This week we’re doing another one of our series of military theory primers, this time focusing on a fairly simple contention: that the United States Navy is a load-bearing component of the global economy. I considered attempting to work in A.T. Mahan and the concept of command of the seas in here but simply outlining the basic argument about the navy’s role in sustaining global standards of living has run out more than 10,000 words, so a primer on Mahan will have to wait for another day.1
The argument here is actually quite easy to state as a series of propositions: global trade is an important part of the global economy, necessary to maintain our standards of living (and in many cases, essential for the survival of people in poorer countries) and seaborne trade makes up the overwhelmingly vast majority of all trade. Moreover, in history to this point it has been a relative constant that in the absence of major naval powers committed to freedom of navigation, pirates and states at maritime choke-points tend to emerge and seriously disrupt maritime trade. Finally, at current, only the United States maintains the kind of navy that traditionally has been necessary to keep sea lanes open, thus making the US Navy at present a ‘load bearing’ component of the global economy. Consequently, this makes the United States’ apparent turn away from freedom of navigation troubling – a move likely to be bad for Americans but also bad for everyone else.
If you nodded your head through all of those points, you are good to go. Hit the tip jar on the way out. But I find that many folks want to contest at least one of those points – they don’t think trade is important (or that it only enriches ‘big corporations’) or don’t realize how substantial sea trade is, or don’t expect sea commerce to break down in the absence of naval power, or don’t understand the kind of navy necessary to provide that sort of power. So the rest of this far-too-many-words-long post (it turned out to be 10,430) is going to belabor each point, one by one, in order to explain why the United States Navy – which I should stress is very much an imperfect institution; we are not here to uncritically glaze the USN, just to describe its function – is configured the way it is and why there is not currently a replacement for it on offer.
Also, let me note at the beginning: if you want regular updates on global shipping as well as good explainers about how global shipping works, I cannot recommend Sal Mercogliano’s What’s Going On With Shipping channel enough.
But first, as always, building navies is expensive. Really expensive. Absurdly expensive. If you want to help keep this ship afloat, you can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).
A World With Trade
Now I want to start by talking about what global trade really is and its role in the global economy, because in many cases before I can get to anything about shipping lanes and choke points and pirates and so on, I find many regular folks have already immediately objected that they do not care about global trade. They think of global trade as a thing which mostly benefits big corporations or ‘cosmopolitan globalist’ elites. But, you must pardon me, they are wrong: they do not yet know that they care about global trade. When global trade is disrupted – even just a relatively little bit! – and the price of a barrel of oil nearly doubles, leading to a one-third surge in the price of gasoline and a 50% jump in the price of diesel, it turns out they care a great deal.
They often just don’t think about that in terms of global trade, because global trade is one of the key things that makes modern prosperity possible, mostly invisibly. That very invisibility, as we’ll see in the end, is part of what poses real political problems, but let us first make trade a bit more visible.
The first mistake that folks make here is to assume that trade is a relatively small part of the global economy. It is an easier mistake to make in a place like the USA, which is very big and thus trades with itself more than most, but globally trade makes up between a quarter to a third of all economy activity.2 That is, it turns out, quite a lot. If your household income fell by a third, that would be very difficult for you. If every household’s income fell by a third, the resulting economic contraction would be double the size of the Great Depression (which reduced global GDP by roughly 15%) and have all sorts of knock-on effects as those households themselves had to cut back on other, non-imported goods and services.3
The second potential mistake here is to assume that all of this trade is mostly a luxury: that it just accrues to the rich or to rich countries or to big corporations. We may remove the ‘rich countries’ here right off: a lot of the countries with very high trade-to-gdp ratios (imports+exports, thus the ability to exceed 100%) are poor countries (the other big group are small, rich countries): countries like Vietnam (190%), Djibouti (206%), Namibia (108%), Somalia (128%), Libya (137%), Guinea (103%) and so on. We’ll come back to this in a moment, but a breakdown in global trade is actually especially bad for poorer, developing countries.
Likewise, while big corporations surely profit off of trade – no poor man ever owned a freighter – they’re not the only ones. We can think about this by thinking about the most staple of all bulk staples: food.
In the developing world, access to global food markets is an essential lifeline. Most developing countries, especially across Africa, are net-food importers, some quite substantially so. Moreover, whereas food imports in developed countries are often ‘exotic’ foods that grow in other climates (think bananas away from the equator), for developing countries, these are often bulk staples. As we saw in 2008-2010 and again in 2022 and may grimly see again soon, increases in the price of bulk stable foods are associated with political instability and suffering in the developing world. Because if the price of bread goes up by 25% in the United States, for most Americans that is annoying, but in many developing countries it means people go hungry because they cannot afford food.
Developing countries are also more likely to have agricultural systems that are exposed to more variability (drought, pests, blight, etc.) as compared to developed countries. And fundamentally everyone relies on trade to insure against famine in the event of a local failure in food production. Trade is what allows us to even out a freak drought in one country or a flood in the other to keep everyone fed. That trade may be in the form of market interactions or it may arrive as foreign aid or disaster relief, but it is still the movement of goods from one place, from one country, to another.
Trade is also important for the developing part of developing countries. Doing the industrial revolution from scratch – designing and building better steam engines, creating factories, developing precision tools, steadily expanding production as all of that industrial capital accrues – took Great Britain something like a century and a half (roughly 1750 to 1900 – we’re being quite approximate here) to hit an economic standard we might define as ‘middle income’ today.4 But developing countries today that have access to trade – and here we mean not just the movement of goods (but also that) but also people – can go through that transformation much faster. The classic interaction is that developing countries sell raw materials5 to import the machinery and experts to build basic manufacturing industries (think steel, concrete, agricultural goods processing and so on) and then sell those goods to be able to afford to important the experts (including educators) and advanced equipment to make more complex finished goods. Because manufacturing, say, a car requires not just raw materials, but the ability to craft high quality materials (like very precise steel alloys) as well as very complex components and very precise parts within low tolerances and that both requires really fancy manufacturing equipment (which also requires those same high quality materials, complexity and low tolerance components to build) and very skilled workers, designers and engineers.
Trade allows developing countries to jump-start progress on each rung of that ladder, importing the experts who already know how to do these things (and can teach more) and importing the machines that can do these things (with which more may be built), ideally resulting in a high-income, more self-sufficient economy achieved in decades rather than centuries. And you can see any number of countries that either have accomplished this (China, Japan and South Korea, for instance) or are now accomplishing it (India, Vietnam), often from very low initial industrial ‘baselines’ (frequently as a result of tremendous neglect or malice at the hands of European imperial masters).
As those developing countries work their way up the value chain from raw materials to basic goods (often textiles) to low-cost, low-complexity consumer goods (e.g. plastic toys) to higher complexity consumer goods (cars, washing machines) to the very top of the value chain (software, aircraft, etc.), their standard of living improves, but equally because the cost of labor in those countries is lower, they provide much cheaper goods to developed countries. Those cheaper goods in turn lower the cost of living in developed countries, making the sort of ‘American Dream’ middle-class lifestyle available to more people.
Of course even among developed countries, trade does not lose its value – there are forms of comparative advantage that have nothing to do with labor costs. Some industries are so large, technical and expensive that few countries are big enough to absorb the entire demand of it – aeronautics is a classic example. It might make sense for some countries to specialize in aircraft production, but most countries are too small to have a domestic aircraft manufacturer just for the heck of it – they’d be better off specializing in something else and using that product to buy the planes. Meanwhile, some goods are simply hard to produce in certain places: Norway is never going to grow many bananas, Japan is probably not going to ever be a major producer of oil, Mali is not going to export much in the way of fish.
All of which is to say that trade directly improves the living standards of regular people in both developed and developing countries and equally, we do a lot of it, with trade representing something approaching a third of the global economy.
All of which now brings us to the key observation: 80% of all goods transported globally move by sea. That is a figure which is too big for bold, so let’s step it up a bit:
80% of All Good Transported Globally Move By Sea
There we go.
So not only do more goods move by ship than by aircraft, railway or truck or river barge or what have you, four times more goods move by ship than by every other alternative system of transportation combined. And if roughly 30% of global GDP is goods being traded, that means that about a quarter of global GDP moves by ship each year. That is a very big part of the global economy!
The main reason for this is simple: it is much cheaper to move goods by sea than by any other method. For the cost of sending one shipping container across the United States by land (truck or rail; when I checked in 2023 around $2,500-7,500, with some variation by weight and exact route) you could also ship that same shipping container from an American cargo port to any port in the world at all (around $6,000). Shipping by sea is (this is the rule of thumb I was given a few years back when I asked) around three times cheaper than rail, five times cheaper than truck and eight or more times cheaper than air freight. That is an enormous cost difference.
Believe it or not, that huge difference in cost is actually less than it was before railways and internal combustion engines made bulk overland transport somewhat affordable. In antiquity, the ratio of cost (derived from Diocletian’s Price Edict) for transport between land, river and sea was 20:4:1, with land transport for a given quantity of bulk staples being twenty times as expensive as land transport. With the miracles of the industrial revolution, we’ve brought down ‘twenty times as expensive’ to merely! three to five times as expensive, per ton-mile.
There are two basic reasons for this. One is that it simply takes less energy to move things over water than it does to move them through the air or overland. But the other reason, that I think is worth stressing here is ships can be really, really big.
A truck can move a single cargo container. A typical freight train might have 100 or so freight cars each moving about a cargo container. A large Suez canal capable container ship, by contrast, might carry upwards of 20,000 TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units, the size of a cargo container). That means a single container ship might match the cargo capacity of hundreds of trains or tens of thousands of trucks. That holds true for other kinds of freight: a tanker truck can move about 200 barrels (bbls) of liquid, like oil. Suezmax tankers can get up to a million bbls and Very Large Crude Carriers (VLCCs) are often in excess of two million.
So the scale that sea shipping can operate on is simply much greater than what is currently possible on land. Even pipelines for oil generally move less than active major shipping lanes (as we’ve seen demonstrated in the Strait of Hormuz) and of course you cannot move iron ore or consumer goods or grain via pipeline but you can move them in large freighters. As a result, nearly all long-distance trade moves as far as it can by ship before transferring to truck or rail for the ‘first mile’ and ‘last mile’ of its transit. It is thus far to say that global trade – which, as we’ve established, is an important part of the global economy which enables rich countries to eat well and poor countries to eat at all – is mostly about shipping on the water.
Strait Up Piracy
All of that seaborne trade, however, is the product of a long period since 1945 in which there have been relatively minimal disruptions of the security of civilian ships moving over the world’s oceans. What I want to note is that this is not automatic, it is an outcome that has been produced. Instead, the historical pattern has generally been that in the absence of major powers exerting themselves to keep sea lanes open (because it benefits them to do so), what we see is that sea trade fragments, with polities sitting on maritime choke-points moving to exploit that control (at the expense of everyone else) and both pirates and privateers disrupting shipping more generally.
Piracy, of course, is extremely old: it is treated as a well-established and perfectly normal thing to be doing in Homer, for instance. We actually have references to sea raiders and pirates even farther back, including in the Amarna tablets (c. 1350 BC). Now I should note that while we generally think about piracy as ships attacking ships, there is a land based component to it: piracy often also includes the raiding of coastal settlements and at the same time pirates themselves need coastal bases (often with friendly local populations) in order to operate out of.
Notably, a lot of this early evidence for Mediterranean piracy comes in the context of the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the period immediately following it (the latter including piracy’s place in Homer’s conception of maritime activity, where it is a normal and regular thing to be doing), periods of state fragmentation where there weren’t any major naval powers in the Eastern Mediterranean capable or willing to enforce freedom of navigation. That changes as we move into the Late Archaic and Classical periods (as reckoned in Greece, so c. 550 BC onwards): the Achaemenid Persians are able to dominate effectively the entire litoral of the Levantine Sea (the part of the Mediterranean between Egypt and Anatolia) and maintained a strong navy – and we hear a lot less about piracy in this period. Later emerging Greek naval powers (particularly the Athenian navy after 483) also had an interest in piracy suppression – Athens was reliant on imported grain and timber and also profited immensely from trade.
That state of affairs continues broadly until the death of Alexander, where we get a resurgence in our evidence for piracy in the context of the Wars of the Diadochoi. Our visibility here is better and one thing worth noting is that piracy here dovetails with what we might term privateering – state-sanctioned piracy – as some of the Macedonians scrapping for control (Demetrius Poliorcetes most notably) hired pirates and mercenaries to harass their enemies. Men might move smoothly from being mercenary sailors in the service of a king to ‘pirates’ and back again while doing effectively the same things on the water. That said, these states also had an interest in trade (especially Rhodes) and so alongside the piracy were efforts in piracy suppression.
This system famously gets out of hand when the Romans in the mid-second century destroyed or crippled most of the major maritime powers of the Eastern Mediterranean (Macedon, the Seleucid Kingdom, the Ptolemaic Kingdom, Rhodes, Pergamum) but didn’t move into the region to replace them. This ends up leading to a series of relatively Roman commands against pirates in various parts of the eastern and central Mediterranean: L. Fabius Labeo in 189, M. Antonius in 102, L. Licinius Lucullus in 86, P. Servilius Vatia in 78, M. Antonius Creticus in 74, L. Caecilius Metellus in 70. This eventually culminates in Cn. Pompeius (Pompey)’s famous command against the pirates in 69, where he was given unprecedented authority to operate basically everywhere in the Mediterranean (using subordinates to coordinate distant activity), a command whose overweening scale is one of the major marker points in the emergence of the Late Republican ‘rogue general’ in Roman history.
Pompey’s success here is, as far as I can tell, actually emblematic of how anti-piracy campaigns succeed: he targeted the pirate’s coastal bases, not their boats and used the coercive threat of force to negotiate rather than just trying to wipe out all pirates. In the end, Pompey smashed some strongholds and used the leverage the threat of that gave him to resettle the pirates (and their supportive populace) inland, away from the coast. Roman piracy suppression after Pompey is much more successful: as Roman controlled effectively the whole Mediterranean litoral, it could deny pirates bases everywhere – although through the imperial period the Romans still had to maintain a navy to keep the trade lanes, upon which their empire’s prosperity relied, open.
To simplify greatly, we see a similar set of processes in the ‘Golden Age of Piracy’ (c. 1650 to c. 1730). It was enabled by state fragmentation and warfare, particularly the rivalries between England and France to one side and Spain on the other. It ended in part because those wars ended, but notably also with the application of the same mix of coercion and negotiation, perhaps most famously with the destruction of the ‘Republic of Pirates’ at Nassau – many pirates took the offered ‘King’s Pardon’ leaving the remainder isolated enough to be destroyed in detail and for British power over the Bahamas to remove the coastal bases necessary for piracy.
And we see a similar interaction with the Barbary Pirates in the Mediterranean. The activities of the Barbary pirates also arose out of a kind of fragmentation, as the Barbary states were weakly controlled vassals of larger Muslim states (most notably from the 1500s on, the Ottoman Empire). To greatly simplify, initially European (and later, American) states found it most expedient to simply pay off these states, but as the balance of power shifted in their favor in the 1800s, they shifted towards coercion. The United States famously ended most Barbary raiding of its commerce with the Second Barbary War (1815), a major achievement for its young navy, with Britain and the Netherlands following suit the next year with the Bombardment of Algiers (1816). Once again the ultimate resolution came when naval powers were able to demonstrate their ability not just to strike pirate ships but to project power inland either by bombardment or the landing of troops. It is the ability to shut down the bases which suppresses piracy successfully in the long term.
Ironically, the fleet was able to effectively bluff a surrender out of Omar Agha, the Dey of Algiers, by announcing they would continue their bombardment if he did not surrender, despite being almost totally out of ammunition. The Dey, unaware of this, surrendered rather than endure a continued bombardment – a useful reminder that the effective window for negotiation may often be narrow and easily missed.
Now alongside pirates, states and other larger polities can also be a problem for maritime trade if they sit on major choke-points. As you can see on the trade-route map below, most trade moves through one or more ‘choke points’ – narrow sea passages where alternative routes are either much longer or simply unavailable. Some of these are major canals (Panama, Suez) or narrow straits or channels (the English Channel, the Strait of Hormuz, the Bab el-Mandeb, the Strait of Malacca, the Öresund, the strait of Gibraltar, the Turkish straits and so on).
While most countries globally have an interest in relatively free movement through these shipping channels, the countries directly on these choke-points may have an interest in extracting value from their control. The classic example of this is the Sound Tolls, the toll that Denmark extracted from ships passing the Öresund until 1857, which at points made up the majority of the Danish state’s revenue. While any one such ‘closed’ or tolled strait may be little more than an inconvenience globally (although notice just how much of an inconvenience restricts on the Strait of Hormuz have been!), because nearly all shipping moves through at least one if not more of these choke-points, if other countries were to follow suit and every country on a choke-point tried to maximize extraction off of it, the result would be a major drop in global trade, which, as discussed above, would lead to a sharp decline in living standards in rich and poor countries alike. Everyone would be worse off.
The current global system, which assumes freedom of navigation in nearly all of these waterways and only allows fees to be charged to the degree that ships require active assistance to navigate a given choke-point (canals have to be maintained and some straits – though not the Hormuz – are narrow enough that safe passage requires help (‘pilotage’); the Turkish straits are the classic example of the latter) is largely a product of the 1800s eventually codified in the 1982 United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), a result of imperial maritime powers (first Britain, later the United States) twisting arms in order to establish a global standard of “innocent passage.” That said, this standard was always backed up, implicitly or explicitly, by force: countries agreed to these limitations in part because everyone understood that if they didn’t, the imperial powers would make them because those imperial powers relied heavily on the free movement of goods and people over the water.
And we should be clear here: that this state of affairs – few-to-no pirates, open choke-points – benefited humanity as a whole was for the most part a happy side benefit of imperial maritime powers (initially mostly Britain, then later the United States and Britain, then later mostly the United States) pursuing their own interests. I want to stress that very clearly for any ‘America First’ers still sticking around: while this system benefits most people globally, we built this system because it benefits us in particular. As we’re going to see in a moment when we get to blockades, we wrote the rules to favor us, to favor the kind of naval power we have and the kind of trade we engage in.
A good example of this are the rules for when it is legal for a country to disrupt trade. On the one hand, unilaterally closing a shipping lane (as Iran has done) is illegal, as is unannounced attacks on shipping (which is to say, piracy). However, blockades are legal as part of war, assuming the blockading country declares the blockade, declares what goods are contraband (they need to be at least thinly connected to military activity) and provides any ship attempting to run the blockade a change to turn around before being engaged. In practice, that means that international law bans all disruptions of maritime trade except the kind only countries with large power-projection surface fleets (of the kind Britain and the United States, who largely wrote the rules (along with, post-1945, the USSR), have) can perform.6 Instead of writing international law to say, “only the United States, Great Britain and maybe the Soviet Union can cut off trade” the solution was to say, “you can only cut off trade via this specific method which only the United States, Great Britain and maybe the Soviet Union can actually perform.”
But maintaining and enforcing those rules remains reliant on naval power or more correctly it remains reliant on a certain specific kind of naval power.
Power Projection Navies
The distinction I want to draw here is the specific subset of navies able to project power over the oceans. Navies, after all, come in different sorts. One distinction you will hear quite often is between a blue water navy (a navy capable of operations on the oceans, the ‘high seas’) and a ‘brown water navy’ (which only operates along the rivers and coastlines of its country) or ‘green water navy’ (not capable of global projection, but able to push out into local oceans and seas). But not all blue water navies are made equal either.
As noted above, effectively suppressing piracy long-term generally requires the ability not merely to get to the body of water in question, but to have the ability to project power ashore, because the ultimate piracy suppression requires removing the coastal bases that pirates operate on. Likewise, the kind of coercion that can compel potentially truculent countries sitting on maritime choke-points to allow unhindered traffic generally also requires the ability to project power ashore. It isn’t enough to threaten to sink that country’s navy (especially if they don’t have much of one), you need to be able to threaten to bombard key cities or deliver a seaborne invasion (we’ll come back to why this is such a problem in the Strait of Hormuz in a moment).
Since trade is global, maintaining global maritime networks means we either need one navy with global projection (which is generally how this works) or a consortium of regional navies that maintain these capabilities in their neighborhood. In practice for the last few centuries, relying on one or a few big navies with global projection has been the norm.
So we need a navy capable of global projection, which includes the ability to get to any key choke-point. It has to, once on station, be able not only to defend itself against other ships but also project power ashore. Since projecting power ashore is a process that invariably takes time it also needs to be able to sustain itself at any key choke-point.
The first requirement alone actually already rules out most of the world’s navies: only a handful of relatively large, relatively wealthy countries maintain navies with a significant number of large warships (generally destroyers and bigger) that can actually do oceanic operations on the regular. Most smaller countries instead operate a mix of smaller frigates, corvettes and cutters which are perfectly serviceable for defending and policing their own territorial waters, but are not suitable for long distance operations. You can actually see this distinction with remarkable clarity because the United States doesn’t operate just one navy – it operates two: the US Coast Guard would, for most countries, be the navy. But for blue water operations, we’re generally going to want larger ships: both because larger ships are more capable (they can carry more weapons, munitions and supplies) but also simply because open ocean travel often demands bigger ships due to more intense weather and longer time at sea. Of course, bigger ocean-going warships are going to be more expensive (which is why countries that have no designs on creating a blue water navy tend to prefer smaller, cheaper coastal ships).
But blue water isn’t enough: we need to be able to project power ashore. Historically, the right ship for this kind of power projection has varied, but since 1945 the ship type for power projection ashore has been the aircraft carrier, particularly a fleet carrier. Many navies operate smaller carriers that mostly carry helicopters and maybe a handful of vertical take-off-and-landing (VTOL) platforms, but if you want to actually project power ashore, you need a large airwing of full-sized capable fixed-wing aircraft. You can actually see this distinction in the US Navy as well. When we say ‘the United States has 11 aircraft carriers’ we’re only counting the CVNs, the fleet carriers. The United States also maintains a bunch of amphibious warfare ships – 2 America-class LHA (landing helicopter assault) and 7 Wasp-class LHD (landing helicopter dock) – which in any other navy would be treated as aircraft carriers, given that they can both operate fixed-wing aircraft. But while these ships exist to support amphibious operations, you wouldn’t want to rely on them exclusively to project air power, especially against an enemy who can actually shoot back. You want the much larger air wing of a CVN (40+ strike aircraft, as compared to half a dozen on an LHA/LHD).
