Elephants and Whales: Sarah Paine on Why Continental and Maritime Powers Build Different World Orders
Dwarkesh Patel
Military historian Sarah Paine argues that continental powers and maritime powers have tried to organize the world in fundamentally different ways, and that the difference still shapes international politics. Continental empires, which Paine's colleagues at the Naval War College call "elephants," pursue security by conquering territory. Maritime powers, the "whales," pursue prosperity through trade. Each approach follows from geography, and each produces its own kind of world order. Paine's position is that the maritime order, built on trade, law, institutions, and alliances, is the only win-win option. Leaders like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, in Paine's view, remain tied to a continental outlook that works against their own interests.
Paine frames the argument with two terms. Geopolitics is the influence of geography on politics. Grand strategy is "grand" because of how many instruments of national power it integrates. To picture those instruments, Paine suggests thinking about who sits in a president's cabinet: diplomacy, the military, finance, agriculture, and a long list of others.
The first distinction: can you defend yourself at sea?
Paine opens with an image of D-Day, 6 June 1944, the point where sea power met land power. Maritime powers, Paine argues, are the exception, and continental powers are the rule. The reason is that a maritime power can, if necessary, defend itself mainly at sea with its navy, and a continental power cannot. Paine's example is Ukraine: no navy is going to save it from Russia.
This is the first distinguishing characteristic, and it has military consequences. A state in the continental world had better have a competent army, and a maritime power had better have a good navy. Paine stresses that the consequences extend into economics and politics as well, and the rest of the lecture follows them.
The United States as a former continental power
Paine then gives what they call a whirlwind tour of American history, to show that the United States began as a continental power bent on reaching the West Coast. The United States tried to invade Canada in 1775 and 1812, and Britain won both times. The Monroe Doctrine, in Paine's reading, was a classic continental spheres-of-influence statement: stay out of my backyard. At the time, though, the United States was too weak to enforce it, so it was little more than a wish list.
American expansion differed from the typical continental pattern in one respect. It preferred "checkbook diplomacy" to massed armies. When Napoleon was short of cash in 1803, the United States made the Louisiana Purchase. When Russia was short of cash, which Paine calls a perennial problem, the United States bought Alaska and the northern part of the West Coast. When Mexico refused the check, the United States fell back on the standard continental method, the Mexican-American War, and acquired Texas. Mexico then accepted the next offer, the Gadsden Purchase, which brought in Tucson and other places.
Paine adds that the longest counterinsurgency in American history was not the recent wars in the Middle East. It was the long war against the native population, who fought bitterly before they were forced to give up. Americans called their expansion manifest destiny and were proud of it. Paine points to a painting in a staircase near the House chamber that is now titled "Westward Ho." Its original title was "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way."
Mahan's prerequisites, and why China and Russia fall short
In the late nineteenth century a different view emerged, driven by Alfred Thayer Mahan, whom Paine calls by far the most famous professor ever associated with the Naval War College, where Paine spent 24 years. Mahan argued that a country's power and position depend less on continental expansion and consolidation than on the wealth it gains from trade. He set out prerequisites for a maritime security paradigm:
- a moat, so the country cannot be invaded across a land border;
- a dense internal transportation grid to move goods in peacetime;
- reliable egress by sea to get the navy out in wartime;
- a dense coastal population to run the commerce;
- stable government institutions that will fund a navy and pass laws that make commerce possible.
Paine measures China and Russia against this list and finds that neither comes close. Neither has a moat. Between them, Paine says, they have more neighbors than any other two countries on the planet, and many of those neighbors dislike them "for excellent reasons." Russia's internal transportation grid is poor, while China's has been improving. Neither has reliable sea egress, because both face narrow seas with many islands and many neighbors, and such waters tend to be blockaded in wartime. Russia's one reliable outlet is in the Arctic, where, as Paine jokes, nobody lives except polar bears. China does have a dense coastal population, but it faces a narrow sea, and Russia has none in the north. Russia has never had a commerce-driven economy. China moved much further in that direction under Deng Xiaoping, but Paine says Xi Jinping has lately favored the crony sector over the private sector. Finally, Paine's test for stable institutions is transparent, regular elections, and "dictatorship for life does not remotely qualify." Paine's conclusion is that both countries have maritime ambitions, but it is not clear they understand what a full maritime paradigm requires.
Mackinder's heartland and Spykman's rimland
A generation after Mahan, the British geographer Sir Halford Mackinder made the counterargument. In a 1904 article, Mackinder argued that Russia, not Britain, held the best geopolitical position in the world. He called the Eurasian interior the "pivot area" or "heartland" and described it as the citadel of land power and the greatest natural fortress on earth. Mountains, deserts, frozen seas, and rivers that reach the ocean at places inaccessible in wartime all protect it. Paine sums up Mackinder's point: the heartland is not insulated by the sea but from the sea. Whoever holds it gains defense in depth, room for strategic retreat, and self-sufficiency. A maritime power like Britain could influence the heartland only from the periphery. In Mackinder's day that meant colonies in strategic places. Today, Paine says, it means allies with bases.
Nicholas Spykman, a naturalized American from the Netherlands, then under Nazi occupation, finished his major work in 1943, the year he died. He believed the power that controlled Eurasia might control the world, and he thought the Nazis had come close to dominating it in 1941. Paine quotes Spykman's complaint that the United States, despite having the safest position of any nation, had been drawn into two devastating world wars within a quarter century and at one point faced serious danger of defeat. American statesmen's expectations had been "consistently wrong." Paine adds: "Sound familiar?"
Spykman reasoned that American influence could reach Europe and the Far East only by sea, and that Eurasian powers could reach the United States only by crossing the seas. This held even after the rise of air power, because big things go by sea, as Paine notes they still do. American security was therefore a function of sea power, and safety at home depended on a maritime shield. For that reason Spykman cared intensely about whether friends or foes controlled the "rimland" around the heartland. The United States needed a continental ally to provide a base for land power. In Paine's reading, Spykman's point was that victory in World War II would depend on allies.
China: the original land power
Paine then begins the "main course," starting with continental empires because they came first in history. The first example is China rather than Russia. Sunzi's Art of War, Paine explains, advises kings on how to stay on the throne and conquer neighbors efficiently in a world full of neighbors who can invade at any time, and where third-party intervention is the norm. The book never mentions maritime warfare and refers to riverine warfare only in passing, because it describes a continental world that existed long before maritime empires. Paine adds that great Eurasian civilizations often rest on great continental empires. A civilization answers how to live and how to deal with others, which makes it a world order of its own, and civilizations have often fought to make their rules universal.
Using maps of precipitation, temperature, and topography, Paine shows how little of China is warm, wet, and flat enough to farm. Too much of the land is "vertical." Paine says this explains why famine afflicted China for centuries and why the country depends on food imports today. An ethnic map shows the Han concentrated in the arable core and surrounded by diverse peoples. How did the Han end up with the best land? Paine's answer is that they destroyed the competing Zunghar and Tibetan empires. The Qing wiped out the Zunghars long ago. In the continental world, Paine argues, the choice was binary: become Han, be killed, or flee. Genocide is what happens to the losers in continental warfare, and Paine says the Uyghurs now appear slated for it.
Paine's quick survey of Chinese history shows repeated expansion, contraction, wall-building, and bloodshed. Paine emphasizes that the Yuan dynasty was not an ordinary dynasty. It was a Mongol occupation, part of a Pax Mongolica in which the Han were a subjugated people. The Mongols spread out from east of Lake Baikal, which Paine links to an earlier period of climate change that pushed their herds south. After the Ming, China was conquered again, this time by the Manchu Qing, which Paine calls the second-largest empire in Chinese history. Paine finds it notable that when China claims its historical lands today, it chooses the borders of either the Yuan or the Qing, the two periods when the Han were ruled by outsiders. Paine also points out that China has raised armies in the hundreds of thousands for thousands of years, something the West did not do regularly until the Napoleonic Wars.
Russia: ingesting and digesting territory
Mackinder paid little attention to China, which was in free fall during his lifetime, and focused on Russia. He expected Russia's new railways to give it strong internal lines of communication in wartime, while Britain was stuck with exterior lines by sea.
Paine describes the Russians as "Mongols in reverse." Moscow first destroyed rival princely city-states, then expanded in pursuit of furs, and kept going until it met countries that fought back. A map of the Russian Empire at its peak in 1914 shows small administrative units around Moscow that grow larger toward Siberia. Standard provinces (guberniya) covered the core. Territories "recently ingested and yet to be digested" were organized as oblasts. On top of the civil map sat governor-generalships in the conquered regions, which Paine reads as a sign of what was really going on. The conquered areas included Finland, Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, the khanates of Turkestan, and Siberia. Paine says China has done something similar, with provincial boundaries that shift and military regions layered over them. American state boundaries, by comparison, have barely changed. In Paine's analysis, shifting boundaries are a way to absorb peoples, and where full absorption fails, at least to neutralize ethnic groups.
