The United States Navy (USN) officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan was referred to by John Keegan as ‘the most important American strategist of the nineteenth century.’ His 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, was immediately well-known, particularly in Europe. When its 1892 sequel, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812, was published, he solidified his reputation as a globally-known and respected military strategist, historian, and theorist. Mahan’s writings promoted the ‘decisive battle’ and naval blockades, which ultimately led to the creation of dreadnought battleships. He eventually rose to the rank of flag officer in the US Navy.
Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840–1914) of the United States Navy authored books and essays in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that established his status as the most influential naval historian and strategist of his time. The popularity of Mahan’s key ideas on warships and international affairs is what made him famous. The first was that a great power’s economic prosperity depended on marine trade. The second was that deploying a fleet of battleships capable of sustaining naval superiority was the best way to safeguard one’s own trade while interdicting the enemy’s; hence, a commerce-raiding strategy carried out by cruisers was unable to cause decisive harm. The third was that a military superpower may be defeated by a country with maritime superiority. These arguments were seen by many as equivalent to the claim that naval dominance was a necessary condition for rising to the top of the global political hierarchy.
Mahan’s theories on sea power, which addressed the interdependence of geography, economics, and force, among other topics, have generated a lot of debate regarding how his writings relate to geopolitics. However, these questions have been predicated on the notion that Mahan’s opinions were straightforward and hence simple to comprehend. Substantial academic monographs that represented consensus of Mahan’s ideas appeared to be in line with conclusions that might be drawn from reading both little and big sampling of his material. There was almost total trust in the mainstream view’s veracity. However, a recent thorough and methodical analysis of Mahan’s several writings has shown that his theories regarding warships and nations were considerably more intricate and profound than previously believed. In fact, Mahan’s real writings on a number of significant topics were essentially the opposite of what was thought to be written by him.
The authour of this article made the revisionist argument in his 1997 monograph Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command: The Classic Works of Alfred Thayer Mahan Reconsidered. This essay’s primary goal is to analyse Mahan’s and geopolitics in light of some of the book’s conclusions. As a result, it will review earlier research on Mahan and geopolitics, give an overview of the most recent revisionist interpretation of pertinent sections of Mahan’s writings, and discuss the consequences of the new study.
The main arguments are that Mahan’s views on the importance of effective political and naval leadership balanced his comments on the significance of geography; his economic ideal was free trade rather than autarchy; his unit of political analysis in relation to sea power in the twentieth century was a transnational consortium rather than the single nation state; and his recognition of the influence of geography on strategy was tempered by a strong appreciation of the power of contingency to affect outcomes.
Before 1914, the acceptance of Mahan’s theories on sea power and national greatness was largely due to the general consensus that the historical justifications for them were valid. However, there were few and inconclusive encounters between groups of surface capital ships during the First World War, and Britain was on the verge of defeat due to submarine attacks on maritime communications. This seemed to contradict Mahan’s claim that battlefleet action, rather than commerce raiding, should be the foundation of naval strategy. Mahan’s claim that sea power was superior to land power was also called into question by the massive scope and intensity of land combat in contrast to the relative inactivity of major naval forces and Germany’s near victory due to military success on the continent. Karl Haushofer was influenced by Halford Mackinder’s work and the example of its great strategic scope, even though the persuasiveness of his specific analysis was weakened.
German geopoliticians ‘frequently expressed their admiration for Mahan, whose global philosophy was built on a scale more grandiose and more audacious than any European expansionist theories of his day,’ according to the final paragraphs of Margaret Tuttle Sprout’s essay on Mahan in the seminal anthology Makers of Modern Strategy of 1941. Furthermore, Sprout noted that the ‘new German approach to statecraft comprises a theory of state power and growth built on expanding land power, roughly analogous to Mahan’s philosophy of growing sea power.’ She then cited the claim made by US political scientist Robert Strausz-Hupé that Haushofer’s views were ‘the most extreme negation of Mahan’s theories,’ and that they were a response to Mahan. Haushofer was a prominent German geopolitical thinker.
The ties between Mahan and geopolitics were a major focus of William E. Livezey’s 1947 literary biography of Mahan. As expositor of sea power,’ he observed,
Long before that phrase was used, Mahan was a geopolitical thinker; as a proponent of sea power, he was the forerunner of Halford Mackinder, an exceptional analyst of the future role of land power; as an advocate of extraordinary depth in space, lebensraum, and land empire, Mahan was Karl Haushofer’s mentor.
After that, Livezey listed the particular facets of Mahan’s philosophy that were connected to the main issues of geopolitics. ‘Mahan’s sea-power doctrine,’ he maintained
polarised a collection of historical facts about the sea’s contribution to the welfare of a country. He talked about geographic location, physical characteristics, territorial size, population density, human character, and governmental character as he examined the various factors influencing power at sea. He believed that industry, markets, the [merchant] marine, the navy, and bases were all strongly tied to the development of national greatness as it pertained to sea power, at least in theory.
