Sarah Paine - Why Russia and China can't escape geography
In a Nutshell
Russia and China remain trapped in a continental security paradigm that prioritizes territorial control, buffer zones, and self-sufficiency, leaving them surrounded by hostile neighbors, vulnerable sea access, and unstable internal lines of communication. Maritime powers like the United States, by contrast, leverage oceans as a shared commons, build global alliances, and pursue compounding wealth through open trade, rules-based institutions, and exterior lines of communication. Geography locks continental empires into zero-sum expansion and high-cost defense, while maritime strategies enable positive-sum growth and collective deterrence—making escape from these constraints nearly impossible without fundamental geographic or strategic transformation.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Good evening. It is a pleasure to be here. The argument presented concerns how the world is organized and how different types of empires historically tried to organize it. Continental and maritime powers attempted to organize the world in fundamentally different ways, with real implications in the present day. The discussion draws on terminology from geopolitics and grand strategy. Geopolitics is the influence of geography on politics. Grand strategy is grand in the number of instruments of national power that it integrates. These instruments include the State Department and diplomacy, the military, finance, agriculture, and a long list of other elements that must be integrated together.
A whirlwind tour of American history begins with June 6th, 1944, D-Day, the Normandy landings, where sea power and maritime power meet land power. Maritime powers are the exception and continental powers are the rule. Maritime powers can defend themselves primarily at sea with their navies if need be. A continental power cannot rely on this approach. A navy is not going to save Ukraine from Russia.
The first distinguishing characteristic between a maritime and continental power is whether it is feasible to defend yourself at sea or not. From this distinction come implications: if you sit in a continental world you had better have a competent army, and if you are a maritime power you had better have a pretty good navy. These implications extend beyond the military to economics and politics.
The United States began its life as a continental power focused on expanding to the west coast. The United States tried invading Canada in 1775 and 1812, but the British won both times and the United States had to abandon that idea. President Monroe declared the Monroe Doctrine, a classic continental spheres-of-influence policy telling Europeans to stay out of the Americas. At the time the United States was too weak for this policy to be enforceable.
The United States became the United States through territorial expansion to reach the West Coast. Unlike a typical continental power that expands with massed armies, the United States preferred checkbook diplomacy. When Napoleon Bonaparte was short of cash in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase was made. When the Russians were short of cash, the United States bought Alaska and the northern part of the West Coast. When checks were not accepted, as with Mexico, the United States used mass armies in the Mexican-American War to acquire Texas. The subsequent Gadsden Purchase brought Tucson, Arizona, and other territories after the Mexicans accepted the check.
The longest counterinsurgency in United States history was against the native population, which put up a bitter struggle. This was longer than recent operations in the Middle East. Americans had a name for their national expansion: Manifest Destiny, the idea that there was an obvious fate for the United States to control a good part of North America. The country was focused on territorial expansion. A painting in the western staircase leading into the chamber of the House of Representatives, originally titled "Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way," reflected this pride in expansion.
In the late 19th century, Captain, later Admiral, Alfred Thayer Mahan, the most famous professor ever associated with the Naval War College, argued that power in the world is not primarily a function of continental expansion and consolidation but of wealth accrued from trade. He identified prerequisites for following a maritime security paradigm:
- A moat so the country cannot be invaded right across its 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 commerce
- Stable government institutions that will fund a navy and pass laws enabling commerce
China and Russia today do not have the full list. Neither has a moat. Both have more neighbors than any two other countries on the planet, and many of those neighbors dislike them. Russia has a lamentable internal transportation grid, while China's has been improving. Neither has reliable egress by sea. China is surrounded by narrow, island-clustered seas, and Russia faces similar constraints. These places tend to be blockaded and closed down in wartime. Russia has reliable egress up north, but no one lives there. China has a dense coastal population, but it sits on a narrow sea. Russia lacks a dense coastal population up north. Russia's economy has never been commerce-driven. China became more commerce-oriented under Deng Xiaoping, but Xi Jinping has recently been privileging the crony sector over the private sector. Neither country has stable government institutions. The litmus test is transparent, regular elections. Dictatorship for life does not qualify.