Now there has been a lot of chatter lately about if aircraft carriers are actually obsolete, most of it being about the ways in which modern anti-ship missiles make aircraft carriers vulnerable. But aircraft carriers have always been vulnerable – look how many of them the RN, USN and IJN lost in WWII! The question is not ‘is the carrier vulnerable?’ but ‘what role does the carrier serve and can any other ship perform it?’ And the answer is that a (fleet) carrier is the striking arm of a fleet, able to project a lot of combat power out a long distance and no, no other ship is able to do that. Yes, you can throw missiles out of VLS (vertical launch system) cells on a destroyer or a frigate, but you are quite limited as to how many of those missiles you can carry and missiles are a lot more expensive than bombs. A carrier can, over time, output a lot more ‘boom’ at a lot greater distance using its air wing (while its air wing also protects the fleet as well).
And that’s really relevant for us because we’re interesting in projecting a lot of combat power ashore, often while keeping our vulnerable ships reasonably far away from any coastal weapons. The big carrier is the sine qua non of doing this sustainably over a long period, which is why countries continue to build them: China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) certainly doesn’t think that carriers are obsolete! A carrier thus is the modern form of a ship doing shore bombardment – able to throw a lot of boom at coastal (and inland) targets – and also required if you intend to actually put troops on land (where they will require both air cover and air support).
A carrier thus makes the threat to drop the marines (US Marines, Royal Marines, etc.) on someone credible. Of course you also need marines available to be dropped and the shipping and landing infrastructure to get them to the theater and onto land. The US Navy does this via the combination of Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU) with a Expeditionary Strike Group (ESG); the former being what you are putting ashore and the latter being the ships to support doing so. Prior to that, of course, this task was done by the British; as Lord Edward Grey famously put it, “the British army should be a projectile to be fired by the Royal Navy.”
Of course, once you have that fleet, capable of moving to any given choke-point or sea lane and projecting power (including power ashore), you also need to be able to potentially sustain it there, keeping ships in supply and rotating them as necessary to maintain a continual presence until those operations ashore are complete. And that requires more than just ships, it requires a global network of logistics bases. In the Age of Steam, these were coaling stations – places where a navy could stockpile coal and other necessary supplies to resupply fleets. Of course, one coaling station wasn’t enough, you needed a connected network of them so ships traveling to distant oceans could sail from one station to the next, refilling their coal bunkers at each point. The British, of course, maintained the most expensive such network in the late 1800s and early 1900s, enabling the royal navy to operate in effectively any ocean.
During the 1900s, the United States undertook to set up a similar network and indeed one of the exercises I sometimes do with my students is noting how neatly many of the United States’ key naval bases parallel neatly the older British network, with the United States in some cases sharing or taking over the exact bases the Royal Navy had once used. That network of bases let you run supplies short distances to your fleet on station, rather than having to do shuttle runs all the way from the home country or – worse yet – be in a situation where the fleet only has the supplies it can bring with it when it departs, operating with a fixed ‘timer’ for its operations.
That said, the problem of logistics combined with how big full-sized carriers (even sub-super-carrier) are brings in another implication: you probably want nuclear-powered carriers. Fuel is one of the largest logistics needs for a fleet that is on the move or actively doing an operation and these ships need a lot of it. But the thing is, for a carrier-centered task force, the carrier is probably at least half of the total displacement of the force. A USN carrier strike group (CSG)’s displacement is around 100,000 tons of carrier, around 40,000 tons of surface ship and around 20,000 tons of submarine. The carrier and the submarines are nuclear powered, so the force is roughly 75% nuclear by weight. The advantage here is that on a practical, operational scale, nuclear carriers and submarines can operate almost indefinitely without refueling. You will run out of munitions, out of food, out of sailor’s sanity long before you need to change out the reactor fuel. Having your carriers be nucleared powered is really expensive (it requires a large body of trained nuclear technicians and engineers), but it makes global power projection much easier.
What those ingredients – a blue water navy with power-projection assets (read: carriers and amphibious warfare capability) supported by a network of logistics bases allowing them to operate globally – what those ingredients let you do is threaten force on anyone who would close down the global shipping lanes (closures that would, to be clear, violate international law under UNCLOS). Historically speaking, once this hammer is in hand, while it may have to be demonstrated form time to time, for the most part it exists as latent force. If you are doing it right, your navy should not actually be doing a lot of fighting, because everyone involved should understand you would drop the hammer if they made you, so they don’t make you.
It’s deterrence, but using a conventional military force (a navy) rather than nuclear weapons.
So if we want to stand back for a moment, we can say one of the main purposes of large power-projection navies is to deter disruptions to shipping. It isn’t their only purpose, of course, but it is perhaps their chief purpose.
The Unique Role of the United States Navy
So to recap before moving forward: global trade is essential for providing for modern living standards and most of that trade must move by sea. Sea lanes do not keep themselves open, historically they must by kept open, typically by a particular form of naval power, which I’ve termed a ‘power projection’ navy – one which is able to logistically sustain itself at long distances and project combat power ashore (via bombardment, air strikes and landing troops).
Doing that mission, in turn requires a navy that has a substantial supply of larger surface warships (destroyers, cruisers, as opposed to corvettes, cutters and frigates), as well as larger aircraft carriers (which provide the modern shore strike capability), supported by a robust global network of supply bases. Since no country maintains a worldwide colonial empire anymore, that robust global network of bases has to be predicated on a robust global network of allies and security partners.
And I’ll cut to the chase: at present, only the United States Navy can do this. No other country is even really on the verge of doing it, though one country may be moving in that general direction.
The first angle we can think about this through, of course, is power projection assets, which is to say, “which countries have fleet carriers, anyway?” Not very many, it turns out. The People’s Republic of China currently has three aircraft carriers, all diesel based; a fourth, rumored to be nuclear-powered and super-carrier sized, is on the way. The United Kingdom maintains two fleet carriers (the Queen Elizabeth class), which are fairly large and robust, but diesel powered. France has the Charles de Gaulle, the only other large nuclear-powered carrier deployed globally outside of the United States navy.
After that, the pickings get slim quick. India has a pair of diesel-powered carriers, but they’re both quite small. Russia had a diesel powered carrier, which it did use for power projection in the Syrian Civil War, but the Kuznetsov is both not a very good carrier and also has been inoperative and in need of repairs for almost a decade now. Then we have navies which operate some small carriers that are basically on the scale of a USN LHD or LHA: Italy and Japan have two each, Spain has one. Frankly, all of the carriers in this paragraph are too small to do serious power projection on their own (the Kuznetsov’s Mediterranean operations were in support of the former Syrian Assad regime, which also offered the Russians land bases). They can enhance a fleet which already includes a powerful air component (indeed, this is a key part of the mission for the smaller NATO carriers – they can assume that in a big operation, they’ll have a friendly Nimitz, Ford, Queen Lizzie or Chuck d’G to support), but they cannot offer the necessary combat power on their own.
A lot of European naval procurement has assumed that in any fight, NATO navies would be fighting alongside the United States Navy, and so what ships they have built are often aimed at supplementing that core capability, rather than replicating it. One manifestation of this is that a number of European navies have better minesweeping capabilities than the USN, a sensible burden-sharing arrangement that proved awkward when the United States unilaterally went to war with Iran without consulting any of our allies.
It turns out that it is good to have allies and even better to consult them with your plans.
When the current crisis in the Hormuz began, I saw people asking why European or Chinese navies didn’t intervene to keep the shipping lanes open, especially given that it was their oil being blocked. And the answer here is quite simple: they couldn’t. It is one thing to have a military capability at home. It is something very different to be able to project that power overseas and right now the only country that has a full suite of power projection assets is the United States.
We’ve already discussed above the limitations imposed by non-nuclear-powered carriers: maintaining them at sea for long periods is a lot more logistically intensive, which is why countries that think they might be doing power projection missions with carriers tend to at least think really hard about having them be nuclear powered. That said, the travails of the Royal Navy really speak to how hard this is to do – and why so few small countries do it. Maintaining a bespoke military nuclear program that can design and maintain a meaningful number of compact nuclear reactors is no small task. For four decades the Royal Navy has struggled to actually decommission old nuclear-powered submarines7 in part because they have a hard time getting enough nuclear technicians to supervise removing and safely disposing of the reactors in them.
The United States Navy pours a tremendous amount of resources into training nuclear propulsion specialists. Indeed, this is something I’ve interacted with directly, because I teach at a university that has both a Navy ROTC program and a research reactor. When I taught US Naval History, required by the NROTC program, a lot (more than half, I think) of my NROTC students were nuclear engineering majors. Smaller countries are simply going to struggle to generate enough nuclear technicians and engineers to sustain such a program without a huge, dedicated national effort.
Nevertheless, not (currently) having nuclear-powered carriers puts meaningful limits on China and the UK’s ability to employ their carriers on power projection missions. That, of course, interacts with the systems of global basing. Here, I think China’s experience in anti-piracy operations off of Somalia is actually really instructive. The PLAN has been sending task forces to operate in the Gulf of Aden since 2008 when the issues there became acute. But despite the fact that there are signs that the People’s Republic of China is trying to assemble a network of bases through the Indian Ocean (termed by western analysts a ‘string of pearls’), the structure of PLAN missions was pretty consistent: each force was one frigate, one destroyer and one supply ship. Each mission lasts about 180 days, including travel time from China, time on station and the return trip.
That short duration is pretty striking, because the c. 15,000 ton displacement (not including the support ship) PLAN squadrons here have roughly the same amount of support ship (one ship, in the 20,000 tons displacement range) as many American carrier strike groups (as noted above, a CSG is 160,000 tons displacement – ten times the size; it has far more combat power), but these exercises remain small and comparatively short. The suspicion one has is that what is happening here is that each of these squadrons is leaving the Chinese mainland with most of the supplies they are going to get on their one supply ship (which represents more than half of the total displacement of the squadron!) and so they have to transit all the way back home when that runs out. There is a Chinese naval base in Djibouti that must also be playing a key logistics role here, but the short duration and small size of the PLAN forces really is suggestive of the approach here. This approach, of course, is hardly sufficient to allow the PLAN to deploy basically anything in the Atlantic or Eastern Pacific or basically anywhere except the west Pacific and Indian Ocean.
At that scale, for the PLAN to deploy the combat-power equivalent of an American CSG to the western Indian Ocean (which, because their flight decks are smaller, would require basically all of them) would probably require nearly the entire PLAN logistics fleet and strain PLAN logistics such that the fleet couldn’t be kept there long and would be very vulnerable if it did not accomplish its objective very rapidly. In naval warfare, you do not want to be caught in a fight at the ragged end of your logistics tether with low fuel or munitions.
Now the PLAN apparently is building a nuclear-powered carrier. They are trying to begin setting up networks of logistics bases. That suggests at least some interest in the PRC in moving towards a global power projection navy, though I would note that history is replete with countries that started to invest in that kind of navy only to revert back to regional defense navies when it became clear just how jaw-droppingly expensive such a navy would be. In either case naval strategy is built strategy and the PLAN probably has at least a decade to go before they have the rudiments of a truly global power projection navy, even if they steamed there at full speed.
Which brings us to a key conclusion: at present, only the United States Navy is capable of performing the kind of power projection which sustained maritime commerce and at present, no other navy is particularly close to being able to replicate that capability. The two most obvious candidates to replace the United States would presumably be China or some kind of combined EU Navy, but it is not clear that China is actually interested in maintaining global maritime commerce beyond their own and a combined EU Navy on the USN’s scale would face tremendous political and economic hurdles, to say the least.
For now, the United States Navy is the only game in town.
Which, it turns out, may be a problem.
Implications
You may have noticed that the infrastructure of global maritime security is fraying lately. Indeed, I would argue, it has been fraying for quite some time.
Although establishing a direct causation is impossible, the fact that the beginnings of these issues correlate to the point at which the United States’ Global War on Terror began to go south and thus the American public began (understandably) decisively souring on America’s traditional role as the guarantor of the global system does not seem like an accident.8 Instead, it has led to the current baleful condition where in the United States is the only state capable of actually sustaining the global maritime system but at the same time is anywhere from indifferent to actively hostile to it.
The earliest of the current woes back back to the mid-aughts with the rise of piracy off of the coast of Somalia. That piracy intensified dramatically in 2008 and 2009, though by 2013 or so a robust international effort had largely clamped down on pirate activity. Starting in 2023, however, the United States was not able to fully restore shipping through the Bab-el-Mandeb, a crucial maritime choke-point (it’s where traffic moving through the Suez and the Red Sea gets to the Indian Ocean). Traditionally, the American response – all the way since the First Barbary War (1801-1805) to a state (and the Houthis are, in practice, the government of large parts of Yemen) disrupting its shipping in this manner would be to invade and topple that regime. Instead, for very obvious reasons, the political will to land the marines in Yemen simply didn’t exist, so the response was instead Operation Prosperity Guardian, an effort to accomplish the mission through ship defense and air strikes.
Then, of course, early in 2026, the United States started a major regional war with Iran which resulted in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. What is striking about this decision is that deciding to go to war with Iran required disregarding freedom of navigation – traditionally an overriding American strategic interest – as unimportant. Of course some of that was simply because the war’s planners – being dumb as hell – assumed they would accomplish a quick and easy victory. But equally it is hard not to notice that the decision to disregard freedom of navigation – at least until the oil price spike reminded everyone why it was important – came from an administration that is also the first American presidency to be openly hostile to global trade since the 1930s. Moreover, once again the political will in the United States for ground operations which might restore trade simply does not exist.9
I want to note something actually quite important here: the war in Iran does not represent a failure of US maritime deterrence, but an abandonment of it. Prior to the decision to launch a massive decapitation and regime-change strike on the Iranian Regime, the United States was deterring Iran from doing the very obvious thing and using its geographic leverage over the strait as a tool against its regional rivals (the Arab Gulf states). The Iranian Regime operated under the quite reasonable conclusion that if it did try to shut down shipping in that region, the United States might respond with overwhelming strikes, perhaps aimed at regime change. That threat was sufficient to achieve deterrence.
The problem, of course is that once you do those attacks anyway they no longer have deterrence value: you cannot threaten someone with something you are already doing. You especially cannot threaten someone with a bullet you have already fired and cannot fire again. Once the Iranian Regime was placed in an existential (for it) war, they had no reason not to close the strait or assert their control over it and so of course they promptly did so. Iran didn’t decide it could ‘take’ the American retaliation and thus decide to close the straight, it realized it was already taking the maximum American retaliation and so would pay no greater cost for closing the strait. The United States, in attempting regime change in Iran abandoned its maritime deterrence.
But the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz isn’t even the only current maritime crisis. There have also been renewed attacks on shipping in the Bab-el-Mandeb but even more than this, Putin’s War in Ukraine has taken dramatically to the waves with Ukrainian efforts to shut down Russian exports to strangle the Russian war economy and Russian retaliation. While Iranian disruptions of shipping in the Strait of Hormuz have involved striking a few ships here or there (adding up to more the 70 such attacks since the war began), Ukraine is operating on a much larger scale, having struck more than 200 ships in just a couple of months.
The United States is retrenching and in some cases is even becoming actively hostile to the global international order. Consequently, every other country in the world must confront the possibility of a future in which the United States Navy does not guarantee the global maritime system. In the period from 1914 to 1945, as Great Britain increasingly found that it lacks the economic resources to maintain its role as the global guarantor of that system, the United States was both ready and willing to act, first as a partner (from 1918 to 1945) and eventually as the primary guarantor. There was a country to pass the baton to.
What the above analysis is meant, in part, to show is that there is no country to pass the baton to now, nor does one appear likely to emerge soon. The PLAN is, as noted, likely many years away from being able to pick of the mantle, but more to the point it is not clear that the PRC is interested in doing so. The PRC’s policy in its nearer seas has not been ‘a rising tide lifts all boats,’ but a mix of dominance politics and beggar-thy-neighbor revanchism. When disaster strikes coastlines, the United States Navy has, historically, been a key player in humanitarian relief efforts, the PLAN much less so. When in 2013 a major typhoon hit the Philippines, the United States sent $37m in disaster relief and a humanitarian relief force that included numerous ships including a complete carrier-strike group. Those fleet carriers are useful for projecting firepower ashore, but they’re also really useful for delivering humanitarian aid in conditions where ports, roads and railroads may be inoperative. By comparison, the PRC sent $200,000 and one hospital ship.
The thing is, there is no way to build a power-projection navy quickly and there really is no way to build it cheaply. Modern warships take time to build and cost a lot of money and effectively projecting power globally hinges on the most expensive and difficult to build platforms. Starting a naval buildup from nothing is not too hard – because you are not carrying the running costs of existing ships – but that stops being the case as your fleet expands. The United States Navy costs on the order of $230-280bn per year. Another country might do it cheaper, but even something like half that cost would require even the wealthiest countries to massively increase their military budget. China may be building up to this kind of navy, but they are years (probably decades) away and likely would need to expand their capital ship fleet something like three-fold, which is hardly a trivial expense.
But as we’ve established, the United States Navy is effectively a load-bearing component of the global economy. While obviously not all trade would cease if the United States dissembled its fleets, the crisis in Hormuz seems to make it fairly clear that maritime trade would be both reduced and quite a bit more expensive. And the economics of long-distance bulk transport mean that land- and air-based options simply cannot replace maritime shipping. If the trade lanes are not kept open, they may not close completely, but history suggests they will narrow.
One counter-argument here is to assert that, unlike in previous centuries, there simply aren’t enough states on major choke-points with an incentive to close them down to make this a problem. I think the last few years have thrown up considerable challenges to this notion, as we see states and non-state actors doing exactly that in the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf – and regional powers unable to resolve the problem. As we saw above, that is the normal historical pattern, slowly reasserting itself and I think, if American retrenchment continues, we ought to expect that to continue.
Now of course even in that future, global trade doesn’t simply stop altogether. It simply becomes more constrained, more limited and more expensive. Some goods become less available, ships have to take the long way around or pay expensive tolls, perhaps in some areas they have to mount greater security precautions and all of those costs get passed to the consumer. Armed merchantmen were common in some periods of history, but it is worth noting that arming merchant ships has never been sufficient to fully protect a merchant marine, for the obvious reason that the defending country must split their defenses across their many, many ships whereas the pirates or rogue states may concentrate all of their force on a single ship of their choosing.
In that world of constrained global trade, we wouldn’t expect some apocalyptic total economic collapse. But some goods that are commonly available – out-of-season or out-of-climate fruit, for instance – might mostly vanish from store shelves. Goods in advanced economies would become more expensive and living standards would decline, as wealthy countries would – on the margin – have to ‘on-shore’ low value-added industries which would pay worse wages, while at the same time the products themselves (imported or domestically made) got more expensive. Autarky – the effort to make most or all of a country’s needed goods domestically – is and always will be a losing economic strategy, because it forgoes comparative advantage. But a marked increase in the cost of trade, a reduction in the availability of imported goods will push wealthy countries in that direction and their economic growth will slow as a result.
What is inconvenient for rich countries, however, will arrive as catastrophe to poor countries who, as noted above, will find their opportunities for development curtailed and their access to affordable necessities limited.
Thus my assessment is that the American voter is making a terrible mistake. On the waves, there is at present no alternative to American naval power and the result of its absence will be a poorer United States. Indeed, Americans are right now living through a small taste of what that world looks like, as the current administration’s decision to abandon freedom of navigation as a priority brings almost immediate karma in the form of higher prices for crude oil, diesel and gasoline.10 Of course a lot of oil has been re-routed around the blockage in Hormuz either via pipelines or sneaking it through via ship-to-ship transfers, but all of that entails additional costs which raises prices.
The problem, of course, is that it has taken me 10,000 words to walk through why this is so – why global trade matters, why specifically maritime trade matters, what the USN’s role in that is and why we cannot simply easily ‘burden shift’ to another country. And the median voter does not have the time in their day to take in a 10,000 word lecture on naval strategy and economics. This was always a policy that relied upon the unified commitment of the elite, for the folks actually running these things to present a collective understanding to their voters that these capabilities were essential.11 Although the facts on the ground have not meaningfully changed, that elite consensus has broken and so here we are.
It is worth remembering that a worse, poorer world is possible, so that we do not become its authors.
- Which is fine. Mahan is very focused on the benefits sea power can bring one country (the one that has it) and much less interested in the idea that sea power can provide a collective benefit to most or all countries, but it is the latter question I am focused on here.
- The standard statistic here that I’ve seen is ‘trade openness’ which is imports and exports combined as a measure of global GDP. But for the question of ‘how much global GDP are goods moving country-to-country, that counts each transaction twice (once as an import and once as an export) so we have to halve the figure.
- American GDP contracted by 30% during the Great Depression, so you could also say, “it would be like the Great Depression in the United States.” Those were, I recall being told often by my grandparents who were kids at the time, not the best of times.
- And of course the existence of a British Empire was a meaningful factor in that.
- Or, in some cases, services, enabled by modern information technology.
- The same is true for embargoes with collateral sanctions. Declaring ‘no one else can do civilian trade with XYZ country’ and attempting to enforce it militarily is against the rules, but declaring ‘anyone who trades with XYZ country cannot trade with us’ is not. The result is that the largest economies everyone trades with (the United States, the EU, in theory China but they haven’t used this leverage) can shut down quite a lot of ‘above board’ trade to a given smaller enemy country. That is, in practice, how sanctions against Iran or Russia work: Iran and Russia may not care if the United States sanctions their businesses, but their international business partners do (because they also do business in the USA or the EU), which either cuts off business or requires it to move through deniable intermediaries (thus, in part, the ‘shadow fleet’), which imposes substantial additional costs. It’s another example of how the great powers essentially wrote the rules in a way that favors their tools and disfavors the tools of other countries.