According to Livezey, Mahan’s affiliation with proponents of geopolitics was disparaging. He felt that any body of work that supported or even acknowledged the necessity of national expansion through the use of force was invalid due to the unparalleled suffering caused by the Second World War and the likelihood of far worse to come. ‘The concepts of empire and power as articulated by Mahan and his school of thought,’ Livezey declared
have not shown themselves to be a reliable foundation for global action. The world is on the verge of catastrophe thanks to the followers of power politics; civilisation is on the verge of collapse thanks to the supporters of unbridled national sovereignty; and half of the world is in revolt due to the proponents of empire, whether they believe in the master race or the burden of the white man.
A whole chapter of Harold and Margaret Sprout’s 1962 book Foundations of International Politics focused on characterising Mahan and Mackinder as the leading proponents of geopolitics. The pair acknowledged that Mahan never gave ‘any neat exposition’ of his geopolitical concepts and that it was necessary to recreate them using ‘bits and pieces, plucked from hastily written books and articles.’ They argued that Mahan’s understanding of world politics is based on four geopolitical principles, which were an ocean and its connected seas that are continuous and uninterrupted; the Russian Empire, a huge transcontinental, almost landlocked state that stretched continuously from eastern Europe to a point further east than Japan, as well as from the ice-bound Arctic to the rough desert-mountain belt of interior Asia; the marine borders of southern and eastern Asia, as well as the maritime nations of continental Europe; and the insular states, Great Britain and Japan, with which he also grouped the United States, all wholly disconnected from the mainland of Eurasia.
The Sprouts thought that both Mahan and Mackinder’s methods of geopolitical analysis were ‘built upon pretty much the same set of geographic features,’ and that Mahan’s 1900 arguments regarding the threats posed by an expansionist Russia ‘clearly anticipated Mackinder’s concept of the Eurasian “Heartland.”’ The pair, like Livezey before them, attacked males and their supporters for believing that ‘military wars determine, in the final reckoning, the ordering of influence and deference in the Society of Nations.’
In response to the destruction of World War II and the conviction that geopolitical modes of thought had contributed to the aggressive tactics of National Socialist Germany and Imperial Japan, Mahan and Mackinder were condemned on fundamentally anti-militarist grounds. After 1945, Haushofer and his supporters, who had close links to the Hitler government, were condemned to obscurity. In Makers of Modern Strategy, the German school of geopolitics was the focus of an entire chapter. However, in the nearly entirely rewritten edition of this text published in 1986, Haushofer and even Mackinder made no reference of the German school of geopolitics. The new chapter on Mahan’s literature did not address the American naval strategy theorist’s connection to geopolitics, despite the fact that he was too significant a character to be disregarded and was not directly impacted by the conflict.
Although acknowledging that there were significant disagreements between Mahan and Mackinder, Livezey and the Sprouts stressed the significance of points of agreement. As a result of this strategy, Mahan’s work suffered harm from being associated with a field that is considered to be outcast. An alternate approach was to depict Mahan and Mackinder’s beliefs as being completely at odds with one another; nevertheless, this form of discourse placed Mahan’s reputation at risk. G.S. Graham described the two men’s opinions on the relative importance of land and sea power in the Wiles Lectures of 1964 as opposing, although briefly. A decade later, the contrast between Mahan and Mackinder was the main theme of a long essay by Paul Kennedy published by the German military history journal Militärgeschichtlichen Mitteilungen. Kennedy then expanded this provocative piece into his seminal book The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery, which appeared in 1976.
Kennedy did not offer fresh perspectives on Mackinder or Mahan. He did, however, analyse what were thought to be the two authors’ most important points on the relative importance of land and sea power and assess how applicable they were to twentieth-century British history. Mahan supported sea power as an independent variable for Kennedy, arguing that naval superiority was the basis of economic dominance and that, as long as Britain controlled the seas, prosperity would surpass that of any other country. Kennedy said that the core of Mackinder’s argument was that sea power was a dependent variable of diminishing importance, which he articulated in two propositions: ‘Sea power itself was waning in relation to land power,’ and ‘Britain’s naval power, rooted in her economic strength, would no longer remain supreme when other nations with greater resources and manpower overtook her previous industrial lead.’ Kennedy was able to infer that, from the perspective of prediction, Mackinder’s theory had been proven true and Mahan’s had been discredited due to Britain’s naval and economic downfall during the twentieth century, despite her initial position of naval preeminence.
Kennedy’s arguments were compelling, and they had a significant and wide-ranging impact. Simple-minded navalism had gained some intellectual credibility due to the classic stature of Mahan’s writings, but this influence vanished when Kennedy’s lucid and forceful explanation was presented. By tackling issues including the economic foundations of contemporary military and naval institutions, the geographical context of strategy, force structure, and deployment, Kennedy’s method broadened the conversation about national policy and strategy. Kennedy’s work encouraged many to study industrial policy and state finance, in particular, since little was known about their specifics and broader effects. As a result, a sizable and continuously expanding body of scholarship has emerged that has revolutionised the study of foreign policy and war.
However, Kennedy’s rehabilitation of geopolitics by endorsing Mackinder’s evaluation of the role of geography in international relations left Mahan at the periphery of serious discussion, even if the earlier rejection of geopolitical discourse following the Second World War had harmed Mahan’s reputation, aggravating the harm already caused by the First World War. Unfavourable assessment of what was deemed to be his fundamental idea had been utilised to get the exoneration, thus even when geopolitics was cleared, he remained convicted due to ties to a dubious body of prior ideas. The conventional perception of Mahan as a fundamentally limited and rigid determinist whose primary analytical focus had been on the growth of British sea power served as the foundation for both types of harm, namely guilt by association with wrongheadedness and guilt by wrongheadedness alone of a different kind. Before examining Mahan’s genuine views on sea power and international relations in the twentieth century, it is crucial to take into account how this incorrect set of concepts came to be accepted.
