The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate pdfdrive com

The Influence of Sea Power Upon History,
1660–1783
, published in 1890, which affected the thinking of Presidents
William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt—as well as that of Germany’s
Kaiser Wilhelm II—and helped prompt the naval buildup prior to World War I.
Mahan showed that because the sea is the “great highway” or “wide common” of
civilization, naval power—the power to protect merchant fleets—had always
been the determining factor in global political struggles, especially as “both
travel and traffic by water have always been easier and cheaper than by land.”
The strength of his argument lay as much in its originality as in its
comprehensiveness.
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Mahan begins his epic with the assertion that “a peaceful, gain-loving nation
is not far-sighted, and far-sightedness is needed for adequate military
preparation, especially in these days.” Mahan is neither a warmonger nor is he
championing despotism. In fact, as he points out, it was because of despotism
and “fierce avarice” that neither Spain nor Portugal, despite being great sea
powers, were in the final analysis great nations. Nonetheless, “Whether a
democratic government will have the foresight, the keen sensitiveness to
national position,” necessary to deter adversaries is “an open question.” For the
friendly foreign ports that are found the world over do not always endure, he
tells us. Not only are nations at peace in general ignorant of the tragedy that
comes from not cultivating a tragic sensibility, but their historians are
specifically ignorant of the sea, ignorant of the vast expanses of the earth that
exert so much influence on the dry-land regions, and contribute to their security
and prosperity. Thus, it is urgent, he warns, to write about the history of naval
war: particularly because the principles of such war have remained constant,
despite the technological advances from oared galley to steamship (and to
nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and submarines in our day). Mahan illustrates
this by a landbound army analogy:
When the march on foot was replaced by carrying troops in coaches,
when the latter in turn gave place to railroads, the scale of distances
was increased, or, if you will, the scale of time diminished; but the
principles which dictated the point at which the army should be
concentrated, the direction in which it should move, the part of the
enemy’s position which it should assail, the protection of
communications, were not altered.
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Mahan embraces the period from 1660, when the sailing ship era “had fairly
begun,” to 1783, the end of the American Revolution. He notes that George
Washington partly attributed America’s victory in its war for independence to
France’s control of the seas—even as decades earlier France had lost the Seven
Years’ War partly because of its neglect of sea power. Yet Mahan’s panoramic
commentary on naval tactics, as well as his illustrations about the criticality of
the sea in human history, range much further back. It was the Roman control of
the water that forced Hannibal “to that long, perilous march through Gaul in
which more than half his veteran troops wasted away. Throughout the war, the
[Roman] legions passed by water, unmolested and unwearied, between Spain,
which was Hannibal’s base, and Italy.” Mahan points out that there were no great
sea battles in the Second Punic War, because Rome’s mastery of the
Mediterranean was a deciding factor in Carthage’s defeat. If the Mediterranean
Sea were a flat desert, Mahan writes, and the land were the mountains rising off
the desert floor, a dominant navy is the force capable of traveling back and forth
across the desert from one mountain range to another at will. This was the case
with Rome. But because water is a strange element, and sailors “from time
immemorial a strange race apart,” we don’t hold navies in the high regard that
we should. “The navy is essentially a light corps,” Mahan goes on, “it keeps
open the communications between its own ports; it obstructs those of the enemy;
but it sweeps the sea for the service of the land, it controls the desert that man
may live and thrive on the habitable globe.”
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And so, Mahan intones, “It is not the taking of individual ships or convoys”
that is crucial; rather, “it is the possession of that overbearing power on the sea
which drives the enemy’s flag from it, or allows it to appear only as a fugitive”
that is so important. And “if a nation be so situated that it is neither forced to
defend itself by land nor induced to seek extension of its territory by way of the
land, it has, by the very unity of its aim directed upon the sea, an advantage as
compared with a people one of whose boundaries are continental.”
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England and America are so situated, and both have experienced long periods
of global power in the course of history. But America’s geographical position,
Mahan implies, has real disadvantages, too. Yes, America is a massive, well-
endowed, virtual island in the temperate zone, independent of the debilitating
power struggles in Eurasia, but at the same time it is a yawning distance from
Eurasian ports, especially in the Pacific, which inhibits its ability to exert
influence over them. The building of a Central American canal in Panama,
which he foresees in his book, will bring American merchant and war fleets into

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greater contact with both ends of Eurasia. But the distance will still be great, and
that will be the “cause of enormous expense.” Though the real effect of the
Panama Canal will be the transformation of the Caribbean from a “terminus” and
“place of local traffic” into “one of the great highways of the world,” as the ships
of not only the United States, but of European nations, transit the canal en route
to the Pacific. With this, he says, “it will not be so easy as heretofore” for the
United States “to stand aloof from international complications.”
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Geography, which makes the isthmian canal possible in the first place, also
necessitates closer ties between the United States and its Central American and
Caribbean neighbors in order to protect the canal and control the seas nearby. By
making America physically closer to Asia, and more involved with Europe
through shipping, the canal would help effect the eventual enfeeblement of
isolationism and the consequent rise of a muscular liberal internationalism in the
corridors of power in Washington. But it certainly wasn’t destiny, despite the
commanding role of geography. For the Panama Canal was the upshot of several
phenomena all involving human agency: the Spanish-American War, the great
power politics that ultimately denied any European nation a role in the project,
the backroom deal-making that resulted in the choice of Panama over Nicaragua,
the conquest of disease in the Central American tropics, and above all immense
labor and ingenuity. Once again, geography provides the backdrop for what
human choice arranges.
And Mahan clearly seeks to influence human choice. In his thumping book,
propitiously published the same year that the U.S. Army consolidated the
American continent with a virtual final (if hideous) victory in the Indian Wars,
and only a few years before the United States would gain, as a result of war,
Spain’s empire in the Western Pacific as well as dominance in the Caribbean,
Mahan issues a call to arms through global sea power. Mahan is not so much a
geographer as a historian and tactician. He represents an imperialistic sensibility
which carries with it obvious geographical implications. This is the decisive
explanation for Spykman’s high regard for him. Not that Spykman was an
enthusiast of conquest; only that he intuitively grasped, as Mahan did, that
America would have no choice but to engage in worldwide power struggles
because of its own geographically privileged position in the Western
Hemisphere, which gave it influence in the Eastern Hemisphere.
Mahan, as one would expect, had enemies. Sir Norman Angell, in an engaging
and spirited defense of pacifism,