Many neighbors, domestic armies, and fighting at home
Mackinder emphasized the advantage of internal lines of communication. Paine points to the matching disadvantage: many neighbors. Around 1900, Russia's security threats ran from Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire to China and Japan. That is very different from Britain's 360-degree moat. Russia suffered catastrophic defeats at the hands of the Mongols, the Swedes, Napoleon at first, and Germany in World War I, and it lost the Cold War. Each time, Paine says, its central position let it recover. In this world, power comes from land and every neighbor is dangerous. Unstable neighbors spill their instability over the border, and strong neighbors may see you as a "menu item."
This shapes what armies are for. In a maritime power, the army exists for expeditionary warfare, meaning it crosses an ocean to fight elsewhere. In a continental power, Paine argues, the army's first mission is to protect the ruling regime. Paine's example is the People's Liberation Army, whose first mission is to keep the Communist Party in power. Its second mission is to garrison the empire and prevent defections, and its third is border defense, where whatever is won is kept. "Away games" are rare.
Paine uses World War II death figures to show what this means. Military deaths among the Axis were 3.2 million Germans, 1.5 million Japanese, and 330,000 Italians. Among the Allied land powers they were 8.5 million Russians, nearly a million Poles, 1.3 million Chinese, and 340,000 French. For the maritime powers, Britain lost 326,000 and the United States 295,000, which by some statistics is fewer than Italy or France, even though France was not in the war for long. Including civilians, Paine says, makes the continental numbers catastrophic: over 7 million Germans, over 25.5 million Russians, nearly 7 million Poles, 11 million Chinese, and nearly a million French. The maritime powers' totals barely change. The reason is that continental powers fight on home territory. Paine calls this the continental powers' "unavoidable agony." When a neighbor invades, you must capitulate or fight on the neighbor's schedule, which is Ukraine's problem. A maritime power watching an invasion can choose whether to intervene, when, and with which instruments. Paine says the United States should think carefully about those choices before intervening everywhere and overextending.
Winning this kind of war can bring large gains. Russia's huge sacrifices gave Stalin control of Eastern Europe for the Cold War. Paine's warning is that territorial domination is very expensive, so the prize had better be worth it.
The continental rulebook, and its flaws
Paine sets out the rules of the continental game. First, avoid two-front wars, because if the neighbors gang up, it is over. Second, allow no great-power neighbors, because today's friend can become tomorrow's enemy. The method is to deal with neighbors one at a time: set them up to fail, destabilize the rising ones, absorb the failing ones, keep buffer zones, and wait for the moment to strike. "This is Vladimir Putin's game," Paine says. Better still is to get the neighbors to do the work by stoking their mutual resentments, pushing them to fight each other, and flooding them with fake news. Russia can then play the "jackal state," moving in to take a kill made by others.
Paine identifies several problems with this approach. It surrounds you with failing states. Russia and China border some of the most dysfunctional places on earth, and Paine asks whether they are unlucky or complicit. It produces no lasting alliances, because neighbors eventually realize the hegemon is their long-term problem. It gives no guidance on when to stop, and Paine says China and Russia have repeatedly overextended, which helps explain the collapse of various empires and dynasties. Paine adds that before the Industrial Revolution this paradigm was very effective, and that it took no account of collateral damage or innocent deaths. It is about killing people and breaking things to take territory, and Paine says we have watched it in Syria and Ukraine. Ancient ruins are ruins, Paine notes, because this kind of warfare is ruinous.
Empire in Russian thought, and a world without insurance
Paine quotes three Russian figures to show how deeply the imperial idea runs. The historian Vasily Klyuchevsky described Russian history as "the history of a country in process of colonizing itself," with its periods defined by stages of occupying new land. Paine notes that he says nothing about the people already living there. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote in his diary that in Europe Russians were "hangers-on and slaves," but in Asia they would go as masters, and that a "civilizing mission" in Asia would drive them onward. Count Sergei Witte, finance minister and in Paine's words perhaps the most distinguished public servant of late tsarism, wrote in 1903 that Russia's task was to take as large a share as possible of the "outlived oriental states," above all China. He claimed Russia had "the undisputed right to the lion's share of the expected prey," traced the movement back to Ivan the Terrible, and called the absorption of much of China "only a question of time" unless the Chinese got their act together. Paine says Putin apparently sees the world the same way.
The danger for such powers, Paine argues, is that when a continental power botches its strategy, its known world can vanish permanently. That happened to Imperial China, Imperial Russia, and many old civilizations. Paine shows a photograph of an aristocrat's whimsical palace, long gone, destroyed in what Paine calls one of the twentieth century's most horrific genocides: the Bolshevik Revolution, the Civil War, collectivization, and the Great Purges, through which the communists eliminated entire social classes. "It is a world without insurance policies," Paine says.
The maritime world: from Athens to Grotius
The maritime world works differently. Paine describes the nineteenth-century Atlantic as the center of the world economy. The rimlands produced wealth and shipped it back and forth across seas treated as a commons. In Paine's framing, the seas were "the original network" that could connect everyone to everything.
Paine traces the origins to the Athenian Empire, which hugged the shores of the Aegean and Ionian seas and paid for itself with trade. Rome and Byzantium were also rimland empires, quite unlike consolidated empires such as Russia and China. Paine contrasts the names. "Mediterranean" means the sea in the middle of the land, while China's name means the central kingdom among kingdoms. One stresses the sea, the other the land.
East-West trade drove much of the conflict. Whoever held the western "toll booth" of the Silk Road, where goods split toward the northern or southern Mediterranean shores, made a fortune. Muslim conquests settled control for a time. Meanwhile, continental consolidation proceeded in Europe, with both France and Germany tracing their origins to Charlemagne's empire. Paine describes the Crusades partly as an attempt by larger European powers to retake the toll booth. They failed, and the Ottomans held it for a long time. That pushed Europeans to find a sea route to Asia. Spain and Portugal ran into the Americas instead, found gold and silver, and switched from spices and silk to "heavy metal."
In Paine's account, the Dutch were the real founders of maritime empire, one built around trading bases. Their weakness was a vulnerable position in Europe. Paine finds it fitting that the Dutchman Hugo Grotius became the founding father of international law. Maritime empires want the seas to be a commons, free of piracy and governed by rules so that everyone can trade safely. In Mare Liberum, Grotius wrote that every nation is free to travel to and trade with every other. In The Law of War and Peace, he cited Roman sources holding that the sea belongs to all, including the line that by natural law "the air, flowing water, the sea, and in consequence, the seashore" are common to everyone. Paine notes that this is a Western idea that others do not necessarily share. China ratified UNCLOS in 1996 but says freedom of navigation does not apply within 200 nautical miles of its coast, where UNCLOS sets 12. In the East and South China Seas, Paine says, that gap matters.
Britain's strategy for elephant hunting
Britain perfected the maritime model because it did not share the Dutch problem. Napoleon eventually absorbed the Netherlands into the French empire, but Britain had its 360-degree moat. It was the only European power that did not need a large standing army, because a competent navy would drown any invading army at sea. Britain turned its dependence on trade into a strength. Trade paid for the navy, the navy protected the homeland and some of the trade, and Britain kept compounding wealth while its neighbors paid for large armies, which Paine describes as economy-killing and coup-generating, and destroyed wealth fighting each other.
Paine notes a limit. A navy can deliver a "prevent defeat" strategy, but not a "deliver victory" strategy, because navies are rarely decisive in wartime. Through trial and error against Napoleon, the British learned to integrate several instruments of national power. Paine says they coined the term "grand strategy" because they needed it. On the eve of the Napoleonic Wars, Europe had consolidated states east and west and a "tidbit zone," the Holy Roman Empire, in between. Napoleon ate up the tidbits, and by 1812, the empire's greatest extent and the year Clausewitz was developing his ideas on land warfare, things looked grim for everyone except Napoleon.
The British answer, in Paine's summary, was a set of rules for elephant hunting. Keep the home economy growing, since it funds everything else. Don't let the elephant forage: blockade and raid commerce to throw the enemy back on its dwindling resources and increasingly bitter allies. "Rent an elephant": arm and fund the continental power most directly threatened, because it is fighting on the main front. Fight in a peripheral theater that is easier to reach by sea than by land, so that attrition adds up, the enemy's attention is divided, and pressure on the main front eases. Do not take on the enemy's main force directly, and never as an opening move. Paine says Britain broke this rule at great cost in World War I. A continental power's strength is its army, while Britain's is its navy, its wealth, and its ability to survive a long war. Finally, fight on the main front only after the elephant has been bled badly, and only with many allies.
