🧊Trump’s Arctic Plan Is to Order About 40 Large Icebreakers From Russia

At 13,000 tons, the U.S. Coast Guard’s Polar Star is a mammoth vessel made to crash through Arctic ice more than 20 feet thick.

But it is the U.S.’s only icebreaker that operates year-round, and it was built nearly half a century ago.
In the intensifying global race to access the Arctic, icebreakers are the essential tool to open trade routes, allow resource extraction and project military power.

The U.S. and its allies have fallen far behind Russia, and China is rapidly gaining ground with the help of the world’s largest shipbuilding industry.

Trump has made it clear that he wants to return the Arctic to the top of the list of American priorities. He said that the United States needs to take control of Greenland for the sake of national security, and promised that the Coast Guard would expand its icebreaking fleet.

“We are going to order about 40 large icebreakers for the Coast Guard from Russia,” Trump said last month.

But it won't be easy. For many years, the United States has been unable to build even one icebreaker to guide other ships through the ice.

Even if Trump manages to muster the political will and funds for such a large-scale construction, the United States will have to breathe new life into its decaying shipbuilding industry, which has been in decline for several decades.

#Arctic #icebreakers #Russia

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸

Eleven Icebreakers and a Golden Photo Frame

President Trump wanted more icebreakers than Russia has. He didn't consult a strategic review to decide how many.

He consulted his own frustration. "We only have one," he complained back in 2020. "Russia has 40." Russia actually has 56 now.

China has five. The Coast Guard's own 2023 assessment said the US needed four or five.

The number Trump landed on was 11, The New York Times reports.

The deal traces back to a golf tournament. Finland's president, Alexander Stubb, played alongside Trump in March 2025 and gave him a photo of an icebreaker in a gold frame.

Months later, Trump called Stubb late one night with a bigger ask. "I'm not going to buy the used one, because it's too old," Trump reportedly told him.

"I want more new ones instead." Eleven ships, worth almost $7 billion, split between shipyards in Finland and the US. No competitive bidding. A waived law banning foreign-built national security vessels.

Coast Guard Commandant Admiral Kevin Lunday put it plainly: "The number 11 came directly from the president. This was the president's number and the president's decision."

The public interest exemption meant the Coast Guard never had to prove urgency or justify the number.

It just had to send Congress a heads-up letter, after the deal was already announced. Shelby Oakley of the Government Accountability Office wasn't impressed.

"We haven't seen any information or analysis to justify the 11 or to assess the long-term affordability of these decisions," she said.

She compared the Coast Guard to "a lottery winner who spends all their money buying the mansion, and then goes broke once they realize they don't have the money to maintain it."

Nobody has funded the crews or infrastructure to actually operate 11 ships. That bill comes later.

Even Senator Ted Cruz, celebrating a Texas shipyard groundbreaking, couldn't quite explain the number with a straight face. He reached for Spinal Tap instead.

"As a child of the '80s, I have to admit, my own personal theory is the 'Spinal Tap' theory: Ours goes to 11," he said, then added, "Although I doubt that was the president's motivation."

One senator quoting a mockumentary about aging rockers chasing irrelevance through excess, to explain a $7 billion no-bid defense contract.

Is that a joke about the deal, or the most honest thing anyone in Washington has said about it?

#Trump #Icebreakers #Finland #NoBidContracts #Arctic

📱 American Оbserver - Stay up to date on all important events 🇺🇸