- Nuclear power provides even more benefit to submarines than to carriers (you can keep a nuclear powered submarine submerged for very long periods of time, while moving at full speed), which is why you see countries that have nuclear-powered submarines but not nuclear-powered carriers
- I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that there’s a good argument to make that the War in Iraq (2003-2011) also represents an abandonment of the United States’ global role, but that is a sticky question for another day. What matters here is that perceived failure in the GWOT is very specifically and explicitly a foundation of the current ‘America First’ movement which evidently isn’t against intervention per se, but is against intervention to uphold the Status Quo global order.
- To be clear, reasonably so, I would argue (and indeed, have argued). Such operations would be enormously costly in both blood and treasure. Instead, a United States truly committed to freedom of navigation would have judged that whatever was to be gained by a war with Iran (not much, in the event) was not worth the disruption to that key strategic interest.
- As an aside, while politicians focus a lot on gas prices – the distillate that people feel hitting their wallet – in the long term diesel is a bigger deal. Everything in your local store required diesel to get from a warehouse to the shelf (via a truck). Higher diesel prices thus push up the price of basically everything a little bit.
- To expand briefly: voters quite reasonably do not have time to be educated on every issue. They take their cues from their elites, from the political and cultural leaders who they understand to have a similar worldview as their own. If the political elites all seem to accept something, the public will generally accept that as true (that’s why it is so useful to be able to present things as ‘bipartisan’ in the United States). But you lose that ‘accepted reality’ if one set of political elites disagrees, as we’ve seen with issues like vaccine and climate change where there is no real doubt about the facts, but the public thinks there is, because the political system acts like there is. The same is true here and honestly the problem is that maritime security and gains through trade are so counter-intuitive to many folks that holding a political consensus to spend two hundred billion dollars a year – even though that spending is probably a net gain for Americans – seems very difficult indeed.
_USS_Laboon_(DDG-58)_Forbin_(D620)_ITS_Cavour_(CVH_550)_RedSea_7_June_2024.png){kind=link}
Typo hunt:
“while it may have to be demonstrated form time to time,”
ITYM “from”
(I am *constantly* making that typo myself.)
“to be able to afford to important the experts”
-> to import the experts
“80% of All Good Transported Globally Move By Sea” (section heading)
-> Goods
“This ends up leading to a series of relatively Roman commands against pirates”
I don’t know if this is a typo, but I’m not sure what “relatively Roman” means here
“notice just how much of an inconvenience restricts on the Strait of Hormuz have been”
-> restrictions
“noting how neatly many of the United States’ key naval bases parallel neatly the older British network”
1st “neatly” is redundant.
“with land transport for a given quantity of bulk staples being twenty times as expensive as land transport”
-> sea transport
Another:
“the ratio of cost (derived from Diocletian’s Price Edict) for transport between land, river and sea was 20:4:1, with land transport for a given quantity of bulk staples being twenty times as expensive as land transport. “
“land transport for a given quantity of bulk staples being twenty times as expensive as land transport” – as sea transport
“It is thus far to say that global trade” – thus to say
“disregarding freedom of navigation – traditionally an overriding American strategic interest – as unimportant” – disregarding as unimportant is a double negative. I’m not sure this is strictly wrong English but it feels weird to me
Somehow the link “comparative advantage” goes to “competitive advantage” on Wikipedia.
It’s an interesting essay, but I can’t help noticing that it never addresses the denial of freedom of navigation that is the decades-long blockade of Cuba, or the US Navy pirating ships heading to Iran even before the shitshow war broke out.
The US, AFAIK, does not actually blockade Cuba.* It has an embargo on a bunch of types of trade with Cuba and (unusually and arguably illegaly) extends this embargo to third parties who are also trading in the US, but they’re not actually preventing foreign trade with Cuba by having ships sunk or non-US detained ships wanting to trade there.
Effectively they’re making the various parties involved pick between having US or Cuba as a trading partner (which for the vast majority of companies, is not a hard choice)
(The distinction is that an embargo or a sanction is a legal barrier: A blockade is physical, you have actual ships sinking or seizing ships trying to contravene the terms of the blockade)
* Normally, they did during the Cuban Missile Crisis, though even there they formally called it a “quarantine”, not a blockade.
I think they’re blockading Cuba starting around when they attacked Venezuela, but it might just be they’ve intensified the embargo enough their regular trading partners are no longer willing to make the trip.
It doesn’t have a decades-long blockade of Cuba, as you say. It does have a months-long blockade of Cuba, since January; but that’s under the famously lawless second Trump administration!
And of course it is entirely possible for company A, based in, say, Singapore, to sell goods to company B, also based in Singapore, who then takes an order from Cuba that is, by a wild coincidence, for very similar sounding goods.
Oh and companies A and B are owned by a variety of shell companies who, if you traced it through carefully, are the same people.
That sort of setup has also been done in various other situations and industries. For example, there was a period where the PRC informed airlines they got to choose between having flights to the PRC or to Taiwan, but not both. Several airlines solved this by creating internal subsidiaries, with zero subterfuge. As in, the name of the subsidiary was clearly related, and it basically shared branding with the parent.
Of course this does end up resulting in higher prices. Cuban cigars and other luxuries have never been effectively banned, but all those shell companies get to charge a middle man markup to the supplier and consumer. The artificial scarcity rewards criminal enterprise and hikes prices, but almost never actually stops goods.
This is part of the larger critique of the war on drugs too; without drugs being illegal we probably wouldn’t have the cartels. Many of them grew from political movements, but what kept them profitable was their ability to charge exorbitant rates on goods that an extremely basic chemistry lesson can teach you to synthesize or which you can grow with primeval techniques. The counter argument is that reducing drug consumption through pricing out consumers is worth it, but that’s often been a post facto argument…even if it’s *right*.
IIRC the ships seized going to Iran were violating international law by portraying themselves as ships from countries that they had not been registered with.
it never addresses the denial of freedom of navigation that is the decades-long blockade of Cuba, or the US Navy pirating ships heading to Iran even before the shitshow war broke out.
I’d also add things like the US mining Nicaraguan harbors in the 1980s (which triggered a court case at the International Court of Justice, which ruled against the United States). The Reagan administration ignored the ruling, because of course they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaragua_v._United_States
I didn’t know of this! For my part, I would add the US support for Chiang Kai-shek’s attempted blockade of Communist state shipping heading to Mao’s China, which lasted for 30 years. The silence on this whole event in the English historiography is SO deafening that the first decent online source I could find on this had been this paper in Cold War History academic journal, published a mere three years ago.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14682745.2023.2206650
@YARD,
That’s outrageous. And you’re right, it isn’t much talked about. Even I had no idea (and I’m fairly reflexively opposed to most US foreign policy historically, so it’s the kind of thing I would zoom in on if I had known about it).
I wonder how much impact it had on the Chinese economy in those years.
Honestly, the more I think about it, the greater its implications appear. As we all know, the conventional narrative of post-WWII China goes approximately like this: crazy Mao takes power and decides to run an autarky because that’s what he wanted to; proceeds to kill sparrows and cause a mass famine, then does a Cultural Revolution, then Nixon meets him and gets him to cooperate, and then he dies and Xiaoping takes over, decides “to get rich is glorious” and opens up the country to trade.
As the above shows, this narrative conveniently elides that Mao effectively didn’t have much of a choice to pursue export-led globalization in the first place; not in the face of constant attacks on shipping from Taiwan, which had nothing less than the reversal of the hard-fought outcome of the civil war as their goal (Truman did voice the proposal of co-governance at one point, but that would have been almost as untenable; there was virtually no trust, given that it was Chiang Kai-shek who turned the civil war hot with purges of Communists a couple years before the full-scale Japanese invasion in 1937.)
Granted, I suppose the PRC and the USSR cooperating to place the breaking of Taiwan’s sea and air power as their top priority might have set the conditions for it earlier, but that would have been very, very hard, given e.g. the outcome of the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis (where the US provided Taiwan with Sidewinders – then brand-new technology which had to be reverse-engineered by the USSR, had no known countermeasures yet, and was deployed in some of the most optimal conditions imaginable, over the relatively cool ocean air; for a long time, these missiles were much less useful than guns when deployed in the Middle East.)
https://historynet.com/fox-two/
(Admittedly, a counterargument is that the PRC capable of enjoying trade as free as the Soviet Union wouldn’t have been under pressure to pivot as hard as it did under Xiaoping. On the other hand, it is plausible that greater integration with global (especially non-Second World) trade would have provided much more of an alternative to Lysenkoist views and hence averted or mitigated the Great Leap Forward’s famine.)
” it was Chiang Kai-shek who turned the civil war hot with purges of Communists a couple years before the full-scale Japanese invasion in 1937.)”
This is very far from the truth! Large-scale violent insurrections by the CCP against the Chinese government began in 1927, which was not only before the full-scale Japanese invasion but even before Mukden.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanchang_Uprising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autumn_Harvest_Uprising
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guangzhou_Uprising
I was referring to White Terror (estimated to have killed 100,000 over some three years at the absolute minimum, and up to a million in the highest estimates), which began with Chiang Kai-shek declaring martial law in Shanghai on April 9, 1927, the most senior Communist figure there (Wang Shouhua, head of Communist-aligned labor union) strangled at a dinner with Du Yuesheng, the leader of Chiang Kai-shek-aligned triad “the Green Gang” (which also controlled the 2nd-largest union in Shanghai) on April 11, and a full-blown massacre of other Communists and sympathizers the following day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_massacre
Nanchang Uprising began on 1 August 1927, Autumn Harvest Uprising began, well, in autumn, and the Guangzhou Uprising was in December of that year. April comes before August (and there were also other White Terror massacres in between, such as July ones in Shaanxi) so no, linear time shows that Chiang Kai-shek started the civil war. (Of course, he hoped Mao and others wouldn’t fight back – but tough luck.)
Having said that, you are absolutely right that I misspoke when timing these events relative to Japanese aggression; the correct phrase to use would have been a couple years before the Mukden aggression, not the full-scale invasion in 1937.
You’re quite right, April does come before August. But I have a question for you in return:
Does March come before April?
“In response to the advances of the NRA, Communists in Shanghai began to plan uprisings against the warlord forces controlling the city. On 21–22 March, KMT and CCP union workers, led by Zhou Enlai and Chen Duxiu, launched an armed uprising in Shanghai and defeated the warlord forces of the Zhili clique. The victorious union workers occupied and governed urban Shanghai except for the international settlements prior to the arrival of the NRA’s Eastern Route Army…”
That’s from the link that you provided, by the way.
Yes and? Perhaps you should re-read what you have just quoted?
…How can you read this, copy this into a comment box, and not realize that the KMT (you know that means Chiang Kai-Shek, I hope?) and the CCP were working together and planned this together? Same as
I.e. they were waiting for NRA (which means Chiang Kai-Shek’s army!), thinking of them as an ally!
Really, ajay, are you actually under the impression that the Zhili warlords were in any way aligned with Chiang Kai-Shek? If so, then: oh dear. At the time, he was literally leading the expedition intending (and succeeding) at subduing them, which began the previous year!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Expedition
You’re still misrepresenting what that article says, and your assumptions about what I know and believe are incorrect.
@YARD
Saying that Chiang turned the Civil War hot is a bit of a misnomer.
He is the one who split the Communists off from the KMT in the already ongoing Chinese Civil War.
I think you are really overselling how much Mao would have done export oriented trade in the absence of a Taiwan blockade.
Mao embraced autarky because he had learned it during the Civil War. He did not trust foreign powers.
The Great Leap Forward starvation was not caused by the killing sparrows incident. That’s just one of the more headline grabbing dumb parts of it.
The Great Leap Forward was first putting people onto collective farms, the output dropping, and the local cadres not reporting the drop in output because this came from the top. That would have been just bad.
BUT…
The cadres were incentivized to report amazing success! The collective farms were producing bumper crops! Cadres competed to have the most amazing stories of agricultural excellence.
So what? Who cares if local governments are fibbing about production numbers to get good press in the People’s Daily.
Well, this is actually a problem.
The PRC was a cash poor society. Lots of tax obligations for people, towns, prefectures, etc. were paid in kind. The good people of Liangshan owe 15% of their crop to the central government.
Liangshan grew 3,000 tons of grain before the Great Leap. After it is collectivized it grows 2000 tons of grain. The official, wanting to impress his higher ups, says that collectivization increased productivity by 10. They grew 30,000 tons! Amazing!
It is all very impressive. But it also means that Liangshan has 4,500 tons of grain taken away. And people starve.
Ok, so maybe it sucks for that village, but the government is getting the grain, surely they can redistribute it and mitigate the starvation?
No.
China was poor.
China wanted industrial and military equipment from the rest of the Soviet bloc.
China was paying for that equipment with the food stuffs it requisitioned. Much of the food the government was taking during the Great Leap was being shipped to Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the USSR, etc.
It isn’t a coincidence that the eastern bloc was able to end rationing in the 1950’s. They were eating the food of Chinese peasants.
Halfway through the Great Leap, local officials had kind of noticed the starvation. They wanted to stop. But Mao didn’t want to. He needed tanks and planes and trains and that meant he needed Chinese foodstuffs to pay for them.
I don’t think you can really call it a blockade when you are doing it to your own country. And the ROC at the time was recognized as the legitimate claimant over all of China.
Much like Israel’s use of military force (including the occupation), it can’t be a police operation when convenient and a war when convenient.
If it was a police operation against rebel forces, then the ROC was very clearly engaging in African-warlord-level human rights violations against her own citizens by callously and deliberately suppressing their legitimate economic activity (including existential one such as getting food to starving people). Since the ROC was an explicitly Han-supremacist state at the time, there is a colorable charge of attempted genocide against all the non-Han minorities living in continental China (ironic enough given how much the Dalai Lama was being paraded by anti-communist propaganda in those same years).
If it was an interstate war (which, come on, obviously it was), then the rules of war apply and they were flagrantly violated for obvious reasons.
A blockade is a legal act of war. It’s when there’s *not* a war (and yes, civil wars count) that it’s just piracy.
Well, as the very paper I quoted says, it is apparently legally impossible for any action done by a state to be qualified as “piracy” – at least as far as the 1958 UN Convention on the High Seas goes. For that matter, this also means the following line in the blog itself
is blatantly incorrect – so long as a state does it, it’s not piracy, and whether it was announced or unannounced has nothing to do with that. One could argue that perhaps the definition had evolved since 1958 – but according to the UNCLOS definition I found via Wikipedia…no, not really?
(I’ll also add that according to this definition, attacks on ships from land, as opposed to another ship or an aircraft, do not appear to count at all.)
P.S. RE
Oh, mind telling it to the Associated Press? According to you, they were wrong to refer to the actions done by Azerbaijan to Nagorno-Karabakh across the first 8 months of 2023 as a blockade (before it was terminated by their own 2-day offensive recapturing the entire region), since virtually every single nation-state had always recognized Nagorno-Karabakh as Azeri, even across those ~30 years when it was not the case de facto?
https://apnews.com/article/armenia-azerbaijan-nagorno-karabakh-blockade-un-33c87875e12be044359d692d19a9eec8
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanbi_policy#:~:text=The%20Guanbi%20policy%20%28Chinese%3A%20%E9%97%9C%E9%96%89%E6%94%BF%E7%AD%96%3B%20lit.%20%27closure%20policy%27%29%2C,the%20newly%20established%20People%27s%20Republic%20of%20China%20%28PRC%29.
Fair – but note how this article has just 9 references and only 4 of those are in English – and of those, 3 are literally contemporary; a piece in the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute published in 1950, another in Foreign Relations of the United States, 1949, Volume VIII and another Foreign Relations of the United States, 1952–1954. The one recent-ish (2010) English-language source is from Taiwan’s National Chengchi University.
In all, it only reinforces my point that there’s been an effective conspiracy of silence and/or wilful ignorance in Anglophone/Western media on this subject in recent years. Yes, it’s great that thanks to the efforts of Wikipedians, anyone who reads the articles on history of Taiwan/20th-century China history top-to-bottom and follows the links would know of this; but let’s be honest, how many people have the time and the inclination to essentially double-check anything their media writes about other countries via Wikipedia? (Even if such a response appears to be more and more justified with every passing year.)
P.S. Speaking of following Wikipedia links; here’s a fascinating tale of a WWII USN ship which ended up sold to Taiwan and deployed in this blockade until the PRC managed to sink it in 1954 with USSR-origin torpedo boats that were themselves a slightly evolved WWII design.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Decker#Post-War
That’s really interesting… but not unexpected?
Bret Devereaux isn’t arguing that the US Navy was committed to freedom of the seas even for its antagonists. It benefits the US to have the freedom of the seas be an ideal and have a public commitment to that ideal.
It doesn’t follow that the US Navy will actively guarantee freedom of the seas for hostile actors. Especially in this case where it technically wasn’t the US interdicting the ships, but rather the Republic of China asserting trade sovereignty over their territorial waters.
The PRC was not recognized by the US until 1971.
The Chinese Communists had shot at and killed American marines in both 1946 and during the Korean War.
The US Navy in the 1953 is actively fighting the Chinese communists in Korea.
Of course they are going to turn a blind eye or even assist the ROC in interdicting shipping to the PRC.
It would odder if they didn’t.
It’s like how people learning about WW2 are surprised to find out that Japan didn’t attack or sink the Soviet US pacific convoys.
Why are they surprised?
Because when you are at war, sinking all the shipping going to your enemy is a given.
We declare the Chinese Civil War over in 1949. But neither Mao nor Chiang believed it was. Disrupting shipping going to your enemy in WAR TIME is fine.
Well, the entire argument about the USN being instrumental to global prosperity post-WWII looks a lot shakier if for much of that period, it had actively encouraged a polity to disrupt one of the most valuable sea lanes there is for the sake of a war it had very obviously lost by then.
Moreover, the arguments you have used here do not explain why the USN had also done effectively nothing about Egypt closing the Suez Canal after the Six-Day War, and not relenting until a couple years after losing the Yom Kippur War. (See another one of my comments.) Egypt had been Soviet-aligned for effectively the entire time (around 8 years) that it kept the Canal closed, and its canal closure mostly targeted US-friendly countries – yet, no “shore bombardment” or attacks on Egyptian navy, never mind a marine landing.
I suppose the simple explanation is that neither Johnson nor Nixon wanted to effectively vindicate Eden’s actions from the previous decade and repudiate Eisenhower at the same time. Whatever the reason though, it begs a question: if the postwar USN was neither protecting the freedom of navigation in the South and East China Seas, nor in the Suez Canal, where exactly was that protection happening, then?
P.S. This blog makes the argument (or rather, it cites Bernard Lewy making that argument earlier) that the 1967-1975 closure of the Suez was substantially more damaging to the USSR than to the US; but even if we accept that, the notion of the US tactically allowing a non-friendly country to undermine freedom of navigation with great effects on allied European economies as well again indicates that “the ideal” was no such thing.
https://thegamming.org/2014/08/31/how-the-closure-of-the-suez-canal-changed-the-world/
Did you ever read Mark Carney’s speech about international law? He gave it at Davos less than a year ago. https://www.weforum.org/stories/forum-institutional/davos-2026-special-address-by-mark-carney-prime-minister-of-canada/
“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.”
This is the core of the idea.
You are trying to puncture an ideal that was never actually completely true, and people knew it wasn’t completely true.
The US and US Navy generally behaved as if freedom of navigation was an important ideal and the rest of the world signed onto it. That this wasn’t a 100% commitment at all times for all situations is a surprise to ….no one except you, apparently.
Devereaux isn’t arguing that the US kept to this ideal all the time. He is arguing that the commitment was credible enough to be useful and it was worth maintaining that credibility.
Was it worth getting into a shooting war with the Egypt in the 1970’s? No.
Was it worth stopping an ally from messing up the PRC’s trade when the PRC is avowed enemy of the US and actively KILLING US personnel?
No.
Can you imagine Eisenhower going to a press briefing and saying, “By the way, we told the ROC to knock off the interdiction of shipping to China because we believe so strongly in Freedom of Navigation. In other news, 330 American servicemen died in combat last week in Korea against the PVA.”
The US was at war with the PRC in from 1950 to 1954. It doesn’t hurt you credibility on the Freedom of the Seas ideal when you allow an enemy who you are AT WAR WITH to be blockaded. The fact that China was technically also at war with the entire world (via the UN) makes this even more cut and dry.
“We believe in freedom of the seas, except for those countries who find themselves at war with almost the entire planet.” Most countries would think, “Yeah, seems fair.”
Is that why “ships from Denmark, Great Britain, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Panama and the USSR” were all trying to get there before Taiwan detained them? Either that’s a very strange kind of war, or that’s a lot of the planet it was clearly not at war with!
If you meant to refer to the Korean ceasefire, then that was in 1953. Either way, the Taiwanese policy in question lasted until 1979.
Yes, the usual guff; exactly the same as that which decorates a brand of toilet paper known as The Atlantic. That sniveling line, “we could pursue values-based foreign policies” is a particular lark, given how the government of the same party he now leads had enthusiastically sold billions of dollars’ worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia as they were gleefully committing war crimes in Yemen – outright violating the international law according to Amnesty International.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/8/11/canada-violating-intl-law-by-selling-arms-to-saudis-report
He’s forced to repeat all these shibboleths because otherwise the inescapable conclusion is that the right thing to do would have been to begin balancing against the US from somewhere around the time he led the UK’s Central Bank, if not earlier, but that reflects badly on his record.
Then where would it have been worth it, then? Somalia, apparently? (Which, as already noted, is a terrible argument for the indispensability of the present-day configuration of the USN, barely involving the assets this blog keeps insisting are load-bearing.)
And every single instance where the US either actively restricted freedom of navigation itself, enabled an ally to do so, or stood back while the others did it undermines his argument! How many exceptions to a commitment is it possible to stack up before one is forced to conclude there was never any real commitment, actually?
It’s really looking like the inverse of that classic “What have the Romans ever done for us?” sketch.
Damn it, the formatting broke up my stanzas and it doesn’t look quite as I intended it to. Oh well, I’m sure the meter is all wrong anyway; there’s a reason it takes a year or more to produce an album with a dozen or so songs on it.