A continental power, Paine argues, cannot play this game. Its narrow, blockadable seas trap its surface fleet and merchant marine, and its many neighbors may invade it. A maritime power that sticks with the strategy can put itself and its enemy on opposite trend lines as the war eats into the enemy's economy, production, and morale. Paine calls it a strategy of protracted war won by exhausting the other side first. It depends less on military force than on economics, coalitions, and institutions, and it has prerequisites: sanctuary at home, access to peripheral theaters, allies, and overseas markets, and institutional stability to sustain a consistent strategy. These are the features Mahan later emphasized. After Napoleon, Paine says, Europe had a century of unprecedented prosperity without a continent-wide war. It was playing the maritime game of trading by the rules, compounding wealth, and not leveling each other's buildings, until World War I.
The second distinction: security versus prosperity
Paine's second distinguishing characteristic is that continental powers face contiguous threats, so they focus on national security. They want to insulate themselves from neighbors through exclusive zones, often extended into the surrounding seas. Maritime powers, secure behind their moats, focus on prosperity. Trade is their route to prosperity and also to security, since trade pays for everything. They want access to markets and oceans that function as a commons all the way from port to port. From this, Paine argues, come two mutually exclusive world orders. One divides the world into large spheres of influence, each a world of its own. The other runs on universal rules with seas open to all.
How the Industrial Revolution changed the currency of power
According to Paine, the Industrial Revolution upended both kinds of empire and brought in a maritime, rules-based global order. It introduced compounded economic growth, driven by institutional as well as technological change. Early on this meant steam power, industry, textiles, insurance, and banking. Paine points out that trade is impossible without insurance and credit. Later it meant railways, the telegraph, steamships, mass markets, general staffs, and armaments. Above all, the currency of power changed. Land used to matter because it produced commodities and supplied peasant conscripts. Once wealth came from commerce, industry, and trade, land no longer determined power. Paine says a country's wealth and power today often track how industrialized it is. The revolution also began a global trading order built on negotiations to reduce transaction costs, a process Paine says continues "eternally." It overturned the traditional balance of power. China in the nineteenth century resisted this order, and in Paine's view ISIS today reviles the liberal economies that support it.
Paine illustrates the shift with transport. The Roman, British, and Mongol empires all held one piece of land, the western end of the Silk Road, which was prime real estate in the continental world. The Suez Canal destroyed the camel trade, because shipping, especially through the canal, was so much cheaper than moving goods across Eurasia by animal.
Paine follows this a century forward to the 1967 war, when Egypt sank blockships to keep Israel from using the canal. The operational effect was obvious. The strategic effect was unexpected. Before the war, almost 90 percent of ships, counted by number, were 50,000 deadweight tons or smaller and fit through the canal. The canal stayed closed until about 1972, and by then almost 30 percent of ships by number were huge vessels that had never existed before and could not pass through. Even after widening, the largest ships still cannot. Paine cites the cost of shipping oil from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam: a little over $13 per ton in a small ship through the canal, and, Paine believes, about a third of that in a large ship going around Africa. The lesson Paine draws is that ship size, more than distance, overcomes the overhead cost of shipping.
Paine's second example is Malcolm McLean, a trucking operator who put truck bodies without chassis onto ships, above and below deck. These were the first containers. Loading costs fell, by Paine's figures, from nearly $6 a ton to under 20 cents, and ships spent far less time in port. The International Organization for Standardization then standardized container sizes, "one if by truck, two if by railway cars, and thousands if by sea," and transport costs collapsed. Paine offers this to skeptics of international organizations as an obscure body that has changed everyone's lives.
This is the basis for Paine's skepticism about Xi Jinping's Belt and Road. Until 1960 the average tanker was 20,000 deadweight tons, and today the smallest ultra-large crude carriers are a quarter of a million. Paine believes the longest trains carry perhaps 600 containers on a good day, while the largest container ships carry over 21,000, with cargoes worth over $1 billion. The overland route is also not continuous and does not use a single rail gauge, so goods are loaded and unloaded repeatedly. It is less secure too: a land route must be controlled end to end through some of the most unstable places on earth. At sea, if a route is blocked, as the Suez Canal was, ships go the long way around. Paine adds that because of China's geography, the seas are open to it only in peacetime. Not because anyone plans to act against it, but because in wartime the shallow, island-studded waters and predictable chokepoints around it become "kill zones" that neither merchant ships nor surface warships can get through unless China is on good terms with everyone, which it currently is not. Peace, Paine concludes, is much better for China.
Paine also points to the surge in world trade after the Cold War, which they call "a miracle of your lifetimes" that lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. Putin's problem, in Paine's telling, was that this wealth accrued to those invested in the trading order, not to those relying on extortion. With what Paine calls a second Cold War now under way, the world is returning to more inefficient arrangements.
The third distinction: interior and exterior lines, and alliances
The third distinction concerns lines of communication. Continental powers have used interior lines to garrison their empires, send armies against neighbors, and build contiguous alliance systems. That worked when power came from land. Maritime powers use exterior sea lines that reach the whole world, which makes a global alliance system possible.
According to Paine, the Industrial Revolution put continental empires "on notice." Land transport costs more than sea transport, and, more importantly, a positive-sum order became possible. Beating up your neighbors is negative-sum because the territory being fought over is damaged in the process. The maritime order aims for trading partners and win-win outcomes: freedom of navigation, free trade, and international law and institutions that lower transaction costs. Its insurance policy is the alliance system. Most countries are not maritime by geography, Paine argues, but by joining together and coordinating their instruments of power they can defend the rules against "rogue continental states."
Paine credits the "ultimate insurance policy" to the generation that went over the top as World War I conscripts, raised families in the Depression, and then, as strategic leaders, sent their own children into World War II. Paine says this generation, in both Europe and the United States, concluded that the answer to depressions and world wars was institution-building on a global scale. They created the UN, the IMF, NATO, and the predecessors of the World Trade Organization and the European Union. According to Paine, these institutions kept the peace in the industrialized world until Putin started his wars. Their premise was that differences should be settled by diplomats and lawyers, because whatever soldiers win will be worth less than what negotiation could have achieved. Paine notes that the Cold War was cold only in the industrialized world. Much of the fighting took place along Mackinder's "inner marginal crescent," where the maritime and continental worlds meet, as each side put its finger on the scale in local civil wars. That destroyed wealth and, in Paine's view, helps explain global growth problems in that era.
The invisible maritime world
Paine says it took 15 years of teaching at the Naval War College to notice something obvious: the maritime world is invisible. The continental world pursues positive objectives, such as taking territory, and you can see whether that happened. The maritime world pursues negative objectives, preventing bad things, and you can never prove you prevented anything, because the prevented event never occurred and perhaps no one was attempting it. At the operational level the continental world produces visible results. At the strategic level it destroys wealth on a massive scale.
Naval missions, Paine argues, are also mostly negative and mostly carried out in peacetime. They are to prevent the destruction of the global trading system, to prevent limits on freedom of navigation, and to deter large countries from taking over small ones, since sovereignty is the foundation of international law. The remedies for rogue behavior include alliances, diplomacy, sanctions, embargoes, and containment. For navies they mean deterrence, blockade, and commerce raiding, which keep the elephant from foraging and give it "a timeout" from the rules-based order.
To the objection that this leaves the problem in place, Paine answers with compound growth. Sanctions work like "economic chemotherapy." Even leaky sanctions that shave one or two percent off annual growth add up over generations to the gap between North and South Korea. North Korea still exists, but with a much smaller "piggy bank." If a rogue state has nuclear weapons, Paine asks whether anyone really wants a nuclear war to eliminate it. The maritime world, Paine argues, does not aim for the operational win of eliminating a problem. It aims to contain the problem at acceptable cost.
The unfinished contest
Paine says the optimists at the end of the Cold War assumed everyone would want to join the maritime order, and they were wrong. Pointing to a slide of Putin and Kim Jong-un, Paine argues that such leaders want to hollow out international institutions, overturn international law, and destroy the alliance system, returning the world to warring spheres of influence.
In summary, Paine names three factors that separate continental from maritime powers: whether a country can defend itself mainly at sea, whether it seeks insulation from the world or access to it, and whether it relies on interior or exterior lines of communication. These accidents of geography produce different preferences. A continental power sees territory to take, while a maritime power sees a market and asks why anyone would want to own another country's domestic problems. A continental power seeks self-sufficiency, while a maritime power trades. A continental power wants exclusive zones, while a maritime power wants commons at sea, in space, in cyberspace, and in the air. Most countries are neither purely maritime nor purely continental, but Paine argues that alliances can give their members a collective maritime position when the group is large enough.
Paine argues the choice is financially consequential. Continentalists tend to be dictators, though not always, and they spend heavily to dominate their own citizens and their neighbors, while maritime powers keep their growth compounding. Paine says China has benefited more than any other country from rejoining the maritime order under Deng Xiaoping, yet the burden of history and continentalist thinking, such as the conviction that "we need to take Taiwan," still weighs heavily. Paine's closing position is that the international order is flawed and a work in progress, but it offers the only win-win solution: letting diplomats and lawyers settle disputes in international forums. The alternative, Paine warns, is a third world war with nuclear fallout, and at this point in history the question is whether humanity would survive it.
