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CHAPTER II

WHY SEAPOWER?

For a maritime state, which the United States—bounded by water on three sides—assuredly is, an overseas bulwark of vigorously supported allies helps contain dangerous enemies, limits their ability to use the oceans as an invasion route, and allows the United States to apply power around the globe. A healthy network of politically like-minded allies also discourages the rise of hegemonies and the spread of their often inimical ideologies that would have unfavorable economic, security, and political consequences for America. A wisely fashioned alliance structure helps a global maritime power secure key choke points in the world’s oceanic trade routes, on whose safety the United States depends for the health of its foreign trade.

Alliances are expensive to maintain, frustrating to preserve, and risky when promises to defend them must be honored. Alliances are also very useful, especially in persuading a hostile state not to test them. America’s allies are a retaining wall that lies flush against potential adversaries on the Eurasian continent, from Russia to Iran to China and North Korea. U.S. alliances fortify the broad geographic girdle composed of states that border both the world’s great oceans and the heartland of the Eurasian continent, from which the most serious current and likely future external threats to American security come.

“The British army should be a projectile to be fired by the British Navy.”¹ Were the United States required to take the offensive at some future point, this observation by Lord Edward Grey, a British foreign secretary in the early twentieth century, would have strategic meaning. Its network of global alliances provides the United States with the space to insert U.S. ground troops onto the Eurasian land mass. Where allies are found wanting, for reasons of either geography or politics, the U.S. Marine Corps, an integral portion of American seapower, would be a “projectile,” insofar as Lord Grey’s remark applies to us.

The presence of American seapower sustains and inspirits our allies, all of whom are weaker than we are. Seapower protects the ever-increasing volume of global trade and, in an extremity, the transportation of military supplies. It deters conflict and succors the international order on which increasing prosperity rests. Strategically located allies—as all of ours are—offer logistic support for U.S. military power in the troubled neighborhoods where it matters. Allies create a defensive barrier that adds diplomatic, economic, and military power to the geographic advantage the United States enjoys from the oceans that separate us from Eurasia. For a maritime nation, the symbiotic relationship of seapower and alliances safeguards the nation’s strategic depth—the broad sweep of its encircling seas—as it ensures that challenges to its security remain at a distance.

The idea of alliances is going through a rocky patch in the United States today. As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump spoke of “putting America first,” an expression of views held by many who are dubious about the length and extent of American engagement beyond its borders since the attacks of 2001. Along the same line were questions about our allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) who have failed to meet the defense spending obligations that the alliance requires. NATO members have been shirking their responsibility to spend 2 percent of their GDP on their own defense for decades. This is not a new story.

Only five NATO members—the United States, Greece, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Estonia—met the Atlantic Alliance’s 2 percent of GDP requirement. Trump’s suggestion would affect the other Baltic States, Germany, and the rest of the 82 percent of alliance members who failed to meet their NATO defense obligations. It might encourage them to take their commitments more seriously. Some already are. Romania, Lithuania, and Latvia will meet the 2 percent target before the end of 2018. Nevertheless, the choice of the electorate in the 2016 campaign implies a diminution of Western security and is a fair representation of the doubts with which Americans today regard an outward-looking foreign policy.

Some of the national media took note of candidate Trump’s comment. However, the U.S. electorate’s general shrug at the threat to hold fellow alliance members responsible for their obligations indicates that the idea of a U.S.-led international order based on allies and supported by naval presence, deterrence, and, if necessary, seaborne expeditionary warfare no longer possesses the acceptance it had enjoyed since the end of World War II.

Skepticism about alliances is not limited to one party. President Obama began his administration by returning a bust of Winston Churchill to the British embassy. He said that then–Prime Minister David Cameron bore responsibility for the violence that followed Muammar Qaddafi’s death when “he [the prime minister] became distracted by other things.”² When Islamist terrorists attacked the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in 2015, killing eleven staff members, heads of state from Europe to the Middle East marched through the French capital’s streets in solidarity. The White House sent no one.

Relations between the United States and Israel declined precipitously in the Obama administration. The media blamed this on frosty personal relations between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Obama. More likely, the latter believed that West Bank settlements are the cause of friction between Israel and the Palestinian Authority and that this tension is key to resolving the Middle East’s problems.

Additional examples of the Obama administration’s cool relations with allies point in the same direction, showing a profound doubt about the wisdom of the U.S. military’s intercession as a keystone of alliance relations, a certainty that U.S. engagement is more provocative than stabilizing, and an abiding faith that important strategic regions of the world can best achieve equilibrium if left to their own devices. The Obama administration’s deep hope of concluding large strategic agreements with states—Iran, for example—that regard the United States with enmity is the obverse face of its ambivalent view of allies. The ambivalence did not begin with President Obama.

