Max Boot writes in The Savage Wars of Peace (2003): "Many Americans cringe at the notion that their country should play globocop. But this is not a purely altruistic exercise. Without a benevolent hegemon to guarantee order, the international scene can degenerate quickly into chaos and worse. One scholar argues, with great plausibility, that the 1930s turned out as badly as they did because Britain abdicated its international leadership role."
Today, it appears that the American "empire" is in decline; Pax Americana is disintegrating. This is a repeat of naval history. It may not require a Cold War–size Navy to reverse the trend, but it will require a Navy that helps sow the seeds of globalization and then continues to do the gardening. It requires a forward-deployed, expeditionary Navy to mind the interests of the United States, just as the Royal Navy minded Britain's in the 19th century.
Navies, by their very presence and intercourse in faraway places, protect national interests every day in ways that armies and air forces cannot. The U.S. Navy is the only branch of our government that routinely employs all the elements of national power—diplomatic, informational, military, and economic. This most flexible use of our power advances national interests in important ways.
But idealistic plans for collective security and a 1,000-ship navy could, if not executed properly, actually undermine these interests and accelerate American decline. That decline would ensure international chaos. Therefore, for the United States the choice is clear: maritime supremacy or international chaos.
Lessons for Pax Americana
Pax Americana, in the unipolar world of the 1990s, greatly resembled Pax Britannica of the 1890s. The American government, like Britain's, concentrated on overseas commerce and investment—and reaped the peace dividend. But between 1990 and 2000, following the demise of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Navy decreased its size by 45 percent, from 574 ships to 316.1 Peacetime, after all, should not require the same size navy as wartime.
In 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated her Diamond Jubilee with a peacetime naval display so impressive to foreign attendees that Kaiser Wilhelm II decided Germany needed a larger fleet of its own. The Royal Navy and the British Empire appeared to be at their zenith during the celebration, the navy well-equipped with modern technology and "wisely distributed to meet the various threats,"2 but in fact both the navy and the empire had been in gradual decline due to the complacency of "splendid isolation" enjoyed by prosperous Britons in a former age of globalization.
With the shock of the Boer War and attendant focus on the army's troubles, the empire's worldwide interests became more difficult to finance and the challenges grew more obvious. Despite the growth of rival fleets, foreign and defense policy rationalization—a policy of reducing commitments, forming collective security alliances, and seeking efficiencies in the armed forces—seemed the least painful solution to a financially conscious empire.3 In 1904 Sir John Fisher, the First Sea Lord, began a "revolution" in naval policy by pursuing more efficient use of the fleet, especially in home waters, saying "the peace distribution of the fleet should also be its best strategical distribution for war."4
By 1906 and 1907, British foreign and colonial offices were complaining loudly about the lack of navy support for earthquakes, revolutions, and other troubles overseas: "If the number of ships is to be reduced to such an extent that the navy will be unable to give the foreign policy of this country such support in the future . . . the only possible conclusion will be that the exigencies of British world-wide policy and interests . . . are being sacrificed to a scheme of concentration for defensive purposes against an attack which is not likely to be made for some years to come."5
By 1914, Pax Britannica—a product of the Royal Navy's hegemony—had disintegrated. This left only alliances and balance-of-power politics to guarantee international order. Under this system, order too would soon disintegrate.
At the same time, in the United States a former assistant secretary of the Navy and president, an avowed Mahanist, was building a new fleet. But the lesson that Theodore Roosevelt learned was not necessarily about concentrating the fleet. Rather, as John Paul Jones understood, the lesson was in the value of its sailing beyond our coasts. Roosevelt ridiculed the opinion, "as old as the time of Jefferson," that the Navy should concentrate on "coast defense," calling it "an attitude about as sensible as that of a prizefighter who expected to win by merely parrying instead of hitting."6
By the time of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had adopted the strategy of Jones, Mahan, and Roosevelt of deploying far abroad. But the Cold War was more peace than war. Pax Americana, born in 1945, shaped the global landscape largely in the image of the United States through the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods system, and the United Nations. The competition with the Soviet Navy may have spurred on a larger and more robust U.S. Navy, but since there was no direct fighting with the Soviets, the Americans helped to spread peace, security, and prosperity around the globe—just as the Royal Navy had done a century earlier.
