The Age-Old Contest Between Land and Sea

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Sally, thanks so much for joining me and for your essay in our current issue on how the battle between maritime power and continental power defines geopolitics in this era as well as past ones. It, of course, builds on work you’ve done for many years on this particular dynamic and the historical competitions where it first emerged.

S. C. M. PAINE

Thank you so much for having me. It is such a pleasure. It was an honor to have the print article, and then this is like double honor being with you now.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Exactly, exactly. Well, as I read your work, going back before this particular article, it strikes me that you’re in some ways reacting to the renewed focus on great-power competition in both U.S. foreign policy circles and the discussion more generally, and finding yourself perhaps unsatisfied with the insight and assumptions and level of historical perspective that underlie that focus. So I’m curious to start, as you’ve watched this discussion develop and watched this renewed attention to power and competition start to redefine American foreign policy, what do you think most of us are missing about the nature of geopolitical power?

S. C. M. PAINE

Great powers have always been out there and competition has always been out there, so this idea that there’s something new about great-power competition, it’s like yesterday’s coffee, which isn’t that great. But if I look at me, I spent graduate school studying two big continental empires, very effective ones, Russia and China, and then I wound up teaching at the U.S. Naval War College for a career, and then I was doing all these maritime case studies about Britain and the United States and how they could or couldn’t leverage their navies and how other people could or couldn’t. And that’s where it became so clear to me from this serendipitous, just having to work for the Navy, which I never expected I would, is realizing there are fundamentally different security paradigms that go with these powers, that are independent of whether you think someone’s a good guy or a bad guy. But with a geographical address—we’ve all got one—you have different security problems.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you watch policymakers in government, people in senior positions or formerly in senior positions, talk about competition and talk about geopolitics, do you think the understanding as it’s shaping policy right now is roughly correct, or is it missing something fundamental about how those competitions work?

S. C. M. PAINE

Oh, I think it’s missing something fundamental. Let’s talk about our country, the United States. I’m not an expert in the United States, but if you look about our history, we start out as a continental empire, and Americans were all about territorial expansion. And then in the late nineteenth century, you get Alfred Thayer Mahan, who’s by far the most famous person ever associated with the U.S. Naval War College, where I’ve spent my career, who’s saying, “No, no, no, no, that power and the position in the world is not actually based on territorial extent, because Russia is really large and really poor. Other places [are] really big, Brazil and Argentina, but you don’t associate them as being a world power.”

So there’s something else going on, and Alfred Thayer Mahan said it’s got to do with all the money you can make on maritime trade, because it’s the oceans that connect you with the entire world. It is not land transport. And oh, by the way, choo-choo trains take up, I don’t know, it’s like 600 containers max, whereas these big container ships now, the big ones, take 21,000 containers. So no [Belt and Road Initiative], the land part, is ever going to do for you what a container ship does.

So then the United States, after having a rethink with Alfred Thayer Mahan and then two world wars later, we’re very much into a maritime security paradigm, which is instead of the United States taking over Canada, more gunboat diplomacy. See how much of Latin America you can take over. Quitting all of that and going, “That’s a waste of money. Wars burn up money, they’re negative-sum. Whatever you get is damaged, and therefore, the loser’s loss is bigger than what you get because you’ve damaged the goods.” And say, “No, no, no, the way to do it is through international law. We all agree on things about how we’re going to trade. Your credit card works in whatever remote part of the globe. They don’t cheat on the deal, and it’s so much cheaper running things. And if you follow laws, it provides both the stable business environment that you need for predictability, and also it makes your costs so much lower.”

And this has been this wealth-producing era. And if you look in European history, I look at it as a maritime era from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I, where there are some wars in there in Europe, but not continent-wide ones. And they’re mostly just trading with each other, compounding wealth, and not blowing up each other’s industrial bases. Or for the United States, tremendously profitable for us and our allies from World War II until the end of the Cold War. So what we’re doing now, of tearing up our alliance system and also tearing up our scientific expertise, is doing our enemy’s work. It’s profoundly frightening, and if you look [at] how rapidly people are changing, it’s incredible.