The first cause of a significant misinterpretation of Mahan’s work was most likely the confusion of disparate views that, although connected to him, were yet distinct in significant respects. The development of British naval supremacy in the latter years of the age of sail was one of the topics of Mahan’s serious historical writing, while many of his sporadic short pieces and the serious histories advocated for the building of a sizable American battlefleet and the expansion of American territory abroad. It would be easy for readers to draw the conclusion that Mahan wanted the United States to attain naval supremacy because he thought it was a necessary condition for achieving global dominance in the twentieth century.
Mahan was interested in both grand strategy and the character of command. Discussions of ‘principle conditions’ of geography or ‘immutable principles’ of strategy, though actually separate lines of inquiry handled with nuance and care for exception, were interpreted as signs of a generally absolutist and determinist approach to history because his thoughts on both topics were interwoven in his writings.
However, the volume, difficulty, diversity, and changeability of Mahan’s work made it extremely difficult to correct misconceptions caused by a casual or insufficient engagement with his writing via thorough and attentive study. Mahan produced nineteen volumes between 1883 and 1913, three of which were two-volume collections. To read them all, one must negotiate almost five thousand pages of fine print, accounting for variations in font and page size. Mahan’s presentation of arguments was frequently complex and difficult to understand because to his aim to attain clarity by meticulous qualification and detailed reasoning. In order to satisfy the expectations of the reading and hearing public, eight of Mahan’s books were collections of lectures or pieces from periodicals covering a wide range of topics.
It should come as no surprise that he changed his mind or unintentionally contradicted himself throughout a serious and productive writing career spanning nearly twenty-five years.
Even the author struggled to provide a comprehensive synopsis of Mahan’s work. His Naval Strategy (1911), an attempt to provide a cogent, analytical synopsis of his thoughts in his later years, drained his physically and soured his soul. Mahan thought it was the worst book he had ever written because of his illness, which prevented him from having a thorough understanding of his own writings. When they wrote in their heyday, later authours either had strong objectives, used insufficient methods, or did not thoroughly study Mahan’s works. Only a quarter of Mahan’s works are cited in the Sprout article in the Foundations of International Politics, but the essays in both editions of The Makers of Modern Strategy are supported by citations from barely more than half of his publications. W.D. Puleston, Livezey, and Robert Seager—Mahan’s principal biographers—seem to have read every book, but they divided their focus, concurrently addressing the issues of text, context, and their relationship. This strategy, in each of the three cases, worked against a rigorous engagement with the writing’s form and content. Additionally, although being extremely comprehensive, Seager’s story is tinged with personal resentment for Mahan, which influenced his assessments of his subject’s work.
Colin Gray claimed that ‘a reconsideration of Mahan is overdue’ in 1989. Under the sponsorship of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the authour of this essay was able to dedicate a full year in 1995 and 1996 to a methodical reevaluation of all of Mahan’s books. This was motivated by his own concerns regarding the fundamental accuracy of the current interpretation of Mahan’s writing, as well as the knowledge that these concerns were shared by others. The investigation aimed to provide answers to two basic questions: Did Mahan’s writings, on any level, constitute a cohesive body of thinking, and if so, what was it?
In order to achieve this, the descriptive analysis of Inventing Grand Strategy and Teaching Command was restricted to Mahan’s examination of the two major phenomena indicated in the title, largely omitting his commentary on ancillary issues like racism, imperialism, militarism, social Darwinism, diplomacy, and international law. It is feasible to address grand strategy alone—which is crucial to the issue at hand—without using the formal analytical tools employed in the book since the analysis of Mahan and geopolitics does not necessitate a discussion of command.
The ‘Influence of Sea Power’ series, named after the title of the first episode, The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660-1783, which was published in 1890, is a four-part history of naval warfare from 1660 to 1815. Mahan’s minor works included eight compilations of his lectures and essays, one biography, an autobiography, monographs on strategy, international relations, or religion, and shorter histories of specific wars (such as the American Revolution, a portion of the American Civil War, or the Boer War). Previous analyses of Mahan and geopolitics have primarily focused on two aspects of the ‘Influence of Sea Power’ series: the first chapter of the first volume discusses the degree to which a nation’s sea power potential is determined by its geography, and the series as a whole focus on the rise of British naval supremacy, which was linked to Britain’s subsequent achievement of international economic and political primacy.
The lengthiest chapter of The Influence of Sea Power upon History is titled ‘Discussion of the Elements of Sea Power.’ It was a hastily written, last-minute supplement to his manuscript that the author meant to make his main text’s scholarly background more approachable for readers in general. The present intense public debate on American maritime interests and navy needs spurred the inclusion of a lengthy treatment of these topics. Mahan’s explanation of the ‘principal conditions affecting the sea power of nations’ seems to have been largely inspired by a prize-essay by W.G. David that the US Naval Institute published in 1882. Geographical location, physical conformation (including climate and natural resources), territorial size, population density, national character, and political organization were all considered by Mahan.