On second thoughts, funny that the Tanker War part of this quick exercise is just about technically correct with “40 years past”, as Operation Earnest Will did take place (someone would have sooner or later brought it up to me), but in 1987 – i.e. 39 years ago. One could claim it’s an unfair accusation since the USN ultimately did intervene to protect shipping…at least 3 years and dozens of attacks after it began. (And technically, Iraq had declared it would attack ships as early as 1981, which already ought to have entailed a response according to the strong version of the “load-bearing USN” thesis, but there may not have been recorded attacks until 1984?)
(And if anyone presents “Iraq was entitled to attack shipping going to its enemy as a combatant (never mind it started the war of territorial conquest in the first place)” as an argument – the blog explicitly treats Ukrainian attacks on shipping to and from Russian ports in the Black Sea as a failure of enforcing freedom of navigation, so not punishing Iraq for initiating the Tanker War ought to likewise count under this same standard.)
P.S. While it didn’t happen at sea, it’s remarkable that the events directly preceding the Iran-Iraq War had also involved freedom of navigation – Iraq had been tolling Shatt al-Arab river at the border of both nations since 1937, until the Pahlavi Iran sensed a moment of weakness after the 1968 Ba’ath coup and refused to keep paying – and also began sponsoring the Kurdish secession. Iraq attempted to invade and capture both banks in 1975 already, was quickly defeated, and had to concede the point – but this defeat had already provided the impetus to begin a massive military build-up. Then, of course, the Revolution seemed to provide a perfect opening to deploy all of that weaponry – particularly since the purges were so far-reaching, 85 generals had been executed between Khomeini’s ascent and Saddam’s 1980 invasion. (In fairness, the very short-lived rule of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt shows what can very easily happen when a revolutionary government fails to purge the military.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shatt_al-Arab_dispute
@Andrensath, @Hector The essay doesn’t address the Spanish-American War of 1898 either. The USA has done and still does commit illegal / immoral acts against other countries. Well duh, what’s your point?
Should I assume from your comments that because the USA has done bad things, the withdrawal of the USN from the world’s oceans will be an improvement?
@scifihughf,
Depends on what that involves. You can assume that I think we’d be much better off if US naval hegemony was replaced by multilateral, international naval peace-keeping forces, which could police lawless actions by the United States just like they would police lawless actions by Putin, the Houthis, or Somalian pirates.
Are these “multilateral, international naval peace-keeping forces” in the room with us now?
Isn’t that what this blog has called the status quo coalition. It looks like that’s led by *checks notes* the US.
That blog was written a while back; I don’t think its lessons apply overmuch nowadays, when across Canada, Germany, France and the UK, more people say that it’s better to depend on China than on the U.S. under Donald Trump (57-23%, 40-24%, 34-25% and 42-34% splits in China’s favour, respectively, with “don’t knows” excluded.)
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/03/15/trump-china-europe-closer-ties-00823457
Aspirationally, perhaps.
The only material solution to this problem would be for the US to sell or donate it’s current capabilities to a coalition, which would basically need to be NATO plus the SEA nations and likely China. If the US is idealogically serious about not protecting international shipping, then this is the next best thing. It’s not like the fleet is *useful* unless you use it.
No other single nation could support the carrier fleet, and the transition would need to be managed with US aid, but a coalition of EU and Pacific nations could. Breaking it up and distributing it would have it’s own upsides and downsides, but critically it would also help ensure intervention was limited to international coalitions; no one could physically go it alone.
Of course there’s a million problems with that, the biggest being that the idealogical opposition to free trade in the US is *irrational*.
The only thing that the US fleet can do which justifies it’s cost is secure trade, so if you’re not going to do that it’s a *sunk cost*, but the people who don’t want to protect trade *also* want to cosplay the military strongman. They need the fleet to bully others to justify it’s expense, and can’t use it to extract trade because they’re both too stupid and sadistic to accept the idea of mutual benefit. But it’s been centuries since extractive empires worked; at best the autocrats will simply lie, bully a few countries and claim this is paying for the fleet, at *worst* they’ll start a war and *lose* the fleet. In between are various flavors of “fleet remains sunk cost, trade starts to break, everyone suffers” and “fleet sinks”.
And if this autocratic movement is defeated quickly and strongly enough it’s still going to be politically difficult to convince the public to sell it’s fancy war fleet.
I keep staring at this sentence and wondering whether “managed with US aid” includes, in this case, the entire burden of servicing the carriers’ nuclear reactors. Even China, France and Japan, with their extensive civilian nuclear experience, could well find it daunting to take on the maintenance of a reactor design they have not developed themselves (refer back to those two paragraphs in the blog describing the scale of the USN nuclear propulsion and contrasting them with the British travails – and they have actually constructed a number of nuclear submarines in the first place!) If a carrier is still tied to service at a US dock, this gives this proposal rather different contours than what was perhaps imagined.
Besides, three of those carriers probably cannot be meaningfully sold to anyone at present, as they are yet to have their reactor replaced – a process which apparently occurs once the carrier hits 23-25 year mark in service, and which itself takes at least 4 years*, but then ensures they are good for the next 25. Looking at the dates, it seems like Harry S. Truman** is due to enter that overhaul pretty much imminently, Ronald Reagan will probably do it before 2030 and George H. Bush before 2035. On the contrary, the initial Nimitz is due to get decommissioned soon (it’s literally 51 years old!) and 1-2 more will follow it before 2035, which is quite close. (Their replacements are also set to enter service by then, but it’s not exactly certain if the US could even be persuaded to complete their construction in such a scenario.)
Was the carrier fleet actually intended to do that in the first place, though? As in, do we have contemporary statements from its architects to this effect, as opposed to post hoc rationalizations of the present day? Since looking from the outside in, another explanation which appears similarly congruent with the facts is that the US absolutely loved strategic bombing for a very long time; perhaps hitting the apogee of absurdity over Laos, which had a population of around 2 million people in the 1960s – and had over 2 million tons of bombs dropped onto it. As such, it designed the nuclear carrier fleet even in the absence of another maritime threat remotely close to WWII Japan so that it would serve as a bomb-delivering instrument second only to B-52s, based on assumptions about bombing effectiveness which ultimately didn’t bear out.
https://www.history.com/articles/laos-most-bombed-country-vietnam-war
Here is perhaps a way to test either premise: if we imagine a counterfactual where the USN carrier fleet is allowed to succumb to benign neglect after WWII, what exactly changes? So far, no-one has been able to name a specific country (never mind several) that is apparently waiting on tenterhooks for the erasure of USN to begin/resume piracy. However, “it’s hard to make predictions, especially about the future” (this quote apparently originated in Denmark, in keeping with this week’s unexpected focus on the country), so perhaps doing this exercise with the already known leaders and landscape of the second half of the 20th century would be easier.
* (in fact, the most recent completed replacement, over on George Washington, took around 6 (2017-2023) and John C. Stennis is similar – it entered reactor overhaul process in 2021 and was once scheduled to leave it in 2025, but then it got pushed back to next month – and might get pushed back further. The notion of anyone else attempting to push a totally new reactor into such a ship is preposterous – and that of transferring a ship to a country an ocean away only to make them hand it over for the next several years is only slightly less so.
**the one which managed to have two planes fall off it last year, in addition to colliding with a Panamanian cargo ship)**the one which managed to have two planes fall off it last year, in addition to colliding with a Panamanian cargo ship)
@YARD Nations would absolutely have to pool resources to maintain the nuclear capability in the medium term, but the EU certainly doesn’t lack the technical or industrial base to do so; some of the best atomic energy programs in the world are European.
But in the short term yes, even my vague pie in the sky proposal assumes US talent is maintaining the carriers, for a year or two past their refit. That doesn’t necessarily mean the USA pays for salaries though, or pays for the fuel, as talent sniping could be involved and several countries maintain ample fuel stockpiles; what they lack is personal and supply chains for various components, but the EU might legitimately have more industrial capability than the US does by now; it’s a nuanced topic. And to step away from the EU, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan would probably have to pool resources to maintain a nuclear carrier strike group full time (i.e. have two of them they rotate).
And if course no matter what everyone would need to agree to share logistics bases.
But I think ultimately these are solvable issues, and if the will existed the US could divest itself of the fleet, or at least a majority of it, to its allies within a few years. Probably one presidential administration. I don’t think there’s any actual popular will for it, and it would be messy, but in terms of technical feasibility it’s possible.
> Was the carrier fleet actually intended to do that in the first place, though? As in, do we have contemporary statements from its architects to this effect, as opposed to post hoc rationalizations of the present day?
I’ve actually raised this point before here; I see parallels to the Romans ending the pubic wars with dominance of the Mediterranean and accidentally becoming a thalassocracy. The suppression of pirates and the establishment of a Mediterranean customs union (at sword point, naturally) was likely the result of the Romans looking at the fancy fleet they had and deciding to do something with it rather than let it rot in port. You have to spend some effort maintaining it, and you want your officers to have some experience, so you find ways to divest the costs. Pirate hunting, imperial tax collection, gunboat diplomacy…they are doing things for someone who has a fleet anyway.
Like with Rome the purpose of the American carrier fleet was to fight a peer rival, Japan then the Soviets, but that rival is gone. And like Rome it’s *current* purpose is to maintain free trade across the imperial sphere of its owner. But it certainly wasn’t built for that purpose.
But if the US goal is self defense and isolation then the carrier group is massively over engineered for that. Honestly the only reason you’d need even one active carrier group is to defend Alaska and Hawaii, eleven is an absurd overreaction. Even maintaining control of South America as part of a sphere if influence only really needs one. And this isn’t idle speculation. If you track the carrier movements the station points are basically-one off South America, one in Pacific (Hawaii or Japan), one in Atlantic, one in Europe/Med, one in Gulf, one staring down China. The rest are recovering or moving between stations. Only half are even vaguely defending territorial waters; most are off policing trade or eyeing Taiwan and Malacca.
Hence talk of downsizing.
An interesting analogy, but I see at least one key difference – the task of clearing pirates across the imperial sphere (in this case, the literal globe) was already more-or-less done by the Royal Navy sometime before WWI (I welcome corrections to make the date more specific) – and it had done so with a fleet that included no carriers, for obvious reasons. As such, there are essentially no reasons to believe that any future operations vs. pirates as defined by UNCLOS (that is, private actors) would require carriers either. They are very unlikely to require a fleet of comparable size to that period’s Royal Navy either, for that matter – for the simple reason that a whole lot of places which used to be British colonies and so were under RN’s jurisdiction now have their own fleets and coast guards.* (The other formerly European colonies have also gone through this, of course, but Indonesia aside, whose coast guard is somewhere around 500 vessels, generally not as dramatically, I believe.)
Hence, this whole proposal again only makes sense if a state actor is simultaneously; a) expected to act aggressively against shipping; b) not be deterred by the inevitable damage to their international standing and the myriad of economic instruments which exist to punish such misbehavior; c) nevertheless would be discouraged by carrier bombing – which, as we have been shown over and over, cannot make truly determined states back down. So once again, I ask – who might such state actors be?
I.e. since the coalition proposed above includes my country (Australia), such questions are only reasonable from my perspective, no? Does not help that there’s a certain divergence of interests; Taiwan’s trade is most likely to be threatened by the PRC, obviously, but the easiest way for Australia to lose over a third of our trade at once is to enter an armed conflict with the PRC. This could well lead to…tensions over the ships’ rotation.
Well, unfortunately, there’s the so-called Naval Rule of Thirds (surprisingly unmentioned in the blog post above?) according to which about a third of naval assets (in this case, carriers) are likely to be in maintenance at any given time, and the other third would probably be used for training and the like, all so that the final third would actually be at full readiness. Apparently, it’s technically possible to downsize it to halves (i.e. do less-critical training while a vessel is being maintained and take other vessels out of active duty to finish crew preparation), but it’s obviously not desirable.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-the-u-s-navy-must-always-have-11-aircraft-carriers/ar-AA1QnXAd
So according to that, three carriers represent the minimum for a 24/7/365 sphere of influence if such a thing is believed to be desirable. So, as we have seen, 11 carriers really means the ability to pummel some place with two while the third is on standby on the other side of the world, and then to rotate them out. (Except that recently, a “standby” carrier in East Asia got pulled out to focus even more on Iran, leaving that region with nothing for now.)
Yes, here’s the crux of the matter. Just about the only colorable argument I can actually see for the USN as it’s presently configured substantially protecting international trade would stem from the assumption that if it were left unchallenged in the region, the PRC’s navy would sooner or later be liable to attempt to blockade Japan and/or the Philippines (an outright invasion when either country numbers over 100 million people is deeply implausible), and so a powerful USN is needed to be able to break that blockade. This argument involves a whole lot of submerged assumptions about geopolitics – yet it is at least far better defined than what this blog had offered so far. (Ending a potential blockade of Taiwan via a naval intervention is totally implausible nowadays – not when anti-ship missiles China had been producing for 15 years and counting have more than enough range to cross the Strait, overfly Taiwan itself and still hit ships tens of kilometers away from ports on the other side of it – and China can produce missiles a lot faster than Taiwan could ever produce interceptors.)
At the same time, this potential ought to be balanced next to the other big thing such a fleet is capable of doing – blocking the Malacca Straits to pressure the PRC. Obviously, that would be the absolute opposite of freedom of navigation – yet many appear to consider such an operation justified as a last-ditch attempt to save Taiwan, or perhaps as part of another regional conflict (Which in turn motivates the Chinese desire to match the US’ carrier numbers to render that stratagem untenable as well.) Whether Asia would be more or less peaceful if the implicit threat of a USN blockade of Malacca would be taken off the table is a remarkable question. (Based on that recent poll of ASEAN where about half the states would strongly prefer to work with China over the US and the other half equally strongly prefers the opposite, it appears the region is split on this question as well.)
*I.e. to give the most obvious example, the Indian Coast Guard currently possesses around 75 armed vessels, ranging in size from WWI torpedo boats (i.e. ~300 tons) to WWII destroyers (approx. 1-2000 tons), and about a hundred more patrol boats (<100 tons; no integrated weapons besides the crew's small arms, but entirely capable of intercepting boats of similar or smaller size to itself.) Pakistan and Bangladesh have much smaller coastlines, but they also operate a non-insignificant number of coast guard vessels (i.e. either one has about a dozen of torpedo boat-sized patrol vessels and around a hundred patrol boats – in Pakistan’s case, some were literally purchased from the US Coast Guard.) This is on top of their actual navies: over a dozen frigates and corvettes (again – what is now classed as one easily matches or even exceeds WWII destroyers in tonnage)
for either one of the latter two, and >40 of those for India + 9 actual destroyers.
@Yard I don’t really have insight to add here; I think we both well understand the questions we’re asking don’t have answers. Are these carriers necessary, even useful, for defending naval routes? No one really knows what would happen if there was a shooting war over Taiwan, but even the US navy is wary of their interceptor capabilities versus China, and if anything Iran has shown us they are prone to overestimating their capabilities (although that might just be Trump being an idiot). Although the flip side is that Taiwan itself is also a launch platform for missiles at any Chinese fleet trying to cross, even if US carriers aren’t effective.
Their primary use against China might be *interdicting* trade, and at that point you’re dealing with a situation where everyone involved would have to basically agree to economic self ruination to produce leverage over China. Would an alliance of SEA nations be willing to blockade Malacca, forcing compliance of dissident neighbors at gunpoint, to prevent an invasion of Taiwan? They have good reason to fear Chinese intervention in the abstract, letting individual nations be conquered is a recipe for defeat in detail as has been shown many times, but if they actually have to *do something*, well…
Most of these questions point to the simpler, but unanswerable question of political will. Do nations want the capabilities that carrier groups offer? Even if a transfer is theoretically possible, is their unity of purpose? Is there even a strategic plan at all? Sure, think tanks and military planners produce strategic plans, but all of them depend on popular will, in a network of very different alliances and political movements even internal to different nations. It increasingly seems like every nation is just making it up as they go, to disastrous results.
There are not currently other navies that could project significant force anywhere in the world, and there are areas where the local governments are probably unable or unwilling to stand up a coastal navy to protect trade that isn’t theirs.
I have two replies.
One, effectively all hegemons — no matter their structure — sometimes do shady things. The question is one of comparison between the possible hegemons. Historically, most hegemons have been very transparent about being in it for their own interests, and not caring about the welfare of their subjects. So, in the reductio ad absurdum case they may not have bothered with writing laws, just saying “our word is the law”. A more realistic case is that of course they did need written law for the purposes of administration, and they realized that unforeseen circumstances would arise, and so they wrote the law in a way that basically did not bind themselves, but did bind their subjects. The result is that these powers would become routinely used in “peacetime” to abuse the subjects and anyone nearby.
The US/SQC hegemony is historically unusual in that it decided against this approach, and wrote laws that — while still favoring the hegemon — important ways also bind the hegemon. So, yes, sometimes (even in “normal” times, such as the various Central American hijinks) the US does shady things, and breaks its own laws in the process. To an extent this is bad, and it is correct to complain about it, but comparing to what approach historically most hegemons have taken, overall the US commits fewer abuses.
So, whereas historically most hegemons are openly villainous, the US makes an effort to not be, and …its reward it to be called a hypocrite? Yes, it is entirely correct to point out that it fails its own ideals, and/because doing so may even have some effect on improving its conduct. But surely it should not be condemned for trying to do better than usual, and even succeeding at it to some degree.
The other reply is to look at the birth of the United States. At the time, its statesmen were very clear that they did not want standing armies and navies, because they also knew that for structural reasons hegemonic power leads to abuses. You can sense that they were quite indignant at needing the Continental Army, that they were dependent on precisely some of its abilities that a standing army had that a militia did not. They even tried experimenting with a naval militia, but that didn’t work. Eventually, reality set in and the USN was created.
Underlying both: those “unforeseen circumstances” mentioned above. It would be very nice if “lawless actions” were only done by individuals or small criminal gangs. Alas, occasionally the majority of a polis supports the pirates, or for that matter the US duly elects a cabinet on the platform of “to hell with order”. So you would need a peacekeeper organization with the heft to coerce the US (or Russia) if its legal leadership tried to do something lawless. Which, quite aside from “where do you get such” (e.g. the UN exists, but the great powers only assented to its formation by ensuring they would have permanent vetos in the security council, so the UN can’t be used to coerce them through that mechanism), would be very similar to a state, and thus would be subject to the same structural reasons that cause states to take lawless actions.
The United States proudly embraced hegemonic power (and decided it needed a strong Navy for just that purpose) in 1898. The year the USA annexed Hawaii, fought the Spanish-American War, and began the brutal suppression of Philippine independence. It was also about the time inhabitants of the USA started calling their country “America”.
I agree, we (humanity) would be better off with multilateral international naval peace-keeping forces. Which don’t exist, and the more examples of previous USA bad behaviour brought up, the more stupid and short-sighted other governments look for not doing anything about it.
I can imagine an end to the current Iran crisis where India and China announce a joint peace-keeping mission to the Straits of Hormuz, which will re-establish free (ish) marine transport. Between the two I think they’ve got enough aircraft carriers and logistics support ships to carry it out. It’s definitely in both their interests, and I don’t think either would mind if Iran also ends up getting well paid in the process. Trump can declare “victory” and that his “good friends” the Indians/Chinese are doing this at no cost to America, and the USN goes home.
@scifihughf,
Yea, I can definitely see India and China getting involved, and that would probably be the best case scenario for this war to end.
Honestly, the best way long term I can see for the Israel-Palestine conflict to end might be for China to get involved as well. The US is not going to be seen as an honest broker for the foreseeable future.
Uhhh…just a few obstacles I can imagine off the top of my head:
* China and India still have an unresolved border situation in the mountains, where their soldiers occasionally fight in hand-to-hand. When it flared up a few years back, with a number of Indian soldiers beaten to death (no loss to Chinese side, AFAIR), India had, amongst the other things, implemented one of the world’s strictest TikTok bans (apparently only matched by Iran, Cuba and…Gabon, ironically enough.) There’s also the minor matter of present-day Pakistan being China-aligned to the hilt (and vice versa) – its recent air-to-air victories were only possible due to Chinese equipment. These facts are…not very conducive to such an extensive cooperation arising all of a sudden.
* India is heavily pro-Israel – to the point where the most likely response to a (still hypothetical, yet increasingly plausible) future anti-Israel US Administration would be the switch to India as its primary arms supplier (potentially involving Russia, at least as far technology transfer goes – depends on how nihilistic Putin’s successor is going to feel about the odds of retaining meaningful influence in the rest of the region.) Hence, it’s unclear how willing it would be to sign off to Iran’s profiting in the Gulf. (For that matter, China does more trade with the Gulf states than with Iran; hence, while there have only been rumours of Chinese weapons in Iranian hands, there had been actual photos of wreckage of Gulf-owned China-produced Wing Loong drones that have been used to attack Iran.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aviation_shootdowns_and_accidents_during_the_2026_Iran_war#Total_aircraft_losses
* How much incentive is there left for the Gulf states especially to retain US military presence in this scenario? And vice versa; their lobbying operations are second only to Israel’s, and all would fight hard to prevent Trump from acceding to that.
* What happens if Israel starts attacking Lebanon again after this force goes into effect? Iran finds it ideologically unpalatable not to counter that via the Strait: do the two countries’ ships sit back (and lose the mission’s credibility) or do they start bombing whatever they can in Iran and effectively co-sign Israeli aggression – as well as risking becoming a shooting gallery themselves? I don’t see China being willing to do that; India might have the will, but has much less capability (smaller aircraft carriers – one of them is literally Kuznetsov’s predecessor and the other is similar; less capable naval planes; fewer destroyers and frigates; half the air defence missile complement on their destroyers; etc.)
If anything, France-India seems like a considerably more plausible arrangement (the two already have some security partnership given e.g. the Rafale sales – and France has its historic connection to Lebanon which might help with mediation). Again, though, I suspect any such mission would be more-or-less entirely symbolic, like most peacekeeper deployments have been historically.
> Honestly, the best way long term I can see for the Israel-Palestine conflict to end might be for China to get involved as well.
