School of War - Ep. 18: Bruce Jones on Seapower

Episode Date: February 22, 2022

Bruce Jones, director of the Project on International Order and Strategy of the Foreign Policy program at the Brookings Institution, joins the show to discuss seapower.  Times 00:51 - Introduction�� 01:17 - The importance of seapower today 06:45 - Innovation of container shipping and how that changed the global economy  12:50 - China re-enters the seas  16:54 - China’s security challenges at sea 22:44 - Shallow seas, narrow passages, and massive ships  24:06 - China’s strategic interest in Taiwan   26:10 - China’s alienation of potential allies   29:08 - American strategic view of the Pacific Ocean 34:41 - Relations between the United States and India, specifically in terms of taking on China  39:12 - Seapower theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan 44:55 - Comparing America’s quest for power at sea during the 20th century and China’s return to the sea today  48:48 - The role of oceanography in nation-state power competition

Domains of competition seem to multiply by the decade. We now compete with our adversaries in space, in cyber, in the information realm, not to mention in the air. How much does that old domain of sea power matter anymore? How do the Chinese think about this question? And how do the Americans who have been tasked with facing them down? It is a prescription for war, this Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infamous.

the bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a stale. We continue to face a grave situation in Iran. And the people who not see buildings. We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in those streets. We shall never surrender. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean.

Thanks for joining School of War. I'm happy to be joined today by Bruce Jones, who directs the project on international order and strategy of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution. He's also the author most recently of To Rule the Waves, How Control of the World's Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers. Bruce, thanks for joining.

Glad it to be here. I'm loving your podcasts. I'm very happy to be part of it. Thank you so much for saying so. So we've been on a bit of a sea power kick the last few weeks. We had Andrew Lambert on talking about Julian Corbett. We had Jerry Roncalado on last week talking about the U.S. Navy. And obviously this episode is a continuation. of that theme. And I thought you would be well positioned for us to take a step back, almost

completely back, and ask a kind of foundational question. All of all of these conversations we've had over the last few weeks have just taken it as a given that sea power matters, that navies matter, that not only do they matter, they're sort of central. And I thought it might actually be valuable to kind of walk through that. I mean, it's it's the year 2022. We have competition in so many different domains. There's a cyber domain. There's competition in space. You know, air power has been a thing for over a century. Isn't it a bit old fashioned to argue that actually through all this complexity and change and new technology, the seas, the ocean remains central to questions of strategy and national power? Great question. And I want to answer it in two very different ways.

First, I want to point out that we live in a world of extensive globalization and 85% of all global trade moves by sea. You hear the word globalization. You think about airplanes. You think about tech flows. Think about finance. All of that's true. And I'll come to it. But 85% of world trade moves by sea.

So the operation of the global economy is a sea-based phenomenon. The United States is a huge part of that. Europe is a huge part of that, Asia's huge part of that. That wasn't always true. That's been an evolving reality over the past 50 years since the advent of bulk shipping and containerization, I'm sure we'll come to. But it is the present reality. And the United States, which historically wasn't particularly OPE exposed to international

trade, has hugely increased its exposure to international trade over the last several decades. I mean, go back to the 80s, 70s and the 80s. and the U.S. economy was roughly 10% exposed to international trade. Now it's roughly 30% about a third of our GDP exposed to trade. But I argue in the book that even that underestimates our alliance on global trade because vastly the most profitable part of our economy is the financial sector. About 50% of all profits recorded by American firms are in the financial services sector. And what do we do with the services sector?

We are the financiers of global trade. As trade moves around the world and as economies grow and we finance, that trade, we finance those transactions, and we record huge profits from that. And so vast parts of the American economy are dependent on the flow of sea-based trade. It's true of energy flows. Roughly 80% of the world's supply of oil is either found at sea or moves by sea to its final destination. And about 60% of natural gas, same thing, meaning that overall somewhere in the order of

two-thirds of the world's energy supply is either found at sea or moves by sea. And then think about technology. Think about data. Think about how much of our life is shaped by the flow of data around the world. This Zoom call, use of our iPhones, finding stuff on Google, U.S. military command flow. All of that movement of data, 93% of it moves on cables that line the seafloor under C-fiber optical cables. So every part of our life, the economics of our life, is profoundly shaped by flows. on and above the oceans, on and below the oceans, excuse me.

And at various points in history, similar phenomenon have driven or being driven by imperial power at sea. From roughly the early 1500s to the advent of the Royal Navy's presence in Asia, the world's dominant power was that power which could fuel the most capacious and most capable Navy in the world. we can spend more time on that. I do think in the strategic realm, sea power receded somewhat during the Cold War because you had this very unusual fact of a large American land presence in both Europe and Asia, right?

We had large numbers of troops in the two major industrial continent zones, the world other than our own. And so sea power wasn't quite as consequential as it was as an instrument of projection of American interest, it still mattered in terms of some parts of the competition of the Soviets, and it mattered in terms of the nuclear tribe, the submarine fleet. But it wasn't a central pillar of strategy. And what I argue in the book is that's rapidly changing and sea powers rapidly again becoming a central part of strategy for this reason.

