by Peter Zeihan
And then there is size. Most maritime powers are countries that possess relatively modest territories, like the islands of Great Britain or Honshu, chunks of land slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Michigan. From small lands come limited resources, particularly when you consider that roughly half of Great Britain and Honshu are useless highlands. For them to become truly powerful countries, they need more resources, whether in personnel or markets or raw materials—they have no choice but to expand into empire. In contrast, the United States has the better part of a continent to draw upon. Self-sufficient in everything that matters from energy to markets, they ventured out as a peer power without peer exposures.
Combined, these factors make American power different from anything that came before: offensively relentless and strategically insensitive to defeat. Even catastrophic losses abroad would never actually harm the base of American power, rooted as it was in the charmed nature of American geography. If Britain lost its empire, it was reduced to secondary-power status. If the Maginot Line were breached, France would fall. If the Americans lost every scrap of land they held internationally, they would still be the most powerful country in human history. It didn’t matter that the Germans were better industrialists or that the English were better sailors, the sheer mass and insulation of the United States veritably guaranteed that the Americans would surpass them both.
With their geopolitical position completely unhampered by international developments, upon their reemergence the Americans immediately became the ultimate arbiter of global affairs.
• In 1898, the Americans seized nearly all of Spain’s remaining overseas empire, including the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. By war’s end, the Americans had 160 vessels, 114 of which were steel, placing it in the world’s top five naval forces.
• In 1899, the Americans adopted the Open Door policy, ostensibly to allow trade with China. The policy was expressly designed to limit Japanese options and was certain in time to provoke a Japanese military response. While Europeans held most of the trade concessions in China, none of the European powers had the ability to project sufficient power into East Asia to protect them in the presence of Japanese action. The Americans, however, could. Open Door set the stage for the elimination of the European presence in Asia.
• In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt announced his corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, indicating that the United States would proactively intervene in Latin American affairs expressly to minimize any and all European influence there; over the next twenty years the United States dispatched troops to the region thirty-two times. Not once were they opposed by an extrahemispheric power.
• In 1905, the Roosevelt administration arbitrated an end to the Russo-Japanese War, splitting the disputed territories so that the Russians and Japanese not only had hopelessly entangled economic interests, but also something that Russia and Japan had never had before: a land border. The peace deal guaranteed future military conflict.
• The Americans completed the Panama Canal in 1914. As if the American territories were insufficient to sustain American power, they had now permanently locked Mexico, Central America, and the northern third of South America into the American economic orbit. The canal also sliced nearly a month off the time it would take for their naval vessels to switch between Atlantic and Pacific theaters, adding strategic flexibility that no preceding naval power had ever possessed.
• In 1917, the Americans became the last major belligerent to join World War I, where they turned a German near victory into capitulation. The Americans helped to implement a peace deal that resurrected Russia and humiliated Germany, but ensured that Germany would be able to rebuild and rearm. A second conflict was guaranteed to ignite, and ignite a good long distance from American territory.
From 1917 on—just twenty years after the Americans had reinserted themselves into the world with the Spanish-American War—the United States became the determining factor in European affairs rather than the other way around. It was neither pretty nor nice, but neither was it unique. Every naval power in history has tried to keep its land-based rivals bottled up with each other rather than floating navies that could challenge them. What set the Americans apart was that their home territories were so rich and so removed that they could keep the disruption, conflict, and bloodshed in a different hemisphere.
Rebooting the World
That’s the nuts and bolts of what makes the countries that rule the world the countries that rule the world. The balance of transport determines wealth and security. Deepwater navigation determines reach. Industrialization determines economic muscle tone. And the three combined shape everything from exposure to durability to economic cycles to outlook. The Americans have been remarkably fortunate in that their geography is the best in the world for all three factors, and beginning in 1890 they finally started leveraging that geography to become the world’s superpower.
The first time that the Americans fully brought their awesome power to bear was in the Second World War. In doing so the Americans did more than determine the course of a global military conflict; they shaped the entirety of the world in which we now live. That reshaping did the oddest thing.
It turned geopolitics off.
CHAPTER 5
Buying Off Geopolitics
For most countries geopolitics are unforgiving. If you exist in harsh terrain or among harsh neighbors you just don’t have many options for managing your affairs, assuming circumstances allow any options at all. The Turks surged up the Danube, as their home territories were not nearly large or secure enough to guarantee their safety and there were no other reasonable directions to go. The Iberians developed new transport technologies to open trade, as otherwise they would’ve been trapped in Europe’s poor backwaters. The British had to have a navy because they lived on an island; had they done otherwise they would’ve fallen prey to any other naval power that could reach their shores.
