Why Arctic geopolitics matters to business

In this edition of Author Talks, the McKinsey Global Institute’s Rebeca Robboy chats with Rana Foroohar, global business columnist and associate editor at The Financial Times, about Sea Change: America’s New Great Game in the Arctic Circle (Crown/Penguin Random House, October 2026). Four years after her first Author Talks interview, Foroohar returns with fresh perspectives on systems thinking and a firsthand look at how commerce, security, and geopolitics are converging in the High North. She explains why the Arctic is emerging as a critical arena for global competition—and a strategic crossroads for nations and businesses. An edited version of the conversation follows.

Why did you write this book?

I decided to write Sea Change for so many reasons. My last book, Homecoming: The Path to Prosperity in a Post-Global World, explored decoupling and deglobalization—the development of more regionalization around the world.

I knew we were heading into a time when regions and countries would look to do more locally. And there was going to be more resiliency and redundancy in systems. So the question was what to write about.

We saw chips as a topic for industrial strategy, but chips are not particularly visual. As an author, I was seeking a very visually compelling topic that would create a kind of “rippin’ yarn.” I wanted a single narrative for smart readers who don’t necessarily get into the policy weeds, with the hope that they would find it compelling.

That’s when I started thinking about ships. Shipbuilding and maritime have been topics for the Biden administration and for both Trump administrations.

China launched a 360-degree strategy to own that industry and its peripheral industries, and to think holistically about how many ships it wanted to build. China also explored how that thinking would tie to other endeavors, such as efforts to own more rare earth minerals, port land, and agricultural supplies.

Twenty years later, America has gone from being—by some metrics—the leading shipbuilder to making 0.1 percent of the world’s ships by tonnage. China owns the majority of the industry. The US is still the world’s largest economy, and at the time I wrote the book, it had 187 ocean-going vessels. China has 5,500 ocean-going vessels.

That number made me think, “Wow, we’re an Arctic nation. If we’re going to have more control over the Western and the Northern Hemispheres, we have to pay more attention to the Arctic.” That realization is important if I want to understand potential conflict in the South China Seas, issues in the Strait of Hormuz, global energy and food markets, inflation, and, particularly, regionalization and spheres of influence, which gets to the topic about the Arctic.

I was able to take a three-week trip aboard America’s one icebreaker [at the time], the Healy. There are three now, although the Healy is still the primary icebreaker that the US operates in the Arctic. I was able to closely observe these issues and see how the Arctic, in particular, is becoming a theater of great-power competition between the US and China. Maritime is at the heart of that. Security, energy, and climate are all elements coming together in the High North. So that’s the basis of the book.

One of the reasons I named the book Sea Change is not just because I was on an icebreaker with the Coast Guard for ten days, but because we really are at a point of sea change in the global political economy.

What was it like aboard the Healy icebreaker in the Arctic?

What is it like to be on a North Pole–bound Coast Guard icebreaker for ten days? Generally, I get seasick, so my first port of call was to the pharmacy to get a little patch. I wasn’t seasick at all. But it’s a good thing I did.

What’s interesting about sailing in the High North is that you need to be on an icebreaker, which is a vessel that has a special hull.

It’s 12 inches of fortified steel, and it goes up and over ice, and slams down to break that ice. It’s a very extreme experience to be on a ship like that. The High North has some of the most extreme ocean weather, with waves up to 40 feet.

While aboard, one night in my bunk with casing on the sides, I realized that we had tilted so much that I had rolled and awakened myself by slamming onto the other side of my bed. That’s a normal occurrence. But there are some incredibly magical moments, such as the photos I took of the aurora borealis, the Northern Lights, which were phenomenal. At 3:00 a.m., it was magical to go to the top of the ship in the middle of nowhere—at the top of the world—and just be enveloped in this kind of ultra green glow.

Finally, as for the Healy itself, any ship meant to travel long distances in places as extreme as the Arctic is like a floating city. With its own power generation and water desalination, it has all the systems that you would need to power a small city.

What surprised you most aboard the Healy—and while writing the book?

Multitasking is something that we all have to deal with in the sector or industry in which we work. Being aboard the Healy as the only Coast Guard vessel in the Arctic means that every single moment of the ship’s time has to be used for multiple purposes. For example, during the ten-day journey, our missions included sonar mapping of coastal shelf areas. We mapped an area the size of Puerto Rico that had never been mapped before. That was one of the tasks that the boat was meant to do. The other was climate research about what we can learn about weather patterns, about sea patterns, and changing waves, and how we can better understand forest fires in Canada that place the entire Northern Seaboard under smog. These are things that insurance companies and financial companies want to know about.

Vessels such as the Healy are used for scientific, military, and security purposes. As one of the officers on board said, “You have to meet presence with presence.” That’s part of what’s happening in this region right now.

