The Geopolitical Vision of Alfred Thayer

Mahan
One hundred years later, the insights of the American strategist continue to have
extraordinary relevance today.

By Francis P. Sempa
December 30, 2014

December 1, 2014, was the 100th anniversary of the death of Alfred Thayer
Mahan, the renowned naval historian, strategist, and geopolitical theorist. It was
an anniversary, unfortunately, that went largely unnoticed. Beginning in 1890
and continuing for more than two decades, Mahan, from his perch at the U.S.
Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, wrote twenty books and hundreds
of articles in an effort to educate the American people and their leaders about the
importance of history and geography to the study and practice of international
relations. His understanding of the anarchical nature of international politics, the
importance of geography to the global balance of power, the role of sea power in
national security policy, and history’s ability to shed light on contemporary
world politics remains relevant to the 21st century world.

Mahan, the son of the legendary West Point instructor Dennis Hart Mahan, was
born in 1840, graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1859, served in the
Union Navy during the Civil War, and thereafter served on numerous ships and
at several naval stations until finding his permanent home at the Naval War
College. In 1883, he authored his first book, The Gulf and Inland Waters, a study
of naval engagements in the Civil War. It was his second book, The Influence of
Sea Power Upon History 1660-1783 (1890), however, that brought him national
and international fame. The book, largely based on Mahan’s lectures at the Naval
War College, became the “bible” for many navies around the world. Kaiser
Wilhelm II reportedly ordered a copy of the book placed aboard every German
warship.
In his memoirs, From Sail to Steam, Mahan credited his reading of Theodore
Mommsen’s six-volume History of Rome for the insight that sea power was the
key to global predominance. In The Influence of Sea Power Upon History,
Mahan reviewed the role of sea power in the emergence and growth of the
British Empire. In the book’s first chapter, he described the sea as a “great
highway” and “wide common” with “well-worn trade routes” over which men
pass in all directions. He identified several narrow passages or strategic
“chokepoints,” the control of which contributed to Great Britain’s command of
the seas. He famously listed six fundamental elements of sea power:
geographical position, physical conformation, extent of territory, size of
population, character of the people, and character of government. Based largely
on those factors, Mahan envisioned the United States as the geopolitical
successor to the British Empire.

Eight years before the Spanish-American War resulted in the United States
becoming a world power with overseas possessions, Mahan wrote an article in
the Atlantic Monthly entitled “The United States Looking Outward,” (1890) in
which he urged U.S. leaders to recognize that our security and interests were
affected by the balance of power in Europe and Asia. Mahan understood that the
United States, like Great Britain, was geopolitically an island lying offshore the
Eurasian landmass whose security could be threatened by a hostile power or
alliance of powers that gained effective political control of the key power centers
of Eurasia. He further understood that predominant Anglo-American sea power
in its broadest sense was the key to ensuring the geopolitical pluralism of
Eurasia. He famously wrote in The Influence of Sea Power upon the French
Revolution and Empire that it was the navy of Great Britain (“those far distant
storm-beaten ships”) that stood between Napoleon and the dominion of the
world.

This was a profound geopolitical insight based on an understanding of the impact

of geography on history. In later writings, Mahan reviewed the successive moves
toward European continental hegemony by the Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs,
Louis XIV’s France, and Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and the great
coalitions, supported by sea power, that successfully thwarted those would-be
hegemons.

In subsequent articles and books, Mahan accurately envisioned the geopolitical

struggles of the 20th and 21st centuries. In The Interest of America in
International Conditions (1910), Mahan foresaw the then-emerging First World
War and the underlying geopolitical conditions leading to the Second World
War, recognizing that Germany’s central position in Europe, her unrivalled
industrial and military might on the continent, and her quest for sea power posed
a threat to Great Britain and ultimately the United States. “A German navy,
supreme by the fall of Great Britain,” he warned, “with a supreme German army
able to spare readily a large expeditionary force for over-sea operations, is one of
the possibilities of the future.” “The rivalry between Germany and Great Britain
to-day,” he continued, “is the danger point, not only of European politics but of
world politics as well.” It remained so for 35 years.

Mahan also grasped as early as 1901 the fundamental geopolitical realities of the
Cold War that emerged from the ashes of the first two world wars. In The
Problem of Asia, Mahan urged statesmen to “glance at the map” of Asia and note
“the vast, uninterrupted mass of the Russian Empire, stretching without a break .
. . from the meridian of western Asia Minor, until to the eastward it overpasses
that of Japan.” He envisioned an expansionist Russia needing to be contained by
an alliance of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and Japan,
which is precisely what happened between 1945 and 1991.

Mahan’s prescience did not end there, however. He also recognized the power
potential of China and foresaw a time when the United States would need to be
concerned with China’s rise. In 1893, Mahan wrote a letter to the editor of the
New York Times in which he recommended U.S. annexation of Hawaii as a
necessary first step to exercise control of the North Pacific. If the United States
failed to act, Mahan warned, “the vast mass of China . . . may yield to one of
those impulses which have in past ages buried civilization under a wave of
barbaric invasion.” Should China “burst her barriers eastward,” he wrote, “it
would be impossible to exaggerate the momentous issues dependent upon a firm
hold of the [Hawaiian] Islands by a great civilized maritime power.”

Similarly, in The Problem of Asia, Mahan depicted a future struggle for power in
the area of central Asia he called the “debatable and debated ground,” and
identified the “immense latent force” of China as a potential geopolitical rival.
“[I]t is scarcely desirable,” Mahan wrote, “that so vast a proportion of mankind
as the Chinese constitute should be animated by but one spirit and moved as a
single man.” Mahan knew that Western science and technology would at some
point be globalized and wrote that under such circumstances “it is difficult to
contemplate with equanimity such a vast mass as the four hundred millions of
China concentrated into one effective political organization, equipped with
modern appliances, and cooped within a territory already narrow for it.”

Like Germany before the First World War, China in the 21st century has
embraced Mahan. Naval War College professors Toshi Yoshihara and James
Holmes have examined the writings of contemporary Chinese military thinkers
and strategists in this regard in their important work, Chinese Naval Strategy in
the 21st Century: The Turn to Mahan. With regard to Mahan’s elements of sea
power, China is situated in the heart of east-central Asia and has a lengthy sea-
coast, a huge population, a growing economy, growing military and naval power,
and, at least for now, a stable government. China’s political and military leaders
have not hidden their desire to supplant the United States as the predominant
power in the Asia-Pacific region. Under these circumstances, China’s embrace of
Mahan is reason enough for Americans to reacquaint themselves with the
writings of that great American strategic thinker.
Francis P. Sempa is the author of Geopolitics: From the Cold War to the 21st
Century (Transaction Books) and America’s Global Role: Essays and Reviews
on National Security, Geopolitics, and War (University Press of America). He
has written articles and reviews on historical and foreign policy topics for
Strategic Review, American Diplomacy, Joint Force Quarterly, the University
Bookman, the Washington Times, the Claremont Review of Books, and other
publications. He is an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Middle District of
Pennsylvania, an adjunct professor of political science at Wilkes University, and
a contributing editor to American Diplomacy.