Just before the outbreak of World War I, a fiery patriot sent to a London newspaper the following letter:
When the German army is looting the cellars of the Bank of England, and carrying off the foundations of our whole national fortune, perhaps the twaddlers who are now screaming about the wastefulness of building four more dreadnoughts will understand why sane men are regarding this opposition as treasonable nonsense.
What picture does this call to mind? Anlaf the Viking ravaging the coast of Essex and carrying women, children, cattle, and goods home to Scandinavia?
What if the thing our patriot feared had come to pass?
What would have been the result of such action by the German army in London?
The Bank of England would have suspended specie payment. A heavy run on all English banks would have followed. London, being the clearing house of the world at that time, bills drawn thereon, but held by foreigners would not have been met; the loanable value of money in foreign centers would have been enormously raised, and instruments of credit enormously depreciated; prices of all kinds of stocks would have fallen and holders would have been threatened with ruin and insolvency. Moreover, German finance would have represented a condition as chaotic as that of Great Britain.
The German general in London would soon have found the difference between himself and Anlaf. Anlaf did not have to worry about a bank rate and such complications: the Scandinavian stock exchanges of the 10th century were not greatly affected when Anlaf raided Essex. The German general sacking the Bank of England would have found that for the sake of a few sovereigns apiece among his soldiers, he had sacrificed a considerable part of his own personal fortune in Germany.
Today, we recognize the interdependence of nations resulting from the World Trade Pattern. What is the World Trade Pattern?
We could begin almost anywhere; but let us begin in West Germany, with an ironworks in Essen making locomotives for a light railway in an Argentine province—the capital for which has been subscribed in Paris— which has become necessary because of the export of wool to Bradford in England where trade has developed, owing to sales in the United States, due to high prices produced by the destruction of American sheep runs, owing to the agricultural development of the West. But for the money found in Paris (due perhaps, to good crops in wine and olives, sold mainly in London and New York) and the wool needed by the Bradford manufacturer (who has found a market for blankets among miners in Montana, who are smelting copper for a cable to India, which is needed because the encouragement given by the Indian government to education has caused Indian papers to print cable news from Europe), but for such factors as these and a chain of equally interdependent ones throughout the world, the ironworks in Essen would have been unable to sell its locomotives.
This is why thousands of merchant ships steam in all directions over the seas of the world. This is why “marine-ism” or sea power has a totally different character from militarism or land power.
This great world trade has had a profound effect upon the character of sea power. Prior to World War I, the world press was full of fears of German militarism on the continent. Some Germans expressed astonishment that while a great deal of talk was heard of German militarism, relatively little was said of the menace of British marine-isin. The reason is not far to seek. Marine-ism, at least in time of peace, does not constitute a very grievous tyranny.
During England’s naval predominance, the ships of all nations sailed the seas without hindrance in time of peace. Many in the navy, like others ashore, when discussing naval policies and international affairs, often assume that in some way “naval supremacy” can secure, for the nation possessing it, trade that could not otherwise be secured. The facts do not support this. In the great period of commercial expansion, when Germany was “capturing” British trade all over the world during the 1930s, there was hardly any German sea power and there was no way in which Britain could use her naval supremacy to prevent this development. In fact, the nations that most rigorously protected their own trade with their overseas colonies were not major sea powers—e.g., France, Holland, and Portugal. The British Navy could not even prevent the Dominions of her own Empire from raising tariffs against the mother country or from trading with outsiders.
Today, marine-ism or sea power retains this special characteristic that makes it so different from military or land power. The Soviet Union, by staging army maneuvers along the Soviet Union-Finland border, can dissuade the Finnish government from raising a tariff or signing a pact. This is militarism in time of peace. By guaranteeing free use of the high seas, the United States, Great Britain, and the NATO countries protect the capability of the Soviet Union to deploy ballistic missile submarines a few miles from our coast, immune from attack. This is marine-ism in time of peace.
In peace, the guarantee of free movement is essential to the smooth flow of trade upon which our prosperity depends. It is our understanding of this important fact—not broadmindedness or tolerance or appeasement— that permits those who would undermine and destroy our form of society to benefit also from naval protection.