Topicality and previously audience-tested content worked well as a marketing strategy. According to Mahan’s most recent biographer, it was not the book’s major body but rather the first chapter that ‘generated the greatest commented and speculation among American and British readers.’ In fact, a lot of Mahan’s critics ‘seem not to have read past the controversial “Elements of Sea Power” or to have done much more than scan the chapter headings of the remainder of the volume.’ When used in conjunction with explanations of significant international political outcomes, five of the six elements—along with Mahan’s claim that transportation over water had been and would continue to be more affordable than transportation over land—formed a set of physical and human geographical propositions that led many readers to assume that Mahan believed that geography dictated the path of history. However, close examination of Mahan’s text and, more crucially, the context shows that this kind of characterisation is flawed and extremely deceptive.
Mahan’s opinions about geographic location may be summed up as follows. First, compared to a continental state, an insular one was more inclined to focus its resources on marine development and territorial expansion abroad. Second, a nation’s naval strategic situation may be significantly impacted by geographic conditions that ‘promote a concentration, or to necessitate a dispersion, of naval forces,’ Third, a country’s geographic location in relation to other powers may provide ‘the further strategic advantage of a central position and a good base for hostile operations against probable enemies’ in terms of attacking both territory and vital trade lines. Fourth, Mahan pointed out that specific bodies of water were especially crucial for military and commercial purposes.
Mahan identified a number of traits in physical conformation. The main problem was the ease of access to oceanic trade, which was dictated by the contour of the coast, which included not only the length of the shoreline but also the quantity and calibre of harbours. The physical characteristics that influenced land-based economic activity were a significant modifying element; if they were advantageous, they discouraged marine entrepreneurship, whereas if they were unfavourable, they encouraged it. The development of sea forces as the most effective means of defence against seaborne invasion and protection of vital communications between significant centres of politics and commerce was encouraged by insularity or near insularity (as in the case of a peninsula) or the division of a polity by bodies of water (as in the case of a country spread across an archipelago). This was a second significant modifying factor.
Territory size and population size were related but potentially deceptive categories. According to Mahan, the former was more interested in population density than just a nation’s physical size. The impacts of a naval blockade were more likely to affect a small population located in a broad area with a sizable coastline than a much bigger population in same conditions, since the latter could produce more powerful military and naval forces. When it came to population, Mahan was more interested in the number of people who pursued ‘callings related to the sea’ and may be considered potential navy members than in the total number. Mahan also used the term ‘aptitude for commercial pursuits’ to define national character.
Mahan based his opinions on a number of presumptions on the relative expenses of land and sea transportation. He was aware that the development of railroads had significantly increased the effectiveness of land transportation. Aside from the fact that ships were still necessary for transoceanic trade, Mahan had good reason to think that international trade would expand and become even more significant as an economic activity for all maritime nations in the near future. He was aware that international trade was substantial and very profitable. Furthermore, he most likely realised that the equivalent application of industrial technology to the design and building of ships, which greatly lowered the costs of maritime carrying, somewhat offset the efficiency benefits that came with the development of railroads.
While Mahan’s descriptions of the geographical elements that comprised the ‘Elements of Sea Power’ were derivative and unexceptionable, a collection of platitudes rather than a groundbreaking geopolitical manifesto, his belief in the ongoing critical importance of long-haul shipping was rational and not merely a projection of the economic conditions of the pre-industrial past into the industrial present and future. More significantly, Mahan made it clear that national marine and naval strategy was influenced by yet another significant nongeographical factor. Prior to doing so, he did observe that ‘the history of seaboard nations has been less determined by the shrewdness and foresight of governments than by conditions of position, extent, configuration, number and character of their people, – by what are called, in a word, natural conditions.’ However, Mahan noted in the next phrase that there was little substance to this regional determinist bone.
The growth of sea power in the broad sense, which includes not only the military might that rules the sea or any part of it by force of arms but also the peaceful commerce and shipping from which alone a military fleet naturally and healthily springs and on which it securely rests, must be acknowledged and will be seen to be greatly influenced by the wise or foolish actions of individual men at certain points in time.
This paragraph preceded Mahan’s exposition of the six main requirements, with the non-geographical sixth condition—’Character of the government’—receiving the greatest attention—more pages of text than the five preceding conditions put together. The first lesson in general was delivered as
By its policies, the government can encourage the natural development of a people’s industries and their inclinations to pursue adventure and profit through the sea; it can also attempt to develop these industries and seafaring tendencies when they do not naturally exist; or, on the other hand, the government may, through erroneous actions, check and impede the progress that the people would make on their own.
The second was that ‘influence of the government will be felt in its most legitimate manner in maintaining an armed navy, of a size commensurate with the growth of its shipping and the importance of the interests connected with it.’ It was further noted that this included sufficient funding for the navy’s institutional ‘healthful spirit and activity’ as well as quick shipbuilding and trained reserves.