China and Russia have maritime ambitions but may not fully understand what a complete maritime paradigm requires.
A generation later, the British Sir Halford Mackinder offered a counterargument. He believed Russia occupies the best geopolitical location in the world, not Great Britain. In his 1904 article he defined the pivot area of Eurasia, also called the great heartland, as the citadel of land power on the great mainland of the world and the greatest natural fortress because it is insulated by mountains, deserts, frozen seas, and rivers that exit onto oceans in very inaccessible places during wartime. It is therefore impervious to sea power. Britain cannot really reach this area. If you occupy the heartland you gain the possibility for defense in depth, strategic retreat, and self-sufficiency. The heartland is insulated from the sea, not by the sea. A maritime power like Britain that wants to influence the heartland must do so on the periphery through colonies in strategic locations in Mackinder's era, or through allies with bases in those locations today.
Nicholas Spykman was also concerned about who controls Eurasia. He believed the country that controls Eurasia could well control the world. He completed his important work in 1943, the year he died. A naturalized American citizen from the Netherlands, then under Nazi occupation, he noted that the Nazis had come very close to dominating Eurasia in 1941. He wrote that despite occupying the safest position of any nation in the world, Americans had been involved in two devastating world wars in a quarter of a century. In the second, the United States was at one point in serious danger of defeat. The expectations of U.S. statesmen regarding the outcome of their actions were consistently wrong, and their thinking about national security generally failed to provide successful answers.
Spykman observed that the influence of the United States can be brought to bear in Europe and the Far East only by means of seaborne traffic, and the power of the states of Eurasia can reach the United States effectively only by crossing the seas. This remains true despite the development of air power because big things still go by sea. Therefore, U.S. security is a function of sea power, and sanctuary at home, meaning invulnerability to attack, is a function of a maritime shield. Spykman was concerned about who controls the rimland of the great heartland, friend or foe. The United States must depend on sea power communication across the Atlantic and Pacific to access the Old World. The effect of this access delimits what sort of foreign policy the United States can have. The United States requires a continental ally who can provide a base from which land power can be exercised. Victory in World War II would depend on alliances and allies.
Continental empires come first in human history. Maritime empires come later. The industrial revolution and the post-World War II institutional framework later opened the possibility of a maritime global order. At the Naval War College, continental powers are often referred to as elephants and maritime powers as whales.
China is presented as the original land power, not Russia. Sun Tzu, the preeminent Chinese theorist on strategic matters in The Art of War, advised kings on how to stay on the throne and conquer neighbors efficiently. In this world there are lots of neighbors, any of which can invade at any time. Third-party intervention is the norm. The book makes no references to maritime warfare and only tangential references to riverine warfare because it addresses the world of continental empires that existed long before maritime developments. The great civilizations of Eurasia are often based on great continental empires. A civilization answers the questions of how one should live and how one should interact with others and is a world order unto itself. Civilizations have often fought each other to make their rules universal.
A precipitation map shows where it does not rain much. Temperature maps show where it is cold. Topography maps show where land is flat. Much of China's real estate is vertical and unsuitable for growing things, which explains why famine afflicted China for centuries and why it remains dependent on food imports. An ethnic map shows the consolidated pink area where the Han, the preponderant ethnic group, live, surrounded by heterogeneous areas. A simplified ethnic map shows China proper. The Han ended up with all the prime arable real estate because they laid waste to the competing Dzungar and Tibetan empires. The Dzungars were wiped out by the Qing dynasty. In the continental world the binary choice is to become Han or be killed. Losers flee south or face genocide. In the present day the Uyghurs are slated for genocide.
The Han started in the Yellow River Valley and spread, building walls repeatedly. They would shrink back during bad periods and then expand again. The Yuan dynasty were Mongols, not Han, an occupation dynasty. The map is inaccurate because the Mongols started east of Lake Baikal and spread in concentric rings over the Eurasian plain during a time of climate change when their herds required them to move south. The Chinese treat it like any other dynasty, but it was the Pax Mongolica, the Mongol world order, when the Han were subjugated people. The Ming dynasty returned Han rule, but then the Ming succumbed to the second-largest empire in Chinese history, another conquest dynasty. These were the Manchus, not Han. Today when China claims its historic lands it chooses either the Mongol Yuan dynasty or the Manchu Qing dynasty, periods when the Han were subjugated people.
