The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future

by A. T. Mahan

What, then, will be the actual conditions when these civilizations, of diverse origin and radically distinct,—because the evolution of racial characteristics radically different,—confront each other without the interposition of any neutral belt, by the intervention of which the contrasts, being more remote, are less apparent, and within which distinctions shade one into the other?

There will be seen, on the one hand, a vast preponderance of numbers, and those numbers, however incoherent now in mass, composed of units which in their individual capacity have in no small degree the great elements of strength whereby man prevails over man and the fittest survives. Deficient, apparently, in aptitude for political and social organization, they have failed to evolve the aggregate power and intellectual scope of which as communities they are otherwise capable. This lesson too they may learn, as they already have learned from us much that they have failed themselves to originate; but to the lack of it is chiefly due the inferiority of material development under which, as compared to ourselves, they now labor. But men do not covet less the prosperity which they themselves cannot or do not create,—a trait wherein lies the strength of communism as an aggressive social force. Communities which want and cannot have, except by force, will take by force, unless they are restrained by force; nor will it be unprecedented in the history of the world that the flood of numbers should pour over and sweep away the barriers which intelligent foresight, like Cæsar's, may have erected against them. Still more will this be so if the barriers have ceased to be manned—forsaken or neglected by men in whom the proud combative spirit of their ancestors has given way to the cry for the abandonment of military preparation and to the decay of warlike habits.

Nevertheless, even under such conditions,—which obtained increasingly during the decline of the Roman Empire,—positions suitably chosen, frontiers suitably advanced, will do much to retard and, by gaining time, to modify the disaster to the one party, and to convert the general issue to the benefit of the world. Hence the immense importance of discerning betimes what the real value of positions is, and where occupation should betimes begin. Here, in part at least, is the significance of the great outward movement of the European nations to-day. Consciously or unconsciously, they are advancing the outposts of our civilization, and accumulating the line of defences which will permit it to survive, or at the least will insure that it shall not go down till it has leavened the character of the world for a future brighter even than its past, just as the Roman civilization inspired and exalted its Teutonic conquerors, and continues to bless them to this day.

Such is the tendency of movement in that which we in common parlance call the Old World. As the nineteenth century closes, the tide has already turned and the current is flowing strongly. It is not too soon, for vast is the work before it. Contrasted to the outside world in extent and population, the civilization of the European group of families, to which our interests and anxieties, our hopes and fears, are so largely confined, has been as an oasis in a desert. The seat and scene of the loftiest culture, of the highest intellectual activities, it is not in them so much that it has exceeded the rest of the world as in the political development and material prosperity which it has owed to the virile energies of its sons, alike in commerce and in war. To these energies the mechanical and scientific acquirements of the past half-century or more have extended means whereby prosperity has increased manifold, as have the inequalities in material well-being existing between those within its borders and those without, who have not had the opportunity or the wit to use the same advantages. And along with this preeminence in wealth arises the cry to disarm, as though the race, not of Europe only, but of the world, were already run, and the goal of universal peace not only reached but secured. Yet are conditions such, even within our favored borders, that we are ready to disband the particular organized manifestation of physical force which we call the police?

Despite internal jealousies and friction on the continent of Europe, perhaps even because of them, the solidarity of the European family therein contained is shown in this great common movement, the ultimate beneficence of which is beyond all doubt, as evidenced by the British domination in India and Egypt, and to which the habit of arms not only contributes, but is essential. India and Egypt are at present the two most conspicuous, though they are not the sole, illustrations of benefits innumerable and lasting, which rest upon the power of the sword in the hands of enlightenment and justice. It is possible, of course, to confuse this conclusion, to obscure the real issue, by dwelling upon details of wrongs at times inflicted, of blunders often made. Any episode in the struggling progress of humanity may be thus perplexed; but looking at the broad result, it is indisputable that the vast gains to humanity made in the regions named not only once originated, but still rest, upon the exertion and continued maintenance of organized physical force.

The same general solidarity as against the outside world, which is unconsciously manifested in the general resumption of colonizing movements, receives particular conscious expression in the idea of imperial federation, which, amid the many buffets and reverses common to all successful movements, has gained such notable ground in the sentiment of the British people and of their colonists. That immense practical difficulties have to be overcome, in order to realize the ends towards which such sentiments point, is but a commonplace of human experience in all ages and countries. They give rise to the ready sneer of impossible, just as any project of extending the sphere of the United States, by annexation or otherwise, is met by the constitutional lion in the path, which the unwilling or the apprehensive is ever sure to find; yet, to use words of one who never lightly admitted impossibilities, "If a thing is necessary to be done, the more difficulties, the more necessary to try to remove them." As sentiment strengthens, it undermines obstacles, and they crumble before it.