Mahan placed a strong emphasis on the governmental factor because he believed that historically, the distribution of geographical favour had been such that multiple nations had the potential to attain naval supremacy, indicating that human action rather than geography had determined the final result. Mahan thought that while geographical conditions had largely dictated British naval strategy in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the country’s eventual victory against France had not. Although Mahan acknowledged that France’s continental location necessitated the maintenance of sizable military forces that were unnecessary for insular Britain, he believed that France’s economic might and geographic advantages were sufficient to have produced a fleet capable of achieving naval supremacy had the British decided to do so. Instead, by focusing too much on land operations in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, France lost the chance to subdue Britain when it was still relatively weak. The development of the commercial empire that could have served as the foundation for far greater economic and military dominance than France really attained was thwarted by this same continental strategy.
Mahan addressed his primary practical issue in the final paragraphs of his first chapter. His main concern at the time was that the isolationist feelings of the electorate would keep the US government from promoting the growth of the merchant marine and the construction of a powerful navy, which he felt was necessary to safeguard important economic and territorial interests in a world where rivalry between powerful nations was starting to intensify. In order to build a fleet ‘which, if not capable of reaching distant countries, shall at least be able to keep clear the chief approaches to its own,’ he wanted to encourage swift government action. Mahan believed that the eighteenth-century French naval strategy history was especially pertinent to the late nineteenth-century American situation. ‘France’s severe humiliation,’ he noted
Britain reached its lowest point between 1760 and 1763, at which point she made peace. The United States may learn a valuable lesson from this time of naval and commercial decadence. We have been spared her embarrassment, therefore let’s hope to benefit from her next move.
Mahan used the French naval victory in the American Revolution as an example. At least six of Mahan’s fourteen chapters of The Influence of Sea Power upon History were devoted to this topic, which served as its culmination. To put it another way, four percent of the chronology was covered by about forty percent of the text. According to Mahan, France utilised its battlefleet from 1778 to undermine Britain’s position in North America in this struggle because she was not distracted by having to deploy forces against a continental European great power and was motivated by an aggressive naval strategy. Even though Vice Admiral de Suffren, the great French naval commander-in-chief in the Indian Ocean, was finally restrained, the bold operations of 1781–1783 showed what the French Navy could have achieved if properly commanded. Additionally, Mahan attributed France’s inability to achieve even ‘more substantial results’ to its reluctance to pursue decisive action at sea, which could have decimated British naval supremacy under favourable circumstances.
In his two-volume follow-up, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812, published in 1892, Mahan was unable to analyse the period in terms of flawed or sound French grand strategy as he had done earlier because political unrest disrupted French naval leadership and administration, making it impossible for operations to be successful regardless of deployment. Instead, Mahan examined whether a nation supreme at sea might defeat its opposite, a nation supreme on land, in place of thinking about the best course of action for governments with significant maritime assets. As a result, Mahan’s thinking shifted to Britain and her ambitious plan of economic attrition. However, Mahan claimed that because the troops were so evenly distributed, the outcome was not predestined but rather depended on the decisions made by individual statesmen and commanders both at sea and on the field. Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson’s relentless pursuit of decisive naval combat, which resulted in notable naval victories with significant wider ramifications, was largely responsible for Britain’s eventual victory, according to Mahan.
The third book in the ‘Influence of Sea Power’ series, a two-volume biography of Nelson titled The Life of Nelson: The Embodiment of the Sea Power of Great Britain, which was released in 1897, expanded on the idea of the crucial significance of the admiralship at sea. The fourth and final work, Sea Power in Its Relations to the War of 1812, was published in 1905. It was a two-volume work that explored the catastrophic effects of naval unpreparedness on the United States, essentially addressing the reverse of his previous main argument regarding the advantages of naval strength. According to Mahan, American naval inadequacy led to an unwarranted conflict and made maritime trade vulnerable to British attacks that severely damaged the country’s finances and economy. The lesson for the United States, as Mahan stated, was not the necessity of building the largest navy in the world but rather the adequacy of a small fleet that could, when geographical and other factors were taken into consideration, prevent even the world’s most powerful sea power from using force to resolve unresolved disputes.
In conclusion, the growth of British naval superiority did not unite the ‘Influence of Sea Power’ quartet. The inability of France to reach her full potential as a maritime power was the main issue of the first book in the series. The central claim made in the second volume of the series was that Britain was able to withstand a Napoleonic onslaught that she may have otherwise lost because to a grand plan of economic attrition and protracted war centred on naval superiority. In order to transform naval advantage into naval supremacy, Mahan emphasised in the third volume the need for exceptional operational leadership.
Lastly, the main argument of the final work was that a relatively small investment by the American state in a larger navy would have prevented catastrophe. In other words, a more powerful but still small US Navy could have neutralised British naval supremacy in the Western Hemisphere under the conditions of a major war in Europe that had reached a crisis.
It is true that Mahan effectively refuted the main point of The Influence of Sea Power upon History in a 1902 National Review article, claiming that ‘history has conclusively demonstrated the inability of a state with even a single continental frontier to compete in naval development with one that is insular, although of smaller population and resources.’ In contrast to the first volume of the ‘Influence upon Sea Power’ series, which detailed a series of significant British naval victories that culminated in the near-total destruction of the combined French and Spanish battlefleets at Trafalgar, Mahan’s writing about the wars of the French Revolution and Empire likely caused him to change his mind. However, two significant Mahanian claims about the nature of sea power that separated it from the historical fortunes of Britain alone moderated this tendency toward geographical determinism.
