Sea Power and American Interests in the Western Pacific

Abstract

Abstract : Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan's massively popular The Influence of Sea Power Upon History became part of the intellectual backdrop to America's acquisition of Caribbean and Far Eastern colonies. Unfortunately, Mahan's thesis also impressed many influential Germans and Japanese. Their aspirations were dashed at Jutland and Midway. The last of these battles gave the United States unchallenged mastery of the world's oceans, a position it continues to occupy 70 years later. Today, China is emerging as a potential competitor. In this volume, David Gompert asks what these earlier contests can tell us about that which is now on the horizon. David offers herein reflections on three encounters between rising and declining sea powers. Two of these ended in war, that between Germany and the United Kingdom in 1914 and between Japan and the United States in 1941. The third, that between the United Kingdom and the United States, led to a gradual and largely amicable transfer of first regional and then global predominance from one navy to the other. None of these outcomes is particularly appealing. Must America ultimately fight for or cede its naval primacy? If one projects recent Chinese and American economic growth rates several decades into the future, it becomes hard to envisage how one outcome or the other can be avoided. How long would an otherwise preeminent China be content to see a smaller, poorer, less powerful rival dominate the world's sea-lanes? How long would an otherwise weaker America wish to guard global trade routes for China's trade at America's expense? Maritime competition with China will almost certainly increase over the coming years. At the very least, China will challenge American dominance of the seas immediately adjacent to it. David Gompert illuminates herein the prospects for that contest in the light of current and future capabilities, existing American and Chinese strategies, and the prior experience of such great-power rivalries.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 34 citations exist upstream.