Navies, unlike armies, are political instruments even in peacetime. But there is evidence today that declining naval hegemony has had a detrimental effect on international order, as it did with the decline of the Victorian Royal Navy. Acts of piracy in the South China Sea, for example, quintupled in the four years following the U.S. Navy's departure from the Philippines (from 25 in 1992 to 125 in 1996).7 Piracy has remained high there and has dramatically increased in other seas, too.
Strategy Is a Plan
As George Washington said to the Marquis de Lafayette (15 November 1781): "Without a decisive naval force we can do nothing definitive. And with it, everything honorable and glorious."
Strategy is nothing more than a plan: setting objectives and devising ways of achieving them. Maritime strategy is a subset of national security strategy (NSS). As NSS seeks to protect and advance core national objectives, so maritime strategy must do the same. While each new administration puts its own face on the NSS, there remain enduring core national objectives that appear in every version. They are measurable, enduring, and never out of vogue, such as territorial integrity of the United States.
These enduring objectives, and the national interests that serve them, are what the maritime strategy must safeguard using both soft and hard power. Our strategy should not hang on short-term threats as it did during the Cold War. It would be a mistake to design a strategy that answered only the identifiable threats of today, such as Iraq or Islamist fascism. To be enduring and effective, our strategy must serve the core national objectives of the United States with a clear-eyed understanding of likely threats, and with due regard for the interests of our allies and enemies.
Questionable Assumptions
Before discussing the role of U.S. national interests, it is important to address some of the dubious assumptions surrounding strategies of collective security, one of which the 1,000-ship navy certainly is.
Any policy that relies on the actions of other nations is not, strictly speaking, a strategy. It is a gamble. Strategies are plans of action designed to meet measurable objectives that, in turn, serve national interests. They are theories of persuasion or coercion that are only as effective as the if/then proposition contained therein (if U.S. ships are home-ported in Japan, then that will deter aggression against Japan).8
Strategies are only reliably effective as long as the strategist controls the resources (the means, or ships in the above example). A strategy can be designed to influence the actions of others, but others' compliance cannot be the action or mechanism in the strategy, because the others may choose not to cooperate. Their compliance is the objective of the strategy that serves national interests.
Additionally, common interests, shared by the strategist and the other, do not necessarily provide a theory of persuasion unless the common interest is of short duration or particularly acute (such as the immediacy of being attacked), because the other always has competing interests. We see this in the news every day at the United Nations.
We see diverging interests in policy toward North Korea (DPRK) and Iran. Members of the international community share a common interest in not allowing these regimes to have nuclear weapons, yet no real progress can be made because China and Russia have competing interests. Despite Security Council agreement about the threat and DPRK and Iranian violations, common interest in nuclear nonproliferation, and a ticking clock, other nations find it inimical to their interests to entertain more coercive strategies.
Finally, free-riders are an eternal part of the international landscape. Free-riders, in political economy terms, are those who "receive the benefits of a 'public good' or a 'positive externality' without contributing to paying the costs of producing those benefits."9 For example, the United States spends more real dollars on defense than the next dozen nations because it provides an umbrella of security over our allies, if not most of the globe. In 2002, Iceland actually spent 0.0 percent of its GDP on defense.10 Because of mutually beneficial American air bases there, which have since closed, Iceland didn't need to spend more on defense.
This type of relationship exists in the United Nations, NATO, and elsewhere that the United States provides positive security externalities. Today in Afghanistan, some of our allies in NATO refuse to allow their armed forces to take offensive action in southern Afghanistan against the resurgent Taliban, despite their obligation under NATO to do so. Germany, France, Spain and Italy refuse to allow their troops to participate in the south. The result is that the U.S., British, Dutch, and Canadian forces are left to do the heavy lifting.
It would be folly to expect these same allies to contribute more to U.S. maritime strategy, and to count on them in a pinch simply because we think they share our interests. The 1,000-ship navy will be very beneficial as a way to improve military and diplomatic relations, and even to help patrol the beat, so to speak. The United States, however, should be under no delusions about its kinetic ability: there will likely be more bobbies than sheriffs. Expecting those who agree to membership in the 1,000-ship navy to zealously protect U.S. interests is tantamount to surrender.