Good evening. It's such a pleasure to be with you. I'm going to make an argument today about how the world is organized, or at least how different types of empires back in the day tried to organize it. It turns out that continental and maritime powers tried to organize the world in very different ways and that these have real implications in our own day.
And I'm going to be using terminology from geopolitics and also grand strategy. What is that? Geopolitics is the influence of geography on politics, and grand strategy is grand in the number of instruments of national power that it integrates. And you're thinking, "Well, what are they?" And think about who sits on a cabinet around a president, who gets convened. Those are the elements of national power, right? So, you've got the State Department, diplomacy, the military, you've got finance, agriculture, you got a whole long list of people, and you want to integrate these things.
But, before I get going, I'm going to give you a sneak detour, a really whirlwind tour of American history, which I'll get done really fast, along with a tour of some of the great geopoliticians. And after that appetizer, I will deliver the promised main course.
Okay, this is June 6th, 1944, D-Day, Normandy landings, where sea power, maritime power, meets land power. It turns out maritime powers are the exception and continental powers are the rule. Why? Cuz maritime powers, if need be, can defend themselves primarily at sea with their navies. Whereas a continental power simply cannot. Think Ukraine. A navy's not going to save them from Russia. So, this is the first distinguishing characteristic between a maritime and continental power, whether it is feasible to defend yourself at sea or not. And from this come some implications: that if you sit in a continental world, you had better have a competent army. And if you're a maritime power, to defend yourself, you'd better have a pretty good navy. But these implications go beyond the military to economics and politics as well, and I'll go into these.
But this country began its life as a continental power, all about expanding to, guess what? Here, right? To the West Coast. And the United States tried invading Canada a couple times, not a new idea. In 1775 and 1812, the British won those things and we had to back off on that idea. And then you get here President Monroe declaring the Monroe Doctrine, which is a classic continental spheres-of-influence, stay-out-of-my-backyard moment. The only trick was that the United States was so weak in those days, telling the Europeans to stay out of the Americas was just on the wish list. It was impossible to deal with.
But if you look at the United States, how it became the United States, it's all about territorial expansion to reach the West Coast. And unlike a typical continental power, which does this with massed armies, the United States preferred checkbook diplomacy. So when Napoleon Bonaparte was short of cash in 1803, that's when the Louisiana Purchase is made. And then when the Russians were short of cash, a perennial problem, that's when the United States bought not only Alaska, but the northern part of the West Coast. But when the checks were not accepted, which is what happened with Mexico, the United States did the standard massed armies approach in the Mexican-American War, and that's how the United States gets Texas. So that the next check offered, the Mexicans accept, and that's the Gadsden Purchase, which gets the United States Tucson, Arizona, and other places.
The longest counterinsurgency in this country's history was against the native population that put up a really bitter struggle. So the longest counterinsurgency is not the recent stuff in the Middle East. It's about what we did to the native population here that eventually had to give up.
And Americans had a name for their national expansion. It was manifest destiny, the idea that it was the obvious fate of America or the United States to control a good part of North America. And they were all about territorial expansion in this painting, which hangs in, I think it's the western staircase as you're getting into the chamber of the House of Representatives. It goes by the politically correct title nowadays of Westward Ho. Well, that's not the title when it was painted. It was Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way. Americans were all about expansion and proud of it.
However, a different view starts emerging in the late 19th century, propelled by Captain and later Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who is by far the most famous professor ever associated with the Naval War College, where I spent 24 years of my career. And when he's looking at the world, he goes, "Actually, power and position in the world really isn't a function so much of continental expansion and consolidation, but really it's about all the wealth you can accrue from trade."
And he thought there were certain prerequisites to follow a maritime security paradigm. What are they? One, you need a moat. You cannot be subject to invasion right across your border or it's over. Secondly, you need a dense internal transportation grid in order to get the goods out in peacetime. You need reliable egress by sea to get the navy out in wartime. And you need a dense coastal population. These are the people who are going to be running all the commerce. And you also need stable government institutions that are going to be stable in the sense that they're going to fund a navy and that they're going to pass laws that are going to make commerce happen.
If you look at these prerequisites and you look at China and Russia today, neither one has the full list, far from it. Neither one has a moat. Both of them have more neighbors than any two other countries on the planet, and many of those neighbors don't like them at all, for excellent reasons. Russia has a lamentable internal transportation grid, whereas China's has been improving. Neither one has reliable egress by sea, surrounded as they are by narrow, in the case of China, island-clustered seas, and Russia as well, loads of neighbors. These places tend to get blockaded and closed down in wartime. Russia has reliable egress up north. Well, great, no one lives there. What do you want to do? Go pet a polar bear? It will not work out. In addition, on dense coastal population, yes, China has dense coastal population, but again, it's onto a narrow sea. Russia does not have a dense coastal population up north. And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector. And neither one has stable government institutions. What's the litmus test for that one? That would be transparent, regular elections, and dictatorship for life does not remotely qualify. So, China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions, but I'm not clear they actually understand what goes into a full maritime paradigm.
Anyway, there was a counter-argument to Mahan that comes a generation later by a Briton, Sir Halford Mackinder, who's looking at the world and looking at Britain's problems, and he thinks that actually Russia occupies the best geopolitical location in the world, not Great Britain. Cuz this is a map from his 1904 article, and he defines as the pivot area, Eurasia is the part of the world he's focusing on, and it's where Russia is, and he also calls it the great heartland. And he said, "Look, that area, the pivot area, is the citadel of land power on the great mainland of the world. It is the greatest natural fortress in the world. Why? Because it's insulated by mountains, deserts, frozen seas, and rivers that exit onto the oceans in very inaccessible places during wartime. And therefore, it is impervious to sea power. Britain can't really get at this area." And he said, "But if you occupy the heartland, this pivot area, you have the possibility for defense in depth, strategic retreat, and self-sufficiency."
So, the heartland is not insulated by the sea, it's insulated from the sea. And a maritime power like Britain, if it wants to influence the heartland, it's got to do it on the periphery. In those days, it would be through having colonies in these very strategic locations. In our own day, it would be having allies with bases in these locations.
This man, Nicholas Spykman, was also very concerned about who controls Eurasia. He felt that the country that controls Eurasia could well control the world. And he had much to worry about when he completed his very important work in 1943, the year he dies. He's a naturalized American citizen from the Netherlands, then under Nazi occupation, and he felt that the Nazis had come really close to dominating Eurasia in 1941. And here's what he said: "Despite occupying the safest position of any nation in the world, we Americans have been involved in two devastating World Wars in the space of a quarter of a century. And in the second one," i.e. the ongoing one, "we were at one point in serious danger of defeat. The expectations of US statesmen regarding the outcome of their actions were consistently wrong. And their thinking about national security generally failed to provide successful answers." Sound familiar?
In addition, he's looking at the world: "Look, the influence of the United States can be brought to bear on Europe and the Far East only by means of seaborne traffic. And the power of the states of Eurasia can reach us effectively only by crossing the seas." And this is true despite the development of air power, because big things go by sea, and they still do. Therefore, US security was a function of sea power, and that sanctuary at home, and by that I mean invulnerability to attack, is a function of a maritime shield. And Spykman's really concerned who controls the Rimland of this great heartland, friend or foe. And here's why. The United States will have to depend on her sea power communication across the Atlantic and the Pacific to give her access to the old world. And the effect of this access is going to delimit what sort of foreign policy the United States can have. And what the United States requires is a continental ally who can provide a base from which land power can be exercised. What he's saying: in World War II, victory in that thing is going to depend on alliances and allies. Critical.
All right. So, that was the hors d'oeuvre. I've done the whirlwind tour of American history, settled in a few minutes or less. You should be happy about that one. And then I've given you some of the most famous geopoliticians there are, a synopsis of what their ideas are. But this is the main course. First I'm going to talk about continental empires because they come first in human history, and then I'll turn to maritime empires, which come later. But then there's the Industrial Revolution and the post-World War institutional framework that opens the possibility of a maritime global order. So that's my game plan.
Oh, I forgot one thing. I don't know whether you all like animals or not, but we at the Naval War College love animals. And so we often refer to continental powers as elephants and maritime powers as whales. Bonus terminology.
All right, I'm going to start out with China, not Russia, which Mackinder was preoccupied with, as the original land power. And here is Sunzi, the preeminent Chinese theorist on matters of strategy, in his Art of War. And Sunzi's providing advice to kings on how to stay on the throne, to conquer neighbors, and do it efficiently. And in this world you've got lots of neighbors, any of which can invade at any time. Third-party intervention is the norm in this world. And if you think about this book, it makes no references to maritime warfare at all, and it makes only tangential references to riverine warfare. And you go, well, why is that? Well, for excellent reasons. He is writing about the world of continental empires in existence long before the maritime things get going.