And this is the second answer. Why is it consequential right now? Because China, which 500 years ago was the most sophisticated maritime country in the world and then withdrew from the seas, has returned to the seas for the first time in 500 years. And that is a geopolitical tsunami that we're only beginning to feel the outer waves of. And so whether you look at it in terms of our exposure to the economics, the global economics, and the extent to which those are dependent on flows at sea, or if you look at in the strategic space, in either case, sea power is backed being front and center in national strategy.

Got it. And we'll come back to China and the Pacific specifically here in a couple minutes, but since you raised it, I wanted to ask you about bulk shipping and about the, you know, the containerization of everything, essentially. It's a big theme of the book. You open with this arresting anecdote of being well upriver in the middle of, you know, the deepest part of the jungle of Brazil and seeing shipping containers coming up the river there. You know, similar form to this question, okay, fine. So we put everything in shipping containers as opposed to just strapping it to the to the decks of ships and boxes big deal like but but i take it it is a big deal so what what has changed with this new technology yeah so it's one of these sort

of strange phenomena encounter sometimes in history one where it seems like a pretty minor and in retrospect incredibly obvious innovation is vastly important and i think it's analogous to the way if you think about the way for motor cars standardization of of manufacturing revolutionize the industrial sector. Containerization is a little bit similar in terms of trade transport, the ability to have a standard of unit for containerization revolutionized trade transport. And let me say two, let me illustrate that and say why it matters. So just to illustrate this, containerization was, there were lots of fathers of this innovation, but the person who made it a commercial reality was an American innovator, a trucking magnate McLean who got sick and tired of trying to

kind of wait for his goods to be offloaded for his truck and wait around on a horse someplace in Baltimore or Newark or whatever and then wait while Steve Adore is loaded onto a ship and then wait at the other end. There's sometimes weeks and weeks and weeks delaying this stuff and he got sick of this. He's like, well, what if I just drive a truck onto my ship? And he drove his truck onto the ship and sailed it up to from Newark to Baltimore. And then realized, of course, well, if he does that, well, his truck's on the ship. He can't use it at the same time.

So you figured out, well, what if you just take the back end of the truck and put it on the ship and then retrofitted a ship to hold what we now think of as containers, these big metal boxes, okay? And sailed what we call the ideal X, first fully retrofitted container ship from sailed it out of Newark, and that ship had 56 containers on it. Okay. Writing the book, I sailed on what was at the time the world's largest container ship. It had the equivalent of 20,526 containers on it. Okay. It's mind-boggling. In the modern period, we're used to thinking of aircraft carriers as giant ships, the largest

container ship in the world has space to, if you took the, if you took the USS Nimitz, the largest aircraft carrier currently in operation, and dropped it down into the space of one of these giant container ships. You could take two of the Nimitz, drop it down into that space and have room left over for the Empire State Building. These are just giant ships. Why does that matter? So I was sailing on a ship owned by the world's largest shipping company, Marisk.

The founder of Marisk, Peter Marisk, used to trade goods in the Baltic seas. And he had a sail ship and then a steamship and he would carry copper and wheat and beer and the kinds of things we traded a lot on ships those days. And I went back and estimated the size of what his ship was carrying. And he was carrying around 20 containers worth of goods. He had a crew of 26. Modern container ships with 20,000 containers have accrued around 25. In other words, this just being this kind of dramatic explosion of efficiency in the costs of transportation.

What does that mean? It means that if you're manufacturing T-shirts or flat screen TVs in China, the cost of transportation is not a factor. It doesn't cost. anything. I mean, the costs are so trivial per unit that it erases the distinction of geography. So it used to be that if we were manufacturing something in, you know, in Mexico or in Cuba or wherever it was, one thing was the cost of labor and the, you know, so it might have cheap labor in a country like that, but you still had to get it someplace, whether by train or truck,

and that was expensive. But bulk shipping has just erased that distinction. And it's allowed Asia's economies and other economies in the world to compete in globalization without distance. being a barrier. The first and the best book on the kind of early phase of containerization by Mark Levinson called the box, he estimated this is a few decades ago when he was looking at this and estimated the cost of sailing. If you think about a T-shirt manufactured in Laos or a Polo shirt manufactured in Cambodia, by the time you sort of get a whole bunch of them, put them in a container, get them to a port

someplace in China, sail them to New York, and get them to the store. It is cheaper to do that than to drive the same goods from the fashion district in lower Manhattan up to up to northern Manhattan, right? So it just erases transportation as a factor for all intents and purposes. And that's really what has allowed the major Asian economies, including China, to enter globalization. I know the spelling is slightly differently, but I need to send the McLean family a note to see if maybe there's some distant. Some residuals. Yeah, maybe some shares I'd do. oversight that we can address.

