Worldmaking (8 page)

Physical conformation is Mahan's second prerequisite for achieving naval greatness. Deep harbors, connecting with long, navigable rivers, were essential to the accumulation of substantial wealth derived from trade. Although the United States was blessed with an abundance of deep-water ports and trade arteries such as the Mississippi, Mahan cautioned against complacency:

Except Alaska, the United States has no outlying possession—no foot of ground inaccessible by land. Its contour is such as to present few points specially weak from their saliency, and all important parts of the frontiers can be readily attained—cheaply by water, rapidly by rail. The weakest frontier, the Pacific, is far removed from the most dangerous of possible enemies. The internal resources are boundless as compared with present needs; we can live off ourselves indefinitely in “our little corner,” to use the expression of a French officer to the author. Yet should that little corner be invaded by a new commercial route through the Isthmus, the United States in her turn may have the rude awakening of those who have abandoned their share in the common birthright of all people, the sea.
52

Again, Mahan reinforces a central message. More financial resources and political capital must be spent to maintain America's dominant position in the western hemisphere, for the creation of a Panama Canal will both create opportunities and invite numerous challenges.

Extent of territory, Mahan's third category, refers not to “the total number of square miles which a country contains, but the length of its coast-line and the character of its harbors.” The critical issue in this respect is whether a country's population is adequate to protect the length of its coast. Great Britain, a small nation with a crowded population, clearly had sufficient bodies to patrol its waters and pack a significant naval punch. The Confederacy during the Civil War, conversely, had a long seaboard to defend with insufficient population to man the coastal defenses. The North's blockade of the southern ports was highly effective and a critical component in its success. But the outcome of the Civil War might have been very different if the South's population had been sufficient to defend its many ports: “Had the South had a people as numerous as it was warlike, and a navy commensurate to its other resources as a sea power, the great extent of its sea coast and its numerous inlets would have been elements of great strength … [The blockade] was a great feat, a very great feat; but it would have been an impossible feat had the Southerners been more numerous, and a nation of seamen.”
53

Size of population was not as important a factor to Mahan as one might imagine. In the period following the French Revolution, “the population of France was much greater than that of England,” Mahan writes, “but in respect of sea power in general, peaceful commerce as well as military efficiency, France was much inferior to England.” Mahan understood that a large population meant a large domestic market and this sometimes meant that foreign trade, and the naval expansion to facilitate it, was not prioritized. And while having adequate numbers to man an effective navy was one thing, the quality of seamen themselves was the more important consideration. In 1793, the British Navy made a concerted effort to employ Cornish miners, “reasoning from the conditions and dangers of their calling … that they would quickly fit into the demands of sea life.”
54
In other words, the lot of the average Cornish tin miners was so dank and perilous that the relative respite offered by naval life ensured that their work rate and hardiness greatly surpassed that of their soft French counterparts. Of course, the ideal naval power would be blessed with a high numerical population infused with a Calvinist work ethic—like Britain or the Netherlands on a much larger scale.

In Mahan's opinion, national character was a vital condition affecting the sea power of a nation. Nations that aspire to strength, wealth, and global respect should have “aptitude for commercial pursuits.” In this regard, Mahan compares successful trading empires such as the British and Dutch with plundering nations like Spain and Portugal, which sought gain through “avarice” alone. While the Iberian peoples were “bold, enterprising, temperate, patient of suffering, enthusiastic, and gifted with intense national feeling,” they became blinded by gold-lust, failing to build the rudiments of a sound, diversified national economy: a functioning infrastructure, heavy industry, export-led manufactures, a sophisticated banking sector, and an entrepreneurial spirit that matched their spirit of adventure. On this matter, Mahan approvingly quotes a contemporary:

The mines of Brazil were the ruin of Portugal, as those of Mexico and Peru had been of Spain; all manufactures fell into insane contempt; ere long the English supplied the Portuguese not only with clothes, but with all merchandise, all commodities, even to salt-fish and grain. After their gold, the Portuguese abandoned their very soil; the vineyards of Oporto were finally bought by the English with Brazilian gold, which had only passed through Portugal to be spread throughout England.

Whereas Napoleon Bonaparte had mockingly dubbed Britain a “nation of shopkeepers,” Mahan made clear that this label was something to embrace: “The jeer, in so far as it is just, is to the credit of their wisdom and uprightness. [The British] were no less bold, no less enterprising, no less patient.” By character and temperament, Mahan asserted, the British “were by nature business-men, traders, producers, negotiators … The tendency to trade, involving of necessity the production of something to trade with, is the national characteristic most important to the development of sea power.”
55
The French were superior in temperament and industry to the Spanish and the Portuguese—“France has a fine country, an industrious people, an admirable position”—but common among Frenchmen was a self-defeating tendency to save, practice thrift, and live a cloistered existence in their beautiful nation. “Who was it said there are two kinds of nature,” Mahan wondered, “human nature and French nature?”
56
There was timidity inherent in the French DNA, which contrasted unfavorably with the British sense of adventure, reflected in their greater propensity to travel and spend hard-earned resources on riskier investments overseas. Britons sagely regarded the hoarding of money as a route to adequate but second-class status. It was fine for a self-satisfied nation such as France, but the British Empire aspired toward a grander ideal, namely, global supremacy founded on the unrelenting accumulation of wealth:

It is said to be harder to keep than to make a fortune. Possibly; but the adventurous temper, which risks what it has to gain more, has much in common with the adventurous spirit that conquers worlds for commerce. The tendency to save and put aside, to venture timidly and on a like small scale, may lead to a general diffusion of wealth on a small scale, but not to the risks and development of external trade and shipping interests.
57