There has been repeated expansion, shrinkage, and bloodshed. China has raised armies denominated in hundreds of thousands of people for thousands of years. The West did not do this regularly until the Napoleonic Wars. It is a brutal world.
Mackinder focused on Russia because in his lifetime China was in free fall. He was concerned about Russia building railways that would give it internal lines of communication advantageous in wartime, while Britain was stuck with exterior lines of communication by sea on the periphery. The Russians are like Mongols in reverse. They started in Moscow, Moscow laid waste to other princely city-states, and then pursued furs for revenue. The Russians kept expanding until they ran into countries that fought back.
The Russian Empire at its height in 1914 shows Moscow as the historic capital. Administrative units are fairly small around Moscow and become very large in Siberia. These are civil administrative units called gubernii or governorates. For recently ingested and yet-to-be-digested areas, different units called oblasti were used. Outlined in red on maps are places in the process of being digested. Military borders are superimposed over civil borders. Only on conquered areas are there governor-generalships, indicating ongoing control efforts. Finland, Poland, Ukraine, the Caucasus, the khanates of Turkestan, and Siberia were conquered. China has similarly used provincial boundaries that come and go and superimposed military regions that move around. In contrast, United States state boundaries have not changed once established.
These boundaries function as mechanisms of ingesting, digesting, and neutralizing ethnic groups when full digestion into regular provinces is impossible.
Mackinder emphasized the advantages of internal lines of communication, which come with the disadvantage of multiple neighbors. Russia's security threats circa 1900, from west to east, were Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan. This security world differs sharply from Britain's 360-degree moat. Many invaders have come for the Russians over the years. Russians fought constantly with Germans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. They suffered catastrophic defeats to the Mongols, the Swedes, initially 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 small ones, if unstable, can allow instability to ooze over the border. Strong, stable neighbors with designs on you are worse. In a maritime power the army is for expeditionary warfare, crossing the ocean to go somewhere else. In the continental world the army's first purpose is to protect the ruling regime. The People's Liberation Army's mission number one is to keep the Communist Party in power. Its secondary purpose is to garrison the empire and prevent defections. Its tertiary purpose is border defense. Whatever is won at the border is kept. Expansion occurs outward when possible. Away games are rare. Most fighting occurs right on the border.
World War II statistics on deaths, not just casualties, illustrate the difference. Axis military deaths included 3.2 million German soldiers, 1.5 million Japanese, and 330,000 Italians. Allied land powers suffered 8.5 million dead Russian soldiers, nearly a million dead Poles, 1.3 million dead Chinese, and 340,000 dead Frenchmen. Maritime powers suffered far fewer: Britain with 326,000 deaths and the United States with 295,000. By some statistics they suffered fewer deaths than Italy or France, and France was not in the war long. Adding civilian deaths, continental powers suffered catastrophic numbers while maritime powers' numbers hardly budged: over 7 million dead Germans, over 25.5 million dead Russians, almost 7 million dead Poles, 11 million dead Chinese, and nearly a million dead Frenchmen. Land power deaths are measured in millions; maritime power deaths are in hundreds of thousands. The reason is the lack of insulation by oceans. Fighting occurs on home territory, ruining civilians rapidly. No country wants to fight on the main front if alternatives exist, but this is the continental power's unavoidable agony. When a neighbor invades, the choice is capitulation or fighting on the neighbor's timing. This is Ukraine's problem. A maritime power observing an invasion can decide whether to intervene, when, and with what instruments of national power. These are decisions the United States must weigh carefully before intervening and overextending.
If you win this kind of warfare, as Russia did under Stalin, you dominate Eastern Europe for the duration of the Cold War, but such territorial domination comes at a huge price. The value of the object had better be worth it.