So in some ways, that it would be fair to say that when we talk about the impacts of globalization, particularly the economic impacts of globalization, but political as well, you know, populism, all the various, you know, the things that we notice in the world around us that are downstream of this, that we are in a significant way talking about the effects of containerization. Absolutely. There's a one-to-one relationship between the rise. of containerization and other forms of bulk shipping, I should say, but the rise of bulk shipping, growth of the global economy, spread of the global economy, globalization and the remaking of our

economy in both economic and political terms. Got it. And so China then, China comes onto the scene for a variety of reasons, one of which you just cite is the decreased cost for manufacturing goods in China and shipping them out to the rest of the world or shipping anything out of China to the rest of the world. And it starts to become interested in the sea in a way that it didn't used to be. How in the modern context, how does that start? Right. So this, I think it's, it's really in the, it's a kind of evolution of Chinese strategic thinking that I trace in the book. I mean, if you think about China after the civil war and the communist takeover, Mao takes over in, in the late 40s. And his experience of the fighting is an experience. Is an experience.

of using what we would call strategic death, right? It's kind of the long march. He pulls his forces back deep inside Chinese mainland territory. He does this long march, which exhausts his competing forces. And it informs early Communist Party thinking about defense. And they have a strategy in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, really, which they call deep inland defense. The notion that they're probably too weak to stop an invader at their shores, they've been

invaded multiple times in their history. They're too weak to stop them at their shores. but they could defeat an invader by simply drawing them into the depth of the Chinese of mainland and exhaust them. So this concept of deep inland defense. That evolves as they begin to gain some strength. And they develop a concept which is pretty self-expoundary called coastal defense, stop an invasion at the seas. And that holds for quite a while. But they begin to notice, they're not, you know, they're observing the same things I'm writing by the book.

They begin to notice how fundamentally their economy is. dependent on the flow of sea-based goods and sea-based energy. Go back to the 80s, the 90s, look at the top ports in the world and they're all in the west. Fast forward to present day and all the top ports in the world are in Asia and most of them are in China. We're all watching the backlog in containers at LA Long Beach and the kind of impacts for us. LA Long Beach moves 8 million containers a year. Shanghai, which is the largest port in China, moves 42 million containers year. And the next five of the largest ports are all China.

So they're just kind of vastly consequential for them, these flows of containers and other forms of bulk shipping in and out of the other ports. So here they are as a rising economy, hugely dependent on the flow of energy and goods into the South China Sea through the Taiwan Strait, East China Sea, the LSC, the major seas that border China and the East. And they're very acutely aware that those are watered. that the U.S. Navy has dominated and controlled since the end of the Second World War.

And sort of there's a debate at that stage in China and some who are saying, well, look, we can just continue to free ride in American security. They, you know, they command the seas, they secure the freedom of navigation. That's very good for us. Our economy is growing. Why worry about that? And another part that says, well, hold on a second. You know, if the United States dominates these seas, couldn't they choke off that trade? And aren't we vulnerable to that? And that begins to drive a shift in thinking and they begin to develop a concept of defense of the near seas and begin to build out the naval infrastructure to challenge the United States to challenge US dominance or to replace US dominance in the near seas in the southeast China Sea and the LLC. And then over time,

it's sort of kind of class security spiral having built up a capacity to defend the near seas, they then worry about their capacity to defend that defense, so to speak. And so they begin to develop infrastructure to go farther out to the far, what they call the Farcees, farther reaches of the Western Pacific, the Arctic, and the Indian Ocean. And that's really when this starts to become a major security problem between ourselves and the Chinese as they begin then to push up against the outer frontier of American power projection. Let's linger on the near seas for a minute. And, you know, I have a very vivid memory of mine is flying out to Okinawa probably seven or eight years ago now. and landing at the airport there in Naha.

And in the time it took to get off the plane, get on a bus, and go to my first stop there, I hear two scrambles of Japanese, you know, defense force jets taking off to intercept incursions into their air defense identification zone out over the East China Sea. You know, and that was quite a few years ago now. And that's how tense things were then. Your travels are more recent and I imagine things have not cooled. So I guess we have the East China Sea. We have the South China Sea, and then you have kind of as part of that, but also a separate issue, the Taiwan issue.

Maybe walk us through the Chinese vision of the security challenge in each of those sectors and what's foremost on their minds. Yeah, but I do think it's sort of important to start with the connections between them. And this is a, you know, this has long been a, or for the last seven decades, been an important American concept articulated first by John Fuster Dulles and the context of the Cold War the Soviets, the notion that we could develop what he called the first island chain, this kind of arc of island features. It runs from Okinawa down through the Riyokos to Taiwan, the Philippines, where we used to have the Subic Bay base, and then all the way to Singapore where we still have a base, although we don't call it that. And what that arc of island features does is enclose the three Cs that abut China's three major economic zones, right?

And so they have a major economic zone in Beijing, one of Shanghai and one in Hong Kong, Guantra. To get stuff out of those economic zones out to the west or to bring stuff in, you have to sail the South China Sea, the East China Sea or the L-C, and then the Taiwan Strait connects them. And so this first island chain that connects those, that this sort of encloses those seas is, I think, a very major feature in terms of Chinese strategic thinking, the notion that American naval power and American allies could enclose and sort of choke off economic activity within those. those seas is very consequential and underscores their doctrine of the Far Csies and what they call their counterinsurgency doctrine, their ability to stop us from coming in to reinforce the near seas. That's one. Two, the biggest gap in that island chain is the Luzon Strait. It was an important feature of Japan's campaign to dominate Southeast Asia. It will be an extremely important feature if we end up in a shooting war with the Chinese in the Western Pacific. The Luson Strait is the main passageway

from the Western Pacific into the New Earses. And so all of that in my mind is a starts as Chinese defensive strategy relative to American naval dominance, but is increasingly a security spiral in an arms race between us and the Chinese for who can, who can mount effective naval power in that space. But then there's this other crucial issue, which is the Taiwan straight. in Taiwan itself. It's a very narrow body of water that separates the east and the South China Sea, but obviously the other side of it is Taiwan.

