or choke points through which a large fraction of international shipping passes. From their shores, seapower can be exercised, whether it is to guarantee the safety of the world’s navigational routes, command the proximate seas, project force ashore, encourage allies by a U.S. naval presence, or supply the bases that support America’s entire network of global alliances.
If budget cuts, loss of interest, disengagement, or other obstacles decimate American power, the nation will lose its ability to make safe the parts of the world in which it has a strategic interest. This will result in historically unprecedented international chaos, from the South and East China Seas to the Persian Gulf to the Mediterranean and, most immediately, to Russia.
The seagoing inklings of this chaos are in full sight as the United States concentrates on combating terror at the expense of reinvigorating its ability to defeat such potential adversaries as Russia and China. The steel sinews of American seapower not only have guarded our ability to ship goods abroad and communicate with allies but also, since the end of World War II, have provided an unequaled ability to respond to crises, remain present in troubled regions, provide disaster relief and humanitarian assistance, and apply force from sea to land. Our seapower has served as the single strongest guarantor of such order as exists in the world today.
No one alive today knows a world in which general principles of order do not exist. Although practiced imperfectly and selectively, most states acknowledge them as the standard of international behavior. Respect for national sovereignty, government by consent of the governed, freedom of navigation on the high seas, and economic systems based on capitalism are some of the better-known elements of the order. All have been objectives of American foreign and security policy since the nation’s founding.
Today’s order has its intellectual roots in the transition from ancient to modern political theory that took place as human nature’s concern with life in society replaced virtue as the aim of politics. For practical purposes, the international system we know began with the Treaties of Westphalia, which were signed in 1648 and which ended the Thirty Years’ War. The war had been an exceptionally barbaric European free-for-all over religion. At its end, the duke of the religiously divided northern European duchy of Pomerania described the long conflict as having “driven [the poor] to such unnatural and inhuman food as buds of trees and grass, and even to the flesh of their own children and of dead bodies.”7
In the event, a balance of state powers and practicality lighted Europe’s path away from repeated violent explosions of religious dissension fueled by the collision of imperial ambition, aspiring states, and lesser principalities. As with the Magna Carta, in which the nobility’s specific complaints against King John led to a broader acceptance of individual rights, the Westphalian agreements set in motion today’s international order.
Since World War II, America’s allies, its military, and its diplomacy have been the most important guarantor of the international system. When fascists in Europe and Asia sought its destruction, the United States together with its allies defeated them. Faced with a challenge from the Soviet Union, the United States and its allies contained it.
In all cases, the ability of the United States to communicate with allies and demonstrate solidarity with them reinforced our partners’ determination and fighting spirit. From Normandy to Inchon to Danang to Baghdad, the United States did more than encourage and reinforce. It fought. These engagements were not altruistic. Such actions as deposing a Panamanian dictator, heading off a military coup against an elected Philippine leader, or preventing additional genocide in the Balkans were aimed at local and regionalized threats. But the large contests, undertaken against large threats, had the collateral effect of preserving the international system.
Both diplomacy and force supported the international system. The single most important military enabler has been seapower. The United States used it to sustain England in the fight against Hitler, to transport men and matériel across the Atlantic, and to return to the European continent by force. The island-hopping approach to Japan during World War II would have been impossible without naval and amphibious forces.
Had the Warsaw Pact invaded Western Europe, U.S. seapower would have been indispensable to NATO’s defense or to succor a second invasion had one been needed to free the continent. The ballistic missiles carried aboard U.S. submarines guaranteed the means of retaliation if the United States were struck first. The Cold War could not have ended well if U.S. seapower had consisted of either a regional or a coastal navy.
Threats to the international system did not stop with the Cold War. They went into a remission, which has ended. Today, China and Russia, respectively, threaten international order by seeking to incorporate the South and East China Seas’ international waters as sovereign ones; and by violating the sovereign territory of Ukraine, by projecting power from Crimea throughout the Black Sea, by challenging the security of the Baltic States, and by assisting Syria’s criminal ruler in preserving his grip in the Middle East, including on the Mediterranean’s eastern shore. North Korea is an international miscreant armed with nuclear weapons and missiles of increasing range. As with other surprising achievements of this impoverished and despotic state, it is a question of time until North Korea miniaturizes nuclear devices sufficiently to mount them on missiles of increasing range. Iran’s support for terror and such Sunni terror organizations as Hamas aim at the heart of democratic governance. The order that any of these states or non-state actors represent would change a tolerably messy world into a brutal one.
Global reach is essential to preventing such a transformation. The U.S. Navy is this nation’s chief instrument of global reach. To name a few examples of its influence, American warships make regular port visits around the world, conduct exercises with friends and allies, engage in humanitarian missions, lead anti-piracy patrols in the Gulf of Aden, and maintain freedom of navigation. It provides the sinews on which the international system’s preservation rests. Allies were critical when America fought for independence. They have been essential in the major and lesser conflicts and confrontations of the past century. As great power competition once again characterizes international relations, America’s allies are indispensable to our security.
Challenges to the international order are synonymous with today’s threats to the United States, whose position as the world’s dominant maritime power is at risk because of increasing threats and decreasing political will to pay for a military to deter them. An understanding of the development of the naval forces of our potential adversaries is essential to grasp the challenge that U.S. seapower faces today.
RUSSIA
A sense of loss or humiliation felt by an entire people is powerful. Germany’s response to its loss of World War I and the terms that the victorious allies imposed were an important part of Hitler’s rise. China’s anger at Europe’s nineteenth-century colonization remains an animating force throughout the Middle Kingdom. Russians may be pleased that the tyranny to which they are subject is no longer exercised by communists. But they are not pleased at Russia’s descent from its status as one of the world’s two superpowers. Understanding what Russia was is essential to understanding what Russia seeks once again to be. In no category of national power is this more important than in the strategic influence that a strong navy gave the Soviet Union.
The professional career of Commander-in-Chief of the Soviet Navy Admiral Sergei Gorshkov poses a problem for Leo Tolstoy’s idea that history