A term I think is useful for thinking about this is “half-court tennis,” of my invention. So when you play tennis, you really ought to think of what’s on the other side of the net. You’ll play the game much better. The idea is we do some pronouncement out of Washington and we don’t think about what any of the follow-on effects are going to be, and they’re going to kill us. It’s going to be so profoundly bad. And Americans understand this for football. Well, apply it to foreign policy. Football is a recreational sport. Foreign policy with nukes—we play this wrong, our world’s going to disappear on us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I think the maritime vision of power and security, the theory of security that comes with that maritime role, is pretty clear. How do you describe, as maybe persuasively as possible, kind of steelman the continental view of security and power? What would a Russian or Chinese strategist say making the case for it?

S. C. M. PAINE

Oh, for Russia and China, they are located on the big Eurasian continent. By their sheer size, they have many neighbors, most of whom they don’t much like. Or they’re very unstable, and then if they’re little and you’re worried about the instability creeping over. There was no maritime world of laws and things when they are forming. This was hundreds of years ago; China, thousands of years ago. And so the security paradigm there is you have a really good army, and anyone messes with you, you just so brutalize them, they do not come back for more. So yeah, that’s the security paradigm, and it’s reality, not choice. But post–industrial revolution, where you have compounding economic growth, it opens different possibilities. And if you deal with people by international law, it’s just so much cheaper.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You mentioned Alfred Thayer Mahan, your predecessor at the U.S. Naval War College. I think about another theorist of geopolitics in that early period, in the early twentieth century, Halford Mackinder, who talked about the importance of Eurasia, of the continental landmasses. Is this, in some ways, in some sense, a battle between Mahan and Mackinder?

S. C. M. PAINE

Yeah, Mackinder’s an interesting man. He’s a Briton. His seminal article is written, I think, in 1904, so it places him in history. And he’s looking at railways transforming things, and he thinks, “Well, Russia, with this interior position, how can Britain influence that?” And he’s missing, actually, yeah, you’re right, Russia can defend itself, and if you’re going to try to invade Russia, that’s a true mistake. But rather, he’s missing that it’s these exterior lines of communication by oceans. That’s where all the money is to be made. And if the Russians could ever clean up their own commercial laws to make it something other than a mafioso—I’m throwing you out of the sixth-floor window because I don’t like what you just told me at the table—if they could get beyond the shakedown way of doing stuff that goes way back . . . It goes all the way back to the Mongol Empire, when they were the tax collectors of the Mongols. They’ve been shaking people down for a long time. But you make a lot more money if you play by laws.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

We talk a lot in the foreign policy world, as you of course know, about the international order or the rules-based order. It’s being probably dismantled as we speak, but when we look back to the post–World War II development of that order, and especially the post–Cold War, it seems in some ways like it was trying to build maritime-power principles into the way the international system functioned. It made everyone able to exist as a maritime power because there were rules of trade and everything else.

S. C. M. PAINE

It’s not going to be dismantled. The United States may decide that it wants to leave it, which would be an incredible way to really injure our own national security. The United States has decided our allies are not so good. We’re treating them like enemies by doing these ruinous tariffs on them, and the reorganization is so rapid. The fighter jets that they no longer want to buy from us, losing all those markets. Brazil is going to sell sorghum straight to China because the Chinese aren’t going to buy ours. And there’s this reorganization, like there’s the [Nordic-Baltic Eight] within the European Union that are all small, but they’re thinking very deeply of what the security structure looks like. It will take Europe—I’m going to make it up—ten years to reorganize it. They will; we won’t be part of it. So they will be stronger, and we won’t.

