As news emerges that the US has pulled out of this week’s big green talks at the IMO, Matt Kenney, the head of Laureate Communications, warns readers on how Trump’s economic policies could sideswipe the most ambitious maritime transformation in a generation. Let’s begin with a truth so plain it should not require reiteration: President Trump’s tariff agenda is not a tantrum, nor a theatrical act of economic populism. This cycle of underestimation has repeated often enough to become a caricature. But caricatures, like clichés, conceal as much as they reveal. Beneath the chaos lies a long game, one that is vital to US interests. Trump has pulled the trigger on a plan to restructure the global trading order. (1) To reverse US de-industrialisation. (2) To defend the dollar’s supremacy, and (3) redraw the postwar map of economic and security dependencies around a renewed American centre of gravity. First, unleash tariff disruption on a scale sufficient to unnerve the whole world. Second, establish a permanent framework of reciprocal tariffs to pressure key industries and sort countries in to buckets – green, yellow, and red. Third, and most ambitious, use this leverage to broker a new Bretton Woods-style agreement. A “Mar-a-Lago Accord” in which countries in the green bucket agree to align their currencies with the dollar, pay for American security guarantees, and re-enter a formalised hierarchy of global economic access. If this sounds implausible, consider that the architects of this vision are not amateurs. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a hedge fund veteran who once helped “break the Bank of England”, and senior advisor Stephen Miran, a Harvard economist and author of A User’s Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System, have spent years preparing the intellectual scaffolding for precisely this kind of realignment. They do not see the current tariff chaos as policy failure, but as step one. Trump is just the kind of trash-can banger needed to hammer it home decisively. What the administration is attempting is nothing less than a replacement of the neoliberal order that took shape in the 1980s (one that prioritised capital flows, cheap imports, and strong-dollar finance) with a new order built around controlled access, managed exchange rates, and an industrial base sturdy enough to withstand a war. The geopolitical implications are enormous. But so too are the consequences for sectors caught between the tectonic plates. Global shipping, in particular, faces the risk of being crushed not through negligence, but through omission. The maritime sector is not the object of the trade war, but it may well be its first major casualty. The hidden cost of strategic disruption In recent years, the shipping industry has made a credible attempt to invest in decarbonisation. New orders for dual-fuel vessels capable of running on LNG, methanol, and ammonia are at record highs. European regulators have introduced carbon pricing, lifecycle emissions accounting, and mandatory port infrastructure requirements. Large carriers have begun investing in zero-emission corridors, fuel certification schemes, and alternative bunker networks. For the first time in its history, shipping has the contours of a climate strategy. But it is also a strategy on a knife’s edge. The costs are high. The incentives are fragile. The investment horizon is long and uncertain. Green fuels are vastly more expensive than conventional ones. Port infrastructure is patchy and