Rules for playing this game include: no two-front wars, because if neighbors gang up it will be game over. No great power neighbors, because today's friend can be tomorrow's foe. Neighbors must be taken on sequentially, one at a time. Set them up to fail. Destabilize the rising. Ingest the failing. Set up buffer zones. Await the opportune moment to pounce and absorb. This is Vladimir Putin's game. Better yet, get the neighbors to do the work by sowing their mutual resentments, getting them to fight each other, and deluging them with fake news so the hegemonic power can play the jackal state, moving in to steal a kill made by others once neighbors have weakened themselves.
This security theory has problems. You surround yourself by failing states. Russia and China are surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet. It is unclear whether they are unlucky or complicit. There are no enduring alliances because neighbors figure out that the hegemonic power is a long-term problem. There is also no counsel on when to quit or how much territory to take before choking on it. There has been a tendency over China's and Russia's long histories to overextend, which helps account for the implosions of various empires and dynasties.
Before dismissing this security paradigm, note that it was very effective. Prior to the industrial revolution, collateral damage and killing innocent people were not concerns. This paradigm is about killing people and breaking things to take
Vasily Klyuchevsky, one of the preeminent historians of the late Tsarist period, described Russia as a country in the process of colonizing itself. Russia's area of colonization grows in tandem with its national territory, sometimes shrinking and sometimes expanding. Historical periods in Russia correspond to stages of occupation and development of acquired land. This worldview renders the people already living on the land irrelevant. Russian strategic thinking holds that small neighbors may be absorbed by larger powers, and if weak neighbors become strong independently, this poses danger. The imperative is therefore to keep expanding outward.
Fyodor Dostoevsky confided in his diary that in Europe, Russians are hangers-on and slaves, whereas in Asia they would be masters. In Europe they are Asiatics, but in Asia they are Europeans. Russia's civilizing mission in Asia would uplift the national spirit and drive further expansion. This idea of empire is deeply rooted in Russian thinking.
Count Sergei Witte, serving as finance minister in 1903, articulated that Russia's problem was to obtain as large a share as possible of the outlived oriental states, particularly the Ottoman Empire and especially China. Russia historically and geographically held the undisputed right to the lion's share of the expected prey. This elemental movement began with Ivan the Terrible. The absorption of a considerable portion of the Chinese empire was only a question of time unless the Chinese strengthened themselves.
If a continental power botches strategy, its known world can vanish forever. This fate befell Imperial China, Imperial Russia, and many other venerable civilizations. A photograph shows an aristocrat's whimsical palace now gone as a result of one of the 20th century's most horrific genocides, when communists eliminated entire social classes. The Bolshevik revolution, the Russian civil war, collectivization, and the great purges completed this process. The continental world is a world without insurance policies.
The Atlantic Ocean served as the center of the world economy in the 19th century, with rimlands producing wealth that moved by ship. The seas function as a commons to be shared, enabling goods to move from port to port. In the modern age, the seas represent the original network potentially connecting everyone to everything.
The Athenian Empire hugged the shores of the Aegean and Ionian seas, relying on accruing trade to pay for empire. The Roman Empire was another rimland empire, very different from consolidated continental empires like Russia and China. The term Mediterranean means the sea in the middle of the lands, emphasizing the centrality of the sea. By contrast, China's term Zhongguo means the central kingdom, emphasizing the centrality of the land. The Byzantine Empire represented another rimland empire.
East-West trade historically generated substantial revenue. The Silk Road carried goods by camel, and whoever controlled the western toll booth where routes split toward the southern or northern shores of the Mediterranean made enormous profits. The Muslim conquests controlled this territory for a period. Meanwhile, continental consolidation occurred in Europe. Modern Germany and modern France trace origins to Charlemagne's empire at the turn of the 8th to 9th centuries. By the end of the first millennium, Europe featured large coalesced states but no single power controlled the rimlands. The Crusades represented an attempt by larger European powers to recapture the Mediterranean toll booth, but they failed. The Ottomans controlled it for a long time afterward.
