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

The Great Illusion
, published in 1909,
condemns Mahan’s writings as “very mischievous moonshine.” This British
journalist and politician, who to his credit was hated by Haushofer, denounces
Mahan’s assertion that the “extension of national authority over alien

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communities” can be a dignified enterprise: for “like individuals, nations and
empires have souls as well as bodies.” Mahan is, in Angell’s view, absurdly
denying the very tangible reality of the individual and replacing him with the
comparatively intangible reality of the state. As Angell argues, “Does anyone
think of paying deference to the Russian 
moujik
because he happens to belong to
one of the biggest empires territorially? Does anyone think of despising an
Ibsen … or any educated Scandinavian or Belgian or Hollander, because they
happen to belong to the smallest nations in Europe?”
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In other words, Mahan,
and by inference Spykman, Mackinder, and the other geographer-geopoliticians,
are determinists and essentialists all. Their warlike tendencies emerge from their
seeing, as Isaiah Berlin complained, nations and empires as more real than the
individuals who encompass them. Again, we can offer only the Haushofer
defense: if Mahan and the others did not engage in the sort of determinism which
Angell condemns, they would leave the field of grand strategy to those who are
truly evil. Alas, we require the moral imperfections of the likes of a Mahan.
In fact, Angell’s treatise on why war and great power competition are illogical
suffered the misfortune of being published only a few years before World War I,
which initiated a century of unprecedented war and conflict in Europe. Angell,
unfairly, became a laughingstock in many quarters. I say unfairly because his
book, in and of itself, is compulsively readable, as well as brilliantly argued. And
his book might have proved clairvoyant were human nature a bit less base than it
is. It is because of the flaws in human nature, amplified by divisions imposed by
geography, that a writer like Mahan wears so much better over the decades than
one like Angell.
In a sign of how the power dynamics of the world are changing, Indian and
Chinese strategists avidly read Mahan; they, much more than the Americans, are
the Mahanians now: they are building fleets designed for armed encounters at
sea, whereas European navies view sea power only in terms of constabulary
action. For example, in a 2004 symposium in Beijing, “scholar after scholar
quoted Mahan … attesting to his influence,” write Naval War College professors
James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara. “And almost without exception, they
quoted the most bellicose-sounding of Mahan’s precepts, equating command of
the sea to overbearing power that closes the maritime common to an enemy’s
flag.”
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 Since then, as the Chinese navy becomes larger and more wide-ranging,
the bent toward Mahan has only intensified in Beijing, especially with the rise of
Indian sea power, which the Chinese fear; the Indians, for their part, view the
Chinese in similar Mahanian terms. The American Navy, meanwhile, appears to
have embraced another theorist. Let me explain.

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Julian Corbett, a British historian of the same era, did not so much disagree
with Mahan as offer a subtler approach to naval strategy, placing greater
emphasis on doing more at sea with fewer ships. Corbett asserts that just because
one nation has lost control of the sea, another nation has not necessarily gained it
(as Mahan believed). A naval coalition that may appear weak and dispersed can,
if properly constituted, have “a reality of strength.” Corbett called this a “fleet in
being”—a collection of ships that can quickly coalesce into a unified fleet when
necessary. This fleet in being would not need to dominate or sink other fleets; it
could be effective by seizing bases and policing choke points. Such a deceptively
able fleet, Corbett argued, should pursue an “active and vigorous life” in the
conduct of limited defense.
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As it happened, Corbett’s book came out after the
British Royal Navy had reduced its worldwide presence by leveraging the
growing sea power of its allies Japan and the United States.
Now the United States is in a position similar to that of Britain a hundred
years ago. America’s Navy has been getting smaller in number: from around 600
ships during the Cold War, to 350 during the 1990s, to 280 now, and with the
possibility—because of budget cuts and cost overruns—of going down to 250 in
the coming years and decades. As such, it is embracing naval allies such as
India, Japan, Australia, and Singapore. The U.S. Navy published a document in
October 2007, “A Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower,” that is more
in the spirit of Corbett, with its emphasis on cooperation, than of Mahan, with its
emphasis on dominance. “Our Nation’s interests,” goes the document, “are best
served by fostering a peaceful global system comprised of interdependent
networks of trade, finance, information, law, people, and governance.” As the
U.S. Navy sees it, our world is increasingly interconnected, with the global
population clustered in pulsing demographic ganglia near the seas that will be
prone to great disruptions, such as asymmetric attacks and natural disasters.
Even great power conflicts, the document says, are apt to be subtle and
asymmetric. There is little talk here of conventional sea and land battles. The
growing naval power of China is not even mentioned. The spirit of “collective
security” is everywhere. “No one nation has the resources required to provide
safety … throughout the entire maritime domain.” And in this maritime domain,
the document indicates that the Western Pacific and Indian oceans will be the
first among equals in strategic importance.
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And so the Rimland of Eurasia and the larger World-Promontory (the
seaboard of the World-Island), to use the phraseology of Spykman and
Mackinder, will have two military realities, it seems. On the one hand, there will
be the U.S. Navy, with its declining but still dominant fleet, patrolling, in the

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spirit of Corbett, in concert with its local allies from Africa to Northeast Asia, in
order to keep the seas safe for commerce. On the other hand, there will be the
assertion of rising power by China primarily, and India secondarily, each armed
with their Mahanian proclivities. Precisely because the Chinese have welcomed
this American icon of imperialist ambition, the U.S. Navy will not be able to
escape entirely from his spirit. For the eternal struggle of power politics goes on,
as much as we might want to escape from it. “To argue that expansion is
inherently misguided,” writes the University of Chicago political scientist John
Mearsheimer, “implies that all great powers over the past 350 years have failed
to comprehend how the international system works. This is an implausible
argument on its face.” And as Mearsheimer goes on, “Since the security benefits
of hegemony are enormous” in an anarchic system in which there is no world
hegemon, “powerful states will invariably be tempted to emulate the United
States and try to dominate their region of the world.”
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So far as his reputation
goes, Mahan’s best days may lie ahead.
With a Eurasian littoral increasingly crowded with warships in order to
accommodate the ambitions of the Chinese, Indians, and others alongside the
U.S., even as an ever more practical polar route cuts distances between Eurasia
and North America, worldwide hegemonic struggles may only quicken in speed
and intensity. Thus, we now need to explore the features of a closed geographic
system.

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