The problem, and really the key issue here generally, is that Israel is not interested in negotiating. It’s *difficult* to get two parties to agree to peace when they hate each other, want peace, and don’t trust the mediator. It’s impossible if one side doesn’t want it, at least not without coercion.
The political situation in Israel is completely fucked, as bad as anything I’ve even heard of. The current polling and politics basically has a dead heat between two pro war candidates. The current ruling party is a far right coalition that ranges from zealots trying to invoke the biblical God like he’s Cthulu and the stars are right to ethno nationalists who just want every Arab *gone*, with exile maybe being an acceptable alternative to death.
The primary opposition, which *also* supports the war, mostly runs off of anti corruption, but they tend to use rhetoric centered around how the war has been prosecuted *incompetently*. Their leader Eisenkot was a noted IDF commander who utilized retaliation bombing as a counter insurgency technique.
These parties, plus the ones too extremely pro war to be part of the ruling coalition or advocating special interests, command about 66% of the voting electorate in recent polling. It’s very likely a supermajority of Israelis are military hardliners, idealogically.
The only parties which clearly advocate for something approaching a stable peace poll at maybe 20% combined, with a third centrist party with unclear war policies (it’s a new merger) rounding them out at 33% total. The exact breakdown is fluid between these parties, because depending on poll they compete against *each other* for the same base. Maybe *20%* of the Israeli population has a clear idealogical commitment to peace. It certainly isn’t more than a third. And by the polling all these groups are competing internally; poll movement is symmetrical with people moving to different pro war parties and maybe to anti corruption parties, but not to or from pro peace parties.
Given the Israeli publics opinions here, I don’t think any peace not forced on them would work, and the only nation with the power to do so is the US. China and india won’t have the capability for decades, and unless they ally to do so that capability is limited by the fact it’s pointed at each other.
The only exception would be for Israel to *lose utterly* to a coalition of neighbors, and that situation almost certainly entails *millions* of deaths.
Well, that would be in line with these poll findings from last year.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/majority-israelis-support-expulsion-palestinians-gaza-poll
@Terry,
Yes, I’m aware there isn’t really much public support in Israel for a two state solution. The Labor Party barely passed the threshold to enter parliament last election, after all, and though they seem to be doing a bit better now, that’s still a very low bar. When I said “China getting involved” I really meant “China imposing a solution on unwilling parties by throwing their weight around”.
@Hector then the problem is simply time. Things feel like they’re progressing very quickly to a breaking point in the middle east, with Iran and Iraq increasingly clinging together and The Gulf States and Saudi Arabia looking increasingly weak even with US support. Add in the fact that Israel has been antagonizing literally every neighbor, invaded three of them (Syria in addition to Gaza and Lebanon) and seems incapable of stopping and I don’t think there’s the decade or so that’s needed for China to develop reliable expeditionary forces. It seems like everything with crash into interstate anarchy much sooner. There’s no longer any regional balance.
I hope I’m wrong; after all there is a strong push towards status quo. But I think it is worth emphasizing that, *today*, only the USA could enforce peace in the middle east with force. And that this force would need to be pointed at Israel for it to mean anything.
@YARD,
Rather than “India is heavily pro Israel” I think it would be fairer to say that “the ruling party in India is heavily pro Israel”. If and when the Right loses power, then the foreign policy will change, the center and left are much less pro Israel (and less pro US) than the right.
A pithy quote from someone almost certainly well to the left of myself which stuck with me; “Any suggestion US involvement in the Mideast has been about “stabilizing” the region rather than opportunistically enforcing US hegemony at the expense of the people there is war crimes and genocide denialism.”
I am not personally willing to go that far, but whenever I see formulations like this, I keep thinking – “What peace and/or stability?” Pick just about any year within living memory as your baseline, and there’s already mass violence in one corner of it or the other; and quite often, the US had been its accelerant, rather than the opposite. (Far from always, but if we start the baseline somewhere around Eisenhower kicking the UK and France out of Egypt (ironically sacrificing Suez’s freedom of navigation for about a year), then trend had been unmistakably growing more negative over time.) This is especially the case regarding your scenario.
It would stop just fine if the US stops pouring billions into it. Here’s one stat which makes it practically impossible to look at the world with the same eyes; in less than a year since October 7, 2023, the US, under Biden, had sent 500 transport planes and 107 ships to Israel, all loaded with weapons.
https://archive.is/Ddduw
That is, two planes took off nearly every day, and a ship docked every three days, delivering over 50,000 tons by August 27, 2024. These were the quantities used up in the Gaza genocide; they are not something Israel even remotely possesses the heavy industry to produce on its own. They are also not something other countries have either the logistics or the interest in delivering.
Point taken, but given how this thread began, it’s a distinction without a difference? That is, the initial suggestion of a joint China-India naval force clearly implied that it ought to happen fairly soon, which means during Modi’s current term. Apparently, the next general election in India is all the way in April 2029; I don’t think even the greatest pessimists on Hormuz expect the crisis to go on for that long. (The half-serious suggestion of it lasting until the election in November 2028 was the darkest semi-plausible one I know of.)
What you describe would require international government and, while that would incontestably be advantageous (and will eventually, given the development of communications technology, become an absolute necessity), moving there from where we are now will be a mind-wrenchingly difficult task. If we desire to make the shift while retaining democracy – essential for government efficiency and optimum economic prosperity – it will be even harder. In short, if we want it (and, once we understand what it would mean, we will) then we need to start working, not to achieve global government (which will eventually arise through necessity) but to transition democracy to an international force.
I agree that a world government will become a necessity, at least if we want to work towards spreading liberty, wealth equality and democracy.
My argument however I would base more on the globalization of trade than the communication technology (although of course both interact). It’s a pretty consistent finding that in democracies, voters usually vote based on the recent changes to their immediate socio-economic status. Basically, if the current government made them worse off, they vote them out, if the current government made their life better, they vote for them to stay. Now I’m perfectly open to arguments that this is frustrating for any political movements or positions that aren’t pure economics (and even bad for some economic political positions that are more long-term), but I think it’s something we should see as foundation from which some of the legitimacy of democracy is derived: If the voters feel their votes have an influence on their economic status, they’ll trust that democracy works. If they lose that trust, they might start looking for alternatives to democracy, and (at least in my opinion) those long-term will be worse. And with the global economy, a lot of economic outcomes are moved outside of the control of the government the voter can have influence over, unless we manage to create an actual world government.
To put it in practical terms: In the wake of 2008, a Greek voter was suddenly hit by wiped out savings, shuttered social services and tax hikes because of details of the US regulations about sub-prime mortgages that they had no way of voting on even in the most indirect of terms. In 2020, a voter in the US suddenly found themself unemployed and shut out from a lot of social activities as the consequence of the hygiene regulations of the Chinese live animal trade they had no way of voting on. Right now, people the world over are suddenly faced with rising gas prices and general cost-of-living increased based on the actions of the US government they had no way to vote on. (And yes, that is simplified. In all these cases the local governments did have an influence on the outcome, but a more dilute one)
How are these voters supposed to express that frustration and anger? They can’t really punish the people responsible with their vote. That they might become susceptible to anti-democratic messaging espousing the dangers of outsiders and arguing for autarky is understandable to me. Morally indefensible, but understandable.
Andy Gibson and Alien@System: how do you actually envision “democracy as an international force” working in practice? First and foremost, how do you get over the wealthier countries’ predictable…hesitancy over getting outvoted on a global level by the much more populous poorer countries, which could easily lead to policies benefiting them at a (considerable) expense of richer polities? I.e. Democratic Republic of the Congo (median per capita GDP of $844*) alone would be a voting bloc equivalent to e.g. France ($39k) and Canada ($45k) put together. Saying that these voting blocs have divergent electoral interests is putting it mildly – and whereas the population of virtually the entire Western Europe is expected to stay stagnant (and outright crater in Eastern Europe), the DRC and other African countries would continue to grow significantly.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-project-database
The closest practical approach might consist of more-or-less scaling up EU’s decision-making structures to UN level; even that is likely insurmountably difficult in the foreseeable future, and results in decision-making that is rather different from what is usually understood as democratic.
What is the connection here? The largest wave of democratization – the end of the Warsaw Pact/USSR – had predated the internet becoming genuinely global by a few years. The role of e.g. Twitter in the Arab Spring had been vaunted once, but ultimately all of those countries have remained authoritarian. Social media in Myanmar had…mixed impacts, to put it mildly. What else is there? In fact…
If you are over on Bluesky, you would have most likely come across by now the counterargument to that. Primarily advanced by one Will Stancil, it posits that the fundamental economic indicators in the US were at their peak in 2024 and so should have led to sky-high approval ratings and easy reelection for either Biden or Harris; the fact it hasn’t happened suggests (in his telling) that modern communications technology had decoupled voting intention from aggregated economy and made the perception of economy (in this case negative – what he terms “vibecession”) predominate. (For what it’s worth – I don’t think it’s actually new, as back in post-GFC/pre-pandemic 2010s, when elections in Russia were still somewhat competitive (at least until 2018 or so), the opposition had the opposite lament: that the proverbial “TV” (what state media said about life in the country) had been beating “the fridge” (i.e. actual conditions trending down) in terms of voter sentiment and likelihood of reelecting United Russia.)
The thing is that the two examples you cite don’t exactly support your thesis? Greece hasn’t actually elected a Golden Dawn government, as your thesis would prescribe; in fact, the latter’s support plunged so much it lost all seats a decade after the 2008 crisis, and was thus in position to be banned with few repercussions; the successor parties put together have slightly more seats than either (formerly?) Varoufakis’ Syriza or the Greek Communists; all of the above, right and left, have half the seats held by Merkelesque/Chiracesque New Democracy. Likewise, the pandemic directly led to Trump’s defeat; while testing the counterfactual is impossible, I think it’s generally believed the results being as close as they were indicate he would have defeated Biden in 2020 had it never happened.
*As of 2022 – but at 2011 dollar values.
@YARD I don’t see how “The higher amount of people in poor African countries would have a higher influence on world policy than the rich countries” is an argument against world democracy. That’s the point. Just like I want the voices of all the poor people in my own country saying “We want a well-funded welfare system” to count more than the voices of the few rich people going “I don’t want higher taxes”. Under the current system, these African countries have basically *no* say in the world order and that to me is a problem, because they suffer for it. So yes, if the people in these places want policies that improve their own lives instead of even more resources going to Europe, then they should be able to vote for that.
As for how to get there, I’ll admit I don’t see a path to such a world government that doesn’t involve a massive catastrophe or outright war. But I still see some value in saying “Here is an end state I’d love to have in the world” even if the path there isn’t clear yet.
As for the matter of economy vs. information, you might well be right and your counterarguments are well-founded. I was speaking from gut feeling. (Although of course when it comes to the necessity of a more global order, the argument can be sufficiently modified: The information environment of people in Morocco should not be dominated by the moderation policy choices of a bunch of psychotic man-children in the US who happen to own the social media platforms)
Well, you have to admit, “I don’t see a path to such a world government that doesn’t involve a massive catastrophe or outright war” is very, very different from “which will eventually arise through necessity”! Granted, the above was Andy Gibson’s framing, and your own at least if we want to work towards spreading liberty, wealth equality and democracy is a lot more conditional. Personally, I have great doubts those sentiments have ever animated a plurality, let alone a majority, of voters just about anywhere – and if that’s not the case, the discussion becomes almost as theoretical as that of fantasy worlds.
In particular, the more financially secure one gets, the less attractive “wealth equality” tends to sound – in fact the ability to look down upon those with less appears to motivate quite a lot of people. (They might deny it in polite society or they might not – i.e. the Actually Existing Pre-Trump Republican voters were saying and writing these exact things, as easily demonstrated by one look at the archives of 2000s-early 2010s Republican online spaces.) For that matter, while W. Bush’s 2000 election is at times retroactively recast as a proof that a significant American constituency for “spreading liberty and democracy” exists/has existed, his actual campaign promised “a humbler foreign policy” – even setting 9/11 aside (an impossible task in this context), I think the evidence suggests the contemporary American median voter understood “Project for the New American Century” and its future influence even less than the 2024 voter understood the influence of Project 2025, if that is at all possible.
Remarkably, we have also seen the opposite phenomenon. That is, moderation of the Anglophone spaces is often performed by people in places like the Philippines, since many of them know English well enough to perform the task, but can be paid a fraction of what a First World-based moderator would. (This also means they have much less recourse/compensation for the psychic damage sustained from regular exposure to some of the worst materials humanity can generate, of course.) Another aspect of this outsourcing, though, is that more subjective decisions about whether things that aren’t strictly illegal are acceptable to see end shaped by their values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cleaners_(2018_film)
The film in the link above (admittedly from 2018, but I doubt things changed overmuch nowadays – besides the general trend towards lower moderation post-“X”) demonstrates this when one of those moderators (a middle-aged Philippina) is shown an oil painting of a naked Trump with tiny genitals and asked if she would have taken it down as a moderator. She says she would, considering it offensive (and in contradiction to free speech as commonly understood in the US) – and the film then reveals this moderation decision had already been taken about a year earlier by someone else – the page of the painter got suspended as the result.
Yes and – as an American patriot, my position is that a hypothetical such force should be sunk as pirates. If the US is still the hegemonic power, that is what would happen. If it has ceased to be, such an attempt would itself be an act of piracy, according to whoever the new hegemonic power is; if that came to pass, likely China. Otoh, it’s quite unlikely an international peacekeeping force of entirely pure motivation, as opposed to a nakedly hypocritical hegemonic force, would ever exist. After all, it’s international, therefore many countries are part of it, who are acting according to their interests, you’re just recreating the Delian League with extra steps (and how did that end?).
See another comment above; ever since 1958, no action done by state actors can be legally described as piracy! (And presumably, a world that went far enough to create such a coalition would be enormously unlikely to redefine the legal definition against their interests.)
An existence of a hegemon is far from an inevitable feature of the global (or perhaps even regional) systems. As the very author here had noted, balancing coalitions intended to deny the rise of a hegemon occur often. In fact, though that blog does not contain “a scoreboard”, my impression is that such coalitions appear to succeed (even temporarily), at least as often as hegemonic breakouts do?
https://acoup.blog/2023/07/07/collections-the-status-quo-coalition/
P.S. The part of the linked post with those 2023 Pew poll results, which got “oversimplified” as we might say that the average respondent thinks that the United States is a meddlesome busy-body that only occasionally considers the needs of other countries…and that the United States is thus a force for good and peace and they like it very much, thank you are such ancient history nowadays; whether this summer’s Pew results finding China to be be broadly more popular across more-or-less the same set of countries than the US, or that Politico poll in my other comment establishing the populations of four major Western countries would rather work with China than Trump’s America…really yet another confirmation we are set for a new era of balancing (in this blog’s/general IR terms) across 2030s at the least.
Off the bat, I’m not saying the US was or is justified in doing all it’s doing with controlling trade in all the specific instances mentioned in this thread.
But there is a large difference between “I blockade a country while generally ensuring free sea trade otherwise” and “I blockade a country against a background of general free-for-all piracy on the open seas that I don’t do anything about.” Even if you want ascribe the US with purely selfish and cynical motives, Mahan’s theory about control of the sea gets you the current general state of naval affairs: It is still advantageous for the US to, as a rather fictional example, intervene when Nigeria would call for aid because Equatorial Guinea is supporting piracy, because that way the US continues to ensure its monopoly on violence on the sea. They’re saying “Nobody else gets to blockade and pirate without our approval”, and to do that, they have to deter all other places that would challenge that stance. And since the US is a modern industrial country, their own benefit of allowing US-based piracy is smaller than allowing generally free trade. Both together can from purely selfish motives still give you a general state of “The US is a guarantor of free sea trade” while leaving space for the examples: In certain cases, the strategic calculus of excluding a country to sea trade in terms of “strategic aims achieved” vs. “economic cost suffered” does come out the other way. But in some ways, the base state of free trade actually enhances this as a tool of not-outright-warfare, because a state which used to have access to sea trade but now doesn’t suffers greater economic pain than one which, because of piracy, did never have a sea-trade-dependent economy in the first place.
(And to reiterate: I do think economic warfare via sanctions is still warfare and costs lives and makes humanity overall worse off. But if the alternative is open war on an industrial scale, then I’ll have to grudgingly admit it’s place in the current world order, because polities continue to have irreconcilable disagreements that they haven’t figured out how else to resolve.)
Um, because hypocrisy is irrelevant?
The argument isn’t that the US is morally pure, or that it *always* supports open trade over *all other* considerations. It’s that it keeps the trade flowing on the whole. That does not require absolute consistency. It does not require good motivations. It doesn’t even require very much good behavior of any kind.
Seriously, I can’t understand people who come up with stuff like this.
This is a pretty strange argument to be making. As Bret remarked on repeatedly in the post, blockades are legal under international law, for the specific reason that the law on the subject was written to favor hegemonic powers with power projection capabilities, and it’s like that in no small part because the hegemonic power – or whoever succeeds them as hegemon, has no interest in changing this. The US did not change this when it succeeded Britain as hegemon. To judge from how China treats its neighbors in the South China Sea, she will not change it either if she ever does.
You are making it sound like the colapse of the British Empire was a bad thing.
That is a “you hate waffles” level of not what he said; The question of “should the Companies have stayed in power” is on a different field of study than “how much was the Brits’ colonial width the key for global trade”, which is was very. It’s even a moot point for the former as he noted that the global trade police baton passed pretty much uninterrupted from Company to America, implicitly showing that Company collapsing doesn’t æffect global trade.
Also the collapse of the Concert of Europe and the Pax Brittanica was pretty clearly utterly disastrous in the short term even if the resulting decolonization was probably helpful in the long run in both economic and human terms. By some measures economic globalization did not recover to pre-WWI levels until the *1980s*. WWI (arguably a bigger structural turning point than WWII), the Great Depression, and WWII were a 1-2-3 blow to foreign trade and investment, then the Cold War slowed rebound. Economic growth generally wasn’t hit quite as badly as global trade and investment, but inflation-adjusted global GDP per capita grew an estimated ~50% from 1870 to 1900, only another 50% by 1950, and since then has repeated that every 20 years.
Sounds more like it was conquered by the American Empire. As was only natural.
“Conquest” is usually the outcome of wars between the previous and new holders of the territory. Or at least opposition. Peaceful transfer between members of an alliance based on shared interests? That is not conquest. Instead, I would say they merged into the United Empire. As was only natural, given that these two constituents themselves (both eponymously, at that) formed from the mergers of the Kingdoms of England and Scotland, and from the thirteen States, respectively.
“Instead, I would say they merged into the United Empire.”
“Conquest” is not a perfect word, but it seems a lot better than “merger” to describe a situation in which the greater power commands and the lesser obeys.
Not all that relevant or super contributive but:
Imma level with you; no navy has been since the days of the Dreadnoughts.
Only when those make like a dictatorial figure from a certain fictional setting and somehow return, will nature be in harmony once more.
King Arthur ?
I completely agree with your points here, you are basically absolutely correct.
I will say there are a few other factors that would probably mitigate how bad the restrictions at choke points got that you didn’t mention.
Independent pirates have more trouble in areas where basically all the land and ports are fully under the authority of the state, unless the state is interested in supporting them, and in comparison to historical examples, states have a lot more control of their land than in pretty much any other time in history (not all states have the same amount obviously, see Somalia, but as a general trend).
As for the states themselves, the diplomatic and economic pressures that could be brought to bear on them would probably have more impact on a lot of countries than they do on a state like Iran or on the Houthis. And military action could add to that, you might not be able to fully take out such positions without the level of power projection you discuss, but you can make life much worse with a blockade or other operations that again, would maintain a weaker level of deterrence still.
Another risk for those states would be that some are close enough to the more powerful navies that could still project enough power. Even if Denmark wasn’t concerned with the diplomatic and economic risks, they are unlikely to start charging tolls on their straits when the UK and France are so close and their logistics for Carrier actions would be relatively simple. There’s also some who have land borders with states strong enough to intervene that way if they felt it worthwhile, whereas Iran is not really so threatened by its neighbours military power (see the Iran-Iraq War).
And as you say, it would not end all trade, only make it more expensive and people would start looking for other options, and countries might indeed start investing more in that power projection and making new deals for logistics bases and things. The EU might not want to do that currently, but if the trade lanes really did constrict that bad, they would care pretty quickly.
Having said all that, it would still be bad, and this is the one area I think you undersold it. A constriction on trade would absolutely be devastating for many poorer countries on a societal level, with famine and other hardship potentially wiping out whole communities and generally contributing to instability and increased violence, and knock on effects for disease and all kinds of other ills.
But it would also still kill people in rich countries. The poorest and most vulnerable would suffer badly, and some of them would simply die. And it would be bad for everyone else too. The poor get less bread, the midder class less meat, the rich less wine, and the super rich less yachts. Literally no one is going to be doing better off for it.
And it’s not just food, the modern trade system is so interwoven and interconnected, that many things you don’t think about could be lost. One area I think about is healthcare. Not only are the medicines themselves at risk, but many delivery mechanisms, storage systems, testing equipment, etc, requires very specific parts and pieces that are not usually produced in a single country. Losing access to those would kill people of all kinds. Over time countries would invest in making sure they had some home-grown versions for the most common things, but some things would just be left, and people would die for it. American private healthcare exacerbates such things, but it would happen in any country, universal healthcare or no. There are already things considered too niche and expensive for hospitals to provide, and this would just expand that list.
So I cannot stress this enough, global trade is an overall good. Yes it has some issues, but having issues and being overall bad are very different things. God I wish people would learn the difference.
A very good article, I appreciate you taking people through it step by step like this.
As I recall it, the other year a hurricane hit Puerto Rico, and it turns out an awful lot of the IV sets used in the US came from there.
There’s a lot of states that have enough difficulty exercising control over some regions of the country that they could probably serve as pirate bases. Lots of parts of South America have cartels powerful enough to interfere in state control, often by bribes but sometimes by force.
As for state deterrence, there’s certainly diplomatic and economic pressures to be brought, but there is a risk if the norm collapses and some straits more resistant to such pressures set up tollbooths that other countries will feel more able to get away with a modest toll.
