[RealClearDefense] Nearly fifty years ago, historian Paul Kennedy wrote a book about the evolution of British naval power titled The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (1976), which reached back to the Elizabethan age through England’s wars with the Dutch, the struggles against Spain and France, a renewed struggle against France, the establishment of Pax Britannica, and its long decline starting with the end of the First World War and continuing through World War II and the Cold War. It is a book that holds lessons and warnings for American naval power, which in relative terms may be in the process of a similar decline.
Kennedy’s book combined history with geopolitics. It included an entire chapter on the geopolitical writings and theories of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the American naval officer and evangelist of sea power, and Halford Mackinder, the British geographer and statesman whose “Heartland” concept foresaw that Britain and other sea powers would be challenged in the future by continental-sized land powers. Kennedy recognized that Mahan and Mackinder, though often viewed as presenting clashing geopolitical theories, actually agreed on some fundamental geopolitical issues, including the supreme value of sea power. Mackinder worried that geography, the industrial revolution and other factors presented the opportunity for a continental-sized state to transform land power hegemony into dominant sea power. Remarkably, Mackinder in 1904 suggested that a more politically organized and technologically advanced China, because of its lengthy “oceanic frontage,” could become a great Eurasian power whose population and resources could be used to strengthen its sea power. That is precisely what has happened in the 21st century. |