And if you think about the great civilizations of Eurasia, often at their basis are great continental empires. And a civilization answers the questions: how should I live and how should I interact with others? And it is basically a world order unto itself. And civilizations have often fought with each other to make their rules universal.
All right. Whirlwind tour of China and what it looks like to be a continental empire. So, here's a precipitation map. Here's where it doesn't rain very much. Here's temperatures. That's where it's awfully cold. Here's topography. That's where it's flat. So, if you notice, if you want to grow things, you need it where it's warm enough, it rains enough, etc. And here's a really good topographical map, and it gives you an understanding of why famine afflicted China for so many centuries of its history and why it's dependent on food imports today. It's just too much of the real estate vertical to grow things on.
And then here's an ethnic map. You can see the consolidated pink area. That's where the Han, the preponderant ethnic group of China, live. And then they're surrounded with all these heterogeneous areas around them. You can go, "Hmm, I wonder what's going on there?" And then here is a simplified ethnic map. It shows China proper, and the curious might ask, "How did the Han wind up with all the prime real estate?" Cuz what's arable is there. And the answer would be, "Well, they laid waste to the competing Zunghar and Tibetan empires." Bet you've never heard of the Zunghars. They were wiped out by the Qing Dynasty a long time ago. And in the continental world, you're faced with a binary choice: you either become Han or they will kill you. And so, you got to get out of Dodge and flee south or do something else. And genocide is what happens to the losers in continental warfare. And apparently in our own day, the Uyghurs are slated for genocide.
All right. I'm going to give you a whirlwind tour, sanitized version, of Chinese history. The Han start up north in the Yellow River Valley, and they spread and they spread, and they do fun stuff like they build walls, they build more walls, not a new idea. And then they shrink back, and oh, that bad, bad time. But then they're back. And then, oh, I don't know what happened there, but anyway, they're consolidated. And then there's this thing, which looks like any other dynasty except a little bigger. Not so. The Yuan Dynasty are Mongols, they're not Han. This is an occupation dynasty, and that map's inaccurate. Cuz here's the real story. The Mongols start out east of Lake Baikal, and then they spread in concentric rings, more or less, over the Eurasian plain in another time of climate change, when their herds just had to move south or everyone's going to freeze to death. The Chinese act like it's like any other dynasty. No, it's not. It's the Pax Mongolica. It's a Mongol world order when the Han were a subjugated people. But they come back with the Ming Dynasty. But then the Ming succumb to the second largest empire in Chinese history, another conquest dynasty. These folks aren't Han, they're Manchu.
And what's fascinating is today, when China claims whatever its historical lands are, they either choose the Mongol Yuan Dynasty or the Manchu Qing Dynasty, when the Han were a subjugated people. So try to untangle that logic. I'm not even going to go there. But the point was not to make that snide remark, although I did make that snide remark, but rather to show you that there's been lots and lots of expansion, lots and lots of shrinkage, and lots and lots of bloodshed while this is taking place. China has been raising armies denominated in hundreds of thousands of people for thousands of years. The West does not do this, at least not on a regular basis, until the Napoleonic Wars. It's a brutal world.
Now, Mackinder didn't much care about China one way or the other because in his lifetime China was a country in free fall. So he's focusing on Russia, the continental empire. Mackinder's really concerned about Russia also because it's building railways that are going to give it all these internal lines of communication, and Mackinder thinks that's going to work really well for
them in wartime. Whereas Britain is stuck with exterior lines of communication. Exterior because you're going by sea and on the periphery of things. So, if you look at the Russians, they're like Mongols in reverse. They start in Moscow and then Moscow lays waste to the other cities, princely city-states. And after that, they're after furs, making money that way. And the Russians keep going until they run into countries that fight back.
So, to show you how this works, this is the Russian Empire at its height in 1914. So, you can see Moscow as the historic capital, and you can look at the colors there and see, ooh, the administrative units are fairly small around Moscow and they get really big as you go out into Siberia. And these are civil administrative units. And here's a clearer map, except it's not really clear. The bigger these units, they're provinces, they're called guberniya in Russian, or governorates. But anyway, these provinces are standard administrative units. But for the recently ingested and yet to be digested, they're putting in different units called oblast, oblasti. And you can't see them on the map, they're in gray print. So, this shows you more or less where they're located. Outlined in red is where these places are. These are the places in process of being digested.
So, these are civil borders. These are the military borders that are superimposed over this, but only on the conquered areas do you have governor-generalships. The "general" should give you a hint of what's really going on. And who's conquered? Finland, Poland, Ukraine, Caucasus, all the khanates of Turkestan, Siberia. And China has also done this, of having provincial boundaries that come and go and move around and also superimposing military regions that also move around. Whereas if you look at the United States, boundaries of states really haven't changed. You've got one set of states and then that's that. But what's on here is these boundaries are a mechanism of ingesting, digesting, and if you can't fully digest and turn everybody into a regular province, at least you can neutralize these ethnic groups.
All right. So, Mackinder's all about the advantages of internal lines of communication. Well, it comes with a corresponding disadvantage, which is multiple neighbors. And these are Russia's no-kidding security threats circa 1900. And from west to east there: Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan. This security world is really different from Britain's 360° you-can't-get-me moat. Lots of people have come to get Russians over the years. And Russians have fought constantly with Germans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire. They have suffered catastrophic defeats to the Mongols, the Swedes, initially to Napoleon, the Germans in World War I, and in the Cold War, but each time the central position allowed them to rise again.
In this world, power is a function of land. Neighbors are dangerous, even the itty-bitty ones. If they're unstable, that instability can ooze over the border. Worse yet, if they're strong, stable neighbors and they have an idea that you're going to become a menu item for them, that's even worse.
So, in a maritime power, the army is for expeditionary warfare. What's the expedition? You cross the ocean and go somewhere else. That's the expedition. Uh-uh in this world. Purpose number one of an army in this world is you protect the ruling machine. So, if you think about the People's Liberation Army, its goal number one, mission number one, is to keep the Communist Party in power. That's not what the armies are in the maritime world. Secondarily, it's to garrison the empire, prevent defections. And then thirdly, it's for border defense. And as you're fighting at the border, whatever you win, you keep, right? As you're expanding outwards, you hope. In this world, away games are a rare event. Most of the fighting's occurring right on the border.
So, these are statistics about deaths, not just casualties, wounded people. This is dead people. These are the sunk costs, all right? No one's breathing life into these people. They're sunk casualties. So, if you're looking at Axis military deaths, you've got 3.2 million dead German soldiers, 1 and 1/2 million Japanese, 330,000 Italians. Now, let's look at the Allied land powers: 8 and 1/2 million dead Russian soldiers, nearly a million dead Poles, 1.3 million dead Chinese, and 340,000 dead Frenchmen. Okay, look at the maritime powers. By some statistics, Britain and the United States, Britain with 326,000 deaths, United States 295,000. By some statistics, they suffered fewer deaths than Italy or France. And France wasn't in the war that long.
And then when you add in all the civilian deaths, the numbers for the continental powers go catastrophic, whereas they hardly budge for the maritime powers. So, you've got over 7 million dead Germans, over 25 and 1/2 million dead Russians, almost 7 million dead Poles, 11 million dead Chinese, nearly a million dead Frenchmen. So, the deaths for the land powers are measured in millions, whereas for the maritime powers, it's hundreds of thousands, still not a great number. And what's going on here? It's because you're not insulated by the oceans. So, the fighting tends to be on home territory. If that's the case, you're ruining civilians at a really rapid clip.
And no country in its right mind wants to fight on the main front if there are alternatives. But this is the continental powers' unavoidable agony: that when the neighbor invades, you've got a choice on that day. Either you're going to capitulate or you're going to fight, and you're doing it on the neighbor's timing. That's Ukraine's problem. Whereas if you're a maritime power observing someone else being invaded, because in theory it's pretty tough to invade you by sea, it's a major point of strategy as to whether you're going to intervene at all, and if you are, what is the timing? What instruments of national power are you going to use? And these are things that the United States needs to think about very carefully before it intervenes all over the place and overextends.
But their advantage is if you win this kind of warfare. If you think about Russians, enormous sacrifices, I've just listed that. For Stalin, it means he dominates Eastern Europe, or Russia does, for the duration of the Cold War, but understand that that kind of territorial domination comes at a huge price. The value of the object had better be worth it before you try it.
In this world, there are certain rules for playing this game. Rule number one, no two-front wars. I've shown you all the neighbors. If they gang up on you, it will be game over in a very bad way for you. Secondly, no great power neighbors. Why? Because today's friend can be tomorrow's foe and that spells trouble. So what do you do? You take on your neighbors sequentially, right, one at a time. You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between, and you await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game.
