With each new Congress, the perennial attackers of the Jones Act come out of the woodwork.
Passed after World War I as a maritime component of our national defense, this act required that all cargo moved by water between two American ports be moved on ships that are American owned, built, repaired, and crewed by Americans. Jones Act critics, predominantly free trade economists, view the Jones Act as “crony capitalism”. They argue that the Jones Act has no real impact on our national security because modern conflicts like the one in Kuwait, deliver troops and supplies in airplanes.
But that was a very limited war and required the Pentagon commandeering thousands of commercial, civilian, cargo, and passenger planes.
In Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, I served as his liaison within industrial unions. Reagan was a staunch supporter of America’s Merchant Marine industry because throughout the wars of the 20th century, that fleet delivered millions of war fighters and billions and billions of tons of equipment to resupply them.
Reagan pledged to revive the maritime industry. In plan entitled: “A Program for the Development of an Effective Maritime Strategy,” he focused on two factors: the difference in size between the Soviet Merchant Fleet and the U.S. Merchant Marine, and the U.S. trade policies that allowed our trading partners advantages denied to American companies. Reagan noted that the size of the U.S. merchant fleet had fallen from its high point of 1,900 ships in 1950 to only 500 merchant ships in 1980. On the trade issue he noted that in 1950, America carried 42% of U.S. foreign trade, whereas in 1980, we carried only 5%.
Reagan believed that the U.S. had lost its advantage because Congress had allowed our trading partners to deliver their trade goods to America on their ships, but would not allow America the same privilege — a practice deemed by economists as a violation of free trade. Reagan added that the international shipping trade is laced with a network of foreign governmental preferences that strengthen foreign fleets at the expense of U.S. Maritime interests.
In my 40 years of observing free trade economists, I have never once seen them oppose foreign countries’ cargo preferences as unfair trade practices. Yet they unanimously oppose cargo preference for American shippers as a violation of free trade.
Knowing that his own economists opposed the Jones Act, Reagan and his campaign manager Bill Casey, former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, secretly agreed for Reagan to appear before the 1980 National Maritime Union Convention to announce that a Reagan administration would preserve the Jones Act. The convention unanimously revoked its two-week-old endorsement of President Jimmy Carter and endorsed Reagan on the spot. Reagan did not need the endorsement of the NMU. He knew he was going to win the election. He supported the Jones Act because he knew the national security consequences of losing the rest of the maritime fleet.
In Reagan’s day, the Chinese did not have a merchant fleet or a navy. But now the Chinese carrying their own merchandised trade on their ships. They now have over 3,000 merchant vessels, all capable of carrying troops and military cargo, and a navy that includes aircraft carriers and submarines along with missiles that they claim can take out any of our warships.
The Chinese have converted atolls in the Philippine sea into mini aircraft landing strips and warned the U.S. to stay out of their newly claimed territorial waters. They are also building ports around the globe, increasing their ability to move throughout the oceans with impunity.
Yet the number of U.S. merchant ships has fallen from the 500 that Reagan saw as a crisis to fewer than 100 ships today.
Some of my conservative colleagues argue that the next war will be a cyberwar or a nuclear war where the kind of ships used in World Wars 1 and 2 will be useless. But history tells us that wars are won or lost by a nation’s ability to put its boots on the ground. American boots in both World Wars were delivered by American ships. The free trade economists have not addressed any of these issues.
In reality, the free trade economists are beating a dead dog. In many ways, the U.S. maritime industry is already dead. Without a vibrant maritime industry, America will not be a global sea power in the 21st century. The loss of this industry will have consequences. The reduced number of sailings will reduce the number of licensed engineers to operate commercial ships. Hence, we will have neither ships nor crews to man them. As we lose merchant ships, we lose the yards that build and repair them, which is of major concern to the Navy. As of this writing, the cancellation of four Jones Act ships being built in a yard in Philadelphia is now threatening the closing of yet another yard.
This issue is too important to be settled in the newspapers. It needs serious congressional hearings where hard questions about our national security are addressed. Nonetheless, Reagan was right on the Jones Act. Without it, America will not have a blue water maritime fleet. When the next inevitable conflict is over, hopefully the boots on the ground will still be American.
Michael P. Balzano, is executive director of the National Industrial Base Workforce Coalition.