Britain's acquisition of vast colonial territory—the “planting [of] healthy colonies,” as Mahan phrased it—and the pecuniary benefits this brought to the mother country, was another realm where national traits played a decisive role. Britain's success, in Mahan's opinion, owed much to the fact that “colonies grow best when they grow of themselves, naturally,” and that Britons did not feel compelled to remake their adopted homes into replicas of the mother country, as the French invariably did, or simply take what was valuable and send it back homeward, as was the case with Spain and Portugal.
58

The English colonist naturally and readily settles down in his new country, identifies his interest with it, and though keeping an affectionate remembrance of the home from which he came, has no restless eagerness to return. In the second place, the Englishman at once and instinctively seeks to develop the resources of the new country in the broadest sense. In the former particular he differs from the French, who were ever longingly looking back to the delights of their pleasant land; in the latter, from the Spaniards, whose range of interest and ambition was too narrow for the full evolution of the possibilities of a new country.
59

That Britons were better suited to the task of empire building owed much to the fact that the nations they colonized were invariably more inviting than the gray, wet, windswept country from which they came. The French had sunshine, an indigenous cuisine that was the envy of the world, and a cultural attachment to leisure that offended northern Europeans. How could the French compare with the British as a colonizing force? Leaving Blackburn for Burma was no great wrench for a Briton. But giving up Marseille for Martinique was likely to give a Frenchman far greater pause.

How did the character of Americans match up with their Old World competitors? Mahan viewed his countrymen favorably in that the U.S. population had an “instinct for commerce, bold enterprise in the pursuit of gain, and a keen scent for the trails that lead to it … It cannot be doubted that Americans will carry to them all their inherited aptitude for self-government and independent growth.”
60
“Inherited” is the operative word. Mahan believed that Anglo-Saxon virtues had been passed down from Britain to its white settler progeny: Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and most important, the United States. But unleashing the nation's latent capacity for expansion required bold leadership. A population possessed of an enterprising spirit was not sufficient. Channeling these potentialities into a coherent strategy required strong guidance from an American president cognizant of the manner in which maritime commercial success determined a nation's place in the global pecking order.

Mahan's final condition affecting a nation's sea power was character of government, in which the book's contemporary resonance was made most explicit. While Mahan instinctively preferred democracy, he was sharply aware that less representative governments often made the better choices on behalf of their people:

In the matter of sea power, the most brilliant successes have followed where there has been intelligent direction by a government fully imbued with the spirit of the people and conscious of its true general bent … but such free governments have sometimes fallen short, while on the other hand despotic power, wielded with judgment and consistency, has created at times a great sea commerce and a brilliant navy with greater directness than can be reached by the slower processes of a free people.
61

Oliver Cromwell's England was a good example of what farsighted despotism might achieve. Cromwell's Navigation Act held that all imports into England or its colonies must be carried in English ships or in ships registered to the country where the goods originated. This decree was greatly resented by the Dutch, whose navy had carved out a niche as the preferred carrier service of that era—the FedEx of its day—but Cromwell's actions greatly benefited English commerce.

Sound leadership was thus essential in the building of naval greatness. In peacetime, “the government by its policy can favor the natural growth of a people's industries and its tendencies to seek adventure and gain by way of the sea.” In wartime, “the 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.”
62
The parameters of U.S. foreign policy had to expand radically to allow the nation to thrive—and to survive. America lacked the capacity to project power, and this was a critical limitation in a world that was shrinking in the face of rapid technological advances. Worse than this, the U.S. Navy lacked the ability to adequately protect its major cities from blockade, a blind spot that could be ruthlessly exploited by any nation determined to challenge the status quo. In its war against France, Britain had successfully blockaded Brest, the Bay of Biscay, Toulon, and Cádiz. What if a hostile nation attempted to do the same to Boston, New York, Delaware, the Chesapeake, and the Mississippi? Mahan was determined that throughout the twentieth century the United States would emulate the forceful, prescient Great Britain, not the wasteful, defensive France.

*   *   *

Mahan's vision for America corresponded fairly closely with the reality that unfolded throughout the twentieth century. Historians are divided on whether the United States is an “Empire,” an “Empire in Denial,” or an explicitly anti-imperial power.
63
Irrespective of which term best encapsulates America's capabilities and intentions, the nation's route to achieving unrivaled global interventionist capability was the acquisition of geographically dispersed military installations—such as Okinawa, Japan; Holy Loch, Scotland; Diego Garcia; Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; and more than
seven hundred
other bases across the world—in precisely the manner favored by Mahan.
64
Mahan recognized that America, blessed with abundant natural resources, need not acquire colonies in the fashion of Britain, Spain, and France. Indeed, the military expert John E. Pike observed in 2009 that “even if the entire Eastern Hemisphere has drop-kicked” the United States from every base on its territory, the American military should still be able to “run the planet from Guam and Diego Garcia by 2015.”
65

This is what differentiates the American empire from its predecessors. Charles V, Philip II, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, Lord Palmerston, and Benjamin Disraeli had expanded their nations' power primarily through the sword. All that America required was a peaceful world in which free trade was practiced. In this benign environment, America's inherent advantages—a people protected by two vast oceans, self-sufficient in vital natural resources, and able to sustain a growing population through large-scale immigration—made its ascendancy virtually ordained. Mahan's achievement was to make this so lucid.