Better yet, you get the neighbors to do the work for you. How? You sow their mutual resentments, you get them to fight each other, you deluge them with fake news so that Russia can play the role of the jackal state, which is once the neighbors have sufficiently weakened themselves and weakened each other, Russia can move on in and steal a kill made by others.
This theory of security has certain problems. One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or are they complicit?" And moreover, there are no enduring alliances in this world because the neighbors figure it out. The hegemonic power is just a long-term problem. And there's also no counsel on when to quit. Like how much territory do you take before you choke on it? And it turns out that there's been a tendency over the course of China's and Russia's long histories to overextend, and this helps account for the implosions of various empires and dynasties.
Now, before you dismiss this security paradigm, understand it was very effective. Certainly prior to the Industrial Revolution, no one cared in this world about collateral damage or killing a bunch of innocent people. This paradigm is all about killing people, breaking things to take territory. And you've seen it operating in real time in your own lives in Syria, Ukraine, and other places. This is why those ancient ruins, the ones that still remain, are ruins, because this sort of warfare is ruinous.
All right, here is one of the preeminent historians of the late Tsarist period, Vasily Klyuchevsky, who's describing his country. He said, "The history of Russia is a history of a country in process of colonizing itself. Her area of colonization grows in tandem with her national territory, at times shrinking, at times expanding, age-old movement. Therefore, the periods in our history are the stages which our people have gone through in the occupation and development of the land acquired by them." There is absolutely no mention of the people who actually live on this land. It's like irrelevant from his point of view. But this is the way Russians have long looked at things: that if you have small neighbors, someone big may take them over, and even worse, if the weak become strong in their own right, it's dangerous. So, you want to keep moving outwards and expanding.
And here, a generation earlier, you have Fyodor Dostoevsky, the novelist, the author of Crime and Punishment and other light reads. Here he is confiding in his diary: "In Europe, we are hangers-on and slaves, whereas we shall go to Asia as masters. In Europe, we are Asiatics, whereas in Asia, we too are Europeans. Our civilizing mission in Asia will bribe our spirit and drive us further." So, this idea of empire is very deeply rooted in Russian thinking.
And here is Count Sergei Witte. He's probably the most distinguished public servant in the late tsarist period. He was a finance minister. And he's looking at the world in 1903, and he goes, "Look, the problem for Russia is to obtain as large a share as possible of the outlived oriental states." And he's thinking of the Ottoman Empire, but particularly of China. And he goes, "Look, Russia historically, geographically has the undisputed right to the lion's share of the expected prey. And this elemental movement of Russia began a long time ago with Ivan the Terrible," aptly named. "And the absorption by Russia of a considerable portion of the Chinese Empire is only a question of time," unless the Chinese get their act together. So, here you have a statesman at the highest levels of the Russian government who is looking at Russian national security, and it's all about territorial expansion. Well, Putin also looks at the world this way, apparently.
The problem for the likes of Putin is if a continental power botches strategy, its known world can vanish forever. And this is what happened to Imperial China, Imperial Russia, and many venerable civilizations. I love this photograph of an aristocrat's whimsical palace. It's long gone as a result of one of the most horrific genocides of the 20th century, when the communists made good their promise to get rid of entire social classes, and I mean get rid of, like gone forever. And with the Bolshevik Revolution and the ensuing Russian Civil War, followed by collectivization, and then the Great Purges that finished the job. This is the continental world. It is a world without insurance policies.
Okay, now for the maritime world. It is a different event. I love this picture. I've no idea how accurate it is, but I think it illustrates the point. So, Spykman is talking about all of these different rimlands and things. And you look at the Atlantic Ocean. It's the center of the world economy in the 19th century, and it's all about the rimland producing all of this wealth, and then you put it on ships and you send it back and forth, so that the seas are a commons that you want to share. The whole point is you want to get goods going from port to port. And in our own highly networked age, think about it, the seas are the original network that potentially connected everyone to everything.
All right, the genesis of this maritime world, maybe it goes back further, but as far back as I go, is the Athenian Empire that's hugging the shores of the Aegean and Ionian Seas, and it's all about the trade that's accruing there that's paying for their empire. The Romans likewise are another rimland empire, very different from the consolidated empires like Russia and China. And think about the terminology: Mediterranean, medi, middle, terranean, land. So, it's the sea in the middle of the land. Whereas the terminology for China, Zhongguo, zhong, central, guo, kingdom. So, it's the kingdom among the kingdoms. One term emphasizes the centrality of the sea, the other the centrality of the land. Different way of looking at things. And here's the Byzantine Empire, another rimland empire. And then for a while no one controls the rimlands anymore.
And in part what's going on is there's always been a lot of money to be made on East-West trade. It used to go by camels, among other things, on the Silk Road. But whoever controlled the westward toll booth on that thing made loads of money, because that's where it splits, right? And it's going to go on the southern or northern shores of the Mediterranean. A lot of fighting over that piece of territory. For a while, the Muslim conquest settled it. They controlled it. And then while those things are going on, there is continental consolidation going on in Europe. And both modern Germany and modern France trace their origins to the empire created by Charlemagne at the turn of the 8th and 9th centuries. And then if you go to the end of the first millennium, you look at Europe. No one controls the rimlands, but you've got these large states that things have coalesced into. And then the Crusades, in part, are a fight of these larger powers in Europe to try to come back and get that toll booth back again, which they fail. Instead, the Ottomans have it for a long time.
And this is when the Europeans have to get clever, because they want to trade with Asia. So, how are we going to go? By ship. And we'll go the long way around. And it's the Spanish and the Portuguese that try this. Except they bump into the New World. New to them, not so much to other people. And they also got a lot of gold and silver here. And so they forget about the spices, silk, and the high-end dinnerware, and they're going to do heavy metal instead. However, it's the Dutch who are the real followers of maritime empire, which is very much defined by their trading bases. Their problem is their location in Europe is vulnerable.
And it's not surprising that it is a member of the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius, who's the founding father of international law. Why? Because maritime empires want to be able to use the seas as commons, don't want people pirating their trade, and would like everyone to have rules so that everybody can trade in safety. So, here's Hugo Grotius in his Mare Liberum, Freedom of the Seas, writing that every nation is free to travel to every other nation and trade with it. And then in his Law of War and Peace, he cites a Roman jurist, so this is going way back: "To all men belong the use of the sea." And then he quotes a Byzantine compilation of Roman law, i.e. going way back in Western thinking: "By natural law, the following are common to everyone: the air, flowing water, the sea, and in consequence, the seashore."
Well, this is very much a product of Western civilization, but not necessarily shared by others. For instance, in 1996, China ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, UNCLOS. Except China says that freedom of navigation does not extend within 200 nautical miles of their coastline. Except under UNCLOS, the number is 12 nautical miles. And in the East and South China Seas, these numbers make a difference.
All right, the British are the real pioneers of maritime empire because they don't suffer the Dutch problem
that Napoleon eventually takes care of the Dutch and integrates them into the French empire. But the Britons have this 360° moat. They're the only power in Europe that doesn't need to maintain a large standing army, because if Britain could maintain a competent navy, no army's going to reach British shores, cuz they're going to be drowned at sea. So, Britain could take a weakness, its dependence on trade, and turn it into a strength. So, the trade is going to finance the navy, it's going to protect both the British homeland and some of the trade, and then Britain is going to be compounding wealth while its neighbors are busy. These neighbors have to fund large armies that can be economy killing and also can be coup generating, that are going to be constantly fighting with each other and destroying wealth in the process.
So, while a navy could provide Britain with a prevent defeat strategy, no one's going to get to Britain, a navy's insufficient for a deliver victory strategy. It's not going to eliminate these continental problems. But, if Britain can keep compounding wealth over time and then its neighbors are busy destroying wealth at a rapid clip, then the difference in wealth is going to get larger, and in that sense things will get better for Britain.
And the Britons, after much trial and error, came up with a way of integrating multiple instruments of national power to deal with this gentleman on the horse. Oh, by the way, if you want to see the horse's skeleton, you can go to the British Army Museum in London, but that's another story. Anyway, gross story, but anyhow, here's good old Napoleon, and the Britons tried different things and eventually figured out the problem is that navies are rarely decisive in wartime. You've got to have other instruments to integrate. Armies sometimes can be. And so this is where the Britons come up with grand strategy. They coined the term because they need to do it.
And here's their problem. On the eve of the Napoleonic Wars, Europe has a bunch of consolidated states east and west, and then there's this big tidbit zone in the middle. It's called the Holy Roman Empire, but it's really a tidbit zone. And Napoleon eats up the tidbits, and then you get to 1812, and this is the maximum extent of the French Empire, and this is when the guru of Western warfare, Carl von Clausewitz, is coming up with his ideas about ground warfare. It's a really bad year for everybody. Not for Napoleon, but everybody else. And this is when the Britons are thinking about how are you going to use maritime power to deal with this?
