Francis P. Sempa
Former national security adviser Robert O’Brien, writing in National Review, warns about the “dire state of America’s Navy relative to China’s.” America’s shipbuilding deficit and the “declining trajectory” of the U.S. fleet “endangers our national security.” China has more warships than the United States does. “On a tonnage basis,” he explains, “China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times greater than ours.” O’Brien characterizes this as a “national security crisis” because the “future of a free and open Indo-Pacific is at stake.” What is ultimately at stake is who shall be “mistress of the seas.”
The problem, writes retired Army Colonel M. Thomas Davis in Real Clear Defense, is America’s diminished defense industrial base that originated with the so-called post-Cold War “peace dividend.” Since then, Davis notes, “the American shipbuilding industry . . . is largely gone, replaced by Asian shipyards.” China’s navy is already the world’s largest, and its relative lead in shipbuilding places it in a position to replace the U.S. as the world’s leading naval power should current trends continue.
But China doesn’t need to replace America as the world’s leading naval power to take Taiwan, dominate the South China Sea, and change the balance of power in the Indo-Pacific. The Indo-Pacific region, Robert Kaplan noted in Asia’s Cauldron, is a “seascape . . . where the spaces between the principal nodes of population are overwhelmingly maritime.” Kaplan described the South China Sea as the “throat of the Western Pacific and Indian Ocean” and the “heart of Eurasia’s navigable rimland.” The geography of East Asia and the western Pacific invites a naval arms race, but the problem is only one side (China) is racing. It is as if Great Britain in the first decade of the 20th century stood-by as the Kaiser’s navy expanded in an effort to command the North Sea and the English channel. Perhaps that is why, according to NBC News, China’s President Xi Jinping “bluntly told President Joe Biden during their recent summit in San Francisco that Beijing will reunify Taiwan with mainland China.”
The great British geopolitical thinker Sir Halford Mackinder wrote in 1902: “Other empires have had their day, and so may that of Britain . . . The European phase of history is passing away, as have passed the Fluviatile and Mediterranean phases. A new balance of power is being evolved . . .” Mackinder’s premonition that the British empire was in its last years was based on his understanding of geography, economics, demographics, and technology. “In the presence of vast Powers, broad-based on the resources of half continents,” he explained, “Britain could not again become mistress of the seas.” And being mistress of the seas was necessary for Great Britain to maintain her empire because, as Mackinder noted, “The unity of the ocean is the simple physical fact underlying the dominant value of sea-power in the modern globe-wide world.”
The quotations above are from Mackinder’s mostly forgotten book Britain and the British Seas. It was written two years before Mackinder’s more famous article “The Geographical Pivot of History” appeared in the Geographical Journal, and 17 years before the publication of his post-World War I masterpiece Democratic Ideals and Reality, in which he provided a geopolitical sketch of world politics and set forth his famous “Heartland” concept. Britain and the British Seas was in a sense a preview of Mackinder’s more famous geopolitical writings, and today it may serve as a warning to U.S. policymakers and strategists at a time when America may be entering the final years of the world order it fashioned after the Second World War.
That American world order was, like Britain’s, based on sea power (plus air power) and economic preeminence. New York succeeded London as the center of the world’s economy. The U.S. dollar succeeded the British pound as the most influential global currency. The American navy succeeded Britain’s navy as “mistress of the seas.” As Britain’s empire receded, the United States replaced Britain’s imperial reach--in the Mediterranean, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Britain’s role as the “holder” of the European balance of power, gave way to America’s role as the “holder” of the Eurasian balance of power.
Mackinder is often mistakenly viewed as a proponent of land power vis-a-vis sea power, but his geopolitical worldview was not that simple. He viewed the technological advances of the industrial revolution--railroads, motor cars--as improving the speed and reach of land transportation, thus allowing continental-based states to be more politically cohesive and able to expand into contiguous areas more rapidly. His great fear was that a hostile continental land power (e.g. Germany, Russia, or China), or alliances of such land powers, could dominate Eurasia and use its vast resources to construct the world’s most powerful navy, thereby becoming “mistress of the seas.” Remember, in Britain and the British Seas he wrote about the “dominate value of sea power,” not land power, in global politics.
When the Cold War ended, Colin S. Gray, who was an intellectual disciple of both Mackinder and Alfred Thayer Mahan, wrote The Leverage of Sea Power (1992) in which he demonstrated by case studies that sea powers have won most of the great power conflicts throughout history. Gray, like Mackinder, Mahan, and Kaplan, understood that the United States must maintain global naval supremacy or go the way of Great Britain.
Robert Kaplan in his important essay “The Return of Marco Polo’s World,” implored U.S. policymakers (the essay was originally written for the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment) to understand who we are:
In geopolitical terms, the United States is a maritime power,
operating from the greatest of the island satellites of the
Eurasian supercontinent, whose mission is to defend a
free trading order from which we ourselves benefit. In
the tradition of the British imperial navy, we protect the
global commons.
Kaplan, echoing Mackinder, noted that “Britain’s historic effort to prevent any one power from gaining dominance over the European mainland is similar to ours now in Eurasia.” Kaplan emphasized, however, that this does not mean that the United States needs to be militarily engaged in many parts of the world. What Clausewitz called the “center of gravity” in 21st century global geopolitics is the Indo-Pacific region. It is there--not Ukraine, not the Middle East--that the United States needs to focus its strategic gaze and its military and diplomatic resources.
Kaplan wrote an earlier essay in which he noted that most global commerce travels the world’s sea lanes, including most American imports and exports, and the bulk of the world’s population lives near the sea, and concluded that “the relative decline of our Navy is a big, dangerous fact to which our elites appear blind.” That was 16 years ago, and things have gotten worse.
Mackinder concluded Britain and the British Seas with a warning that Britain was growing poorer and “may no longer have the means of building and maintaining an adequate fleet, and may lose command of the sea.” That is precisely what Robert O’Brien and M. Thomas Davis are saying about the United States. Xi’s confidence in “bluntly” informing President Biden that China will take Taiwan either peacefully or by force, and the Biden administration’s failure to reveal that after the summit are perhaps indicative of the shifting balance of power in the western Pacific. I’ll close by paraphrasing Mackinder: Other empires have had their day, and if present trends continue so may that of America.
No comments:
Post a Comment