The United States is in many ways the exception that proves the rule. America’s physical place in the world is not just benign, but empowering. With no hostile nations on its borders, no hostile entities capable of bringing mass invasion to its shores, and an economy without peer, the American margin for error is absolutely massive. Only the United States could engage in a war as dubious as Iraq or roll out a social policy as byzantine as Obamacare and walk away largely unscathed. In most countries, suspect leadership is often rewarded with national destruction. By contrast, the United States is so huge and so far removed from the world and has such deep reserves of national power that highly questionable or even failed policies can lead to a second term.
But just because the Americans don’t need a plan and accidentally stumbled into superpowerhood, doesn’t mean that they have never had a plan. And when they do have a plan—good or bad—the world is remade. One of these plans not only radically reshaped the world, but is solely responsible for the world we are living in today.
To understand just how fundamental America’s reshaping of the global system is, we need to take a look at the most destructive war ever fought.
The Limits of Superpowerhood
World War II was the most significant conflict in human history for any number of reasons, but two stand out above the others. First, it was the first truly industrial conflict in that all of the players had fully internalized the whole host of industrial technologies. The Germans had introduced industrialization to land warfare in the mid-1800s, but from their speedy success in defeating Denmark, Austria, and France, it was obvious that their foes hadn’t yet figured the technologies out for themselves. By the beginning of World War II, all the major combatants were fully industrialized, from the manufacture of machine guns and uniforms to the logistics of food distribution. Just as industrialization improves productivity and output by an order of magnitude, so too does it improve the capacity for destruction. Death was regularly dealt at ranges and in volumes on an entirely new scale. Even the low-end assessments for the war estimate 50 milli
on dead.
The war’s most enduring legacy, however, wasn’t its reach or destructive capacity or the number of players involved, but the fact that one of those players had finally come of age. Because of American participation the war’s outcome was never in doubt.
Not only could the United States put a number of men into the field that dwarfed Western European capabilities, but it could also equip them and provide matériel for its British and Soviet allies and overcome the German U-boat strategy by sheer mass while fighting another war in another theater. Making matters even worse for the Axis, America’s core territories were never under direct threat, so the Americans did not need to focus resources on defense. By mid-1943, the Americans were on the offensive in almost every single battle of every single theater. Those infrequent occasions when the Axis was actually able to seize the initiative and attack were so rare that they’ve gone down in the American annals as landmark confrontations: places like the Battle of the Bulge1 and Kasserine Pass. The surprise is not that the Allies won, but that the Axis held on for three years after raising America’s ire.
But as awesome as the sheer magnitude of the American war effort was in absolute terms, it paled in comparison to the United States’ strategic position when the dust settled.
• The Germans and the Soviets had lost 7 million and 26 million people, or about 11 and 15 percent of their total populations, respectively. The Americans had lost “only” 420,000 people, in relative terms one-thirty-fifth the German losses and one-forty-fifth the Soviet losses.
• At war’s end the Americans had forces—on friendly terms—in the United Kingdom, West Germany, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Austria, and Norway. The European geographical advantage over the non-American world remained so huge that even in the ashes of the postwar devastation the occupied Western European states still collectively represented one-quarter of global economic power.
• There was little industrial capacity outside of the United States. The United Kingdom was running at full throttle, but running at full throttle on matériel and capital provided almost exclusively by the Americans. Only the Soviets had an independent system—a system that had depended upon U.S. matériel for the past three years. And even with that assistance it was still less than one-third of American economic output.
• Not only had most of the world’s industrial and consumption capacity been destroyed, but the war had been so destructive that it had taken as well the bulk of the imperial militaries. Only the Soviets still had an army, but bereft of naval transport it was an army that was not deployable in a global sense.
• The Americans controlled the oceans. In mid-1939, the Americans had 178 surface combatants and 58 submarines in the water out of a total fleet of less than 400 vessels. On the war’s final day only six years later the Americans had a 6,800-vessel navy with over 1,000 major surface and submarine combatants. As important, the navies of every major naval combatant of every significant prewar power had been relocated to the seabed. The United Kingdom was the sole exception, and it could no longer operate without assistance beyond European waters. For the first time since the onset of the blue-water era in the early sixteenth century, there was only one navy on the oceans.
It was the single greatest concentration of power that the world had ever seen.
The question was what to do with the war gains. One obvious option was to absorb the Axis and Western European empires into itself and establish a Pax Americana over the global system. That’s certainly what the occupied Europeans and the opposing Soviets expected. After all, it was what they had been doing to each other and all parts of the world within their reach for the entirety of the deepwater era.
But direct global control just wasn’t the Americans’ style. It wasn’t so much a moral distinction as a practical one.