Taiwan is not an ally, but they are, as I like to call it, alliance adjacent, the close defense partner, major trading partner, Democratic nation. And you can't really separate Chinese strategy for the near seas from their capacity to ultimately execute a military campaign in Taiwan. The same assets come into play, the same structures come into play, the same commanding control infrastructure. structure comes into play. And our ability to mount a defense of Taiwan should we choose to do so is implicated by precisely the same challenges that we face in terms of continuing to deploy

forward naval power inside that first island chain, Chinese missile systems, Chinese C4 ISR, etc. So I think the Taiwan issue is separate, but very consequential. And you can't separate it. It's separate from the Chinese perspective, but you can't separate it out in such a strategic terms, because all the things that China needs to build up militarily in terms of broader reasons for a sea power also give it increased capability to contemplate an invasion of Taiwan. I do think that this started defensively. I do think this was at first about stopping the United States for being able to choke off trade in the near seas. And there was this sort of interesting phase where we began to see Chinese naval buildup, resource claims, oil claims, fishing. claims, etc. in the southern East China seas. But in the other hand, we were also co-patrolling

with the Chinese in the Indian Ocean against counter-pirecy, working with them in the Malacca's trades against piracy. And there was a sort of incipient debate, both in Beijing and Washington, about whether Chinese interest in globalization and our interest globalization could mean that actually we could in a way co-patroll the seas. But I think that ship has sailed. That collapsed pretty quick. And older, more traditional patterns of insecurity. and distrust between these two countries have really taken hold. And as we've watched their internal behavior change and they're cracked down in Hong Kong and all these kinds of things have altered our assessment of Chinese ambition and strategy, I think they've changed their assessment of our relative strength and strategy. And we are now fully in an arms race in those waters, which is pretty tense that kind of scrambles that you're talking about are happening all the time.

We're sailing nose to nose against Chinese ships every single day. They're on your accidents every single day. And it's not just us. It's the Russians are there, the Australians, the Australians, the Indians occasionally, Indo-Pacific Command estimates that there are 200 submarines at any one time sailing around the South China Sea. That's a lot of boats in a pretty shallow body of water. Yeah, you know, I mean, you look at a map, right? And you think about what it must be like to sail through those waters.

And, you know, if you're me, you picture, gosh, it must just be a bunch of empty ocean. I don't have much experience of the seas. I was in the Marines for seven years and I spent a grand total of four hours on a ship for a tour. It was a tour during the basic school. So that gives you an impression of what was like to be in the Marines in the period I was. But I just picture a big empty ocean in your book. You give a, you were there. I mean, that's not.

That's not. I mean, there are moments. There were times when I was stand up on deck of the ship, I was sailing on and you look out and this kind of, you know, you can't see any other ships around you. But when you sort of scrape a little bit, what you realize is, that the sea is very shallow.

They're pretty narrow passageways where major ships can sail safely. It's just the whole area is dotted with sand keys and reefs and atolls of various types, including ones that China has militarized, but even well before that, just as features of block shipping. So the shipping lane is pretty narrow. There are oil and gas exploration installations. There's undersea cables. There's vast fishing fleets.

So it is a clogged sea in those terms. It doesn't always look at like it when you're standing. atop a ship in the middle of it, but it is pretty clogged. And especially as you begin to approach the Taiwan straight, where it both narrows dramatically and gets very, very shallow. So it is a tricky body of water to navigate. So help me finish the thought here. You know, I think we and many listeners sort of understand that the political and kind of regime

reasons for Taiwan's, excuse me, for the people of Republic of China's interest in Taiwan, But in purely strategic terms, what is its interest in acquiring or reacquiring, depending on how you want to phrase it, Taiwan? What changes in the strategic picture if the PRC rules Taiwan? Yeah. One very important thing, which is it gets a base outside the first island chain. Right. So right now to compete against us to launch expeditions into the Far Cs, China's Navy, PLAN, first have to sail past that first island chain.

