Gateway to What?

The Port of Seattle marks its 100th anniversary this year, and what is remarkable about that milestone is not how much things have changed during the intervening decades, but how much remains the same.

OK, the website devoted to the ports centennial (www.portseattle100.org)that, well grant you, is new. The Port of Seattle probably didnt post anything on the internet when it went into business in 1911.

But the underlying concept of what the port is and does is remarkably unchanged. Railroad networks reaching across the United States bring goods to and from the port, where theyre loaded onto and unloaded from ships headed to and from, for the most part, Asia.

Consider a 1920s vintage ad posted on the centennial website boasting Seattle is the nearest and fastest route to the Orient, is Bringing the Far East near and is the Gateway to the Orient. To emphasize the point, the accompanying map shows the preferable Seattle-to-Yokohama route vs. the longer, slower journey from San Francisco to the Japanese port.

Even better, the ad notes, the Port of Seattle is connected with all transcontinental rail lines.

In that context, whats also remarkable is that for all of the consistency of purpose and function during the past 100 years, the Port of Seattle could be in for some dramatic changes in its role in world commerce during the next 25 yearsnever mind the next 100.

With competition from other North American ports as well as land and sea routes, and shifts in global trading patterns likely to emerge in the coming two decades, the Port of Seattle faces huge challenges in remaining just one of many gateways to Asia in this new century, much less contending for the role of being The Gateway.

The port has been through this sort of thing before. The silk trade with Japan was at one time a significant element of the ports business. Railroads dedicated priority trains to move silk to the East Coast as fast as possible. By the early 1930s, that trade had dwindled due to many factors, including increased use of the Panama Canal.

Competition will resonate with those considering the ports future in 2011, since the expansion of the Panama Canal to accommodate larger ships that will go directly from Asia to Gulf and East Coast ports is one of the serious threats Seattle now faces. So are new, expanded, renovated and improved ports all along the West Coast, from Los AngelesLong Beach to Prince Rupert, B.C.

Just as important will be what goods will move through those ports, and from where and to whom. Americas raw materialscoal, logs, wheat, even recycled paperwill continue to be in demand to feed Asias factories. But will China continue to be such a huge supplier of finished goods to the United States when it has its own burgeoning domestic demand to supply? What if more trade shifts to Chinas suppliers and competitors closer to home, from South Korea to Vietnam to Indonesia and Malaysia, each with its own growing industrial infrastructure and middle class of consumers?

In a recently published book, Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power, author Robert Kaplan suggests that while a focus on the Atlantic was yesterdays news, focusing on the Pacific may be todays. The real actionpolitically, economically, militarilyin the new century will be in the arc from Oman across India to Singapore.

The Port of Seattle embarks on its second century having endured the recession, landing some new clients and tackling internal financial and managerial shortcomings that had some wondering for a while just how dedicated it was to the maritime shipping business.

But internal challenges are the smaller part of the larger question about the ports future. What role does the Port of Seattle play in the new global economic scheme? Does it have a role? It needs to figure that out, lest the story of the port at 150 be a saga of its devolution to a quiet, out-of-the-way outpost on the Pacific sending out the occasional can of smoked salmon.