“..the diplomatic and economic pressures that could be brought to bear on them would probably have more impact on a lot of countries than they do on a state like Iran or on the Houthis.” Let’s remember that Iran was behaving acceptably in response to diplomatic pressure until we decided to blow it all up with no apparent reason or plan.
By “behaving acceptably”, you mean “delay, delay, and more delay.”
Because in 2029 the US will have another President, and that person might be more agreeable, so no need to sign a treaty today.
It’s straight out of “The Devil’s Dictionary” by Ambrose Bierce.
Iran was/is at a weak point. Russia, China, and any other potential ally are in no position to help. Iran is running out of water. It’s the kind of opportunity the US has been waiting for since 1979.
Delay of *what*?
Nothing important enough, is what.
Opportunity for what? To show our entire asses to the world?
@Emily,
He means “opportunity to bully / beat the State of Iran into doing what America wants”, I think. As you point out, it didn’t quite work out that way, at least thus far.
Are you aware that America recently tried and failed to surrender?
That’s not something you do when you’ve got a weak enemy and a long-awaited opportunity.
Always fascinating to see someone for whom the Ledeen Doctrine is not discredited. Did you know him?
So I cannot stress this enough, global trade is an overall good. Yes it has some issues, but having issues and being overall bad are very different things.
I think one strong indicator that long distance trade is, at least up to a point, is a very good thing, is that pretty much all societies we know of, irrespective of their economic, social, cultural and political context, saw the value in it and engaged in it. Even in situations where they could have easily made the goods for themselves.
both Denmark and France are in the EU
“..honestly the problem is that maritime security and gains through trade are so counter-intuitive to many folks…”
Are they, though? The gains through trade have always been so obvious as to encourage people to engage in trade even in far far riskier and expensive trading environments. But, yeah, I understand how loss aversion is a thing, and it can be easy to point to the losses from trade (the paper mill shut down) than the gains (everything we buy is much cheaper).
Most of the public is not sufficiently aware of cost structures to really understand the gains and think we could make stuff at home at basically the same prices and the main impact of trade is that the good factory jobs are gone. Then occasionally people who think this set out to make a company that manufactures in America and rapidly discover that even minimum wage labor, much less trade school labor, is way too expensive to sell at prices Americans will pay.
Also a lot of people do not realize how much foreign content is in things where the final assembly is done in America.
Clothing. Even if your shirt says “made in the USA”, the fabric was most likely imported; the US domestic textile industry is a faint shadow of what it was a couple generations ago.
There seems to be a large segment of the public that believes in a zero-sum world, that believes every trade has a winner and a loser. Sure obviously in many ways they don’t act like they believe this (they buy things at the store after all), but they believe it enough for arguments about gains from trade to fall flat for them!
Ask thinkers, even in the field we now call economy, before the late 18th century, and they will tell you: it is intuitively obvious that goods have value just like they have mass. So if a transaction happens at a price other than the inherent value of the goods, one side benefited and the other lost. Now, of course, human relationships are not transactional, so the party who “lost” (overpaid or under-asked) did a favor to the other and can expect reciprocity, and the party who “gained” acknowledges this. Now, while people (as retail customers) have only a vague and approximate sense of how much things are worth, they do have a sense for it; but if the price is within it, they are largely willing to defer to the merchant’s more experienced appraisal.
Furthermore, since we build this intuition on goods that can sit in a warehouse (or granary) for months, or indeed e.g. furniture than can remain useful for decades, obviously their inherent value does not swing wildly day by day. It is only natural to extend this to services, too. (Hey, the same service is performed in each instance…) Now, if a business is in temporary trouble, it can explain that, and many retail customers will even do them a favor by paying the temporarily elevated price. (Or at least people like to imagine that they would.) But if a taxi/hotel/whatever exhibits their judgement as to the true value of the services provided by posting the same price most of the time — so they cannot claim ignorance — but then habitually departs from it without the slightest exhibition of contrition, that is outrageous.
Value is not a fixed thing. I like blueberries a LOT. I buy them at all times of the year, even when they are expensive. Someone else may only buy them at low prices.
Your entire post reads that the value of blueberries is a set, known thing that is the same for everyone.
Market prices are set by the market, not by value. Because value is a personal thing.
Even ignoring subjective taste-if you are starving then blueberries are worth your life. But the worth of your life, measured merely in the blueberries you might produce later, is much higher than a handful of blueberries today.
Substitute blueberries with grain and you basically have an explanation for how agriculturist economies and rents work. I feed my serfs rice so they can harvest more rice than I fed them. The excess rice is my rent, an excess value created by their labour. They are receiving less than their fair share, but it’s not zero sum, their rice consumption pays dividends.
You’ve missed the point of Marte’s post; he’s not saying an inherent theory of value is correct. He’s saying that it used to be how everyone thinks, and that moreover that it’s still what most people find intuitive and thereby is a substantial determiner in how most people act, despite the belief’s incorrectness. In short, he’s agreeing with you, and with me, by elaborating on my point that many people believe in an inherent theory of value despite its incorrectness.
Basically you’re reading the comment as if the bulk of it is from his point of view, but the opening makes clear he’s talking about other people’s opinions, and then the rest of the comment is written from the internal perspective of those opinions. It’s demonstrating and elaborating on the way that most people get things wrong!
Goods have value, but the nature of this value has been a point of contention for as long as economics exists. Even then you’re making a few assertions that most people would agree are *wrong*, specifically that the goods have inherent value. Almost nobody thinks that about most goods. Further most systems decouple value from price; price is related to value, but only imperfectly.
But the biggest single point of clarification is that goods don’t have value unless consumed, and their consumption can confer value above their price. A bag of grain has a price, but it’s value could be that it keeps you alive, and its price could even be fully recouped if you use your labor to produce more grain than it took to feed you. This is the basic value proposition of agriculture economies; grain has more value than it’s cost, so whomever controls the productive capacity to make grain can extract a portion of this value as profit.
Value being zero sum only makes sense in the absolutely most primitive of economic theories, which break down when explaining or predicting any actual behavior. However these systems work to a extent when talking about *finance*; the trading of commodities as financial instruments. In finance, particularly modern finance, most people doing trading and most trading markets are almost completely insulated from value generation, and traders in particular largely operate in zero sum fields. Even dealing with productive property each trade is so deeply leveraged and abstracted that value creation is it’s own commodity, and the actual trading always has a loser. The fundamentals of the economy have been completely decoupled from the financial markets generated from them; Spacex can make less money from sales than it was given in stocks investments and it’s stock price can *increase*, purely based on hype.
And, unfortunately, most of our money is trapped in financial markets, so this breaks people’s brains; the part of the economy that actually relates to *value and objects* is smaller than the part of the economy that’s high stakes betting. It makes more sense for a company to take investment money and reinvest it in ways that drive up financial prices than worry about it’s actually valuation long term; who care if SpaceX actually gets value from its rockets, it could hype up XAi and trigger a rally for its stockholders other financial assets. The need to invest in things that produce other things is *gone*, which is unsustainable as a society.
(Copying here my reply to votingmachine.)
You’ve missed the point of Marte’s post; he’s not saying an inherent theory of value is correct. He’s saying that it used to be how everyone thinks, and that moreover that it’s still what most people find intuitive and thereby is a substantial determiner in how most people act, despite the belief’s incorrectness. In short, he’s agreeing with you, and with me, by elaborating on my point that many people believe in an inherent theory of value despite its incorrectness.
Basically you’re reading the comment as if the bulk of it is from his point of view, but the opening makes clear he’s talking about other people’s opinions, and then the rest of the comment is written from the internal perspective of those opinions. It’s demonstrating and elaborating on the way that most people get things wrong!
I’m not sure that’s what he meant, although that doesn’t matter. The effect you’re referring too, the zero-sum fallacy and zero-sum thinking, is absolutely a part of public discourse. There’s actually political science research on this, people trend towards zero sum thinking during economic stagnation and it results in…I guess the best term would be “aggressive” political movements.
The thing is I don’t I think that it’s actually part of how academics used to think, or rather that a bit of nuance is in order. The idea of zero sum economics is actually more of a modern phenomenon arising from financialization, and an ancient phenomenon, arising from land being the only meaningful “estate”. As early as the 1800’s economists had formalized the counterpoint, and trade was well understood to produce value for multiple parties. This all happened long enough ago that it effectively killed any intellectual discussion of actual zero sum economics, so I think we have to go to other causes than merely outdated economic thinkers for this.
It’s still absolutely a part of modern economic thought, but it’s coming from people like Trump and Musk, who aren’t economic thinkers but rather people adroit at exploiting the financial system; they manipulate ownership markets with open and subtle corruption very well.
To be frank I think the real issue is simply that while *economics* isn’t zero sum, ownership is. Your right to a share of the split from economic surplus does stand in competition with everyone else. The obvious solution is social and economic equality, ensure everyone has access to rewards equally, but it’s socially gauche to be for egalitarian property distribution as that’d be *socialism*. Because of that thought terminating cliche stopping all effective political action frustrated people project their feelings of anxiety over how *ownership* is zero sum to *the economy* being zero sum, and output their aggression politically through support for economic imperialism.
I meant my comment as Sniffnoy read it. I hoped the first sentence would be quite unambiguous.
(“before the late 18th century” was specific reference to Adam Smith, 1776.)
The risky trading environments don’t rule out trade, as you say, but they do increase transaction costs. If these are high enough, bulk trade starts to fall out. For example, in the late medieval Meditarranean, trade was about high-value goods: spice, fine cloth, slaves, weapons, dyes, jewelry. Even the trade ships were pretty fast and sleek. These make for beautiful, romantic pictures in school history books.
At the same time, Baltic was quite a bit safer, and trade was in bulk. For example, Holland was importing so much cheap Polish rye that the Dutch farmers could concentrate on wheat and other higher-value crops commercially, and eat, themselves, imported rye. And simultaneously, the center of European commerce moved from Venice and Firenze to Amsterdam. It is trade in bulk goods that makes nations rich – and bulk goods require peace for trade to be profitable.
Important addendum: the Baltic trade was cheaper despite it passing through the Danish straits and having to pay its toll.
Although the presence of a nation controlling the strait there, even in an exploitative manner, was probably preferable to merchants than the chaotic mess of the Red Sea or Eastern Mediterranean. Better to pay the toll that one nation levied than deal with ten different political entities trying to murder you the second you enter the strait. Even if the only service the Danes provided was separating baltic from north sea pirates that’s still going to help you escape.
“The gains through trade have always been so obvious as to encourage people to engage in trade”
And they have always been capable of simultaneously engaging in trade because it benefits them and denouncing their trading partner for exploiting them. Man is not a rational animal.
Also, the bad smells and pollution are Somewhere Else, which is bad for the people in the country with the factory, but a benefit for the people importing the goods. (It has been a very long time since I was near a paper mill, but I can still remember the smell. Given the choice of living near a data center or a paper mill, it would be a difficult choice of lesser evil.)
yeah were already fucked, good god the 30’s are going to suck most likely.
Ah well.
Still thank you for taking the time to walk through this, all of it makes sense with thought and history on the why, but you giving it the structure really brings it all home nice and neat.
no one cares to plant the trees that gives the future generations shade anymore and all that.
Still the Why is always important.
Thank you for your time.
In similar discussions, someone always brings up “But the US hasn’t signed the United Nations Convention On Laws of the Sea!”
So, via Sal Mercogliano, no the US Congress did not ratify UNCLOS back in the previous century, because various US mining companies objected to the part of UNCLOS that forbids private sector undersea mining out beyond territorial waters. Sigh.
However the US State Department and any other branch of the US government has always stated, or replied to questions, that the policy of the US Gov is to uphold every aspect of UNCLOS except the bits about undersea mining. And since nobody has actually worked out how to make undersea mining out in the high seas profitable, there’s no actual difference between US policy and any other country that has signed UNCLOS.
Upthread there’s some examples where the general tend towards open navigation was breached, which does lead to questions about stated versus actual commitment, but given the post itself pretty much answers the “what are the enforcement mechanisms” question, this is a gap that would exist even if the US ratified the treaty
One of the roles the USA has historically played is moral whipping boy. Europe and a few other powers can enact legislation and enter into treaties banning various military hardware they find distasteful with the full confidence that the USA will continue using them. Cluster bombs and mines are two that spring to mind. This gives Europe and similar powers the best of both worlds. They can claim the moral high ground while simultaneously benefiting from the use of these weapons because technically it’s not THEM using the weapons.
This is another example of that trend.
Mostly the USA doesn’t seem to care. Those who do, at least in my experience, find it funny. The military folks I know take it as part of the job–an annoying one, but not anywhere near the worst. As for civilians that pay attention to this sort of stuff, we’ve gotten used to the idea over the past century and were quite happy to do what we think is necessary to ensure the status quo maintains. (This has changed with Trump, and it remains to be seen what, if anything, will be left of the USA’s reputation after he’s done destroying it.)
I’m not sure the European states were even relying on the US being able to use cluster bombs and land mines on their behalf in some future conflict, so I don’t think this quite holds up.
Furthermore, I don’t think “whipping boy” is accurate. Insofar as they existed in the past (and the attestation is pretty thin) the idea is that the whipping boy gets beaten for a prince’s offenses, theoretically teaching the prince not to do bad things because his friend will get whipped. This isn’t anything like the scenario you describe, which is itself questionable in that it’s by no means clear that the states which have banned cluster bombs and land mines are somehow hypocritically “benefiting” from the US’s choice to maintain arsenals of those weapons.
“I’m not sure the European states were even relying on the US being able to use cluster bombs and land mines on their behalf in some future conflict, so I don’t think this quite holds up.”
In my direct experience European military planners definitely do rely on US willingness to use cluster munitions, and acknowledge openly that their job would be much more difficult without it.
“I’m not sure the European states were even relying on the US being able to use cluster bombs and land mines on their behalf in some future conflict….”
Maybe not these days. But prior to the invasion of Ukraine–and even well into it–Europe was very willing to sign into agreements that limited their arms, and the USA was equally willing to use those arms Europe abandoned to defend Europe. That’s not to say that Europe had no military assets or tactics and was entirely dependent upon the USA; as I recall France has long been a major arms exporter. Rather, they focused on certain areas of combat, whereas the USA focused on….well, all of them. And Europe was absolutely relying on the USA for help. That’s the whole point of NATO and some other treaties–an attack against one is an attack against all. Europe was in no way, shape, or form going to say “Know what, USA? You can sit this one out.”
“Furthermore, I don’t think “whipping boy” is accurate.”
I have little patience for this sort of “argument”. I’m well aware of the historic usage of the term. We are both also well aware of the modern usage. Good gods, have you never listened to Metalica? Do you use “bedroom” to only describe space within a bed, as the originator intended? Do you think “silky” literally means made of silk? Or “baking hot” means literally hot enough to bake?
We’re not lawyers, this is not a deposition, and standard vernacular usage is perfectly acceptable in a blog comments section, particularly when the term is explained. English is a language of metaphor, approximation, and allusion. See Chesterton on the subject. And those allusions can change over time. This is how new languages evolve, and why American, Australian, and British English are different. And English is particularly bad about it, because it has no central authority (like French or Arabic do); definitions are determined by usage. Unless your name is Amelia Bedilia, you know perfectly well what I meant and your “objections” were facetious nonsense.
As for Europe and the USA, if you think Europe hasn’t criticized the USA for refusing to sign certain arms bans, that’s a failure on your part. They’re pretty vocal about it. And it’s rather obvious that Europe benefits from the USA’s refusal. It’s part of deterrence and the prevention of escalation to full nuclear war. War is never certain, but refusing to use effective weapons is going to limit one’s efficacy in armed conflict. It’s like being in a dive bar. You can be unarmed and nerdy as long as you have a buddy that’s got a .45 on his hip and a willingness to go back to prison. We can debate whether or not Europe is worried about invasions, but….well, Europe is BEING INVADED, and that invasion has been going on since at least 2016 (depending on how you determine the starting point). Plus Europe benefits from marine trade that the USA defends, as well as other actions the USA takes, and the USA’s refusal to sign onto those bans is part of how we fight. It would take a special kind of stupid for European leaders to not realize that they were benefiting from the USA’s use–or threatened use–of these weapons.
It’s worth adding in that many of these weapons – specifically the two you mention, anti-personel mines and cluster bombs – might be a bit more useful than chemical weapons, but do, like chemical weapons, carry large, obvious and significant downsides. Remember that the US hasn’t signed the convention on chemical weapons, but most allied countries rely on them still not using chemical weapons alongside their forces, because chemical weapons are a dubious waste of money that are as likely to kill your own allies as the enemy.
That and, at the time, European nations were primarily opting out of using mines and cluster bombs on themselves, whilst the US was opting in to using mines and cluster bombs on its european allies (which may, indeed, have beneffitted the ability of the NATO to say ‘well we won the war with the USSR’, but it would have been inaudible in europe due to all the mines and cluster munitions having deafened those they didn’t kill).
at the time, European nations were primarily opting out of using mines and cluster bombs on themselves, whilst the US was opting in to using mines and cluster bombs on its european allies (which may, indeed, have beneffitted the ability of the NATO to say ‘well we won the war with the USSR’, but it would have been inaudible in europe due to all the mines and cluster munitions having deafened those they didn’t kill).
Not sure about the timeline. The APM and cluster weapons bans were a long time after the end of the cold war. The UK, for one, used cluster weapons extensively in Bosnia and in the first Gulf War.
If the weapons are “a dubious waste of money”, you wouldn’t need a ban on them. Has anyone ever set out to ban rifles that shoot backwards?
My understanding is that they’re tactically useful in certain situations but also mean the area basically permanently has unexploded munitions a kid could accidentally set off because cluster submunitions have a high failure rate and you need landmines everywhere to really do the job and it’s basically impossible to sweep them all, so there’s been a serious and consistent push to try to ban them and most militaries don’t use them in the non-peer conflicts we tend to be fighting even when they’d be a good option.
The US reserves the legal right to use them and has sometimes employed cluster munitions in the recent past, but my understanding is that while it’s legal formal policy is to restrict their use when they’re a threat to civilians and the current doctrine for using landmines includes having a plan to try to clean up all of them after you’re done by keeping track of where they are.
For landmines, it’s generally accepted that a proper military will be able to carve paths through it in a relatively short timeframe if you aren’t shooting at them, so mostly their tactical purpose is to force the enemy to spend a while in the open finding and dealing with mines while you shoot at them rather than killing people directly. If you hide them well you maybe get a couple vehicles before they stop advancing and start mine-clearing, but mostly you hide them so it takes longer to be sure you got them all.
This was a very interesting essay, but it prompted me to wonder: how was US domination of the oceans, and its role as the guarantor of free navigation, seen during the Cold War era when there were two superpowers rather than one? Was their any effort by the Eastern Bloc to build up their own naval forces enough to challenge the US, or to share power and responsibility for maintaining the shipping lanes?
Not really. The Soviet navy was, always thought of more as a defensive one: The goal was to be able to defend the Soviet coastline(s) and to (in an optimistic scenario) be able to prevent the US from moving freely/reinforcing the europeans. (with stuff like nuclear-missile launching submarines beinga separate thing)
Consider that the USSR had 1 operational carrier (the aforementioned Kuznetsov) and you can tell they were building their navy very differently.
There was a brief period in the 1950’s where Stalin was trying to build more of a power-projection navy, but a lot of the designs were already obsolete at that point.
That’s not actually true; even if you discount the two Project 1123 helicopter carriers (built in the 1960s and only retired after the USSR itself collapsed – however, their wing of 15 helicopters was intended entirely for anti-submarine warfare and in fact these ships were formally titled “anti-submarine cruisers”), four other carriers were built in the 1970s. Kuznetsov is essentially the modernized evolution of them; its official designation is “Project 1143.1”, vs. “Project 1143” for those earlier ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev-class_aircraft_carrier
Anyway, those never did do much either – largely because the one plane they were designed to carry, the VTOL Yak-38, was a horribly obsolete design by the time it entered service in 1977 (3 years after F-14 and just a year before the UK’s Sea Harrier); as a pure ground attack aircraft with no onboard radar (and so no way to even detect enemy fighters beyond any visual range, let alone target them – OR to guide longer-range air-to-ground missiles) and just a ton of payload when taking off vertically (up to 2 tons taking off “normally”, but they could only do it from land), it had much less utility than even the contemporary Ka-25 helicopters on the same ships. (Kuznetzov was expanded to support the naval version of Mig-29 and Su-27, but too little, too late.)
Having said that: the Soviet navy (and now the Russian one, and I guess the Ukrainian and probably the Turkish navy too) always had to operate around the Montreux Convention, which had prohibited the passage of aircraft carriers larger than 15,000 tons via the Straight of Bosporus – perhaps that size was impressive when it was signed in 1936, but it’s totally useless for anything besides helicopters (and now drones) in the jet age. I suppose the USSR could have attempted embargoing/bombing/invading Turkiye until it revised that, but it was considered easier to stick a bunch of anti-ship armaments onto the carriers which they would hopefully never get to use and call them “anti-submarine cruisers” (for 1123) or “heavy aircraft-bearing cruisers” (the formal title of Kuznetsov and its predecessors). (I suppose it was also conceivable for the USSR to build “proper” aircraft carriers for the Pacific Fleet only…but it would have had taken decades to get the shipbuilding over there to the same level as the Black Sea wharves.)
Yes; Stalin was essentially hoping to replicate the United States’ legendary Fletcher/Allen T. Sumner destroyers (175 of the former and 58 of the latter got cranked out during WWII)…when the jet age had already left their Bofors/Oerlikon-based anti-air defences grievously insufficient, and fast-developing anti-ship missiles rendered gun/torpedo-based destroyers irrelevant by mid-1950s.
One stunning bit of maths I did last year: since each one of those ships (Project 30bis) contained over 2000 tons of metal (empty displacement was 2316 tons, but presumably not all of that was metal), merely halving the order from the 70 ultimately built to 35 and redirecting the metalworking capacity to even heavy anti-aircraft artillery (also rendered obsolete, but a little later) would have been enough to give every one of North Korea’s 20 key cities defences akin to Berlin in WWII (i.e. ~300 >100mm B-29 cannons and hundreds more lighter autocannons). Instead, all but a few sustained >50% infrastructure destruction by the time the USAF was done – a few cities were literally bombed to the ground with 97-100% destruction.