First of all, Mahan believed that cooperation between two or more states would be necessary to achieve naval dominance in the industrial era. In the first chapter of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, he argued that ‘the circumstances of naval war have changed so much within the last hundred years, that it may be doubted whether such disastrous effects on the one hand, or such brilliant prosperity on the other, as were seen in the wars between England and France could now recur.’ In several of his lesser writings, which will now be recognised in the text by the date of original publication with full citation saved for the notes, Mahan reiterated this viewpoint and advanced related points. Mahan said in 1894 that it was ‘improbable that control [over the seas] ever again will be exercised, as once it was, by a single nation.’ During the Napoleonic Wars, he wrote in 1907 that it was ‘not likely, indeed, that we shall again see so predominant a naval power as Great Britain.’
Mahan thought that the British of his day lacked the power to sustain naval supremacy, which is defined as having the greatest fleet in the world as well as a degree of predominance sufficient to dominate all significant seas essential to her military and economic security. As early as in 1894, Mahan argued that ‘Great Britain’s sea power, though still superior, has declined relatively to that of other states, and is no longer supreme.’ In 1910, Mahan issued a warning that ‘the British navy is declining, relatively, owing to the debility of a government which in the way of expenditure has assumed obligations in seeming excess of its power to meet by sound financial methods’ in response to the Liberal government of Britain’s decision the previous year to expand social welfare programmes and in the face of a rapidly growing German navy.
Mahan believed that representative governments’ tendency to cut costs on military spending was the main issue facing both the United States and Britain. In the opening chapter of The Influence of Sea Power upon History, he noted that ‘popular governments are generally not favourable to military expenditure, however necessary.’ In 1897, Mahan contended that the governments of the United States and Britain were incapable of providing sufficient funding for ‘a complete scheme of national military policy, whether for offence or defence,’ and that the ‘instincts’ of an insular state—a term he felt applied to both the United States and Britain—with its ‘extensive commercial relations’ were ‘naturally for peace, because it has so much at stake outside its shores.’ Mahan argued in 1911 that ‘it is impracticable for commercial representative nations to prepare for war in time of peace, because the people in general will not give sufficient heed to military necessities or to international problems to feel the pressure which induces readiness.’
Mahan favoured democratic governance above monarchy, and as a result, he suggested transnational cooperation as a solution to the issue raised. He argued in 1900 that ‘each man and each state is independent only so far as there is strength to go alone, and no farther.’ If more action is required after this point, cooperation must be agreed upon. Mahan was persuaded that Britain and the United States had excellent incentive to work together because of their political and cultural affinities, the lack of significant competing interests, and the existence of powerful shared ones. Mahan favoured an informal but deliberate coordination of operations that resulted in a superiority of power sufficient to attain the advantages of naval dominance realised by Britain alone a century prior, rather than a traditional alliance. In 1894, he stated, ‘To Great Britain and the United States is intrusted a maritime interest… which demands, as one of its exercise and its safety, the organised force adequate to control the general course of events at sea.’
The Anglo-American naval consortium established by Mahan was not intended to be a partnership of naval equals. In 1912, Mahan said that America could ‘properly cede superiority, because to the British Islands naval power is vital in a sense in which it is not to the United States.’ However, this opinion was dependent on Britain continuing to hold the top naval position. Mahan was troubled by American naval construction cuts that coincided with the anti-big ship Democratic takeover of the House of Representatives in 1910, worried that Japanese immigration to the West Coast would eventually result in a conflict with Japan over ownership of continental American territory, and thought that Germany might actually overtake Britain as the world’s leading sea power.
Mahan called for America to retain a ‘preponderant navy’ in late 1912 as a result of these worries, but he believed that this was still inferior to a navy that granted ‘paramountcy.’ Furthermore, rather from being global and offensive like in the case of gaining global naval superiority, the goals of such a force were regional and defensive, protecting American interests in the Caribbean and maintaining American sovereignty on the Pacific coast of the continental United States.
Mahan’s claim that sea power was a transnational phenomenon was the second main argument that opposed the spatial determinist findings about specific nation states and naval dominance. It is true that Mahan defined sea power primarily in terms of government-directed national naval and economic competition in the preface to The Influence of Sea Power upon History. However, in The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, the nation state and sea power were distinguished. Because of the ‘circumstances of the time,’ Mahan observed, Great Britain used maritime power ‘as absolute mistress’ during the major conflicts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, he went on to note that the combination of commercial and naval activity created ‘a wonderful and mysterious Power’ that could be ‘seen as a complex organism, endued [sic] with a life of its own, receiving and imparting countless impulses, moving in a thousand currents which twine in and around one another in infinite flexibility… throughout all it lives and it grows.’
Mahan found opportunities to extol the advantages of peace and free commerce even in The Influence of Sea Power upon History, which covered a period when powerful powers’ economic practices were founded on mercantilist doctrine. The business across the Indian oceans, which was ‘open to private enterprise and grew more rapidly,’ was contrasted with the French East India Company’s monopoly on trade between important domestic and Indian ports. Mahan contended that ‘peace and the removal of restrictions, and not due in any sense to government protection’ were responsible for the French merchant marine’s tripling in size within twenty years of the end of the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14). In an 1890 article, Mahan stated that he opposed protective tariffs and supported free trade for the United States. ‘The activities of a modern ironclad that has heavy armour, but inferior engines and guns; mighty for defence, weak for offence’ is how he compared protection. He then noted that
such a lethargic attitude is practically incompatible with the temperament of the American people. Regardless of any prejudice in favour of or against protection, it is reasonable to assume that once the prospects for profit elsewhere are recognised, American business will find a way to access them.