U.S. National Interests
National interests naturally flow from core national objectives that define what the United States is. Thus, any damage to them threatens our existence as a nation. Reasonable people can quibble over what exactly core national objectives are, but the general concepts are enduring. Broadly, there are three areas that concern us:
- Military: territorial integrity, freedom of citizens, promotion of external interests (through the use of force if necessary)
- Political: the preservation of our values: freedom, individual rights, and democratic institutions in the United States
- Economical: prosperity through free-market principles (which makes globalization inevitable)
All U.S. national interests derive from or serve these core objectives. The extent to which they impact core objectives makes them vital, important, or peripheral interests.
With this in mind, an assessment of threats to U.S. core national objectives is required in order to devise strategy that serves national interests. For example, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 and massed Iraqi troops on the Saudi border, he directly threatened oil supplies upon which the U.S. economy relied. The preservation of the U.S. economy is a core national objective, therefore the Saudi and Kuwaiti oil supplies became vital national interests. They were vital because the threat immediately and directly impacted a core national objective. Vital interests are generally those that the United States will protect even at the expense of war.
An important interest could be something that will affect core national objectives over time, but not immediately. For example, keeping the Al Saud family in power in Saudi Arabia might be an important interest, because they ensure the oil keeps flowing. But a replacement regime won't necessarily stop the flow. We may or may not go to war over this.
Peripheral interests are those that may be in accord with our values and virtuous to advance, but not at significant cost. Human rights are a good example. The United States is working hard to end the genocide in Darfur by all means short of force, but it will not unilaterally invade to protect innocent civilians in another country without some vital interests being involved.
Military strategy concerns itself predominantly with threats to vital interests. The Navy, however, has an important role to play in defending other interests in addition to the vital ones, because it also possesses diplomatic, economic, and informational power. A carrier strike group on a port visit employs many different types of diplomacy, captures media attention, and infuses the local economy with hundreds of thousands of dollars per day.
Maritime strategy must meet the threats to vital interests (e.g., through deterrence, homeland defense, power projection)—and it must meet threats to the 90 percent of commerce that travels by ship, as well as the ideological threats to democracy and globalization.
It must take care of the gardening through expeditions, forward-basing, and port visits. The maritime strategy, in order to avoid global chaos, must provide for the spread of Pax Americana.
If Navy planners and resource providers want to continue to live in a world that increasingly promotes American values, the new maritime strategy must be one that ensures a rededication to Pax Americana. The strategy must serve U.S. interests without handing over to allies the responsibility for defending them.
Alliances are important; as Vice Admiral John Morgan's All Flag briefing says, "In a globalized, interconnected world, nobody can do it alone." But someone must lead. Without leadership, international chaos will ensue. Learning the lessons of the past requires that the U.S. Navy lead as the Royal Navy once did. We must not seek false security for a few dollars less than real security.
Captain McMahon is associate chair of the Political Science Department at the U.S. Naval Academy. He teaches national security policy.
1. Congressional Budget Office, Budgeting for Naval Forces: Structuring Tomorrow's Navy at Today's Funding Level (Washington D.C., 2000), p. x. back to article
2. Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (London: Ashfield Press, 1986), p. 206. back to article
3. Ibid, pp. 209–10. back to article
4. Ibid, pp. 216–17. back to article
5. Ibid, p. 219. back to article
6. Theodore Roosevelt, An Autobiography (New York: Scribner's, 1925), p. 207. back to article
7. International Maritime Organization (IMO), Reports on Acts of Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships, Annual Report – 2005 (London, MSC. 4/Circ.81, 22 March 2006), Annex 5. Available from: http://www.imo.org/includes/blastDataOnly.asp/data_id%3D14323/81-colour.pdf. back to article
8. From Blackwill's Taxonomy: Ambassador Robert Blackwill and Dr. Philip Zelikow co-taught a course called "Pursuing the National Interest" at the Kennedy School of Government in which they imparted an analytical framework for formulating and implementing national security policy. back to article
9. Paul M. Johnson, A Glossary of Political Economy Terms, Auburn University. Available from: http://www.auburn.edu/~johnspm/gloss/free_rider. back to article
10. Congressional Research Service, Report for Congress, Comparisons of U.S. and Foreign Military Spending: Data from Selected Public Sources (Washington, 2004), Table 3. back to article