Unable to regain the Mediterranean route, Europeans sought to trade with Asia by going the long way around by ship. The Spanish and Portuguese attempted this, encountering the New World and its gold and silver, which diverted attention from spices and silk. The Dutch became the true pioneers of maritime empire, defined by trading bases. Their vulnerable location in Europe prompted Hugo Grotius, a member of the Dutch Republic, to become the founding father of international law. Maritime empires require seas as commons, protection from piracy, and rules enabling safe trade.
In Mare Liberum, Grotius wrote that every nation is free to travel to every other nation and trade with it. In On the Law of War and Peace, he cited a Roman jurist stating that the use of the sea belongs to all men. A Byzantine compilation of Roman law established that by natural law the air, flowing water, the sea, and the seashore are common to everyone. This framework is a product of Western civilization.
China signed and ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea in 1996 but maintains that freedom of navigation does not extend within 200 nautical miles of its coastline, whereas UNCLOS establishes the limit at 12 nautical miles. These differing numbers have significant implications in the East and South China Seas.
Britain pioneered maritime empire without the Dutch vulnerability. Napoleon eventually absorbed the Dutch into the French Empire. Britain's 360-degree moat meant it was the only European power that did not need to maintain a large standing army. If Britain maintained a competent navy, no invading army could reach British shores. Britain transformed its dependence on trade into strength: trade financed the navy, which protected both the homeland and trade routes. Britain compounded wealth while neighbors funded large armies that were economy-killing, coup-generating, and wealth-destroying through constant fighting.
A navy provided Britain a prevent-defeat strategy but was insufficient for a deliver-victory strategy. By compounding wealth over time while neighbors destroyed wealth rapidly, Britain's relative position improved. Britain integrated multiple instruments of national power to address continental threats.
On the eve of the Napoleonic Wars, Europe consisted of consolidated states in the east and west with the Holy Roman Empire as a fragmented zone in the middle. Napoleon consumed these fragments, reaching maximum territorial extent in 1812. Carl von Clausewitz developed his ideas about ground warfare during this period.
Britain developed a strategy for dealing with a continental power attempting to upend the trading system:
- Rule 1: Keep the home economy growing to produce funds for military operations, allies, and all other activities.
- Rule 2: Prevent the elephant from foraging by closing down enemy trade through blockade and commerce raiding, forcing reliance on dwindling resources and embittered allies.
- Rule 3: Rent an elephant by finding, arming, and funding the continental power most directly threatened by the adversary to maintain the main front.
- Rule 4: Identify a peripheral theater where sea access is more efficient than land access. The attrition differential between peripheral and main theaters adds up, forcing divided enemy attention and potentially relieving pressure on the main front.
- Rule 5: Do not engage the enemy's main force directly, particularly as an opening move. A continental power's strength lies in its army, whereas Britain's strength lies in its navy, wealth generation, and capacity to survive protracted war.
- Rule 6: If fighting on the main front becomes necessary, only do so after the enemy has been gravely weakened and only with numerous allies.
Continental powers cannot execute this strategy due to insufficient maritime access. Their surface fleets are confined to narrow, blockaded seas. Their merchant marines cannot operate freely, and they face numerous neighbors who might invade.
Britain's approach set opposing trend lines: war increasingly encroached on enemy territory, undermining the enemy's economy, productive capacity, and morale. This constituted a strategy of protracted war won by exhausting the opponent first. The strategy emphasized economics, coalitions, and institutions more than the military instrument alone. It requires sanctuary at home, access to peripheral theaters, alliance partners, and overseas markets, plus institutional continuity to maintain consistent strategy over time.
After the Napoleonic Wars, Europe experienced a century of unprecedented prosperity without continent-wide war. Smaller wars occurred, but participants made substantial money through maritime trade conducted according to rules. Compounding wealth without destroying infrastructure generated prosperity. World War I ended this period.
Continental powers face contiguous threats, requiring focus on national security. They seek to insulate themselves from neighbors through exclusive zones extending into surrounding seas. Maritime powers, protected by the moat, focus on national prosperity. Trade provides both prosperity and security through revenue generation. Maritime powers want oceans to function as commons with open access from port to port.
These characteristics produce two opposing world orders: one dividing the world into large spheres of influence, each a world unto itself, and another operating under universal rules with open seas accessible to everyone.