The attempt to patch things up with powers that regard the United States as hostile started well before he took office. A senior foreign policy official of George W. Bush’s administration asked a highly respected elder academic, one of America’s leading experts on Turkey and the Middle East, about the advisability of building bridges to Iran’s radical clerics. The professor answered that the effort would “earn nothing except the enmity of the Iranian people and the contempt of their rulers.”³

President Obama also tried his hand at grand bargains. He sought to “reset” relations with Russia, notwithstanding Vladimir Putin’s 2008 invasion of Georgia. The remaking of U.S. foreign policy did not end with Russia’s rejection of Obama’s overtures. Echoing Obama’s 2013 televised wishes to Iran, Secretary of State John Kerry wrote the same year of his commitment “to resolving the differences between Iran and the United States, and continuing to work toward a new day in our relationship.”⁴

Iran’s leadership was unfazed. In early May 2016, the deputy commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, General Hossein Salami, threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to the United States and its allies. He added that “Americans cannot make safe any part of the world.”⁵ The Iranian general’s overstated claims aside, he has a point.

Most of America’s allies are medium-sized states located where geography and the nation’s broad political interest in containing potential adversaries combine. Asked to define Central Europe, a senior Polish statesman once sought refuge in geography, calling it “the area between the Baltic and the Black Seas.”⁶ This description includes, among others, the Baltic States and the Visegrad Group of the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia, as well as states that abut the Balkan Peninsula, Romania and Bulgaria. These mostly democratic states sit on or near Russia’s western border, so that the center of the entire area brackets Russia while its littoral extremities touch the seas through which Russian ships must pass to reach the Atlantic or the Mediterranean. Geography, containment, and politics combine in favor of the United States. Wise policy will exploit these strengths by supporting the Atlantic Alliance.

The post–Cold War commitment of the United States to the independence and security of Central and Eastern European states has added to Western Europe’s strategic depth as it nourished democratic stability in the cradle of the wars that convulsed Europe beginning more than a century ago. The same American commitment has countered Moscow’s effort to control utterly the flow of energy westward and corrode NATO, an alliance whose ability to preserve freedom on the western end of the Eurasian continent remains vital if there is to be such a thing as “the West.”

The Middle East is significantly different from Europe and Asia because America’s most important ally, Israel, is a regional power that has successfully withstood neighboring enemies’ attacks since reassuming its position as a Jewish state nearly seventy years ago. Otherwise, America’s generally weak allies are mostly grouped together along the Persian Gulf, where their self-interest in resisting Iran and maintaining peaceful seas over which their oil can be transported has aligned with America’s large interest in an unmolested supply of Middle Eastern oil and—now—growing interest in containing Iran.

Finally, there is China, where American allies, friends, and partners bracket the East Asian mainland from Japan to South Korea to Taiwan, the Philippines, the Australian continent, Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, and the subcontinent, India. The U.S.-led network of bilateral alliances has supported the progress of democracy, large strides in regional prosperity, and increased markets for U.S. goods and services. As with the European peninsula’s oceanic borders, the dependable presence and deterrent ability of American seapower has been pivotal in supplying the hard power to ensure the safety of free sea-lanes, defend allies and friends, and convince a growing potential adversary that nothing is to be gained from war with the United States.

While a peaceable U.S. presence has remained a constant in the region since the end of World War II, its effects have changed. Where U.S. interest once offered stability in which East Asian states prospered, today the bilateral relationships that exist between these states and the United States are a land moat against Chinese regional hegemony as well as a breakwater against China’s ambitions in the island chain that lies further east in the Pacific. Because half the world’s population lives in Asia, regional hegemony there has a meaning unlike anywhere else.

The allies, partners, and friends that successive U.S. administrations have constructed into a global system since World War II share several important characteristics. They are all at great distances from the United States but quite close to potential adversaries. They ring the Eurasian continent. Besides the Arab states and Vietnam, they are democracies. With very few exceptions, they sit astride vital sea lines of communication or choke points through which a large fraction of international shipping passes. From their shores, seapower can be exercised, whether it is to guarantee the safety of the world’s navigational routes, command the proximate seas, project force ashore, encourage allies by a U.S. naval presence, or supply the bases that support America’s entire network of global alliances.