Not everyone understands this fact, however; Russia not only claims, but enforces sovereignty over the huge Sea of Okhotsk, the Kara Sea, and vast portions of the Arctic. Fishermen have been arrested hundreds of miles from shore. Breaches of Soviet law which take place in these areas of “historical” Soviet possession entitle the enforcement agency to pursue the offender across the high seas and arrest him, provided he has not reached the haven of the coastal limit of a foreign power’s territory.
This type of enforcement is the same as militarism. The Soviet Union imposes Soviet law over those waters which she possesses the power to dominate. If she possessed the type of power that the British navy had in the last century and the U. S. Navy now has, she would surely deem it to her advantage to control the world’s shipping so that her own trade benefited. The thing that we know, but that Russia does not yet understand, is that the measures of enforcement designed to favor the Soviet Union would disrupt and disorganize world trade patterns so that Russia herself would become a victim of the disorder together with the rest of the world.
Marine-ism cannot be exercised in the same way as militarism. The traditional freedom of the seas heavily influences trade and shipping activity in time of war.
Up to and including World War I, belligerent rights were a subject of hot contention. Does a country engaged in a war have the right to interfere with the trade between two neutrals? Does a neutral have the right in time of war to trade with another neutral, which borders a belligerent and trades with the belligerent?
In the early years of World War I, the United States tried to maintain the peacetime freedom of the seas for neutral shipping. The energetic defense of neutral rights as against any extension of belligerent rights by Great Britain, puzzled many Americans. It appeared to them that their government was harassing, on behalf of commercial interest, that sea power which for a hundred years had never threatened them and which, in the opinion of many Americans, had stood between them and a dire military tyranny.
We were faced at that time with three courses: to confirm and fortify belligerent rights; to attempt to secure a limitation of belligerent rights and protection of neutral rights by strengthening international law; or to maintain and enlarge belligerent rights after internationalizing their exercise in some form.
The matter was decided for us by the arrival on the scene of the submarine. As time passed the attacking state of the submarine changed from the surfaced condition to the submerged condition. Surfaced, it became vulnerable to attack and so continuous total submergence during attack was emphasized. Thus, it lost the ability to identify its victim and to stop, board, and search neutrals. It either attacked everything in its area as enemy or it risked allowing the foe to pass unchallenged among neutrals.
As World War I progressed, a continuing and increasing attrition of neutral ships drove home the point that the submarine was an instrument of wide-ranging striking power. The ability to continue peaceful operations by skirting the war theater no longer existed. Neutrals were forced to accept the protection of convoys and these convoys were protected by the belligerent power which exercised control of the surface of the sea. In this way, it evolved that a neutral was able in time of war to trade with the belligerent power who controlled the sea, but not with his enemy.
Sea power in this age enables the country possessing it in time of war to channel neutral trade to his own support and to deny such trade to his enemy. The lesser sea power and the submarine power is placed in an unenviable position. He must attack the e shipping of those he would wish to befriend as well as the shipping of his enemy. His e attack, which prevents neutrals from delivering goods to his enemy, also tends to make e enemies of those with whom he has no quarrel and whom he hopes to keep out of the war.
The forfeit of the advantage of blockade s in the current Vietnam debacle would surely be regarded as one of history’s most glaring strategic blunders but for the trade-offs involved in such a move. The unique situation in Vietnam demonstrates the enormous weight a major trading power puts in the freedom of the seas. It explains, too, the resistance to increasing very much the extension of national territorial rights into the sea.
None of this discussion of war applies to major nuclear conflict. Therefore, the war at sea of which we speak between significant powers will be undeclared and limited. The confusion of rights and freedoms in the transition from peace to declared war is great, but the struggle that results when weighing future consequences to trade against immediate military advantage becomes enormous in undeclared conflict.
Command of the sea is in the first place a defensive capability. In the hands of a state which has no land frontiers, sea power inhibits invasion of its territory. If the nation possesses a great foreign trade it is enabled to carry on that trade even during the actual period of war. The nation thus may be saved from any overwhelming interruption to its industrial and commercial life.
The possessor of a mighty U-boat fleet cannot draw benefit in this way. At best he can bring all trade by sea to a halt, and this does nothing to bring the goods he urgently requires into his country.
Three constants make sea power what it is and what it will continue to be for a long time:
• The world trade pattern makes nations interdependent;
• The application of sea power in peacetime reveals enlightened self interest;
• The application of sea power in time of war provides an advantage to its possessor.