The industrial revolution upended both types of empires and ushered in a maritime rules-based global order. It introduced compounded economic growth through technological and institutional changes. Institutions represent organized systems for accomplishing tasks more efficiently. Early phases involved steam power, iron industry, textiles, insurance, and banking. Later phases involved railways, telegraphs, steamships, mass markets, trade, general staffs, and armaments.
The currency of power changed. Previously, power derived from land because land provided commodities for sale and peasant conscripts for mass armies. Once wealth became a function of commerce, industry, and trade rather than land, the world was upended. Today's distribution of wealth and power correlates with degree of industrialization. The industrial revolution initiated a global trading order minimizing transaction costs through trade negotiations, a process that continues today.
Traditional societies found their security paradigms obsolete. China opposed the incoming maritime order in the 19th century. ISIS and similar groups revile liberal economies and societies favoring trading orders.
Halford Mackinder focused on railways creating an integrated transportation grid across the yellow area on his map. The Roman, British, and Mongol empires all controlled portions of the western terminus of the Silk Road, prime real estate in the continental world. The Suez Canal, another industrial revolution product, wrecked the camel trade on the Silk Road. Shipping by steamship through the canal proved far cheaper than moving goods across Eurasia by draft animals.
During the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, Egypt sank block ships in the Suez Canal to prevent Israeli use. Operationally, Israel could not use the canal. Strategically, the canal remained closed from 1967 to approximately 1972. Before the war, nearly 90% of ships were 50,000 deadweight tons or less, fitting through the canal. By 1972, nearly 30% of ships by number were ultra-large vessels that could never pass through the canal. The cost of sending oil from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam in a small ship through the canal exceeded $13 per ton, whereas sending it in a large ship around Africa cost approximately one-third that amount. The strategic effect was that overhead costs in shipping depend primarily on ship size rather than distance.
Malcolm McLean revolutionized maritime trade by placing truck chassis minus wheels on ships as containers. This reduced loading costs from nearly $6 per ton to less than 20 cents per ton and substantially reduced port time. The International Organization for Standardization standardized container sizes to fit one container on trucks, two on railway cars, and thousands on ships, further plummeting transport costs.
Until 1960, average tanker size was 20,000 deadweight tons. Today, the smallest ultra-large crude carriers measure a quarter million deadweight tons. The longest train can carry approximately 600 containers, whereas the largest container ships carry over 21,000 containers with cargoes valued over $1 billion. Maritime transport is substantially cheaper and more secure than land routes. Land routes require end-to-end control through unstable territories, whereas maritime routes allow rerouting around blockages.
China's Belt and Road Initiative faces significant challenges. The land component is not continuous, involves different railway gauges requiring repeated loading and unloading, and passes through unstable regions. Maritime routes remain cheaper and more secure. For China specifically, the seas are open only in peacetime. In wartime, regardless of adversary action, China is surrounded by neighbors, shallow seas, and islands that block access to the high seas at predictable points. These locations become kill zones where merchant traffic and surface ships cannot pass without friendly relations with all neighboring states.
Following the end of the Cold War, world trade expanded dramatically, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The wealth-producing trade occurred in countries vested in the trading order rather than in extortion-based systems. The second cold war has shifted focus toward more inefficient arrangements.
Continental powers historically leveraged interior lines of communication to garrison empires, deploy armies against neighbors, and form contiguous alliance systems. This functioned when power derived from land. Maritime powers use exterior lines of communication by sea to access not only immediate neighbors but the entire globe, enabling global alliance systems. The industrial revolution put
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 modus operandi of beating up all your neighbors is negative sum. This means fighting over territory and damaging the goods while fighting, so whatever someone lost in pristine territory now looks damaged. Wealth is destroyed at a very rapid clip. The maritime world operates differently. The goal is to have trading partners and win-win outcomes so everybody makes money and growth compounds. This maritime order focuses on freedom of navigation, free trade, and international laws and institutions that facilitate trade in order to minimize transaction costs and maximize wealth.
The insurance system for this order is the alliance system. Most countries are not maritime by geography, but if they gang up together and coordinate diverse instruments of national power when dealing with rogue continental states that want to upend the trading system, they can turn out in force to protect the rules that protect them all.
