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Chapter VII
THE ALLURE OF SEA POWER
Whereas Mackinder’s emphasis was on land power because of emerging
technological developments in rail and road transport, the same Industrial
Revolution made American Navy captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a slightly older
contemporary of Mackinder, a proponent of sea power. Mahan thought sea
power not only more important than land power in the fight for dominance, but
also less threatening to international stability. Mahan noted that it is “the limited
capacity of navies to extend coercive force inland” that makes them no menace
to liberty. Mahan thought that instead of the Heartland of Eurasia being the
geographical pivot of empires, it was conversely the Indian and Pacific oceans
that constituted the hinges of geopolitical destiny. For these oceans would allow
for a maritime nation to project power around the Eurasian Rimland, affecting
political developments inland—thanks to the same rail and road feeder networks
—deep into Central Asia. Nicholas Spykman, with his own emphasis on the
Rimland around the Indian and Pacific oceans, was as profoundly influenced by
Mahan as he was by Mackinder.
Though Mackinder was awed by the strength of Russia, given its control of
the Heartland, Mahan, whose book
The Problem of Asia
preceded Mackinder’s
“The Geographical Pivot of History” article by four years, espied Russia’s
vulnerability, given its distance from the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.
Russia’s “irremediable remoteness from an open sea has helped put it in a
disadvantageous position for the accumulation of wealth,” and, as Mahan goes
on, “This being so, it is natural and proper that she should be dissatisfied, and
dissatisfaction readily takes the form of aggression.” Thus does Mahan reveal
the deepest psychological currents—based, in fact, on geography—of the
Russian national character. Mahan calls the nations lying to the south of Russia
and north of the Indian Ocean the “debatable ground” of Asia, “the zone of
conflict between Russian landpower and British seapower.” (Spykman, four
decades later, will call this area the Rimland.) Of this debatable ground, Mahan
emphasizes the importance of China, Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey. It is no
coincidence that in 1900 he is able to identify the pivotal states of geopolitical
significance in our own time: for geography is unchangeable.
Geography helped dictate a containment strategy against the Soviet Union
from the southern tier of Eurasian states during the Cold War that involved all of
these Rimland nations; and geography helps determine the importance of China,
as a state and civilization extending from the Eurasian Heartland to the warm
waters of the Pacific Rim, even as geography helps determine Afghanistan and
Iran as two Heartland nations critical to the destiny of the Middle East. It was
Mahan who, in 1902, first used the term “Middle East” to denote the area
between Arabia and India that held particular importance for naval strategy.
India, he points out, located in the center of the Indian Ocean littoral, with its
rear flanks protected by the Himalayan mountain system, is critical for the
seaward penetration of both the Middle East and China. Sea power, it emerges,
provides the Mahanian means by which a distant United States can influence
Eurasia in a Mackinderesque “closed system.”
1
Mahan’s ocean-centric view has its flaws. As Robert Strausz-Hupé explains in
Geopolitics
, “In the fact that Britain and the United States clung to the doctrine
of Mahan they [Haushofer and the other German
Geopolitikers
] saw Germany’s
shining opportunity. As long as the Anglo-Saxon powers made that [Mahanian]
doctrine—so appealing because it promised security
and
business as usual—the
basis of their defense—Germany was assured of just that breathing space she
needed for organizing total war.”
2
Mahan’s sea power doctrine, in other words,
concentrating as it did on grand Eurasian security, did not, as aggressive as it
was, sufficiently take into account the ability of a land power to quickly lay siege
of Europe from Iberia to the Urals.
Yet Mahan did cover his tracks. For he wrote that “the due use and control of
the sea is but one link in the chain of exchange by which wealth accumulates.”
3
Nevertheless, his thinking was more suited to the sea power expansion of the
United States around the world than it was to the preservation of the balance of
power within Europe. There was, in Strausz-Hupé’s words, a “lusty imperialism”
to Mahan, who saw the ultimate goal of American power to be more than just the
“sea-to-shining-sea” of Manifest Destiny, but also to encompass the domination
of the Caribbean and the Pacific, which would make the United States the
world’s preponderant power. Mahan held that a nation must expand or decline—
for it was impossible for a nation to hold its own while standing still. As a
tactician he was often similarly unnuanced, believing in the concentration of
naval power through battle fleet supremacy: “the massed fleet of line-of-battle
ships.”
4
But Mahan, who published nineteen books in a twenty-year period, beginning
in 1883, is hard to pin down: a lusty imperialism was just one side of him. He
was also a democrat who, despite his observation that democracies are not
friendly to military expenditures, openly preferred democratic to monarchical
rule. He did not necessarily feel that a massive fleet was absolutely necessary for
the United States, which he believed should cooperate with Great Britain, since
naval supremacy was only possible through a coalition. He considered war an
unnatural condition of nations, which they, nevertheless, had to tragically
prepare for. And he foresaw a multinational system of maritime alliances to
guard the global commons. So it is important not to caricature him.
5
Mahan laid out his overall vision in
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