The US was never a major commercial shipbuilding hub aside from during WW2 when manufacturing capacity was "reallocated" to shipbuilding. We were a very insular

The US was never a major commercial shipbuilding hub aside from during WW2 when manufacturing capacity was "reallocated" to shipbuilding. We were a very insular regional power that concentrated on our continent and some archipelagos with limited strategic value until WW2. It was the UK that was the center of commercial shipbuilding before the Japanese, Koreans, and Chinese took that mantle. The US had a decent military shipbuilding industry, but they atrophed after the Cold War ended, and the incentive for naval warfare capacity receded until recently.