The ultimate insurance policy was created by the greatest generation. These were the conscripts of World War I who were told to go up and over trenches. The survivors came back and tried to raise families during the Great Depression. By the time they were of the age to be strategic leaders, they were sending their own kids to fight World War II. This generation, in both Europe and the United States, concluded that the solution to great depressions and world wars was institution building on a global scale.
They built institutions that have lasted to the present and held the peace in the industrialized world until Vladimir Putin decided to upset the order. These institutions include the UN, the IMF, NATO, the predecessor institutions of the World Trade Organization, and the European Union. The idea is that differences must be hashed out with diplomats and lawyers because when soldiers are sent in, whatever gains are achieved will be inferior to what could have been accomplished through diplomacy. Fighting each other is ruinous.
During the Cold War, fighting that occurred was cold in the industrialized world but hot elsewhere. Much of it took place on McKinder's intermediate crescent where the maritime and continental worlds meet. Civil wars in this zone saw both sides of the Cold War putting their fingers on the scale, resulting in wealth destruction that helps explain why global growth rates had problems.
The continental world is visible because it is about positive objectives. Taking territory is observable: either it happened or it did not. The maritime world is about negative objectives. It prevents bad things from happening, and it is impossible to prove that anything was prevented. The thing prevented never happened, so it remains invisible. At the strategic level, the continental approach destroys wealth at a massive clip. The maritime world prevents bad things from happening to the international trading order from which prosperity is derived.
Naval missions are more often than not about negative objectives and mostly occur in peacetime. The three key missions are: preventing the destruction of the global trading system, preventing limits on freedom of navigation, and deterring expansion where big countries take over little countries. The bedrock principle of international law is sovereignty. If nations are constantly invading each other, no international law exists.
The antidotes to rogue behavior in the maritime world are alliances, diplomacy, sanctions, embargos, and containment. Navies focus on deterrence, blockade, and commerce raiding. This prevents the continental problem, the elephant from foraging, by giving a timeout from the rules-based order.
Sanctions function like economic chemotherapy. They prevent one or two percent growth per annum even with leaky sanctions. Over several generations, this difference is the gap between North and South Korea. The point is not to get rid of the problem entirely. If a rogue state has nuclear weapons, the goal is not to have a nuclear war to eliminate it. The world is about containing problems at acceptable cost rather than achieving operational wins that totally eliminate them. North Korea can live miserable lives at home while being contained.
Optimists at the end of the Cold War thought everyone would want to join the maritime party, but the continental-maritime difference of opinion continues. Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un want to upend the maritime order. They want to hollow out international institutions, upend international law, and kill off the alliance system to return the world to warring spheres of influence so they can live the squalid lives their citizens have to live.
There are very different geopolitics associated with continental and maritime powers. The 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. These accidents of geography have predisposed different preferences:
- A continental power typically looks at territory as something to take, whereas maritime powers see it as a market to make money from
- Continental powers want to be self-sufficient, whereas maritime powers trade for what they need and want access to markets
- Continental powers desire exclusive zones, whereas maritime powers want commons to share seas, space, cyber, and air
Most countries are not strictly maritime or continental by geography. Alliances can bestow a collective maritime position and power package to those countries that join in. When the alliance gets large enough, countries that are not maritime alone can collectively function as one.
This choice about which way to go is very financially consequential. Continentalists tend to be dictators and are about hemorrhaging cash to dominate their own citizens and neighbors. Maritime powers keep growth compounding. China has benefited more than any other country from rejoining the family of nations and this maritime world under Deng Xiaoping. However, the legacy of history and the burden of history, including continentalist outlooks such as the need to take Taiwan, weigh heavily.
The choice is consequential. There is only one win-win solution. It is, however flawed this international order is, a work in progress. The only win-win solution is to deploy the diplomats and lawyers to hash out differences in international forums. If soldiers are sent instead, the result will be a third world war with nuclear follow-on effects, and it will be seen whether humanity makes it. This is tremendously consequential, particularly at this juncture in history.
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