And here's what they come up with. Their strategy for elephant hunting. How do you deal with a continental power that's trying to upend the trading system on which you're making money? So, rule number one is you keep the home economy growing. That is number one, because that's going to produce the money that's going to fund your military, fund your allies, allow you to do everything. Secondly, don't let the elephant forage. You want to close down enemy trade through blockade, commerce raiding. So, you're going to throw it back on its own dwindling resources and its increasingly embittered allies. Rule number three, you want to rent an elephant. You want to find the continental power that is most directly threatened by your continental problem. And you want to arm, fund, do whatever you can to keep them in the fight, cuz that's the main front of whatever this war is.
Rule number four, Britain needs to find a theater that is peripheral to that main theater, where access by sea is much more efficient than access by land, and you want to fight there. Why? Because it's going to do several things for you. The attrition between the peripheral theater and the main theater is going to add up, that's good. You're going to force the enemy to fight with divided attention, and ideally, if it's a really good theater, you're going to relieve some of the pressure on the main front as your enemy's going to have to divert resources.
Rule number five, a rule that Britain broke at great cost in World War I. Do not take on the enemy main force directly. You certainly do not do that as an opening move. Think about it, a continental power's major strength is its army. That is not Britain's great strength. Britain's great strength is its navy, its ability to generate wealth, and therefore its ability to survive protracted war. Don't play the continental game, it won't be good for you. And rule number six, if you're going to fight on the main front, only do it after you have really bled that elephant so that it's been greatly weakened, and you only do it with lots of friends, gang up on them.
As much as a continental power might want to play this game, it cannot. Why? One is insufficient maritime access. When Mahan talked about egress to the sea, basically they're on these narrow seas that are blockaded, which means you cannot get your surface fleet out reliably in wartime. Second, it means your merchant marine is going nowhere. And in addition, these continental problems often have a surfeit of neighbors, some of which might invade it. So, it can't play this game.
But if Britain did and kept at it, it could set itself and its enemies on opposing trend lines. So, the war is going to increasingly encroach on enemy territory with the main theater and the more peripheral theaters, which is going to undermine the enemy economy, productive capacity, morale, and together this is going to undermine the ability for your enemy to continue fighting. In effect, it's a strategy of protracted war, but Britain's going to win by exhausting the other guy first. And if you think about it, the focus isn't primarily on the military instrument of national power, it's actually much more about economics, coalitions, institutions.
But there are prerequisites for it. You can't play it if you do not have sanctuary at home. Sorry about the double negative, but the point is if people are going to invade over your borders or level your industrial base, you have a hard time trying to do this. Moreover, it requires access, access to peripheral theaters, access to your alliance partners, access to overseas markets. It also requires institutional stability at home in order to follow a consistent strategy over a long period of time. These are some of the characteristics that Mahan would later emphasize.
All right, after the Napoleonic Wars there followed a century of unprecedented prosperity in Europe where there was no continent-wide war again. During this period there were some smaller wars. And it meant to be where they're just making a lot of money playing the maritime game, which is just trade according to the rules, compound wealth, don't level each other's buildings, you'll make money. But World War I came, never mind.
All right, now I'm into the second distinguishing characteristic between maritime and continental powers. The first one was the ability or inability to defend at sea. Here's the second one. Continental powers face contiguous threats. So they have to focus on national security, and often they want to insulate themselves from neighbors, and they want exclusive zones to do this, and they often want those exclusive zones to extend out into the seas around them. Maritime powers think this is crazy land, because they've got the relative security of the moat, no one's going to invade them. So they're going to focus on national prosperity, and trade is the path to prosperity and to security, because this is the money that's going to pay for everything. So they want maritime access to markets. So they want to operate with the oceans being commons, and they want it to go all the way up from port to port, cuz you can't trade unless you go port to port.
So from these distinguishing characteristics you get two mutually exclusive world orders out of this. One of them is we're going to divide the world up into very large spheres of influence, each a world unto itself. And the other one is no, no, no, we're going to operate under universal rules, and the seas are going to be open to everyone.
Okay. The Industrial Revolution upends empires of both types. And it's going to usher in a maritime rules-based global order. And it's a game changer because it introduces compounded economic growth, which is indeed revolutionary, and it arises over a combination not just of technological changes, but also institutional changes. What are institutions? It's how we organize each other, right? We join into some larger institution, and then it has some purpose in organizing people to do things more efficiently. So, in the early phases, it's starting with steam power, industry, textiles, insurance, and banking. You can't do the trade without insurance and banking for your loans and things, institutions. And in its later phases, it's about railways, telegraph, steamships, mass markets, trade, general staffs, armaments.
And what's going on is the currency of power has changed. Power is a function of land back in the day. Why? Because land is where you get the commodities that you can sell, and also rural areas is where you're going to get your peasant conscripts to field your mass armies. Well, once wealth is a function of commerce, industry, and trade, it isn't land anymore. And this upends the world. If you think about the world today, who's rich, who's poor, who's powerful, who's not, it's often the degree to which the country is industrialized.
And the Industrial Revolution opens up the beginnings of a global trading order, where you're trying through trade negotiations to minimize transaction costs so everybody can make a lot of money, and this is a process that is still ongoing in our own day. Trade negotiations continue eternally. But it upends the traditional balance of power. The traditional societies are suddenly, their security paradigms no longer work. And China back in the 19th century was just opposed to this incoming maritime order. In our own day, ISIS, or whatever is left of it, absolutely reviles the liberal economies and societies that are favoring this sort of trading order.
If you look at the big yellow area that Mackinder cared about with railways, cuz railways are a product of the Industrial Revolution, he was thinking all in terms of an integrated transportation grid there. Another way of looking at this map is the Roman, British, and Mongol empires all share a piece of real estate. It would be the western terminus of the Silk Road. So, in the continental world, that Silk Road is a really big deal, and that is prime real estate. However, another piece of the Industrial Revolution is the Suez Canal, which is going to wreck the camel trade on the Silk Road, because once the canal is built, even with steamships, but the canal even more so, it is so much cheaper to send things by ship than to try to walk it over Eurasia with draft animals, and it just upends the economics of the continental world versus the maritime world.
And let's fast forward 100 years to the 1967 war, where you've got Israel fighting Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, and as part of Egypt's strategy, it doesn't want Israel using the Suez Canal, so they sink a bunch of block ships here. So, that's the operational effect. Israel is not going to be using the Suez Canal, but here is the strategic effect, the ones that actually count in this life. If you look at before the war, almost 90% of ships were 50,000 deadweight tons or less, and this is numbers of ships, right? And so, they could all make it through the Suez Canal, which could take ships up to that size. But then the Suez Canal is closed down from 1967 to 1972-ish.
And so that's a long time in world trade. Well, look at the adjustments that take place. By '72, you got almost 30% of the number of ships, not the capacity, are these huge ships that never had existed before. They're not going to make it through the Suez Canal. And the Suez Canal has since been widened, but still the biggest ships can't make it through. And so then if you look at the cost of sending oil from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam in the Netherlands, if you're going to send it in an itty-bitty ship through the canal, it might be a little over $13 per ton to send it. Whereas if you're sending it in a big ship the long way around Africa, I believe it's a third that price. So, strategic effect of things, unexpected. That overhead cost in shipping, the size of ship gets over a lot of it. It's not about distance.
And here's the other guy who really revolutionized maritime trade, Malcolm McLean, who I bet you've never heard of, but now I'm going to fix that. He ran a trucking company, and he decided to put his trucks minus the chassis on ships, what we call containers. Above decks, below decks. And when he did this, he reduced the loading cost from nearly $6 a ton to less than 20 cents. And then port time is again much reduced, so ships are out about making money. And then for those of you who are skeptical about international organizations, here's one you've never heard of. The International Organization for Standardization then standardized these container sizes to fit one if by truck, two if by railway cars, and thousands if by sea. And this just plummets transport costs. So before you dismiss international organizations, understand that here's a little one you've never heard of that has made massive changes in your lives.
Okay, and it leads to plummeting transport costs through the duration of the 20th century. And our latest dictator for life, Xi Jinping, he's got this Belt Road thing that he thinks is going to be a good idea. Good luck with that one, and here are the statistics to back me up. Until 1960, the average tanker size was 20,000 deadweight tons. And if you look at our own day, the smallest ultra-large crude tankers are a quarter of a million deadweight tons. I believe the longest train can take maybe 600 containers on a good day, whereas the largest container ships can take over 21,000, with cargoes valued at over $1 billion. So, it is so much cheaper to send things by sea.
