Russia has been the world’s largest wheat exporter for the past two years, as it was in the years prior to 1914—before the Soviets wrecked Russian agriculture. This has current naval relevance because sea power is about the reality that wheat and other bulk goods travel most efficiently by sea. Food has become Russia’s second most important export, behind oil but ahead of arms. Today, as in 1914, Russian wheat reaches the world primarily through the Black Sea ports, which means through the Turkish Straits at the mouth of the Black Sea.
We often think of sea power in terms of strikes against land targets, but historically what has mattered has been the protection or disruption of trade, especially the flow of important commodities. The most recent war against trade was the 1980–88 tanker war between Iran and Iraq. The Chinese government has justified the buildup of the People’s Liberation Army Navy to the Chinese people on the basis of the country’s dependence on seaborne importation of bulk goods, largely oil and food.
The current faceoff with China differs from the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union because China relies heavily on access to world resources. The Soviets did not, despite agricultural failures that forced them to import wheat on a massive scale. Chinese reliance on the sea shifts any maritime confrontation into historically familiar territory. Historical experience matters because it shows how various possible strategies actually played out. In World War I, the failure to keep open Russian access to trade through the Turkish Straits had enormous consequences. But few then or later appreciated the maritime dimension of the situation.
A Chinese freight carrier transits the Sea of Marmara, the inland sea that connects the Black Sea with the Aegean. Southern approaches to the sea are guarded by Gallipoli. China depends heavily on imports of raw materials and foodstuff, nearly all carried by ships. (Alamay / Tim Graham
In 1914, wheat exports accounted for almost half of Russia’s national income. They came from the fertile black soil of southern Russia, including what is now Ukraine. As a consequence, the best-developed Russian ports were on the Black Sea, and the only other major Russian ports—on the Baltic—were blocked by Germany. Turkey’s attack on Russian Black Sea ports on 29 October 1914 resulted in the closing of the straits to Russian exports.
The British government had fumbled an attempt to keep Turkey out of the war, even welcoming the possibility that the famously corrupt Turkish state could be brought down. Turkey had performed poorly in the 1912–13 Balkan Wars, and it seems to have been taken for granted that the country could easily collapse. There also was an ideological element. For years Europeans had supported the struggles of Christians within the Turkish empire; now it seemed that they might soon be liberated. British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith wrote that he was grateful for the Turks’ actions.
For their part, the Germans, who advised the Turkish army, also saw things ideologically. The Turkish Sultan was, at least in principle, the Caliph ruling the world’s Muslims. The British and French Empires contained hundreds of millions who, in theory, could join the Turks in a holy war.
No one thought about the maritime reality, that Turkey was the gate that could very nearly cut Russia, and its wheat, off from the world. But the autumn 1914 world wheat harvest proved worse than expected, and governments feared instability caused by rising bread prices. The big Russian harvest could have made up the difference, but it was blocked by the Turks. Asquith wrote that it would be easier to storm the Dardanelles—the Turkish Straits—than to raise the price of bread in England.
By the time the British and French did try to storm the Dardanelles, the connection with bread and with the Russian economy largely had been forgotten. It certainly has been forgotten since. The operation was badly botched, and many historians have dismissed it as a pointless failure. The consequences of that failure suggest it should have been viewed instead as a crucial opportunity lost.
To Britain, Russia had a vital strategic role. In 1914 the cabinet imagined that the “Russian steamroller” would overrun Germany while the British and the French fought a holding action on the Western Front, but the inadequacies of the Russian army were ignored. It is possible those flaws might have been mitigated if access through the Turkish Straits had been maintained, providing a conduit for weapons, ammunition, and even British and French troops to stiffen the Russians. (Russian ports in the Arctic and the Far East were too limited to be of use.)
An Ottoman artillery unit is seen in this undated photo from the 1915–16 Gallipoli campaign. The unforeseen consequence of the Ottoman closing of the Dardanelles was Russia’s inability to get wheat exports—representing half of all national income—out of Black Sea ports, with devastating consequences for Russia’s participation in World War I. (Library of Congress)
The maritime failure at the straits—the invasion at Gallipoli—had enormous consequences. Without export income, Russia needed to borrow massive sums in Europe, mainly from England. Its economy tottered. The Russian war effort failed for all sorts of reasons, but being cut off from Allied help—and cash—made things far worse.
Had the Gallipoli assault succeeded, Russia might not have collapsed into revolution. The need to raise money to prop up Russia badly damaged the British economy, to the point that by 1917 Britain would have found it difficult to continue without loans from the United States. And Russian weakness helped draw the British into a ruinous war in France. The failure at Gallipoli is hardly the whole story, but it was far more important than most historians have imagined. In hindsight, what stands out is the limited strategic vision in the British cabinet, particularly regarding the maritime dimension.
For China today, it is not so much what goes out by sea as what must come in to keep the country alive. The Chinese equivalent of the Turkish Straits is a combination of the Malacca Straits and the South China Sea, and current Chinese leaders clearly understand what those two chokepoints mean. The “One Belt, One Road” initiative is intended to bypass the Malacca Straits, moving trade to ports on the Bay of Bengal. It is unlikely, however, that the road-and-rail network can replace entirely large bulk carriers offloading in ports close to Chinese consumers. In this way, the seaborne flow of vital commodities offers the sort of leverage that has been so important in past maritime wars.
The role of the chokepoints explains why the Chinese are applying so much pressure on the relatively weak governments of the countries that border them, such as Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines. The current U.S. policy of showing that the Navy’s fleet cannot be kept out of the area is an attempt to stiffen those countries. However, this neglects the leverage the flow of imports through the chokepoints and Chinese-controlled ports offers.
China presents few land targets the destruction of which would be decisive in ending a conflict on favorable terms. (The one exception—Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing—cannot be attacked in a limited war.) But a credible threat to block the chokepoints and the commodity flow might end or even deter a war, even if the Chinese succeed in terrorizing the states through whose waters the ships pass.
Such “sea denial” might appear to be a lesser form of sea power than “sea control.” However, the two can be—should be—mutually supportive. The West learned in the Cold War just how expensive sea control could be in the face of a powerful, modern submarine and long-range bomber sea-denial force. The 1980s-era maritime strategy leveraged the Soviets’ need to control the seas where its ballistic-missile submarines operated while broadening the threat to the Soviet homeland away from the central threat axis in Germany. Today, a new strategy would force China to spend a lot more to counter a U.S. sea-denial threat, leaving a lot less with which to attack U.S. sea-control or power-projection forces—aircraft carriers, for example.
In World War I, the Germans and the Turks managed effective sea denial in the Turkish Straits, probably without considering how important it could be. Historical analysis reveals how much they gained, and how much this cost the Allies. The United States and its prospective allies should examine how best to exploit the similar Chinese vulnerability at present.
None of this is to suggest that the United States should be threatening to choke off Chinese merchant traffic in peacetime. But it should contemplate how best to do so in some future crisis. World War I was a maritime war, but far too often it is seen mainly as a land war in which the maritime aspect was to support armies on the Western Front. (In 1980, the expectation in a possible NATO war was much the same.) President Ronald Reagan’s maritime strategy recognized a key Soviet weakness and showed that the Cold War was a lot more maritime—and that maritime pressure could change the situation. Now it is again up to the Navy to look at the problem of Chinese aspirations in a much more maritime way.