We have very strong positions all up and down, all up and down it. That doesn't impede them on a day-to-day basis, but it sure would in a war fighting, sure would in war fighting mode. If they were able to have a base on the eastern edge, the first island change, that really, in a deep way, changes the picture for them in naval power. Obviously, they still have to confront us in Guam and Hawaii, etc. but it's, you know, removing one wall is, if you have to fight over two walls, that's harder than fighting over one wall, right? And so to get past that first island chain, I think it's pretty important for them. There are two ways they can do that in my view. If you look at the political negotiations they have with the Philippines under Duterte, you know,

if the Philippines flipped from being a U.S. ally to being a Chinese ally and gave China a base, then it would have secured that outcome. What I see in the Philippines is whatever Duterte thinks about that possibility, the Philippine Armed Forces have absolutely no intention of going that way. Which leaves Taiwan as there are other option. Very complicated, challenging, difficult option for them, but it would be their only other option to get a base outside the first island chain. Different people have different views on how much that matters, but it's certainly part

of the equation for them. One structural advantage we seem to have in what is otherwise, you know, is that the years go on, you know, an increasing volume of bad news, at least in terms of the trends, as the Chinese do seem kind of incorrigible and their own worst enemies when it comes to the question of relationships with powers that might be helpful to them. They just seem, they seem to be impressive to alienate everyone. A series of own goals. Quite impressive. We're pretty capable of own goals, but it's hard to, it's hard to find as significant a string of own goals as China's scored on itself in the last several years in exactly those terms. Yeah, look, I think that they,

you know, they really blew this last period where they could have sustained the sense of power more focused on globalization than on military power. That was always a bit of a myth, but, you know, it was a credible myth for a while. They've lost that shield of innocence, so to speak. And as you say, they're just, you know, they're awfully rough. And they're in their diplomacy with small powers, who, you know, a lot of those small powers own pretty useful geography. Yeah. Yeah.

No, I remember the same trip that my other anecdote came from, meeting with them, I'll just, I'll just say an official from a, from a nation typically aligned with the United States and its interests in that region. And, you know, asking them what they would do if Japan and China got into it. and receiving the unequivocal answer that this was a series of Japanese problems, the Japanese were going to have to handle, and it was not this country's business to be involved. And that has in this case, and in other cases, it seems changed dramatically. I guess if China were the kind of country that were better at managing these sorts of questions, then it probably wouldn't have to be quite so paranoid about the threats to its shipping in the first place. Yeah, I mean, although I think we should be careful because I do think there are important exceptions to what we've just said.

I watch pretty carefully Chinese diplomacy and Myanmar, and they've learned very quickly there. They went from a mode of alienating everybody to making major inroads. Now they've lost that because of the coup, etc. But they are capable of changing strategy and changing tactics. I've seen that in India. I've seen that in other places. I mean, obviously in India, they're in bad shape now. but they are capable of changing tactics and there are places where they've done better than what we've just described.

So, I mean, there are our own goals, but we shouldn't get too comfortable that they're going to take themselves out of the equation. They are making headroads. Talk to most countries in Africa about Chinese investment and American aid. And I mean, it's just a no-brainer. They'll take Chinese investment any day of the week, right? And we don't have a whole lot to offer these days. So we're losing ground in some important places, too. For a point, for a point.

So let's switch perspectives then and hop over to Hawaii, where Indo-Pacom is headquartered. What is the American strategic view of the same situation in reverse? You know, what are we, you've done a fantastic job both here in the book, which is really excellent, by the way. And I recommend to our listeners, I mean, it's this combination of, you know, the sort of analysis you would expect of the issues but with history and a kind of engaging travelogue. And I learned a lot from it. But what's the American vision of the same sort of challenges in reverse? So I have to say it was fascinating to be in Hawaii doing some of this work. And I spent some time there aboard the USS John Paul Jones, which is quite an old ship, but it's our most

advanced ages, ages class ballistic missile defense destroyer. So a couple of different points. First of all, is just in the book why you sort of once again the front lines of our strategy to deal with an ambitious Asian power, right? It's where we, it was the front lines of our fight against the Japanese, and it's going to be the front lines of our struggle against the Chinese. I want to make two points here. First, because I really think this matters for Americans to understand. When we talk about naval competition, we've talked so far about ships sailing back and forth and near seas, etc. I think when you invoke that concept, naval combat, or invoke the image of ship sailing in the Pacific, I mean, people have read a lot of naval history, people have read a lot of Patrick O'Brien novels. I think the image is, you know, two ships out there exchanging cannon fire at 200 yards or something like that.

That is not what modern naval warfare looks like, as you know. The Navy is a pletka. platform for radar and satellite collection and missile launch and the launch of air power. There is the possibility of ship to ship combat, but it's not the main thing that ships would do if we were in a warfighting scenario. These are sources of missile launch and missile defense and air power launch. I say that because when we look at the possibility of a naval clash with the Chinese, in the Western Pacific. What we are looking at is what the Chinese call informatized war, what sometimes we call systems war.

We're talking about large scale, a large scale clash between highly technological, technologically sophisticated instruments involving long-range missiles, air power, cyber efforts to combat their information management capabilities, them to us, submarine warfare. This is very high-end technological war fighting that we're talking about. And potentially at a very large scale. It doesn't take much, it doesn't take many turns of the escalation dial between where we are bumping into one ship or another in the East China Sea and we're

mounting air strikes deep inside Chinese mainland. That's to do with Chinese missile technology and a ship missile technology which you can come to. It's pretty sophisticated. But I want to reinforce that point for your listeners because I think, I think it's important for folks to understand that when we're talking about naval power, we're not just talking about, as I say, a limited clash between ships at sea. We're talking about the front lines of a highly sophisticated technological platform for warfare with China.

