Geo-political structure of the world

Assignment 1

Submitted by: Quratulain

Nimra saif

Amimah ijaz

Submitted to: Ma’am Sidra Batool

Date: 1 December 2019

Mahan’s Sea Power

Alfred Thayer Mahan was a United States naval officer and historian, whom John Keegan called "the most
important American strategist of the nineteenth century." His book The Influence of Sea Power upon
History, won immediate recognition and was a highly influential exponent of sea power in the late 19th
and early 20th centuries.1

Mahan’s sea power

Mahan believed that national greatness was inextricably associated with the sea, with its commercial use
in peace and its control in war. Mahan made three major propositions regarding navies and international
relations. The first was that maritime was essential for the economic prosperity of a great power. The
second was that the best means of protecting one’s own trade while interdicting the enemy’s was to
deploy a fleet of battleships capable of maintaining naval supremacy. The third was that a nation with
naval supremacy could defeat a country that was militarily pre-eminent. Many these arguments as
tantamount to the contention that naval supremacy was the pre-requisite to ascendancy in the world
political order.2 Mahan’s main ideas could be justified as an obligatory nod to the U.S. Navy’s intellectual
heritage, or as an act of faith in the capacity of patristic writing to inspire strategic insight. There are three
main arguments. First, Mahan believed that when one side in a conflict possessed absolute sea command
or in special cases even temporary local control, naval operations in direct support of land forces could be
of decisive importance. Second, Mahan maintained that naval supremacy in the twentieth century would
be exercised by a transnational consortium acting in defense of a multinational system of free trade. Third,
Mahan was convinced that the transformation of naval materiel by radical technological change had not
eliminated tactical and strategic uncertainty from the conduct of war, and that the improvement of
executive ability through the rigorous study of history should therefore be the basis of naval officer
education.

Mahan attributed his initial inspiration—for the idea that naval supremacy was of much larger historical
significance than was generally recognized—to his reflections on a historical case involving the use of

1
(The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2019)
2
Jon Sumida (1999) Alfred Thayer Mahan, geopolitician, Journal of Strategic Studies, 22:2-3, 39-62, DOI:
10.1080/01402399908437753
uncontested command of the sea to achieve decisive military success. In his memoirs, he recalled that in
1885 he had chanced upon Theodor Mommsen’s history of ancient Rome. While reading this book, Mahan
had been struck by the thought that the outcome of the wars between Rome and Carthage would have
been different had the latter possessed the ability, as did the former, of using the sea as an avenue of
invasion instead of moving its armies over land. After some reflection, Mahan decided to apply the
example of the victory of a state that could use naval force effectively over one that could not to the
history of European wars in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mahan, it appeared to many,
had intended his analytical history to be a grand strategic primer for his own times, and in particular for
the government of his own country. He was indeed a proponent of a much strengthened U.S. Navy. It is
thus not hard to imagine that he hoped that his homeland would become the world’s greatest power in
the twentieth century by the same means that Britain had used to achieve this status in the period covered
by his histories. The fact that the United States ultimately rose to the top in large part through the effective
use of naval supremacy has only reinforced the propensity to draw such inferences about Mahan’s
underlying motive.3

Heartland theory
The Heartland theory is a geopolitical concept which analyzes the political and economic success of the
world’s regions by geography. The theory was hypothesized by 20th-century British geopolitical scholar,
Halford Mackinder in his paper to the Royal Geographical Association entitled, “The Geographical Pivot of
History” in 1904. According to the theory, the core of global influence lies in what is known as the
Heartland, a region of the world situated in Eurasia due to its sheer size, a wealth of resources, and a high
population. Mackinder stated that the nation in control of the Heartland had the potential to “command
the world” but also highlighted the great natural barriers which surrounded the Heartland. The theory
had great political ramifications, and some historians believe that the theory was the inspiration behind
Germany’s invasion of Russia during the Second World War4

A contrast between Mackinder and Mahan

Mahan’s categorization of power was based upon the size of a country, the racial ‘character’ of its
population, as well as its economic and military capacity. The core of his thesis focused on the political

3
Sumida, Jon. "NEW INSIGHTS FROM OLD BOOKS: The Case of Alfred Thayer Mahan." Naval War College Review
54, no. 3 (2001): 100-11. www.jstor.org/stable/26393843.
4
Sawe, Benjamin Elisha. "What is the Heartland Theory?" WorldAtlas. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/what-
is-the-heartland-theory.html (accessed December 1, 2019).
control of the sea, looking to it as “a highway for commerce and also for hostile attacks upon countries
bordering on it.” Mackinder’s perspective held whoever controlled the geographical pivot area he termed
“the Heartland” controlled the rest of the world, because of the concentration of population, resources
and industrial potential contained in it. He believed that sea power was no basis for power or territorial
conquest, since ‘warships cannot navigate mountains’. However, he did advocate the idea of
‘amphibiosity’, which in essence encapsulated notion that sea power in the final resort must be able to
project power ashore to balance the threat from land power. Mackinder’s central claim was that
geography could aid statecraft and he believed that the environment shaped identity in ways that produce
a world that is a mutually hostile such that international relations are primarily based upon force The
emergence of a new strategic environment, marked by the rise of small aggressive states armed with
weapons of mass destruction is possibly the greatest danger to current world security. In the case of the
United States and many other states, the ‘seas’ around them are not a sufficiently powerful buffer
anymore, given the aerial threats posed by long-range missiles and combat aircraft. Sea power alone is
also not sufficient, and military presence is necessary to partake interventions that enable the
containment and control of rogue or failed states, as well as weapon states such as Iraq. This is directly
contradictory with Mahan’s concepts. Due to the advances in aerial military technology and
unprecedented globalization, naval power has lost its position of dominance although it is still important
for a states power. This combined with the need to control oil rich south central Eurasia, today’s central
‘pivot area’ and the local conflicts that accompany it, as well as the collective need to control ‘rogue and
failed states’ to ensure world security means Mackinder’s thesis has greater relevance than that of
Mahan’s in contemporary geopolitics.