When I talk about continental maritime powers, the Naval War College, the first assignment in the strategy department is Thucydides. The man’s been dead for over 2,000 years. He’s talking about continental and maritime strategies. It goes back a long way. And this development of a rules-based order, it used to be done through empires—Roman Empire, Roman law—so this rules-based order is not going away. It’s an evolution. Think of all the institutions that have been built since World War II. This is the great legacy of the greatest generation in the West. These are the people who suffered through World War I as young people, the Great Depression as people your age-ish, and then had the sorrow of being the strategic leaders of World War II. They decided institution building was the way to go, and that legacy remains. And it will continue to remain, and yeah, it has its ups and downs. And the United States is being incredibly foolish right now. Whatever problems Americans think they have, they’re misidentifying the solution.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How do you see the Chinese reaction here? China seems, as I read your work, your piece in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, a really interesting case in that it has struggled to become a maritime power, even as it seems to recognize some of the advantages of it.

S. C. M. PAINE

It’s understanding there is a maritime rules-based order. And the reason I say it’s maritime is because we all connect with each other by sea. And also the cables, the cables that provide the information, run under the sea. This is a maritime order. Now, all the countries there aren’t islands. There’s hardly any country that fully can be maritime [besides] Japan and Britain. And the United States has these really long borders with Canada and Mexico. If they ever go really hostile in a way that’s very threatening to us, game over on maritime stuff. But this rules-based order that’s maritime, it means if you all gang up together, you can deal with the bullies, us included if our country becomes a bully, because we’re big but we’re not bigger than everybody else.

So China could also join this order. This was the great hope, and they’re not interested. I suspect they want to build a Chinese-based order, and China is the central kingdom, and run it all through bilateral relations that run through Beijing, but they’re not nice to their neighbors. It’s basically, “We’re big, you’re small, and just do what you’re told.” And then they had these long borders, which if everything goes to whatever and there’s some major global war, you better believe their enemies will be infiltrating everything under the sun over those borders. And the Ukrainians have shown us how the little things like drones can really wreck you. And so it’s such a tragedy. China was doing so well by joining the party. Russia would do so well if it would only join the party. And now we are exiting the party. It’s a mistake.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

How do you assess Chinese strategy under [Chinese leader] Xi Jinping, and especially since [U.S. President] Donald Trump has come back into the presidency?

S. C. M. PAINE

When I look at China, it has three pillars of legitimacy, historically, at least this is what I think. Others can disagree. One is ethical rule, and that’s where the Communists just cleaned up on the Nationalists. Well, that’s gone because they’re just all known for corruption these days. Another one was economic prosperity. Boy, did [former Chinese leader] Deng Xiaoping deliver on that and his successors. It’s been the miracle of China—joining the maritime order, compounded growth, it’s been great. Well, that’s done, particularly since Xi Jinping is going to spend all his winnings on his foreign policy agenda. And the third one is territorial integrity, and that’s where he is at and that’s where Taiwan comes in. I think they want to maintain the monopoly of the Communist Party rule. They’ve now got an educated enough populace where the normal thing is people want to have more say about their lives. The answer is they aren’t going to do that, and then that’s all the crackdown. And so to me, it’s a dead end. It’s a tragedy. It’s not going to make China great. If it continues, it’ll probably lead to some really big wars.

And then the great question on these big wars, you can just see them as they’re gathering. Oh, another leader who’s taking down his country is [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. You look at these gathering wars with people who are not thinking about the next generation. That’s what a statesperson does, but they’re thinking about me staying in office.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

I noticed that you left [Russian President] Vladimir Putin out of your rogues’ galley of leaders. I assume he was meant to be there.

S. C. M. PAINE

Oh, yeah. No, definitely, he’s obvious.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

As you’ve watched Ukraine, do you see that as a harbinger of further attempts at territorial conquests to come, and has there been some change in norms around use of force?

S. C. M. PAINE

Oh, okay, let’s go for concepts, I promised. So one is maritime-continental. One, a continental outlook is looking at the territory as what you really want. So that’s why “I want Taiwan” or “I want Greenland,” whatever it is. And maritime is, “No, it’s all about making money from trade and reducing transaction costs through laws that we can more or less adhere to.”