I think the strategic question which we have to debate is, is the focus of American sea power now to contain the PLAN inside the First Island? chain or is it to continue to secure freedom of navigation globally or both and if it's both we need a bigger navy and simple bottom line there's just a limited number of things you can do with x number of ships and we have a lot fewer ships than we used to have we've increased the number a little bit over the last decade or so but we're still we're half the size that we were at the end of the Cold War and we're nowhere near big enough as a Navy to simultaneously do the job of containing Chinese naval power inside the first island chain and maintain freedom of navigation globally. Now, you can have a debate.

We can have a debate about which those two things is more important. My own view is that the freedom of navigation globally is actually in some ways more important than the near seas. But I certainly ideally would be doing both. And then a really important second piece of this is that we're not the only people out there with the Navy. and increasing our collaboration with the Japanese with the Indians, with the Europeans, as they begin to restore naval capacity, which has been sort of deeply eroded in the European context, really matters for our ability to be able to do those two things simultaneously. And I would say I give credit to both the Trump administration and the Biden administration

to have begun to lay the groundwork for a deeper naval collaboration with India, with Japan, with Britain, et cetera, over the last several years, I think really taking shape. now in the form of the quad and the Ocas deal and other things we've seen. So that we're not trying to do the two jobs of meeting Chinese naval power in the Western Pacific and maintaining free movement navigation globally on our round. You know, we've talked about Japan, the Philippines. We've mentioned Australia. But you just mentioned India.

And could you give us a bit of a, I don't know, kind of a progress report on where U.S. India cooperation specifically on the issue of China, but I guess more broadly this this question of freedom of the sea stands because they are this obviously, you know, vast strategic force waiting to be unlocked. They obviously have their own very serious concerns with China that are, you know, land-oriented border disputes with China. And yet, you know, my impression has been that over the years, the notion of closer and closer U.S. India cooperation vis-a-vis China is this sort of dream that everyone has. The Indians seem frustratingly unenthusiastic about our particular vision of the thing.

But maybe that's getting better. Maybe it's still caught in the middle. Give us a sense of where things stand. Two points. One, I talked earlier about China returning to the seas for the first time in 500 years. India has never been a sea power. There is no point in Indian history where it was a major naval power. So what we're waiting for is China's turn to the seas,

not it's return to the seas, okay? It has an aircraft carrier, it has a few ships. It is not a major naval power. But it has expressed the intent to become one, and it has this phenomenally important geography I described in the book as a thousand mile dagger into the heart of China's Indian Ocean ambitions, right? It's just this vast fact. If you sail east from China, you go past the first island chain, you go out through the Straits of Block, you hit India. Right now, the Indian Navy doesn't pose a particular challenge to the Chinese Navy, but it certainly could. it if it developed. And so what we're watching and waiting for for India to really deepen and

develop its naval capability. That takes a decade. It doesn't happen overnight. But it's building out its naval bases at the end of the sea. It's forging very effective naval cooperation arrangements around the whole of the rim of the Indian Ocean. And it is engaged in a shipbuilding project. I would say that actually the Navy is the place where the U.S. India relation has gone best. there's still a giant question mark about what, if any, role we will play vis-vis China, India tensions in the Himalayas, on their land border. And that's an important question in India's mind. You know, if we can describe things like the quad as a kind of budding alliance with India, the Indians are you asking, okay, if we're going to have your back at sea, doesn't mean you have our back at land.

We haven't even begun to ask that question. There are lots of frustrations dealing with India. As you know, it's always sort of a step forward. and 0.9 of a step backwards. The strategic vision is there at the level of the prime minister, this one, and his predecessor and foreign ministers. It just doesn't translate into a very sort of archaic bureaucracy, which is dense and recalcitrant in old fashion. But we are making progress with it.

And at the political level, I think the quad really was a leapfrogging forward of this. Co-patrolling with the quad, naval exercises at the quad, all this kind of stuff has really made a difference. And that's, again, it's China's biggest own goal is the way they've managed to irritate the Indians and prod the Indians into something awfully close to an alliance with us. It's not an alliance. I already avoids that word. It's not an alliance yet. But it's certainly moving in that direction.

And that's potentially a very big deal. But it does require solidifying it. It requires India to actually develop in naval terms the way it can. The last point I want to make about India, I read about this briefly in the book, is it's also the only. country that has the real potential to remake globalization. Right now, we're just hugely dependent on the flow of low-cost goods from China, right? We can't change that by increasing our trade cooperation with the Europeans or the Canadians or whatever. Mexico helps, which just doesn't have the scale. The country that if it were willing to genuinely open to international trade and

investment that could change that picture is India, has not so far been willing to do that, but we're beginning to see the signs. There was an announcement a few weeks ago, the start of trade talks for a free trade agreement in the United Kingdom and India. That would begin to matter a great deal if India were to really open up to trade and investment with the West. That would begin to change the dynamics of globalization in ways that are aligned with the way the strategic picture is falling out. So in the book, you talk a fair amount about Alfred Thayer Mahan and we probably need to do a whole episode on him at some point. We haven't yet. It's an oversight.