And oh, on the Belt Road thing, it would be nice if the whole thing were continuous. It's not. It would also be nice if it were all the same gauge. It's not. So, you're loading, unloading, loading, unloading. What a mess. Also, not only is it far cheaper to send things by sea, it is far more secure. If you're going to run the Belt Road thing, or the belt part of it, the land part, you've got to control the whole thing end to end. You're going through some of the most unstable places there are. Good luck with that one. Whereas in the maritime world, if it is unstable, or they do block ships and close down the Suez Canal, well, forget it. Just go the long way around. It'll be fine.
And also, for China, with its geographical setup as it is, the seas are going to be open to it only in peacetime. In wartime, this has nothing to do with anyone doing anything to them. It's just facts. It is surrounded by loads of neighbors, shallow seas, lots of islands; they're blocked in from the high seas, and from very predictable points. In wartime, those places become kill zones. Merchant traffic cannot make it through those places unless you're friendly with everybody, which China currently isn't, maybe it'll change. And even your surface ships won't make it out. So, peace is definitely the better thing.
If you look at the end of the last Cold War, too, sadly we're in the second one, but look at how world trade just takes off. It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion. But with the second Cold War, we're into more inefficient things again.
This brings me to the third
distinguishing characteristics of continental and maritime powers. It has to do with the transportation revolution. So, continental powers historically have leveraged interior lines of communication, that allow them to garrison their empire, deploy their armies against neighbors, and then to form a contiguous alliance system. And that worked well when power was a function of land. Well, that's not true anymore. The maritime powers are using these exterior lines of communications, the ones by sea, to give them access not just to the people right next to them, but to the entire globe, which opens the possibility for them to form a global alliance system. And from this reliance on interior versus exterior lines of communication, it gives you the possibility of what sort of alliance systems that you can have.
All right, the industrial revolution put continental empires on notice, not simply because land transport is so much more expensive than sea transport, but because it opened the possibility of a positive sum world order. The land empire MO of beating up all your neighbors, well, it's negative sum. What do I mean by that? Is your fighting over territory, you're damaging the goods while you're fighting. So, whatever someone lost in pristine territory now looks like this. And it's negative sum. You're destroying wealth at a very rapid clip. Whereas the maritime world is, "No, boys, don't do it that way. You want to have trading partners. You want to have it win-win. So, everybody makes money. So, we have compounded growth." And this maritime order is focusing on freedom of navigation, free trade, international laws and institutions that facilitate trade in order to minimize transaction costs so we can maximize the money.
And the insurance system for all of this is alliance system. So, most countries aren't maritime by geography, but if they all gang up together and they coordinate diverse instruments of national power when they're dealing with these rogue continental states that want to upend the trading system, they can turn out in force to protect the rules that protect them all.
And here's the ultimate insurance policy that was created by the greatest generation, which were the conscripts of World War I. The people who were told to go up and over trenches and to see how that would go. And the ones who survived came back and tried to raise their families during the Great Depression. And then by the time they were of the age to be strategic leaders, they're off sending their own kids to fight World War II. And they concluded, and this generation is in Europe and the United States both, they concluded that the solution to great depressions and world wars was institution building on a global scale, and they built institutions that have lasted to the present and held the peace in the industrialized world until Vladimir Putin decided to wear his magic, but they create the UN, the IMF, NATO, the predecessor institutions of the World Trade Organization, and also of the European Union. And their idea is we must hash out our differences with diplomats and lawyers, 'cause when you send the soldiers in, whatever gains you think you're going to get are going to be inferior to what you would have done with the diplomats. It's too ruinous fighting each other.
All right. So, if you look at where the fighting that did go on in the Cold War, 'cause it was cold in the industrialized world, but it was really hot elsewhere, a lot of it's on this Mackinder's Inner Marginal Crescent, which is where the maritime and continental worlds hit. So, if there's civil wars going on in there, the one side of the Cold War wants to put its finger on the scale, and the other one wants to put its finger on the scale, and there we go. And that is all wealth destroying and helps explain why growth rates and things weren't as, or globally had problems, 'cause you're destroying wealth.
All right. The maritime world is invisible, and this took me 15 years teaching at the war college to notice the obvious. Sometimes the obvious becomes obvious by stating it. Let's see if it works for you. The continental world's visible 'cause it's about positive objectives. It's all about making things happen. So, you want to take territory, you can see it. Either you did or you didn't. But the maritime world is about negative objectives. It's preventing bad things from happening. And you can never prove that you prevented anything. Maybe no one was trying anything to begin with. And it's invisible, right? The thing you prevented never happened. Surprise, surprise, you can't see it. But in the continental world, it's all about positive operational objectives. You're destroying neighbors to take their territory. But, at the strategic level, you're destroying wealth at a massive clip. That is a problem. Whereas, the maritime world, it's invisible, all the bad things that you're preventing, anyone messing with the international trading order which you're making your money from, in part, and a lot of domestic activity as well.
And navies, their missions, more often than not, are also about negative objectives. Not all of them. What are they? And think about naval missions. Most of them happen in peacetime. Yeah, wartime happens, too. But, for navies, it's mostly in peacetime. And what are they up to? Mission number one is prevent the destruction of the global trading system. That would be important. Your prosperity hinges on that one. The second really important mission is prevent limits on freedom of navigation, 'cause if you cannot get goods from port to port, it's pretty useless. And thirdly, it is to deter expansion into taking over big countries, taking over little countries. Think about it. The bedrock principle of international law is sovereignty. If we're all going to be invading each other, what international law is there? And the antidotes to rogue behavior in this maritime world are alliances, diplomacy, sanctions, embargoes, containment, numerous instruments of national power. And navies are about deterrence, blockade, and commerce raiding. What you're doing is you're preventing the continental problem, the elephant, from foraging. You're just saying, "You're getting a timeout from the rules-based order 'cause you can't behave yourself."
And you can go, "Well, the continental problem's still there." Well, what's interesting, so you all know about compounded growth. It's powerful, right? Over generations. What people don't think about, this is back to negative objectives. Sanctions are like economic chemotherapy. What you're doing is preventing one or two percent growth per annum, even with leaky sanctions, right? Well, then you go, so what? Well, no, the difference over several generations is the difference between North and South Korea. I get it, North Korea is still there, but they got a much smaller piggy bank than they would have otherwise. And yeah, you're not getting rid of the problem, but if the rogue state has nuclear weapons and you go, "Oh gee, we just want to get rid of it." Really, you want to have a nuclear war to get rid of North Korea? This world is not about the operational win of totally eliminating a problem. It's rather containing it at acceptable cost. So, the North Koreans want to live miserable lives at home, have fun with it. Go live miserable lives at home. And it's being contained at acceptable cost. That's what's going on.
Okay, the optimists at the end of the Cold War thought surely everyone wants to join the maritime party. Not so. The continental maritime difference of opinion continues, and I guess you like the slide here of Mr. Fit and Misfit, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. They want to upend this maritime order. They want to hollow out international institutions, upend international law, kill off our alliance system so we can return the world into warring spheres of influence and that we can live the sort of squalid lives their citizens have to live.
Okay, to summarize, there are very different geopolitics associated with continental and maritime powers, and these discriminating factors are the inability or ability to defend primarily at sea, a focus on insulation from versus access to the world, and a reliance on interior versus exterior lines of communication. And these accidents of geography have predisposed different preferences. One, a continental power typically looks at territory as something you might want to take. Whereas, a maritime power is, "No, no, no, that's a market. I want to make money there." And who wants to own their domestic problems? And then there's the continental power wanting to be self-sufficient. Whereas, a maritime power is, "Hey, I'm going to trade for that. I want access to markets. I'm going to make a lot more money this way." And the continental desire for exclusive zones, whereas a maritime power is saying, "No, we want commons. We want to share the seas, space, cyber, and the air, that this is the way to do stuff."
And then many people notice that most countries, except for a few islands, they aren't strictly maritime, or if they're completely landlocked, I mean, most countries are not strictly maritime or continental by geography, but there's a corollary. Alliances can bestow a collective maritime position and power package to those countries that join in. It gets large enough that even though they themselves are not maritime alone, together they can be.
And this choice about which way to go is very financially consequential in our own day, because typically continentalists tend to be dictators, not always, but typically. And they're all about hemorrhaging cash to dominate their own citizens and their neighbors. Whereas, a maritime power goes, "That's nuts. Why would you ever do that?" And they're keeping the growth compounding.
And if you think about China, it has benefited more than any other country from rejoining the family of nations in this maritime world under Deng Xiaoping. But the legacy of history and the burden of history, these continentalist outlooks like, "We need to take Taiwan." Really? They weigh heavily, and the choice is consequential, and there is only one win-win solution. However flawed this international order is, it's a work in progress, and the only win-win solution is to deploy the diplomats and lawyers to hash out these things in international forums, because if we're all going to send soldiers, we're going to get a third world war with nuclear fallout effects, and we'll see whether humanity makes it. It's tremendously consequential, particularly at this juncture in history. Anyway, thank you for your attention, and I appreciate you all coming.
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