Another one is limited and unlimited objectives. What’s an unlimited objective? An unlimited objective is when your adversary is going to vaporize you at the end of the day, or at least minimum, it’s going to overthrow your government. Okay. A limited objective is something different from that. So you can go back to [German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck]. It’s, “I want these two provinces,” and then it’s over, and the Danish government or the Austro-Hungarian government are still going to be in place at the end of the day. So if your adversary has unlimited objectives and you compromise with them, you are setting them up to come back for the kill. So it’s very important in your assessment of others to determine where it’s at.

Okay, Vladimir Putin, I believe—and then you have to keep reassessing because no one knows for sure; you’re not in his head—I believe has unlimited objectives for not only Ukraine but many countries in Europe and probably for the liberal democratic order itself. I also believe that China has an unlimited objective vis-à-vis liberal order. Now, their counterargument would be, “Hey, you’ve got an unlimited objective against us because you don’t like dictatorships,” but it’s important to understand that. And it means that compromising with these folks on serious stuff is dangerous. You need to be very thoughtful.

On the other hand, backing them into a corner is also insane, because the one who’s on the losing side, their last thing is going to be a nuke, and that’s the problem. So all the wonderful political scientists who think they’ve got deterrence covered, they’re wrong. A cornered dictator will use it as their last item. And you think we’re going to be rational after that happens? And then what happens? So we’ve got irresponsible leaders all over the place. So Irresponsible Leader A does nuke. What do you think Irresponsible Leader Number Two is going to do? It’s going to be over.

Another framework I think is really helpful is thinking about the tactical level, the operational level, and the strategic level. It comes from warfare. At the tactical level, you have a tank. It has certain capabilities; it shoots so far. Something of whatever caliber is needed to take it out. You have a little tank unit and that unit has certain capabilities. But then you want to apply it to a military operation. This is the operational level, which is either a battle or a campaign, and then you’re going to be having tank units and air units and all these different things. And then you’re going to have an operational objective. Presumably, it’s going to be “Take that hill,” or “Prevent somebody from taking that hill,” something of that level. So tactical level, operational level. What’s the strategic level? Why are you sending tanks in the first place?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If I apply that set of questions to some of the avowedly continental powers that you address in the piece, maybe Russia and Iran being the first of them, it seems, you argue persuasively that they would be more prosperous and probably more secure today if they had followed their rules-based system and taken part in this order in a cooperative way. Why didn’t they? If you look at the choices that those leaders made, they’re not complete idiots. What were they doing? Was it geography?

S. C. M. PAINE

They’re not complete idiots. They’re continentalists; they want to stay in power, right? Look what people are willing to do to stay in power. It’s really hard to transition from continental to maritime if you’re in a really rough security environment, and most of these leaders, they’re dictators. They have really extensive political police, secret police, to keep themselves on the throne. They personally may not be better off by joining the maritime order, and so it takes civil society and others to make it happen. If you think about—

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So it’s a tension between national interest and the political imperatives for the leader in that case.

S. C. M. PAINE

Yeah, they’re at the operational level, and it’s all about them.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

There’s a sense in much of the American foreign policy community at this point that it was a mistake over certainly the 1990s and on, so maybe going back even further to the initial opening, to China.

S. C. M. PAINE

The Gulf War?

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

No, I mean, really going back—this is about China specifically. There was this sense that the United States should support China’s rise and engage with it diplomatically, economically, that it would become more of a maritime power in some sense and that would ultimately be good for the order and for us. Do you think that was a mistake? Was it inevitable, in some sense, that China would make this turn?

S. C. M. PAINE

Well—and you can make the parallel argument about Europe hooking its energy supplies to Russia; same idea—is, surely they’ll join the party. And of course that’s not who they are. But I don’t think you would’ve known conclusively that’s not who they are without trying it, and then if you don’t try it and do it, you’ll never have the political will to counter it.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You did some of your early historical work on the Chinese-Russian relationship, going back deep into history.