Despite America’s numerical superiority vis-à-vis every foe it had battled to date, occupation doesn’t play to American strengths. A Pax requires long-term occupation of key distribution and gathering nodes, large-scale urban pacification, and in general making the occupied populations offer up a sizable chunk of their wealth and income to their occupiers. Put another way, it means fighting a wide-ranging, manpower-heavy, low-intensity war of occupation. Forever. The Americans may have been numerous, but they were still maritime. Maritime powers favor highly mobile units that zip about, bringing superior firepower to discrete conflict zones, smashing foes and then flitting off before their adversaries can reposition their land-based forces. A long-term occupation would have parked U.S. detachments across the length and breadth of its new territories and compelled them to police local populations. Their mobility advantages would be surrendered.2
The tactics of occupation aside, the strategic picture a Pax presented wasn’t very promising either. As of 1946, it was obvious that a cold war with the Soviets was already under way. The Soviet military was not only numerically larger, but clear and extremely present across the bulk of northern Eurasia. In a Pax arrangement the Americans would be draining money and resources from their occupied territories, so expecting Pax subjects to fight to maintain an American empire would have been a tough sell. That meant that the Americans wouldn’t just need a few million men to keep the British and French and Italians and Germans and Dutch and Arabs and Persians and Indians and Indonesians and Taiwanese and Japanese and Chinese and Koreans and Filipinos in line, but that Washington would also need additional American forces in the millions to hold the defensive lines against the numerically superior Russian and Red Chinese forces. The Americans were powerful, but they just didn’t have the numbers to occupy the bulk of the globe. With a Pax, the American “peacetime” army would have had to exceed wartime force levels.
In contrast, the Soviet/Russian military was built expressly for occupation. Russia has no geographic barriers at its borders. Gaining security comes from a simple, two-pronged strategy: occupying everyone nearby to secure strategic buffers, and establishing an intrusive intelligence service to infiltrate the occupied populations in order to keep them docile. The same techniques used to occupy Ukraine and Armenia and Central Asia were already being applied with brutal success in 1946 to occupy Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria and Latvia. As of the late 1940s, it was apparent that while the Americans had come in first in the war, they simply lacked the staying power to hold on to their gains in the face of strident Russian challenges backed by more men, simpler supply chains, a higher tolerance for casualties, and a practiced, casual willingness to apply massive violence to civilian populations to achieve political ends.
A direct American-soldier-for-Soviet-soldier face-off couldn’t be won. What the Americans needed were not just allies to help carry the defense burden, but allies who were so eager that they would be willing to stand up against the awesome force of the Red Army, a Red Army that was still roused by the fact that it had single-handedly decimated the Nazi Wehrmacht at Stalingrad. That requires a special kind of motivation.
Specifically, it requires a hell of a bribe. And what the Americans came up with was one of the great strategic gambits in history. They assembled a plan, and then assembled their wartime allies on July 1, 1944, for a conference in New Hampshire to lay out their vision for the new world. Which returns us to Bretton Woods.
Waging Peace: Free Trade as a Weapon
The three-point American plan was nothing short of revolutionary. They called it “free trade”:
• Access to the American market. Access to the home market was the holy grail of the global system to that point. If you found yourself forced to give up the ability to control imports, it typically meant that you had been defeated in a major war (as the French had been in 1871) or your entire regime was on the verge of collapse (as the Turks were in the early twentieth century). A key responsibility of diplomats and admirals alike was to secure market access for their country’s businesses. The American market was the only consumer market of size that had even a ghost of a chance of surviving the war, makin
g it the only market worth seeking.
• Protection for all shipping. Previously, control of trade lanes was critical. A not insubstantial proportion of a government’s military forces had to be dedicated to protecting its merchants and their cargoes, particularly on the high seas, because you could count on your rivals to use their militaries to raid your commerce. As the British Empire expanded around the globe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they found themselves having constantly to reinvent their naval strategies in order to fend off the fleets of commerce raiders that the Dutch, French, Turks, and others kept putting into play. The Americans provided their navy—the only one with global reach—to protect all maritime shipping. No one needed a navy any longer.
• A strategic umbrella. As a final sweetener, the Americans promised to protect all members of the network from the Soviets. This included everything right up to the nuclear umbrella. The only catch was that participants had to allow the Americans to fight the Cold War the way they wanted to.
Accepting the deal was a no-brainer. None of the Allies had any hope of economic recovery or maintaining their independence from the Soviets without massive American assistance. There really was no choice: Partner with the only possible consumer market, the only possible capital source, and the only possible guarantor of security—or disappear behind the Iron Curtain.