The same tendency is shown in the undeniable disposition of the British people and of British, statesmen to cultivate the good-will of the United States, and to draw closer the relations between the two countries. For the disposition underlying such a tendency Mr. Balfour has used an expression, "race patriotism,"—a phrase which finds its first approximation, doubtless, in the English-speaking family, but which may well extend its embrace, in a time yet distant, to all those who have drawn their present civilization from the same remote sources. The phrase is so pregnant of solution for the problems of the future, as conceived by the writer, that he hopes to see it obtain the currency due to the value of the idea which it formulates. That this disposition on the part of Great Britain, towards her colonies and towards the United States, shows sound policy as well as sentiment, may be granted readily; but why should sound policy, the seeking of one's own advantage, if by open and honest means, be imputed as a crime? In democracies, however, policy cannot long dispute the sceptre with sentiment. That there is lukewarm response in the United States is due to that narrow conception which grew up with the middle of the century, whose analogue in Great Britain is the Little England party, and which in our own country would turn all eyes inward, and see no duty save to ourselves. How shall two walk together except they be agreed? How shall there be true sympathy between a nation whose political activities are world-wide, and one that eats out its heart in merely internal political strife? When we begin really to look abroad, and to busy ourselves with our duties to the world at large in our generation—and not before—we shall stretch out our hands to Great Britain, realizing that in unity of heart among the English-speaking races lies the best hope of humanity in the doubtful days ahead.

In the determination of the duties of nations, nearness is the most conspicuous and the most general indication. Considering the American states as members of the European family, as they are by traditions, institutions, and languages, it is in the Pacific, where the westward course of empire again meets the East, that their relations to the future of the world become most apparent. The Atlantic, bordered on either shore by the European family in the strongest and most advanced types of its political development, no longer severs, but binds together, by all the facilities and abundance of water communications, the once divided children of the same mother; the inheritors of Greece and Rome, and of the Teutonic conquerors of the latter. A limited express or a flying freight may carry a few passengers or a small bulk overland from the Atlantic to the Pacific more rapidly than modern steamers can cross the former ocean, but for the vast amounts in numbers or in quantity which are required for the full fruition of communication, it is the land that divides, and not the sea. On the Pacific coast, severed from their brethren by desert and mountain range, are found the outposts, the exposed pioneers of European civilization, whom it is one of the first duties of the European family to bind more closely to the main body, and to protect, by due foresight over the approaches to them on either side.

It is in this political fact, and not in the weighing of merely commercial advantages, that is to be found the great significance of the future canal across the Central American isthmus, as well as the importance of the Caribbean Sea; for the latter is inseparably intwined with all international consideration of the isthmus problem. Wherever situated, whether at Panama or at Nicaragua, the fundamental meaning of the canal will be that it advances by thousands of miles the frontiers of European civilization in general, and of the United States in particular; that it knits together the whole system of American states enjoying that civilization as in no other way they can be bound. In the Caribbean Archipelago—the very domain of sea power, if ever region could be called so—are the natural home and centre of those influences by which such a maritime highway as a canal must be controlled, even as the control of the Suez Canal rests in the Mediterranean. Hawaii, too, is an outpost of the canal, as surely as Aden or Malta is of Suez; or as Malta was of India in the days long before the canal, when Nelson proclaimed that in that point of view chiefly was it important to Great Britain. In the cluster of island fortresses of the Caribbean is one of the greatest of the nerve centres of the whole body of European civilization; and it is to be regretted that so serious a portion of them now is in hands which not only never have given, but to all appearances never can give, the development which is required by the general interest.

For what awaits us in the future, in common with the states of Europe, is not a mere question of advantage or disadvantage—of more or less. Issues of vital moment are involved. A present generation is trustee for its successors, and may be faithless to its charge quite as truly by inaction as by action, by omission as by commission. Failure to improve opportunity, where just occasion arises, may entail upon posterity problems and difficulties which, if overcome at all—it may then be too late—will be so at the cost of blood and tears that timely foresight might have spared. Such preventive measures, if taken, are in no true sense offensive but defensive. Decadent conditions, such as we observe in Turkey—and not in Turkey alone—cannot be indefinitely prolonged by opportunist counsels or timid procrastination. A time comes in human affairs, as in physical ailments, when heroic measures must be used to save the life of a patient or the welfare of a community; and if that time is allowed to pass, as many now think that it was at the time of the Crimean war, the last state is worse than the first,—an opinion which these passing days of the hesitancy of the Concert and the anguish of Greece, not to speak of the Armenian outrages, surely indorse. Europe, advancing in distant regions, still allows to exist in her own side, unexcised, a sore that may yet drain her life-blood; still leaves in recognized dominion, over fair regions of great future import, a system whose hopelessness of political and social improvement the lapse of time renders continually more certain,—an evil augury for the future, if a turning tide shall find it unchanged, an outpost of barbarism ready for alien occupation.