S. C. M. PAINE

Yeah.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Do you see the Chinese-Russian relationship as an enduring one, or do you see deeper tensions there that will ultimately upset it?

S. C. M. PAINE

Oh, they were enduring neighbors. China’s going to eat Russia’s lunch, and it probably already is. And we’re not privy to what all these deals are, but China and Russia are neighbors forever. The Russians treated China terribly when they were in the driver’s seat, and if you think the Chinese have forgotten that, come on. No, they haven’t. But Russia, it’s great having them pinned in this conflict with Ukraine, which also pins the West. And just feed Russia enough to bear all the costs, and then China can go empire-build near where it is. And then it’s quite enjoyable for China to watch the West tear itself apart as much as possible, and the United States has been very helpful in this endeavor. But it’s really bad news for Russia. And now there are gas shortages and things, and it’s unclear how much control Putin really has over Siberia.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Can you imagine China taking territory from Russia in the Far East in the next couple of decades?

S. C. M. PAINE

Oh, easily. But this is the rules-based order. It means the fundamental principle that endured for a long time was just because you’re big, you can’t devour small countries. That sovereignty is the most fundamental principle of international law, is that you have sovereignty over your own territory. But if you go into wars, the territory changes, and Vlad the Bad decided he wanted to try a war. Ukrainians relieved him of many of his strategic bombers that he can’t make more of. We don’t know what his deterrent looks like. China is building up a huge nuclear force. We always think it’d be used on us, but there are other possibilities. Yeah, it’s a mess.

It’s much better to trade with each other than to get into this, and so when we run these tariffs on other people, we aren’t thinking, how much does wrecking their economy matter to them? A lot. So that means you’re going to get quite a reaction from doing it. So you need to get beyond the half-court to think about the other court, and Americans need to stop tearing each other apart. We’re all on the same boat. When it sinks, whether you like the other party or not, we shall sink together.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Japan seems like an interesting and distressing echo. When you look at the shift in the early twentieth century before World War II, you argue that Japan had prospered under a maritime trading order and then suddenly made this continental turn. What in the Japanese case drove that shift?

S. C. M. PAINE

We passed the [the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930], whichever way you want to call it. Hawley and Smoot decided that for the Great Depression, the solution was tariff walls, and we need America First protecting U.S. jobs. And so, right, except what do you suppose everyone else is going to do when we cut off our markets? The Japanese go, “Well, we need an empire. No choice,” so they invade Manchuria. And you could argue that that’s the beginning. And it’s in 1933 that Hitler comes to power. We’ve tanked their economy—clever us!—and it’s not just . . . the West in general goes protectionist, sets the hothouse conditions for world war. Tariffs are not the solution.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

In a sense, you’re taking away the maritime path to power. You’re taking away the maritime order as an option for those powers, and they’re resorting to continental strategies.

S. C. M. PAINE

Yeah, it’s a disaster, as opposed to figuring out, working together to end the Great Depression. People learned a lot more about economics by the time World War II was over, what was necessary. It’s called how to fix all of our economies. If you want to fix your economy at the expense of somebody else, they’ll react.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

One thing that is really striking in reading your historical account of the maritime order and maritime power is the ways in which we’re seeing threats to maritime trade, threats to the open seas, whether that’s in the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea, or we saw enormous portions of world trade shut down by the Houthis, who are not exactly a highly capable outfit, and that’s leaving aside tariffs and everything else. Do you worry about this end of maritime security being part of this driver?

S. C. M. PAINE

Oh, yeah, it’s because the rules are breaking down. This is what Americans are failing to see, is if you have the rules, people like Houthis don’t try certain things. You know traffic rules? Most of us obey most of them. I get it that people are fooling around on speed limits, but they aren’t mostly wildly above speed limits. They’re mostly within norms. If everyone on one bright day decided they were just going to do whatever, there’s no police force that could deal with all of it. And so this is the problem with the breakdown of the rules-based order. It’s not going to go away; it’s going to be weakened. In other parts, it’s going to be stronger. In other areas, it’s going to be weaker.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

You make a persuasive case in the piece that, at the core, the rules-based order was really about building in maritime principles that all could, at a certain point, join. All could enjoy the gains of that order. We see that coming apart in lots of ways. What are the consequences of that decay of the rules-based order, if that does in fact continue?

