The Navy Made America a Superpower Once. Can It Again?

Alexander Wooley

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In 1987, with the publication of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, historian Paul Kennedy ignited a firestorm. His sin was forecasting the United States’ decline. The notoriety ensured that his book became a bestseller and that Kennedy would be consulted by U.S. presidential candidates; a copy even made its way onto al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden’s bookshelf. But critics lashed out at Kennedy’s apparent defeatism; military strategist Edward Luttwak’s review of the book was titled “Paul Kennedy’s Rise and Fall.”

Victory at Sea is not The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers—neither groundbreaking nor likely to be controversial. Instead, it hearkens back to his The Rise And Fall of British Naval Mastery in its theme of maritime superiority being intimately connected to economic power and industrial capacity. Kennedy, the J. Richardson Dilworth professor of history and director of international security studies at Yale University, is clear at the outset that the book began as brief text to accompany acclaimed maritime artist Ian Marshall’s paintings of warships, and it grew from there. (And the paintings are stunning: If you’re not stirred by a portrait of the Italian battleship Vittorio Veneto at La Spezia, Italy, a marriage of painter Claude Monet and Capt. Alfred Thayer Mahan, this book may not be for you.) The result is part coffee-table book, part sweeping, single-volume narrative. The scope is most reminiscent of historian Craig Symonds’s 2018 World War II at Sea: A Global History.

In Victory at Sea, there’s nostalgia on two fronts. There’s Kennedy harkening back to his earliest days when he published works specializing in naval history. More broadly, there’s nostalgia for an America ascendant. In 1938, the U.S. Navy had 380 active ships. By the end of 1944, that number was 6,084. But Victory at Sea looks at more than just the United States’ steel-hulled rise to superpower status: It also explores the other five major naval powers of the war—Britain, France, Germany, Italy, and Japan—starting in 1936 when rearmament began in earnest.