Terrorists Firing Missiles at Cargo Ships Are a Geopolitical Threat

FRANCIS P. SEMPA

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Writing in the National Interest, James Holmes, the J.C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and one of our nation’s most perceptive geopolitical thinkers, senses trouble ahead for the world’s maritime powers in reading a report from U.S. Central Command that Yemeni rebels fired an anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) at the bulk cargo ship Unity Explorer (owned by the United Kingdom and flying a Bahamanian flag) in the Red Sea. It was one of several attacks on commercial ships by Houthi rebels — attacks which Central Command characterized as “a direct threat to international commerce and maritime security” and that Shashank Joshi, defense editor of the Economist, calls a “threat to international shipping.” But, as Holmes points out, the threat may be much greater. (RELATED: Iran Is Backing Attacks Against US Troops)

Holmes suggests that the ASBM used by Yemeni rebels a few days ago is likely traceable to Iran and China. China’s PLA, Holmes points out, has a monopoly on ASBMs, noting that the “DF-21D and DF-26 missiles anchor China’s anti-access and area-denial network” which enables Chinese commanders “to strike . . . moving ships at sea up to 2,000 nautical miles distant.” Holmes believes that Chinese Communist Party leaders are “proliferating ASBMs around the Eurasian perimeter” for sound geopolitical reasons. To understand those reasons it is necessary to revisit the classical geopolitical writings of one Briton and two Americans: Halford Mackinder, Alfred Thayer Mahan, and Nicholas Spykman.

Eurasia Is Central to Geopolitics

Mackinder, Mahan, and Spykman approached global geopolitics from the insular perspective of their maritime countries. Although they differed in some aspects of geopolitical thought, they agreed on the centrality of the Eurasian supercontinent to world politics. 

Mackinder wrote in Democratic Ideals and Reality (1919) that the inner “Heartland” of Eurasia was the key geographical region of global politics. Mahan and Spykman, on the other hand, saw the crescent-shaped geographical region abutting the Heartland — which Spykman in The Geography of the Peace (1944) called the “Rimland” — as crucial to control “the destinies of the world.” Mahan in The Problem of Asia (1901) wrote that the world’s maritime powers needed to maintain access to Eurasia’s shores to uphold the global balance of power. All three agreed, however, that, as Mackinder wrote in Britain and the British Seas (1902), “the unity of the ocean is the simple physical fact underlying the dominant value of sea power in the modern globe-wide world.”

Holmes in his National Interest article concisely summarizes the Mackinder-Mahan-Spykman analysis by describing the “‘rimlands’ separating the heartland from the sea as an oceangoing hegemon’s portal to project influence into the Eurasian supercontinent.” Those classical British and American strategists understood that sea power (and now, of course, combined with air power) could only influence the Eurasian balance of power by gaining and maintaining access to the Eurasian littoral by predominant sea power and Rimland allies. “A dominant navy,” Holmes explains, “couldn’t control events unless it could wrest command of the ‘marginal seas’ around the periphery from local defenders.”

China’s proliferation of ASBMs, Holmes suggests, is part of a strategy “aimed at warding off a dominant Western navy” from the Eurasian periphery. ASBMs and other “bleeding-edge technologies” of “access and area denial,” Holmes writes, “could allow resident Asian powers [China, Iran, Russia] to undo centuries of Western maritime supremacy — and in a turn undo Western stewardship over the international order.” 

What Holmes is suggesting is that the Yemeni rebel attack on maritime shipping using an ASBM may mean that China’s known strategy of access and area denial in the South China Sea may be expanding to other regions of the Eurasian Rimland with global geopolitical implications. American strategists and policymakers would do well to remind themselves of the sage advice uttered by Nicholas Spykman during World War II: “The United States must recognize once again, and permanently, that the power constellation in Europe and Asia is of everlasting concern to her, both in time of war and in time of peace.”