The notion that sea power was a self-sustaining supra-national system whose existence and growth depended upon the actions of corporate institutions, both public and private, and individuals, worldwide, rather than just a desirable policy option for a specific state, was further discussed in Mahan’s other lesser works in later years. Mahan observed in 1902 that ‘the unmolested course of commerce, reacting upon itself,’
has also aided in its own quick development, which has been exacerbated throughout the most of the century by the predominance of a solely economic definition of national greatness. This, along with the enormous increase in communication speed, has strengthened and multiplied the ties that bind nations’ interests to one another until the entire new system is an articulated system that is not only enormously large and active but also extremely sensitive, unlike anything seen in earlier times.
In a different essay written a month later, Mahan contended that ‘war has ceased to be the natural, or even normal condition of nations, and military considerations are simply accessory and subordinate to the other greater interests, economical and commercial, which they assure and so subserve.’ Mahan went on to say, ‘Let economical rivalry be confined to its own methods, eschewing force.’
Mahan was similarly confident that there were other variables that made big military conflict a genuine possibility, even if he thought that the marine economic component of sea power generally supported peace rather than war. According to Mahan, the competition between European superpowers for control of Asian and African territories that were sought after for their potential economic value, governments’ vulnerability to public opinion, which when inflamed could lead to war even if it were ill-advised, and the emergence of an Asia armed with industrial weaponry that would challenge Western Civilisation for global dominance were the three main threats to amicability. Mahan was particularly concerned about the expansionist plans of militarist monarchical nations, such as Japan, Russia, and the German Empire.
Thus, his concept of an Anglo-American naval consortium was meant to prevent aggression and enforce international law in order to support the peaceful political and economic development of underdeveloped areas, secure the majority of international trade, and act as a barrier against invasion so that, in the event of hostilities, Britain and the United States could mobilise their economies for a protracted war of attrition.
Mahan stated in 1900 that he thought there were ‘determinative conditions’ that might ‘shape and govern the whole range of incidents, often in themselves appearing chaotic in combination, and devoid of guidance by any adequate controlling forces.’ However, he believed that recognising those forces and understanding their dynamics were challenging undertakings when dealing with the past, and much more so when thinking about the future. ‘In history entirely past,’ Mahan went on to remark,
when a problem has become sufficiently clear to indicate that one era has finished and a new one has begun, a skilled observer may identify the main reasons, formulate them with some degree of accuracy, and follow the interaction that led to the outcome. Determining the nature and interrelationships of the components operating in the present is clearly much more difficult; it is much more difficult to determine the direction of each element’s individual movement, from which speculation may build some notion as to what will follow as a result of forces. The distinctions between history and prophesy are all present here.
In other words, Mahan believed that because human affairs were complex and outcomes relied on intricate relationships and contingent circumstances, even solid history could not guarantee accurate forecasting. On the other hand, a historical-informed mind could benefit by taking into account a variety of options, even ones that are inconsistent or even mutually incompatible. In a collection of articles published in 1900, for instance, Mahan discussed the containment of Russia, whose power he acknowledged was derived from central position and control of vast continental territory, through an unofficial coalition of Germany, Great Britain, Japan, and the United States. He also contemplated the development of a world culture that reconciled east and west as well as the collision of Europe and Asia in a catastrophic war due to cultural differences. Despite his ongoing concerns about Russia in the long run, Mahan issued warnings about the immediate threats posed to the United States by a militant Germany or Japan after Russian weakness in the Russo-Japanese War was exposed and the German and Japanese navies grew rapidly.
Given the aforementioned, it should be evident that Mahan did not see the naval component of sea power as the dominant factor in the unavoidable struggle by a single state for global dominance, but rather as a significant influence in a number of potentially very different sets of circumstances that might or might not involve war. In other words, Mahan’s writing about future international relations was contemplative rather than prescriptive, engaging with several distinct premises, each of which was vigorously explored but always with awareness of other equally valid points of departure with potentially conflicting or even opposing ultimate outcomes. For Mahan, adopting this strategy was an understanding of the limitations of the intellect when faced with the unpredictable nature of human affairs rather than a declaration of moral cowardice or intellectual weakness. In 1900, he claimed that the ‘philosophy of life is best articulated in paradox. We may best steer our course as individuals or as a society toward successful solutions by openly accepting opposing realities and appreciating them without attempting to combine them.’
‘If such unity may be found in these, it will not be due to antecedent purpose, but to the fact that they embody the thought of an individual mind, consecutive in the line of its main conceptions, but adjusting itself continually to changing conditions, which the progress of events entails,’ stated Mahan in the introduction to his first collection of articles. These terms may be used to describe all of his writings that dealt with current and future occurrences. In order to serve as the foundation for judging specific cases, Mahan combined and re-combined principles and history in varying proportions depending on the situation rather than developing a system of thought that was used to mechanistically process current and future problems of twentieth-century statecraft. Therefore, Mahan’s geopolitical identity may be discovered by engaging with the unified sensibility that gave rise to his observations and conclusions rather than by randomly selecting samples from a diverse corpus of observations and conclusions. After this is finished, constructive critique can start.