But, you know, you talk about him. You talk about some time you spent at the Naval War College. Give us a sense of who Mahan was and what his principal ideas were and how, you know, these sort of theories of sea power for more than a century ago could possibly be relevant today. It is ironic. This is a thinker who's, of course, revered in naval circles and largely ignored outside them in the United States, but is paid a great deal of attention to in one very interesting place, which is Beijing. It was actually really by reading about Chinese thinking that I kind of came back to Baham because the Chinese have really incorporated Mahanian notions. So this is a, you know, he was a naval scholar, ended up as president of the Naval War College, who was a close friend of Teddy Roosevelt. And they really, this really comes together during the Spanish-American War, which despite its name was a war fought exclusively at sea, two major battles, one in Cuba, one in the Philippines.

And Teddy Roosevelt, who was Secretary of the Navy at the time or just after, I forget the exact sequence, but he was certainly heavily involved in naval issues around the time of the Spanish-American War. watched the American Navy compete against the Spanish fleet. And looking back, I always find this kind of thing extremely interesting. We won that war and we won it handily. But he goes back and he takes a very close look and realizes that we won because we had a couple of very skillful captains and we had very good luck. But that actually our fleet was badly outdated and not remotely capable of projecting American power into Asia.

or defending our interests in the Atlantic. And he began this process of fleet modernization, launch what was known as the Great White Fleet. And Thayer Mahan was his thinker through all of that. They lived together for a while. They were close friends and really informed Roosevelt sinking. So when you think about America had been a sea-going nation before, Barbary Wars, what was called,

Asiatic Station. We had naval ships in the Aung Sea River. But we were not a major naval. power until after the Spanish-American War. And it was Therah Mahan's thinking and Teddy Roosevelt behind him that really took us down the direction of becoming a naval power to the point that where by the end of the First World War, we were already the largest Navy in the world. Everybody always thinks that that happened in the second world, but actually it happened

by the end of the First World War. Mahon's core point was that national power is a function of economics. Economics is a function of trade, and most trade moves by sea. Did then, it does now. And therefore, if you are keen to secure your own economic interests, you have to have naval capacity to secure the flow of commerce. And he developed a series of notions about what naval strategy should look like if it's going to secure the flow of commerce.

In particular, he had the notion that you have to have the ability to maintain what he called sea lanes of communication, the ability to connect one naval station to the next, whether that's for refueling or rearm moving purposes. That was the concept that undergirded our acquisition of Hawaii and then of Guam, kind of a string of islands that took us out to the Pacific, which was the kind of central trading location for us in those days. Those concepts were sort of central to the formation of American naval power. And it's really striking to me to watch how they were then central, by the way, to Germany

when it developed as a naval power in the late 1800s, early 1900s, and have been hugely relevant to Chinese naval thinking, as we talked about earlier, recognizing how dependent they were on the flow of sea-based energy and a sea-based trade, and therefore developing the naval capability to protect it. A critical component of Mahan's thinking is that you have to have maritime capability, you have to have a naval capability, you have to have bases. Right now, we still have a huge advantage over the Chinese, and we have this kind of global string of bases that we can use. China has very few allies and very few bases. But it seems to me that if you look at where China is investing in its infrastructure and import acquisition, etc., essentially what is doing is laying the foundation for a wider network of bases. And we've begun to see that. I write about Djibouti in the book. We've seen Equatorial Guinea begin to emerge on the Atlantic coast, laying the foundation for this network of bases, which it could use to protect its

commercial interests, but also to project sort of naval powers, the Blue Water Navy. That puts us into immediate clash with us in terms of our global naval role. Last quick point, I didn't set out to write this as a Mahanian book. As I said, when I encountered how much China was using Mahon, I sort of went back to him. What I do try to do in the book is update these realities because, of course, when he was writing, we weren't consuming vast amounts of oil and gas. We are now the flow of oil and gas by sea is a crucial additional, feature of why sea base flows matters. And there are issues of ocean sciences and climate

change that he would not have been aware of that weren't germane to when he was writing that do matter now. And so in a way, part of what I'm trying to do is sort of update Mahanian concepts or update notion of sea power to the contemporary world. But it is classical Mahanian thinking that is right behind the Chinese naval modernization. You obviously, you suggest the parallels in the book. And I wonder if there's good research being done or if you're aware of something that's been written that does a sort of full comparison between the American quest for power at sea around the time that Mahan is writing. That is to say, you know, we had a sort of near seas concern at first in terms of the Caribbean. Exactly.

