “technically disruptive, tactical stand-in engagements that confront aggressor naval forces with an array of low signature, affordable and risk-worthy platforms and payloads”.