S. C. M. PAINE

Well, the rules-based order is about how we interact with each other, and primarily how we interact is through trade. And as the rules break down, that means that when you sign contracts in certain parts of the world, who knows if they’re going to be honored? It means that you don’t have institutions, go-to institutions, where you can go, well, we got this problem, and that we could resolve it internationally by adjusting rules on a very specific topic. That goes away. And then you’re into, “Oh, my trading block, we can come up with a few rules for this,” and instead of having one-stop shopping of just one form of rules that everyone understands what they are. All of a sudden, you’re doing all these bilateral deals against each other, and it’s much more expensive, tremendous amount of overhead. And then the real breakdown is when people really want something, and someone doesn’t want to give it and they decide they’re going to come in and take it. And that’s when you get wars. So it’s very consequential, and the unraveling starts at one level and then it unravels to the other level.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Can you imagine Europe becoming a true geopolitical actor, really shaping international order? What would that look like?

S. C. M. PAINE

It already has shaped the international order. You think the United States did it all? The whole point of the maritime order is one country doesn’t own it. If one country owned it, no one would join it. It is an aggregation of what we’re all willing to put up with. What’s the common denominator on rules that we can all more or less follow? That’s the international order. And a lot of bright minds in Europe have been instrumental in negotiating this, as have some Americans, but lately we’re having a tantrum. It’s like the Americans are having a tantrum and doing a self-timeout of the global order. It makes no sense. It’s unprecedented in U.S. history to make this little sense.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

The other disquieting historical parallel that comes up in your piece and in your work on this is the run-up to World War I, when you saw powers embracing continental strategies in ways that became, as we of course know, disastrous. That seems like another lesson to heed here. If you look at that history, what worries you, and what are the right warnings to take from that?

S. C. M. PAINE

Oh, yeah. Well, (A) everyone’s fighting their own separate wars, and even though it’s broadly two alliance systems, because everyone has different war objectives. There’s no way. You can’t get out of the alliance because it got ruined by yourself, but you can’t settle the war because whatever your minimum objectives look nothing like your partner’s minimum objectives. There’s just no way to get out of this thing, and it goes on and on and on. And then you have very operationally minded leaders who are thinking, “We are just going to send more kids at this,” and just killing a whole generation of young men across Europe. It’s horrific. But yeah, what worries me is leaders just being operationally focused instead of [asking], “Why are we doing this? What’s the purpose?”

And for me, it’s the next generation. It’s making things better for them. What else is there? And not just the kids in my country, but human beings more generally. And I don’t mean that means I have to sacrifice everybody in my country. No, that’s not it. But make it better. If you come up in strategy with win-win strategies, others will join. If you make it zero-sum, which is continental on a good day, because continental is actually, it’s not just “I get everything, you get nothing.” It’s no, we fight about it, ruin the thing, and therefore it’s negative-sum. Where now, China is after a negative-sum world order, Russia is after one, and somehow we think it’s going to get better if we join it. And then our allies are going, we’re crazy. And so Europeans have to organize together because they’re dealing with Putin, and it’s obvious. But we need to fix, well, we need to fix ourselves at home, and that involves talking to each other.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Sally, thank you for all of this. You have a really singular way of illuminating some of the deeper forces that shape the kinds of conversations and kinds of problems we’re thinking about every day. So, thank you for the piece and for this conversation. I can’t say it’s a cheery one, but we appreciate it.

S. C. M. PAINE

I really appreciate being here, and I urge Americans to engage with each other. Be honest and forthright, that’s what I’ve tried to do. It doesn’t mean I’m right, but then I’m eager to hear the counterargument of, what have I got wrong? And let’s together take our best ideas and forge a way forward. Thank you for having me.