The Revenge of Geography (18 page)

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.
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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.
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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 land-bound army analogy:

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 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,
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?”
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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.

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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