Of course, Stalin wasn’t even in the mood to give the KPA late-WWII ISU-152s (the legendary Zveroboy – they had to make do with the only-good-relative-to-Marder SU-76), never mind 2-year old T-54s (which would have been mostly facing Shermans had they been sent to Korea in 1950 in place of T-34s) or even Kalashnikovs (already in service a year before the Korean War – over a decade before the M-16), so politically speaking, that’s a moot point. (Similar to how North Vietnam had to win the war with the USSR’s oldest anti-air missiles, and never ever getting technology like anti-ship missiles or “Scuds” (already in service in 1962!))
This is true only at grand strategic scale. The Russian idea of a strategic defence means operations-level offence. So, for example, the Soviet Baltic and Northern Fleets had very good amphibious capabilities, and “flanking by sea”, i.e. tactical amphibious operations in support of land operations were very much part of the doctrine. For example, any war against Norway would have involved division-level amphibious operations against Finnmark. The Kutznetsov, with its Yak-38s, would have come very handy in those, because the US would not probably have committed a cruiser task force in support of Northern Norway.
Well, as I said, Kuznetsov specifically was expanded to enable the take-off/landing of Mig-29K and Su-27K (now titled Su-33), and those have already been tested on it 2 years before it was fully commissioned, so it never carried Yak-38s. The issue is that this commissioning happened on January 20, 1991 (six months before Yak-38 flights were suspended, for that matter), so any speculation regarding its combat performance in the Soviet Navy requires some alternate history work to extend the lifetime of the USSR itself – as it was, the last thing it had done in Soviet service was to steam at full speed from Sevastopol towards the Murmansk ports in November of that year – not to take part in any combat operations vs. Norway, but to prevent Ukraine from laying claim on it after its independence referendum in December. (Formerly Soviet Ukrainian leadership had already declared independence in August and ordered the ship to be transferred into their fleet, but as their declaration wasn’t yet backed by a referendum, the order was ignored.)
As for whether the four Project 1143 “cruisers” which did carry Yak-38s would have achieved much in an operation targeting Finnmark…in general, it’s better to have military equipment than to not have it, but otherwise, lots and lots of question marks here.
The timeframe for such an operation is, to be generous, 1977 (Yak-38 is accepted into service – the first Project 1143, Kiev, spent several years with just a handful of prototypes before that)-1990. 1979 is probably the most favourable year – the second Project 1143, Minsk, enters service in 1978 and probably has full complement by then, but Norway is still a year away from receiving 60 F-16s. Even then, Norway still fields up to 100 F-5s (up to ~130 if counting trainers/reconnaissance versions) and hasn’t yet retired the Starfighter (although how many of the original 24/28 remained operable by then is unclear). Unlike the F-16, those two can only fight in visual range, so a Yak-38 could theoretically get lucky and score a hit first (one of Indian-owned Su-7s, the first Soviet fighter-bomber jet, had reportedly downed a Pakistani fighter with its cannon in 1965) IF it sacrifices some of its already-limited ground attack capability (only 4 pylons in total, including for gun pods) – but the disparity in flight characteristics is still enormous (F-5s routinely out-turned Mig-21s in Ogaden – and those were actually designed for air-to-air combat). So, Yak-38s are liable to sustain catastrophic losses if they are met by any meaningful number of F-5s/Starfighters in the air. Worse still for the hypothetical Soviet commander, Norway had already developed its air-launched anti-ship missile, Penguin, by 1972 (i.e. years before 1143s entered service) and fit it to the ground-attack version of its Starfighters (designed to Canadian specifications, funnily enough), which it had ~25 more of. Since even the ground-attack Starfighter is about 33% faster than Yak-38, the fate of the entire ship and its air wing (36 landing spaces, though in practice about half were allocated to helicopters) would effectively rest upon the shoulders of these two anti-air missile launchers. (Even the US didn’t have area-scale naval air defence until the mid-1980s, when the upgraded Ticonderoga cruisers started to receive Aegis – never mind the USSR, so any other ships would struggle to provide anti-air cover to 1143.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-11_Shtorm
That is, unless the land-based MiG-23s and MiG-25s (perhaps the Su-15 interceptors also get pressed into offensive service – never mind the doctrine reserving them for spy balloon/nuclear bomber interceptions) collectively manage to achieve effective air supremacy with their beyond-visual range missiles (if these three plane types run out of their 4/6 on-board missiles, they would effectively have to turn back and let the late-generation MiG-21s dogfight) – but at this point, the land-based ground attack planes (some Su-24s with 8X the bomb load of Yak-38 are already in service by 1978, but the bulk would be made up of Su-17s and MiG-27s with “only” 4X the load) are going to do incomparably more damage anyway.
Finally, the operation might theoretically involve 3 or even all 4 1143s if it is pushed back to after 1982 and after 1987, respectively – but at that point, Norway’s 60 F-16s more than outweigh any extra Yaks. (The total number of planes remains about the same, as they replace the Starfighter – which also increases the odds of a successful Penguin attack.) It’s not even clear if the Murmansk base could sustain that many 1143s at once – and if it could, such force concentration there, as opposed to sending half to the Pacific (where the Yaks couldn’t really take off in high humidity anyway), had a very distinct risk of eliminating any strategic surprise and prompting even more military equipment sales/donations to Norway. So in all, still a deeply iffy scenario.
Russia has serious problems when it comes to building a navy in the form of its ports. The northern ports on the European side ice over every winter (less so now) and its ports on the Black Sea need to go through one of the narrowest choke points on the planet with both sides held by Turkey, which is a NATO member and held the strait against British efforts to sieze it in WW1. So it’s difficult to operate a surface fleet from the northern ports when they can’t leave or return for a good chunk of the year, and if tensions spiked Turkey could cut off the Black Sea. I don’t know what conditions are like on the Pacific side, but it’s far away from most of the industrial base so a poor place for a shipyard.
As for China, they weren’t as industrialized as the other major players during the Cold War so they’d have difficulty building such a fleet, and their relations with the Soviets were much worse yhan the West generally believed so serving as a fleet base for a Soviet fleet would not have been very appealing.
The Russian Navy has a good icebreaker support, so simply in technical terms, it can leave its bases in the Baltic year-round. Their Arctic Ocean ports never freeze, as Gulf Stream heats the Western Arctic Ocean.
However, in tactical terms, an icebreaker-assisted warship is in dire straits. It leaves behind a track of broken ice that looks like a very long tail when viewed from the air – and the Russian Navy bases in the Gulf of Finland are behind a narrowish channel that is a few hundred kilometers long and surrounded on both sides by NATO countries. Most likely, that strait would be closed with mines, fixed and self-propelled artillery and surface-to-surface missiles during a war. The Kaliningrad bases have a better access to the expanse of the Baltic Sea, but in a shooting war, a venture out into the Baltic would be very exciting, considering the supremacy of the combined fleets and air forces of Germany, Poland, Denmark and Sweden.
In practical terms, this is somewhat inconsequential, though, because in any conceivable war situation, the Russian Navy would already be out in the sea, prepared for offensive operations as a part of the overall Russian aggression. It is not like anyone would attack Russia.
To further reinforce your point, the Ottomans held Gallipoli against not just British (and Imperial), but also French troops! While British-led, the Gallipoli expedition was very definitely a multi-national effort
> In practical terms, this is somewhat inconsequential, though, because in any conceivable war situation, the Russian Navy would already be out in the sea,
Well, we’re discussing this in the context of maintaining a global naval presence year-round, not specific short-duration offensive operations. The US standard is six months at sea then return to a major port, and the mechanical breakdowns in the Iran war show what exceeding that by even a bit does. And you can have mechanical failures requiring a return to port unexpectedly even within six months. So while Russia has developed ways to deal with the ice, it’s still not a good naval base and that’s why warm-water ports in Crimea have been a consistent desire of theirs.
No, because it would have been a stupid idea. Quite apart from the fact that the US could afford more navy than the entire Warsaw Pact added together, there’s the matter of geography.
The Warsaw Pact’s access to the open sea was Vladivostok. That’s it. St. Petersburg opens onto a NATO lake, there are 3 chokepoints and basically a NATO lake before the Black Sea reaches the Atlantic, and the Arctic Ocean is too far away from anything important to be useful beyond being an operating area for nuclear submarines. That leaves the Pacific, and what good would a Pacific Fleet do in a war against NATO?
You are mixing up the timeline pretty badly! Back when the Warsaw Pact actually existed, not only was St. Petersburg called Leningrad, but the Baltic Sea was quite far from a NATO lake – the combined coastlines of Estonian/Latvian/Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republics and of the Polish People’s Republic (in addition to RSFSR’s coastline at aforementioned Leningrad, of course – and also at Kaliningrad and Vyborg) amounted to somewhere around half of the entire Baltic coastline! To give but one example, in the 1970s, Gdansk wharves were used to construct a series of amphibious landing ships that are still in Russian service today – in fact, heir NATO designation is the Polish word for “frog”, AFAIR.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ropucha-class_landing_ship
@YARD,
To add to your excellent summary, East Germany had a coastline too, and Finland was of course neutral. Sweden might have been neutral too, not sure. Definitely not a “NATO Lake” although of course you would have to get by Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and England to get *out* of the Baltic.
Sweden was neutral (though tended to lean western) and Finland was… Complicated.
@Arilou,
I’m aware in broad terms of Finland’s “complicated” situation, yes!
I think we often also make the mistake, when thinking of situations like NATO or the Warsaw Pact, of seeing these individual countries, or even worse, the alliances as a whole, as monoliths. Maybe it would make more sense to acknowledge that there were more or less central/”reliable” member countries, and also that in some of the countries, at least, the attitude towards international alliances might depend a lot on what party or coalition was in power at the time. For example, if the Communists had been part of a governing coalition in Portugal in the 1970s, or in Italy early in the Cold War, would those countries really have ended up joining in with America if a NATO/Warsaw Pact war had broken out? Regardless of what their treaty obligations said? Or on the other side, would Romania late in the Cold War really have automatically waded in on the side of the Soviet Union?
More recently, I saw some polling in 2021 that indicated that the majority of people in Slovakia and Greece, and I believe Austrians too, would *not* want their government to fight alongside America in a hypothetical war against Putin’s Russia. Although to be fair, that was in 2021, and I would strongly expect that the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine changed things.
Completely irrelevant given leaving the Baltic requires going through Denmark, a NATO member, and not leaving the Baltic defeats the purpose of having a blue water navy.
It is extremely relevant for defensive purposes; and as for the offensive ones, it had theoretically provided the USSR with the capacity to direct all the Warsaw Pact wharves on the Baltic Sea coast to simultaneously build up a single naval fist, which would have had much better odds of punching through whatever obstacles might get thrown up around Denmark. This would have had required decades of meticulously planned investment to pull off properly, but a USSR where Stalin was succeeded by e.g. Beria rather than Khrushchev (whose thaw had also involved deprioritizing the arms race) might well have managed it.
Having said that – a MASSIVE issue with attempting to operate a “blue water navy” out of the Baltic Sea is that even nowadays, there are stilll 80,000 naval mines that have not been deactivated, so ship traversal is restricted to known safe corridors. Those are large enough to enable all the peacetime traffic, but it’s very much not a welcome limitation during wartime.
https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/2170533/estonia-still-clearing-thousands-second-world-war-mines-its-waters
@Frank,
I’m aware, and I noted that. But the phrase I was objecting to (and YARD) was “NATO Lake”. That seems to be an allusion (especially considering it’s on the blog of a Classical history expert) to the phrase about the Mediterranean, back in the days of the Roman Empire, being a Roman lake. And the situations aren’t comparable at all. Rome really did, for a while, control all of the Mediterranean shoreline, NATO never did with the Baltic, or anything close to it.
You don’t seem to have ever actually gotten back to the section on blockades!
Ah, can fix.
How does the importance of aircraft carriers for bombing to maintain freedom of navigation against extractive polities or pirate bases square with your previous piece on the ineffectiveness of strategic bombing in wartime? From the Iran example, I guess that the distinction is that a state at peace would find the cost of being bombed far outweighs the profits of piratical extraction, while a state at war is fighting for higher stakes and can endure those costs.
Because what aircraft carriers are doing in this case isn’t just bombardment (though that helps) but air support for marines. WIthout carriers you either have to source land based air cover, or go in without it, both of which has… problems.
It’s also just a threat. Strategic bombing doesn’t win wars, but it’s not exactly pleasant to go through. Better to avoid it than to survive it. Is it worth the pain in order to extract tolls or support pirates?
Here, it’s worth noting that the 1989 American intervention of Panama, whatever you think of it (assuming you know/remember it happened at all, that is*) was objectively highly successful at its stated military goals – and yet, it appears to have been carried out with no carriers involved. You are free to consult the list yourself, but the only ship I can see there – USS Vreeland – was a frigate, not a carrier.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_units_involved_in_Operation_Just_Cause
On the other hand, a comparable operation in Grenada a few years earlier did involve both a carrier and a flat-deck landing ship which in part functions like a small carrier. Notably, it was also much smaller-scale, fielding ~7,300 US troops vs. 27,000 deployed to Panama – and was only faced with <1,500 regular troops (some 600 more Cuban construction workers on the island were handed out weapons, but that's not quite the same thing.) In that sense, 1983's Grenada had in fact been one of the comparatively few places with the same population density as early-19th century Algiers or Tripoli, and thus where the same stratagems made sense. It still provides no proof such tactics work against larger adversaries (assuming you haven't already managed to co-opt their leadership beforehand, like in Venezuela.)
* Plenty of gamers do have firsthand or at least second-hand knowledge of the Swedish series of Just Cause “sandboxes” (best known for paragliding and blowing up everything in sight) but probably have only a vague idea it’s named after a real historical event – particularly since the series moved away from Central America after its first two installments, AFAIR.
Also, the use of airpower facilitates the landing of ground forces to take control and fully destroy the bases for control of straits. Without it you would massively struggle to make a contested landing. The airpower alone might not be enough, but that doesn’t make it not necessary.
I suspect the argument comes down to the better defined strategic aims. Deterring a country from piracy requires not total surrender, but only the disabling of the harbors from which they support piracy. Disabling a harbor via bombs is a lot more doable than disabling the entire military-industrial production base. And as you correctly note, if you signal and negotiate correctly, the pirate-supporting country knows its not in an existential fight, which of course also lowers the amount of political will it has to escalate into full-blown war.
That being said, I do think there is a shift in warfare there which might make piracy deterrence harder in the future. Before industrial firepower, disrupting shipping or blocking a strait required a ship. Now, with long-range missiles and drones, while it’s not possible to capture a ship without a harbor, it’s certainly easier to sink one from a launch base away from the coast or away from larger harbors. I’m not versed enough in all the military technology to say how far away we are from some kind of tipping point where indeed purely land-based naval control of a strait becomes possible, but when it does, the navy would indeed find it hard to suppress that with air power (although at that point of course the navy would also have access to similar improved range and targeting capability).
We have the answer on that tipping point and it’s right now if you’re committed. Iran has been able to persistently harass shipping in Hormuz with missiles and drones and the US Navy does not think they can safely operate in there to stop them. There’s still traffic, but it’s sharply reduced and much of it is either from or to countries Iran would like to keep at least neutral to them.
The reason why I’m cagey is that Iran still has a navy present in the strait. I’d generally agree that between the Houthis and Iran, the tipping point seems close, but to truly reach it I feel like you need targeting capabilities from land that can discern the ships so that you can hit the ones that don’t pay the toll – which I’m less sure those parties have.
“Deterring a country from piracy requires not total surrender, but only the disabling of the harbors from which they support piracy”
That may have been true a decade ago, but not anymore. Your enemy doesn’t need a harbor to launch remote-controlled jet skis loaded with explosives, any beach will do. Even a larger USV like Sea Baby doesn’t require that much infrastructure.
And even if you have complete control of the entire shoreline, the enemy could still launch FPV drones from a few kilometers inland.
That “tipping point” lies in the past. Specifically, it happened during the 1800s, with the invention of a useful design for mines, the capacity to build and lay them in large fields, and the somewhat later invention of the torpedo. It lead to lots of well-documented debate in the Admiralty, in Parliament, and the press, about what the future of the Royal Navy should be.
“Young school” (jeune ecole): cheap torpedo boats and mines — so cheap they can attack in swarms — can sink battleships (and anything else). The battleship is obsolete, we shouldn’t waste any money on building any.
“Old school”: small boats can’t operate in bad weather (very common on open oceans), lack the range to cross oceans, lack endurance on station, or the ability to bombard stuff on the land. They are strategically defensive weapon systems that can deny an area to enemy battlefleets more cheaply than a battlefleet of one’s own, but they can’t do power projection. They should be classed with coastal guns, which have long existed, long proved frustrating for ships (especially before explosive-filled shells, it was even more disproportionately easier to hit and damage a ship, than to shut down a gun emplaced on land and partly dug into earthworks), but improving on them with the increased range, and bonus points for the creativity of attacking below the waterline. So there is work to be done on figuring out what to do about them. But since the Royal Navy needs to be able to do power projection, it needs to maintain battleships. (Well, most of the colonial work is in practice for cruisers, but if someone wanted to make trouble and did have a serious navy, then by golly, the Royal Navy would sail a battlefleet around the world.)
That was a live debate at the time but the people who tried Jeune Ecole ended up not having much luck with it. In practice it was hard to hit battleships with torpedoes without getting blown to hell; only Japan had a torpedo with the range and stealth for it. Other nation’s torpedoes were mostly shorter-ranged than guns and left a highly visible trail warning the battleship to get out of the way.
The most it did was get the battleship fleets to use lighter ships as escorts to screen out torpedo boats.
Generally, if navies had to react to new thing X by spending money on building fleets of X-destroyers, spending effort on training maneuvers to avoid Xes (such as “twisting ship” when incoming wakes are spotted), spending yet more money by designing new ships to include X-protection systems — I would say that’s evidence that X is a big deal. Likewise, not only did all navies adapt to their enemies using X, all navies also got some X of their own. And their conclusion from e.g. WW1 was that they kept putting X on ships designed after it, and kept improving X in various ways (even if certain Marks proved highly flawed).
This is the perspective of a major navy, and the established wisdom in the US and in Great Britain. Is it true, though? What actions can we see where a traditional battle fleet would have attacked a Jeune École style fleet?
We know from WWI that in the Mediterranean, the Austrian battleship raid against Otranto was stopped whn Italian torpedo boats destroyed the Szent István. And the Austrians sunk the cruiser Leon Gambetta with a submarine. In 1919, British torpedo boats operating in Gulf of Finland successfully damaged two battleships moored in the port of Kronstadt. In 1941, the destruction of Force Z by Japanese aircraft was also in line with the teachings of Jeune École.
On the other hand, there has been essentially only a single case where a battle fleet did engage a fortified coast: the landing of Normandy. In that case, the landing was planned and prepared for two full years, and the fire support mission used the full firepower of the British Home Fleet and the US Atlantic Fleets: seven battleships and about 25 cruisers, and an immense amount of air power. This against a position with less than a dozen light coastal guns!
So, the experience shows that fleets don’t attack defended positions or get into confined waters where light units could attack them.
I would, instead, say that on tactical level, these experiences show that Jeune École was right in its main thesis: tactically, naval defence and light units give you better bang for the buck, if your aim is defensive, not offensive.
I would like to note that therr was one country which was forced to try this approach. After the destruction of the Imperial Russian Baltic Fleet in the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, the Russian Navy had no battle-wothy units. Since the Crimean War, one of the major strategic threat scenarios had been a British or (later) German attack against St. Petersburg via sea.
Because the Russian Navy was no longer a fighting force, Russia built the “Peter the Great Naval Fortress” on the Baltic, with super-heavy 300 mm batteries and lighter 230 and 152 mm batteries with overlapping arcs of fire, closing the Gulf of Finland and its approaches in several layers. This formidable force was never tested, though: the Germans conquered Tallinn by land and when they made a landfall in Finland, it was after Brest-Litovsk Peace treaty, and the fortresses were unoccupied.
On tactical level, though, we know that this concept worked: in December 1939, two Russian battleships attacked a 300 mm Finnish battery at Saarenpää. The battery was able to damage one of the ships, and they needed to turn away, after expending about 500 300 mm grenades against the fortress. The fortress suffered two killed and eoght wounded in action. This demonstrates very well that a battleship fleet would have been completely unable to break through the Peter the Great fortress chain. So, I would say that land-based area denial in a narrow strait became overwhelming in about 1910’s.
I was going to say that the losses of the Russo-Japanese War had also forced the Russian Imperial Navy to adopt Jeune École principles almost as enthusiastically as the originator itself (France, as the name suggests)…but while it’s a just-so narrative, the actual timeline went the other way around! That is, after the Black Sea fleet of sailships got wrecked by the Anglo-French fleet of (primarily wooden and unarmoured steamships), the navy was determined to stay ahead of the technological curve this time, and so they became the earliest adopters of armoured ships after the US itself (Lincoln literally sold Monitor’s blueprints to Alexander II, and its copies were already patrolling the Black Sea by the time the US Civil War ended), and the most prolific early adopters of the torpedo. Jeune École was responding to torpedo ship successes in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878.
We can see this in a table on Russian Wikipedia page for “torpedo carrier”*; already in 1886 (the earliest year for which data is available, for some reason), the Russian Empire actually fielded significantly more of these ships than France; 119 vs. 77, whereas Austro-Hungarian Empire had 42, and Italy had 58. (The British Empire was in the lead in absolute terms, with 129, but that was a smaller fraction of a much larger fleet than anyone else’s.) By 1892, the number of British ships of this class actually grew 1.5-fold, to 186; but the Italian number more than doubled, to 129, the French one tripled to 222…and the German fleet apparently saw A 19-FOLD INCREASE, from 8 to 152, which altogether pushed the Russian fleet’s number from 2nd place to 5th (they still grew, but only modestly, to 143.)