The most surprising thing about writing the book is that the topics that I outline—climate change, great-power competition, energy needs, security—can be scary and anxiety-provoking at times.

There’s a lot to be glad about, and it’s an untold story.

We can combine manufacturing expertise, resources, talent, and knowledge transfer.

Why do you call the Arctic ‘the new Great Game’?

It’s almost as though there is a great game going on right now, so I use that analogy. It’s a reference to the great game of the 19th century between Russia and Britain, in which those two powers, over 100 years, began to try and map Central Asia, India, and the passageways that would take them to crucial minerals and riches. At that point, those riches were gold and other kinds of ores, now it’s rare earth minerals, natural gas, oil, and more.

Why should business leaders care about the Arctic?

Some readers are very enchanted by the idea of the Arctic, and they’ll simply be interested in following that story. Other readers may say, “Why should I care about the Arctic? What’s up there?”

There’s a lot up there. Before climate change, which is in some ways the protagonist of this story, we didn’t have to care as a multinational, because there were very few opportunities for commerce. There were no easy ways to get under the tundra and permafrost to reach the minerals and the resources there. In fact, this area is the single biggest untapped region on the planet for resources such as rare earth elements and fossil fuels.

It matters because it’s a big choke point. What are the commerce pathways that nations can control and feel secure about? What parts of the world, the spheres of influence, can the US, China, Europe, and other middle powers control?

Where will the new trade pathways be? How can you ship your energy if there are problems in the Strait of Hormuz? The Arctic will be one of those places. And China, always the long-term planner, has a Polar Silk Road that they have been planning for many years now, in addition to the One Belt, One Road initiative, or New Silk Road.

How do you think about the economy, markets, and society’s well-being with a systemic view, as opposed to a more limited market-knows-best view?

Why does shipbuilding matter for economic competitiveness?

A lot of people wonder why we should care about shipbuilding, which seems like an old-fashioned industry. There are several reasons.

If you read the [Section] 301 case in shipbuilding against China, the Chinese decided to make this one of the strategic sectors that they would prioritize holistically with different national resources, subsidies, training—many integrated industrial policy strategies, which is the only way you can do industrial strategy—in an integrated, holistic way.¹

They decided to prioritize it because it’s about supply chains, security, resiliency. If you don’t control your own shipping industry, you’re in trouble. You’re vulnerable to blockades and to supply cutoffs.

It also gets at the fact that in this new world, this post-neoliberal, post–Bretton Woods world that we’re living in, resiliency matters. It’s not just about efficiency anymore; it’s about resilience, and you need to balance the two.

Why does systems thinking matter now?

Systems thinking is a major topic in this book and in all four of my books. How do you think about the economy, markets, and society’s well-being with a systemic view, as opposed to a more limited market-knows-best view? Sometimes markets do know best.

The political economy swings back and forth like a pendulum. I delved into this topic in Homecoming. The last big shift was the Reagan–Thatcher era. During that era, we saw globalization and a lot of trade happening in the world. But then when it gets too extreme, as many people in the past ten to 20 years feel that it has, there’s pushback. There’s an anti-globalization movement and a sense that we need a little more say at the national level about what’s happening.

That’s when you start to get into things like industrial strategy. Now, every major region is pursuing an industrial strategy: Europe is making its own ships, as are the US and Asia. You’re seeing more areas start to say, “What do we really need to make at home?”

I often give McKinsey a shoutout because I’ve been using McKinsey Global Institute [MGI] research for a long time in my own columns. And I have often thought to myself, “I wish there was some kind of national resiliency czar who had a MGI-esque platform where all the information about resources, talent, and IP [intellectual property] could be shared in a way that would make it easier for everyone—for business, for policymakers.”

We’re moving slowly but surely toward something more like that, but we still have a long way to go.

What defines the new era we’re operating in, or ‘sea change,’ and what matters most in navigating it?

One of the reasons I named the book Sea Change is not just because I was on an icebreaker with the Coast Guard for ten days, but because we really are at a point of sea change in the global political economy. If you’re an economic history buff, as I am, and you look back, about every 100, 75, 50 years, the pendulum shifts. It tends to go through a period of a lot of globalization, financialization, and new-business creation. Eventually, you reach an extreme level of that.

Then the pendulum swings the other way, resulting in greater regionalization and a greater focus on national politics and resilience.

That is where we are right now, because the world is dynamic, and when one system becomes too extreme, it tends to swing back in the other direction. Now, those periods when the pendulum is swinging are very dynamic, as they tend to be when great fortunes are made.

I hope that, in writing this book, I’ll help business leaders better understand what the future might look like and how they should think and plan for it.