THE ALLURE OF SEA POWER - The Revenge of Geography - page 81

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 Geopol-
itics , “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 as-
sured 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 ag-
gressive 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 Un-
ited States the world's preponderant power. Mahan held that a nation must expand or de-
cline—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 topics 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 con-
sidered 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 glob-
al 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 McKin-
ley 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, es-
pecially as “both travel and traffic by water have always been easier and cheaper than by