Mahan and geopolitics are particularly pertinent to four revisionist claims. First, Mahan’s primary focus in the ‘Influence of Sea Power’ series was the crucial role that politicians and admirals played in making decisions, rather than the ability of geographical circumstances to shape history. Second, Mahan believed that a transnational alliance consisting of the United States and Great Britain would most likely exercise naval supremacy in his day and in the near future because both countries had significant and expanding seaborne commercial interests that required robust protection in the event of war, and neither had the resources to maintain a large enough navy to do the job on its own.
Third, Mahan believed that worldwide free commerce promoted peace over conflict and was a key component of his theory of sea power. Fourth, Mahan lacked a clear vision for the future. Although he was convinced that sea power would play a major part in international affairs due to the nature of things, he did not believe that sea power would define its parameters or determine its results.
Mahan’s impact on later geopolitical practitioners is a challenging subject. There are other options, such as unintentional usurpation, poor assimilation, or even independent innovation, in addition to different levels of borrowing, from grand robbery to pilfering. In many respects, Mackinder’s ‘heartland’ concept was foreshadowed by Mahan’s conception of the threat presented by Russia’s vast territory, although it is still unclear if or to what degree the later authour was influenced. Regarding the German school of geopolitics, it is likely that Mahan’s perception was the result of a skewed understanding due to insufficient reading, but in any event, it was more of a general approach than a specific argument. The new research on the American’s work has nothing to say about Mackinder and Haushofer’s intellectual debt to Mahan. However, it does offer the foundation for a helpful reconsideration of Mahan’s theories in light of Mackinder’s.
Mahan was a firm believer in the importance of sound operational leadership and strategy. Mackinder was perhaps more aware of the risks and possibility of inadequate civilian and military leadership after the First World War, and he was more focused on the long-term effective use of national and imperial resources because his own nation was smaller and less resource-rich. Mahan was a steadfast supporter of Anglo-American naval cooperation as the cornerstone of naval dominance in the twentieth century, mindful of his own nation’s unwillingness to invest in defence and conscious of Britain’s relative economic and naval decline. Although Mackinder experimented with the concept in 1905, 1909, and the years following World War I, his primary concern was the upkeep of an effectively unified British Empire. Mahan supported free trade and the idea of a global commonwealth because he was optimistic about his own nation’s economic strength and ability to compete in a global market. Mackinder was a supporter of protection and, in essence, the partition of the world (or even nations) into autarchic zones because he was concerned about British commercial susceptibility to increasingly effective foreign rivals.
Mahan and Mackinder participated in a comparable range of possibilities when it came to forecasting the future, which may be evidence of a fundamental consensus on the broad parameters that characterised the interaction between geography and politics. Mahan envisioned a transnational naval consortium as the embodiment of naval supremacy and the potential foundation for a coalition of peripheral maritime powers to contain an expansionist Russia. Mackinder also considered this idea, albeit with less zeal and confidence in a result that would benefit the latter. Mackinder also considered Mahan’s idea that European civilisation was in opposed to Asian civilisation. In the shorter run, both men were concerned about the military danger Germany presented. The format of inquiry was where Mahan and Mackinder diverged the most, not their subject matter or findings. Mahan was a historian and, at his core, a humanist. Mackinder was a social scientist at heart and a political geographer. They are complimentary rather than antagonistic in this crucial sense.
By rerouting and reorganising the historical study of international relations, Paul Kennedy’s depiction of Mahan and Mackinder’s approaches to the subject of sea power against land power as opposites served a valuable and significant function. Kennedy’s appraisal of British history in the twentieth century is still a very strong competitor, if not unquestionable, when it comes to the fortunes of a specific nation-state. Kennedy’s assumption, however, that Mahan’s perspective on the twentieth century was merely a continuation of the tale of British sea power’s ascent throughout the sailing era is incorrect. The application of Mahan’s actual concept of a transnational naval consortium as the basis for naval supremacy, moreover, transforms the story of British relative decline globally into one of her subsumption into a politically and economically preeminent conglomerate of associated states. In the end, Britain’s standing in this alliance was diminished from a senior to a junior partnership with the United States, but its political power and overall economic prosperity have not changed.
Mahan has been reduced to a side passage in the pantheon of discredited intellectuals, frequently mocked as nothing more than a prophet of national aggrandisement by mastery of the sea, and remembered for the impact rather than the content of his ideas. However, Mahan’s analysis of the relationship between continental and insular land structures, his recognition of the fundamental significance of patterns of sea transport and trade, and his connection of these topics to national policy set within a transnational perspective unrestricted by commitment to a single future were examples of a perceptive and adaptable intelligence. His worries are still major concerns for today’s geopolitics students, and his later forecasting exercises appear remarkably accurate in retrospect: the containment of the Germans, followed by the Russians, with the question of conflict between Asian and Western civilisation explored if left undecided, and the emergence of a global free-trade economy based on shipping. Mahan’s intellectual descendants may legitimately choose not to study his extensive and challenging work in its entirety, but learning about his mindset and appreciating the content of its achievements are worthwhile endeavours—possibly even required ones for serious geopolitics students.