And then, you know, I'm old fashioned and think that, you know, regimes matter and that there are, significant differences between the United States and the People's Republic of China that should affect how we think about them and sort of make predictions about their behavior. That said, there's some obvious structural similarities in the sort of turn of the 20th century strategic picture that the United States faced and the picture that China faces today. And it's kind of obvious thought. I wonder if anyone is devoting the attention to it. It deserves. Yeah, I think so. I think that it's actually a great opportunity for me to give a bit of a shout out to a group of scholars at the Naval War College, the Chinese Maritime Studies, you know, there just do superb work on understanding Chinese naval thinking and Chinese naval strategy. And I couldn't have written the book

without their works. I mean, there's a lot of other things other than China's Navy in this book, but at core understanding China's return to the seas and they're thinking a lot of that rests on the of the naval war college. It's a huge asset that we have that team in the United States that have the skills that they have and the depth of knowledge they have of Chinese naval strategy. But yeah, the parallels are absolutely there. I mean, I agree with you, regime type matters to our overall appreciation of what China is. When I talk in the book about the kind of evolution of American thinking about China, that's very much in my mind. But there are, as you say, there are also structural factors. And I invoke Sir Admiral Crow and the kind of Sir Air Crow and the way the British

re-appreciated German naval power in time. Some of these are simply the fact of one major power distrusting another major power as we have through history. And possibilities of shared commercial interests and stuff just are not going to prove to be enough to hold back those tensions. If I were the Chinese, I think what would most worry me about the comparison is, you know, the United States had a relatively long period with interruptions, but a relatively long period where, you know, from the sort of preposterous statement that the Monroe Doctrine was at first on a lot of time and space to ourselves, sort of untroubled by European powers because the Europeans

were so busy at each other's throats. And China doesn't seem to me to enjoy a similar advantage at the moment. Oh, indeed. And I write a little bit about this in the book that if you compare the process by which we came to have the dominant global Blue Water Navy and the process that they would have to go through, I don't see a pathway for them to get there. Right. So it actually takes me to a point which I think is worth discussing.

I don't see the PLAN displacing U.S. Navy anytime soon. I don't see China displacing the United States anytime soon in the sort of hegemonic terms. But what I do see is them developing what I call in the book a counter hegemonic capability, an ability to frustrate our capacity to do quite a lot of the things that we want to do or to do so with relatively low costs. And I think they have a reasonable expectation of being able to succeed in developing a counter hegemonic capacity. How quickly, how effectively, in what relationship with the Russians, how they handle India, all questions to be shaped. But we've gone from a period of time where we had an enormous amount of strategic freedom to one where we will be much more constrained by Chinese military power.

It's just a fact of life. How we handle that, what strategy we develop are questions that we need. urgent answers to. But I don't think that they're going to displace us. They're just going to be able to complicate us. Towards the end of the book, you spent a fair amount of time discussing oceanography and ocean sciences. And it sort of made me think of, you know, scholars and writers of various sorts moving in advance of European imperialism in the 19th century and 18th century. Here you have sort of science moving in advance of the projection of power at seed. Talk to us a little bit about that and the role.

that these kinds of research play in, you know, nation-state power. Yeah, I found this one of the most fascinating parts of the book. Actually, I knew very little about it when I started. But, of course, when you step back from it, it makes obvious sense that navies should be interested in understanding the oceans, right? That makes sense. And we know our history, know about the HMS Beagle and the Challenger, these extraordinarily important British scientific expeditions of the 1800s.

I was really struck to discover that in that period, one of the largest scientific expeditions was not British. It was American. It was USX exploring expedition, the USX, which charted the Southern Ocean, which did some of the earliest work on ocean currents and methametry really basically started what became the Smithsonian collection. Early in our history, we were an important ocean sciences power that faded during the Civil War, obviously. And then we came back to what, of course, at the onset of the Second World War, when we realized that we were going to be fighting in Europe and fighting in Asia. Navies were going to be very important. We began to study the seas.

A number of really important things follow. One, its experiments undertaken by the U.S. Navy at the beginning of the during the Second World War and the early parts of the Cold War that then lay the foundation for a lot of what we know today in terms of deep sea energy exploration and deep sea energy recovery, which is vastly consequential for the United States. It's vastly consequential for the world economy. A lot of that comes out of the engineering and science of the U.S. Navy in the 40s and the 50s. A huge amount about what we currently know about climate change comes out of U.S. Navy experiments in the 50s, nuclear testing at sea and various other things, wave dynamics. The seas are massively consequential to the regulation

of climate and of the absorption of carbon. We know a lot about that because of the Navy, frankly. That's evolved a little bit. We now have NOAA and other civilian agencies, but the Navy was at the core of that. We know a lot about the Arctic because for years during the Cold War, American submarines were sitting under that Arctic ice, tracking Soviet subs.

And as they were doing so, they were measuring sea ice and ice melt and various other things. So navies have been hugely important for understanding of the world around us. and for our energy and climate reality. And it strikes me as consequential, therefore, to notice that China, India, and other powers are rapidly developing in ocean sciences capability. We see that in Chinese scientific expeditions in the Arctic, in the Antarctic, in the Southern Ocean, around the world. We see it in Chinese prowess in deep sea mineral mining, in their campaigns. to protect and disrupt undersea cables, which are vital. So I sort of treat the ocean sciences as a kind of leading indicator of global state power.

And the fact that China is rapidly developing an ocean sciences capability is something we should be watching. There are still space. There's still space for scientific cooperation there. We cooperate with the Soviets on ocean sciences in the heart of the Cold War. But the ocean sciences are inherently dual use. everything they're learning the Arctic, their scientific presence in the Antarctic, etc. are also features of budding global naval presence, a global budding global maritime presence of which a naval presence can follow.

Bruce Jones, author of To Rule the Waves, a really, really interesting discussion. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me on. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.