If budget cuts, loss of interest, disengagement, or other obstacles decimate American power, the nation will lose its ability to make safe the parts of the world in which it has a strategic interest. This will result in historically unprecedented international chaos, from the South and East China Seas to the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and, most immediately, to Russia.

The seagoing inklings of this chaos are in full sight as the United States concentrates on combating terror at the expense of reinvigorating its ability to defeat such potential adversaries as Russia and China. The steel sinews of American seapower not only have guarded our ability to ship goods abroad and communicate with allies but also, since the end of World War II, have provided an unequaled ability to respond to crises, remain present in troubled regions, provide disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, and apply force from sea to land. Our seapower has served as the single strongest guarantor of such order as exists in the world today.

No one alive today knows a world in which general principles of order do not exist. Although practiced imperfectly and selectively, most states acknowledge them as the standard of international behavior. Respect for national sovereignty, government by consent of the governed, freedom of navigation on the high seas, and economic systems based on capitalism are some of the better-known elements of the order. All have been objectives of American foreign and security policy since the nation’s founding.

Today’s order has its intellectual roots in the transition from ancient to modern political theory that took place as human nature’s concern with life in society replaced virtue as the aim of politics. For practical purposes, the international system we know began with the Treaties of Westphalia, which were signed in 1648 and which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The war had been an exceptionally barbaric European free-for-all over religion. At its end, the duke of the religiously divided northern European duchy of Pomerania described the long conflict as having “driven [the poor] to such unnatural and inhuman food as buds of trees and grass, and even to the flesh of their own children and of dead bodies.”⁷

In the event, a balance of state powers and practicality lighted Europe’s path away from repeated violent explosions of religious dissension fueled by the collision of imperial ambition, aspiring states, and lesser principalities. As with the Magna Carta, in which the nobility’s specific complaints against King John led to a broader acceptance of individual rights, the Westphalian agreements set in motion today’s international order.

Since World War II, America’s allies, its military, and its diplomacy have been the most important guarantor of the international system. When fascists in Europe and Asia sought its destruction, the United States together with its allies defeated them. Faced with a challenge from the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies contained it.

In all cases, the ability of the United States to communicate with allies and demonstrate solidarity with them reinforced our partners’ determination and fighting spirit. From Normandy to Inchon to Danang to Baghdad, the United States did more than encourage and reinforce. It fought. These engagements were not altruistic. Such actions as deposing a Panamanian dictator, heading off a military coup against an elected Philippine leader, or preventing additional genocide in the Balkans were aimed at local and regionalized threats. But the large contests, undertaken against large threats, had the collateral effect of preserving the international system.

Both diplomacy and force supported the international system. The single most important military enabler has been seapower. The United States used it to sustain England in the fight against Hitler, to transport men and matériel across the Atlantic, and to return to the European continent by force. The island-hopping approach to Japan during World War II would have been impossible without naval and amphibious forces.

Had the Warsaw Pact invaded Western Europe, U.S. seapower would have been indispensable to NATO’s defense or to succor a second invasion had one been needed to free the continent. The ballistic missiles carried aboard U.S. submarines guaranteed the means of retaliation if the United States were struck first. The Cold War could not have ended well if U.S. seapower had consisted of either a regional or a coastal navy.

Threats to the international system did not stop with the Cold War. They went into a remission, which has ended. Today, China and Russia, respectively, threaten international order by seeking to incorporate the South and East China Seas’ international waters as sovereign ones; and by violating the sovereign territory of Ukraine, by projecting power from Crimea throughout the Black Sea, by challenging the security of the Baltic States, and by assisting Syria’s criminal ruler in preserving his grip in the Middle East, including on the Mediterranean’s eastern shore. North Korea is an international miscreant armed with nuclear weapons and missiles of increasing range. As with other surprising achievements of this impoverished and despotic state, it is a question of time until North Korea miniaturizes nuclear devices sufficiently to mount them on missiles of increasing range. Iran’s support for terror and such Sunni terror organizations as Hamas aim at the heart of democratic governance. The order that any of these states or non-state actors represent would change a tolerably messy world into a brutal one.

Global reach is essential to preventing such a transformation. The U.S. Navy is this nation’s chief instrument of global reach. To name a few examples of its influence, American warships make regular port visits around the world, conduct exercises with friends and allies, engage in humanitarian missions, lead anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden, and maintain freedom of navigation. It provides the sinews on which the international system’s preservation rests. Allies were critical when America fought for independence. They have been essential in the major and lesser conflicts and confrontations of the past century. As great power competition once again characterizes international relations, America’s allies are indispensable to our security.