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 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.6
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 land-bound 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.7
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 th
ose 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.”8
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.”9
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 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.”10
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, 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 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?”11 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.”12 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.
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.13 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 spir
it 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.14
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 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.”15 So far as his reputation goes, Mahan’s best days may lie ahead.
The Revenge of Geography Page 13