The Finland Model: burden-sharing that builds American yards.

I have determined that it is in the national security interest of the United States to increase domestic shipbuilding capacity using the Memorandum of Understanding of October 9, 2025, between the United States and Finland with regard to medium icebreaker construction as a model.

The general rule is that the Navy does not build warships in foreign yards. This memorandum waives it for up to three ship classes — but only for a foreign supplier that simultaneously builds or buys a U.S. shipyard, builds every ship after the first two in that yard, hires and trains an American workforce, licenses its proprietary shipbuilding techniques to the U.S. operation, and sources a U.S. supply chain for construction and maintenance. Access to American naval procurement is the payment; a transplanted industrial base is the price. Burden-sharing, in this construction, is not an ally spending more on its own defense — it is an ally capitalizing America’s.

One further clause extends the doctrine’s reach: the memorandum directs a plan to channel financial resources pledged in the administration’s trade deals into the U.S. maritime industrial base. Money committed at the negotiating table as trade concessions is being routed, by name, into shipyards. Trade policy, allied industrial capacity, and naval force structure are treated as one ledger — which is roughly the doctrine’s definition of itself.