Then, in 1900 (still well before Tsushima!), the Russian Imperial Fleet regained its second spot, going to 174…as France stood still and both Britain and Germany were apparently vastly disappointed in those ships’ capability, since their numbers plunged – to 95 and 113, respectively. By 1904, the British numbers doubled back up to 159 (quite a whiplash in Admiralty policy!), German ones continued to plunge to 90 (now at similar levels to Japan’s 82 – going from 26 four years earlier and seemingly nothing before that), Russian ones slightly declined to 156 (coming close to Italy’s 143) and France became the undisputed champion with 282 such ships. Sadly, whoever edited that table apparently couldn’t find references for WWI period, so it cuts off there. Nevertheless, a remarkable set of numbers!
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE%D0%BD%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%B5%D1%86
*”Миноносец” – literally “mine carrier”, since the torpedoes were initially called “self-propelled mines”; this term refers to torpedo-armed ships with the displacements of several hundred tons (134 tons for the initial example** in Russia, and 300-500 for most others), whereas torpedo boats (“torpedo cutters”, literally) refers to those with <100-ton displacement; in English, this distinction does not exist and all torpedo-armed ships with displacement below 1000 t or thereabouts and limited open-sea capability are just called "torpedo boats". Furthermore, the ships which are called "destroyers" in English are named "эскадренный миноносец
**Improbably, it was literally called Взрыв ("Explosion"); one can only imagine how its 21 crew felt about that. Yet, in an interesting inversion of nominative determinism, it served just fine for 30 years before getting peacefully scrapped. Admittedly, it never saw combat and was only really used for training; but let's just say plenty of ships with much less inauspicious names were lost for non-combat reasons.
There’s an entire dynamic of “Yes, most of the work is done by cruisers, but you need a battlefleet or the enemy will have one and you won’t and will just sink all your cruisers…” So you end with two battlefleets.
To clarify because based on the responses to my comment my explanation of what tipping point I mean is unclear:
I’m not talking about the ability to close a strait or make a waterway safe entirely – I do agree that between drone ranges, torpedoes and sea mines, it’s already feasible to just shut down territorial waters to everyone. What I meant was selective attacks or blockades of specific ships, because that’s what needed to make piracy/strait control an economic tool.
If a polity makes a stretch of ocean impassable to anyone, it doesn’t get any money from that, but if it can impose tolls or only allow ships of certain flags to pass, then it can extract money, directly or indirectly via diplomatic concessions, from that lever. The ability to sink the ship from land is the enforcement mechanism in that case, and to be effective, it needs to be precise. The polity needs to be able to exactly blow up the ships that didn’t pay the toll or are flying the wrong flag, and for that it needs targeting capability. For now, this targeting as far as I’m aware still requires some physical presence in or above the stretch of water in question, which is therefore vulnerable to a fleet-based interdiction by another power.
I’m trying to understand what you have in mind that hasn’t existed for several decades by now.
For the sake of simplicity: you can sell whitelisted tracks. If a ship wants to cross your straits, they call your Toll Office and ask for a track. On confirmation of payment, you generate a series of waypoints and times and maneuvers and promise to not blow up 1 (one) ship that follows it exactingly. If you want to be performatively cruel, you can throw in instructions to speed up and slow down and turn a 360° circle. And you blow up any traffic not following one of your whitelisted tracks. Anti-ship missiles (1950s), torpedoes (late 1800s), and guns have a human in the loop deciding when to launch, and in what direction. Or for when a command-detonated mine should explode (this type preexists the more famous “spiky” contact-detonated kind).
Radar and sonar, WW2 tech. Passive hydrophones, before 1900 (matching telephones). If you don’t mind the occasional fog day, because even a 10% chance of being blown up (perhaps the fog unexpectedly disperses) makes merchants not try to run the passage, you can build this with binoculars, telegraphs (mid-1800s, predecessors exist), clerks with spreadsheets, and guns big enough to cover the straits (fire control might be an issue before the mid-late 1800s for wider straits). At which point, you might rather base the identification on flying a physical Toll Flag, which can be rented at physical tollbooths (if for some reason you want the tollbooth not to just be in the middle, inside the field of fire).
For more realism, you can add whatever further rules to the system, as long as the officers doing the targeting can follow them. Say, give exemptions to the local fishermen for obvious reasons. (Their fishing boats don’t look or sound like deep-draft cargo ships. They probably take shortcuts across shallower water.)
Partially because they can support ground operations to truly take a port or missile base offline long-term, partially because piracy is an economic transaction so if ransoming a freighter for $100 million gets the US to inflict $1billion in damage in retaliation it doesn’t look so good.
Also, strategic bombing can be somewhat effective at reducing capabilities and the RAF kept a number of German warships unseaworthy over a long period of time with persistent raids, so you can plausibly keep down the number of pirate ships significantly with airpower even if the country is as committed to piracy as it is to state survival.
I think the image where you aren’t sure is a Perry class frigate with the MK13 missile launcher removed, which I believe started in 2003 just in time for that picture. It’s got the flat forward superstructure and looks smaller than the destroyers.
One of the problems is that modern tech has made it a lot easier to at least “disrupt” trade from a land based position with missiles, drones and/or aircraft without even setting a hull in the water. Obviously this still means you’re limited to “choke points” or near-coastal stuff for your disruption. But the houthis have shown how hard it is to actually keep someone from doing so. And unlike old style big coastal guns these modern systems are a lot more replacable (and harder to hit in the first place)
I agree that fixed coastal guns are rather antiquated, but they are surprisingly hard to hit. Let us take as an example a completely antiquated case: a 152 mm Canet coastal gun in a fortified position: an 1890’s design with 1950’s level of protection, removed from Finnish service since 2002. The weapon is in a position blasted in solid bedrock, with an armoured steel roof. The ammunition, command and crew spaces are in rock bunkers, effectively immune against any weapons effects. To destroy the gun, you need to get a direct hit with a cruise missile, i.e. to hit a target of less than 10 m in circumference, and heavily camouflaged. This photo shows such a gun placement, with no camouflage. It is easy to see how small the target is.
Even with 1990’s technology, this was a very untrivial task. Most likely, you would need to expend quite a few pieces of smart munitions, even assuming no point defences. Considering that such guns are never fighting alone but as a part of a wider network of fixed emplacements, naval mines, infantry defences, air defence and mobile systems, the destruction of the complete coastal defence to allow an invasion to proceed is anything but simple.
Oh yes, but that kind of position will also have a fairly limited range compared to drones/missiles (not to mention less accuracy) so while it can do the job of “defending against invasion” fairly well, it has a lot harder time denying a strait trade, f.ex.
(and the longer the range of the gun the more visible it’s going to be)
Modern drones (and land-based missiles) means the “reach” of land-based firepower becomes more effective. (it being cheaper and easier to replace is just a bonus)
Though of course, a lot depends on exactly how narrow the strait is you’re trying to deny.
True. Typical coastal cannon has a range of some 25 km. (The 1980’s Finnish 130 mm fixed gun can fire well over 30 km km with rocket-assisted projectiles, but with normal grenades, it is claimed to have a range of over 24 km. Its Swedish 120 mm sister has a range of 27 km. A gun with a higher range, like the 300 mm Obuhov naval cannon, is indeed clearly larger and more visible.) The coastal guns are accurate, though, at such ranges: in the 1939 Battle of Russarö, 152 mm Canet guns caused damage to a Soviet cruiser Kirov at 20 km range.
The practical use of such coastal fortifications in Finnish and Swedish use during the Cold War was not offensive, though: the idea of closing the Baltic Sea was nonsensical, when the whole Eastern shore of the Sea was part of the Soviet Union. The idea was to close off the coasts of both countries, and especially the shipping lanes that go deep inland within the archipelago. In such use case, a gun that can destroy everything that its (land-based) fire control can observe over the horizon is quite enough. In addition, it was relatively easy to maintain such fortresses in constant combat readiness, which guarded against any nasty surprises from the sea.
For this reason, Finland still maintains a modest number of 130 mm fixed cannon batteries, and trains personnel for them. They are a good and cheap complement to missile units, even if with a limited combat life.
Mines and torpedo boats (or the occasional land-based torpedo launcher) were invented in the 1800s. Exactly the same arguments were made at the time as today. (More detail in a related comment above.)
And on a technical point: you mentioned aircraft. If you have the air superiority (or otherwise permissive environment) to use and not lose a maritime patrol aircraft based on a strategic bomber or a civilian airliner, you can have ranges in the low thousands of km. In practice, this is most relevant for submarine-hunting, but the Soviets also tried hunting American carriers with missile-carrying Tu-95s. As the mock combat of the ’80s showed, this didn’t really work; somehow carriers always have AWACS and fighters on combat air patrol nearby. But if you tried to bully civilian shipping, you might be able to do it (for a time) from the far side of an ocean, even if there is an enemy air force that would want to prevent you from doing that.
Though this carries diplomatic risks on the scale of unrestricted submarine warfare. Case in point, during the Iraq-Iran war, Iraq had the French modify a business jet to carry anti-ship missiles. On one of its missions, they flew down the Gulf, looked for something in the place where Iranian tankers would be, shot at it, and it turned out they managed to target USS Stark.
1980s, you say? Tu-95 had entered service in…1956. The first carrier-borne AWACS, E-1 Tracer, followed 4 years later, in 1960 – and it wasn’t yet that good, since the crews had to personally alert the rest of the battlegroup of their findings. Automatic radar feed aboard ships followed with E-2 Hawkeye, which technically entered service in 1964 – but the early production models kept overheating from stuffing so many avionics inside a comparatively small airframe, so it’s taken until about 1971, with the E-2C model, for carrier-borne AWACS to reach the level of effectiveness we are now familiar with. Moreover, while an AWACS might be capable of spotting the missile carrier from several hundred km away, “fighters on combat patrol” still had to fly either into visual range, or almost all the way there to actually intercept it – the first aircraft capable of carrying a truly long-range air-to-air missile, F-14 Tomcat, didn’t enter service until 1974. (And those Phoenix missiles took months to produce at the time as well.) Before that, by the time a fighter caught up with the missile carrier, the latter would have already long fired off its projectile, and the fighter pilot might no longer have anywhere to return to.
Either way, Tu-95, practically the only Soviet aircraft with the range to reliably reach the continental US, wasn’t actually the primary anti-aircraft carrier platform by any means. Granted, it could fulfil this role – by simply launching a nuclear-tipped cruise missile into the general target area (even a miss on the order of several kilometers that failed to outright sink the aircraft carrier would have had blown off everything from its deck). That was completely in line with the same 1950s Cold War logic which likewise had the US attach two nuclear cruise missiles to the wings of B-52s – purely so that they could hit S-75 air defence sites (their locations identified via satellite imagery and coordinates input beforehand) well before the bomber entered their range. (This was only possible because the S-75 is comparatively short-ranged and 1967’s S-200 – let alone the following S-300/400 – was completely impractical to suppress in this manner – but by then, ICBMs had rendered strategic nuclear bombers largely symbolic anyway.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-28_Hound_Dog
Instead, the non-doomsday anti-ship warfare was initially the responsibility of lighter strategic bombers – first the B-29 copy Tu-4 (in 1950, Stalin’s Politburo was seriously considering responding to the Inchon landing by making the one anti-ship regiment of these fire off all 50 prototype anti-ship missiles, which were effectively scaled-down MiG-15s that could only follow the beam from the bomber – but still had a range of 90 km, and a 600 kg warhead), then Tu-16 (3 times smaller than B-52, with concurrent limitations on range and load – but the 9-ton payload was still well above the WWII bombers, and it was cheap enough for dozens to end up exported to the Middle East) – but for most of the Cold War, this was the task assigned to the regiments of supersonic Tu-22 and Tu-22M (in large part because anti-air missiles effectively eliminated the utility of a supersonic strategic bomber vs. more conventional targets anyway – while here, it was hypothetically capable of shooting at a carrier and turning back fast enough to reach the protection of interceptor patrols before the carrier-based fighter had caught up.) The former could carry one Kh-22 missile, the latter (effectively a wholly different design, despite the name) three – i.e. a fully-equipped “anti-ship warfare regiment” of >20 planes could fire off over 60 missiles.
That is why the Aegis system was invented – so that a Ticonderoga cruiser could guard an aircraft carrier with up to 2 interceptors per every missile a regiment could conceivably fire. (Yes, Aegis-equipped Ticonderogas have 122 missile slots – though filling all of them with interceptors leaves nothing for Tomahawks and the like.) Nowadays, of course, the maths is much less favourable, since while a carrier strike group might not have a Ticonderoga anymore (those are really old and due to be retired in a foreseeable future), an Arleigh Burke has 96 slots – and there are 5-6 per strike group. On the other hand, anti-ship missiles have evolved as well – i.e. hypersonic missiles allegedly reduce odds of success by any single interceptor to ~5%.
I was referring specifically to Ocean Venture 81 and its yearly successor exercises. There it was tested in real life, without the artifice of pre-negotiation, how often would fighters pull alongside the bombers, or would a CG paint the bombers with fire control radar (as a maritime SAMbush), vs. how often would they get to weapons launch point against the carriers.
E.g. this.
Yes, and as you have said, this exercise took place in the 1980s, using technology which did not exist at the time the Soviet counter-carrier doctrine was designed. i.e.
This is referring to what is now Aegis, but started out as the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS). Here’s how this technology spread (this source was written as early as 2015, according to the Internet Archive, so it’s definitely pre-LLM):
https://ethw.org/First-Hand:Legacy_of_NTDS_-_Chapter_9_of_the_Story_of_the_Naval_Tactical_Data_System#Spread_of_NTDS_in_the_Fleet
So, the earliest time when a USN battlegroup might have plausibly managed to run silent would have been in mid-1960s – a decade after Tu-95 and Tu-16 had entered service with the nuclear anti-ship missiles, 4 years after the original Tu-22, and only a couple years before the conventional Kh-22 missile. It would have also been a much smaller and more vulnerable battlegroup next to the ~60 ships which took part in the North Atlantic phase of the Ocean Venture alone. Even then, these systems were much less refined back then as opposed to their 1981 state.
In fairness, “today” probably refers to 1999, when the above was written, rather than 1981. Nevertheless, mid-1960s systems were very much NOT at this level – just read the linked page again for the struggle throughout the 1970s to standardize all the digital subsystems, recall that the E-2 did not get refined till 1971, etc.
Lastly, perhaps the main reason Ocean Venture led to the outcome it had was the terrible neglect of AWACS in the Soviet doctrine. Whereas USA’s first dedicated AWACS with the overhead radar dish was the 1954’s EC-121 Warning Star, I believe (some Flying Fortresses and even Avenger torpedo carriers got ad hoc conversions as early as 1944, but those had the much less effective underbelly radars), which was produced in bulk (232 planes!), the USSR’s first attempt at AWACS was 1962’s Tu-95RTs (some 50 planes), which had the weaker underbelly radar and was only supposed to guide submarines, not missile carrier regiments. Only about a dozen of the overhead radar AWACS, Tu-126, had been produced, as that radar had overloaded the same Tu-95 frame and forced designers to weaken the sound/vibration insulation near the twin-blade turboprop engines, which ultimately cut practical (i.e. ones the crews could bear) surveillance flights to well below the technical maximum duration. (This neglect had also heavily cost some of the USSR’s allies: i.e. 1982’s “Mole Cricket” could have ended quite differently if the Syrian air force had AWACS guidance, whereas they were cut off from ground radars by a mountain range and heavy Israeli EW.)
Hence, I don’t think Ocean Venture would have produced the same results if it were attempted in the second half of the 1980s, when the first properly working AWACS – A-50 and the Ka-31 helicopter – were finally entering service in significant numbers. Perhaps more to the point, it’s far from clear where it would still work today – not only had the PRC in particular had learned the Soviet lesson and now fields somewhere north of 50 AWACS, but Saab managed to make this technology affordable to middle powers – countries from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia (9 and 8) to UAE, Brazil (5 each), Greece (4) and even Poland and Thailand (2) now all have those. On the flip side, ultra-long range air-to-air missiles make it considerably easier to down AWACS – but that still eliminates the same element of surprise Ocean Venture had enjoyed.
Trump will destroy the US Navy, inevitably, as he kills everything he touches. It’s the way of things. This creature is living typhoid. When will enough people realize this basic, essential fact in time to do something about it?
November of 2026.
An interesting read, but I’m missing how the blockades of Cuba and Venezuela by the United States which also involves taking ships and randomly killing fishing boats on the open ocean would fit into this.
Are these part of the abandonment of the principle of free navigation as well or is that a sign that the USA is now moving openly to a position of hostility towards the concept? Effectively becoming part of the piracy problem?
Randomly killing fishermen is a sign we’re moving towards privateers and apparently have already started contracting out doing so to PMCs based on an account by a fishermen who was boarded by guys with guns and American flag patches but not in the uniform of any identifiable governmental organization.
Cuba and Venezuela are blockades, which are understood to be lawful acts of war when directed at a specific country. We’re pretending we aren’t at war for domestic political reasons of it being wildly illegal but we basically are.
I think part of the problem is that the scale of enemies that can harm our forces has decreased.
What I mean is, a random fishing boat with a shape charge–just PVC, shaped copper, and some C4, really–can do SIGNIFICANT damage to a US war vessel. That’s not hypothetical, it happened about a decade ago, and the technology has only improved. And you can carry something big enough to do that sort of damage on a ship small enough that *I* can legally captain it (26.5′ powered boat according to my license). Things no longer have to be big to be dangerous.
Further, at least with Venezuela, there’s drugs and human trafficking. Not always the way you think, either–it’s pretty easy to hide someone in a 26.5′ long boat. If you’re smuggling out valid military targets it’s hard to argue that you’re a random fishing boat. Not impossible–see the Lusitania, which carried munitions and other war contraband–but tricky.
To be clear, I deplore what happened in Venezuela. It was fundamentally immoral, strategically inept, and tactically futile (how’s gas prices these days?). But I also don’t think Venezuela is run by saints who have never done anything wrong ever ever ever. Even if we accept that the invasion was immoral, we don’t need to assume that the person being invaded has also entirely played by the rules. My stance is that both sides are almost certainly guilty here.
“I think part of the problem is that the scale of enemies that can harm our forces has decreased… Things no longer have to be big to be dangerous.”
Relatively small motor torpedo boats or suicide-bomb boats being able to damage large warships is not a new phenomenon, but even if it was, it wouldn’t do anything whatsoever to explain why the US is currently sinking random fishing boats with drone strikes and random pirate attacks off the coasts of Latin American states. Yes, a small boat you could legally captain could (illegally) in theory have a huge bomb on board and somehow be capable of sinking a Coast Guard cutter if you pulled alongside and suicide-bombed it. This does not give the US military a license to randomly decide to murder you and sink your boat just because they can.
“Further, at least with Venezuela, there’s drugs and human trafficking”
It is by no means apparent that the US under Trump is making any effort to ascertain which boats carry drugs and enslaved prisoners, versus simply killing any boat they care to kill at random. Moreover, the US has operated various forms of customs enforcement and anti-smuggling operations for centuries, as have many other powers. Randomly murdering the crews of the boats without even trying to secure their surrender, let alone inspect them to confirm that the boats are carrying contraband, is not a reasonable step and is not justified by “but human trafficking happens!”
No person who desires to live in a world where anyone has freedom or where justice ever exists for anyone, would agree that it is reasonable and fitting to go around blowing up small boats at random on the vague excuse of “but drug smuggling is a thing.”
“My stance is that both sides are almost certainly guilty here.”
Guilty of what? Who even is the other ‘side’ here, with the US military being one side here? Is the other side Maduro, whose offenses against the US are frankly vaguely defined beyond just “we don’t like him?” Is the other side some specific drug-smuggling cartel? Is the other side ‘those random fishermen Pete Hegseth wanted dead because it would make him feel like a big man for the rest of the night to get to kill someone?’
“Further, at least with Venezuela, there’s drugs and human trafficking.”
I would like to point out that blowing up a boat you suspect is engaging in human trafficking, would also blow up the victims of said trafficking.
I struggle to imagine what scenario would justify summary execution of both a suspected criminal and their suspected victims.
Which is why these apparent random killings of small boats in either international waters or the coastal waters of foreign countries is so indefensible.
“I would like to point out that blowing up a boat you suspect is engaging in human trafficking, would also blow up the victims of said trafficking.”
I didn’t say that part well. I think sometimes that’s the point. The fishing boat isn’t necessarily the target, the person IN the boat is the target. If some high-value target is fleeing on a fishing boat, militarily speaking, sinking the fishing boat may be justified. The USA in WWII would not have hesitated to sink a fishing boat carrying critical German or Japanese communications, or a general, or the like. The USA may consider a drug kingpin to be equally valid.
Again, I’m not defending this. I think prohibition, like strategic bombing, has been thoroughly demonstrated to be ineffective at best and counter-productive at worst. But drug rings have a history of using small craft to smuggle things and people, so it’s not unreasonable to assume they’re doing the same here, and if you accept that killing members of drug rings is a valid use of military power it follows that a small craft smuggling a key member of the ring is a valid military target.
I mean we don’t recognize killing unarmed drug smugglers we could easily take alive as a valid use of military power and Trump declaring them to be terrorists does not make it one.
“I mean we don’t recognize killing unarmed drug smugglers we could easily take alive as a valid use of military power….”
Tell that to Nicaragua, Panama, Ecuador, Honduras, and a few other countries. Or watch the original Predator movie, no one questioned the initial premise. We in fact have a long history of violence, including military action, against groups that manufacture and distribute drugs, including military force, and that includes killing unarmed people, military and civilian.
Secondly, the term “unarmed” doesn’t magically make someone an invalid target. If a Japanese general was fleeing during combat on a fishing boat and happened to not have a sidearm, no one’s going to question the validity of the USA sinking that boat. It’s no longer a civilian craft, it’s a military asset. If the person fleeing had a US code book but no weapon, again, no one would question the validity of shooting to kill. And while the USA has historically made a reasonable attempt to avoid killing civilians, such deaths are inevitable in combat; the boundary can be very thin. The notion that “unarmed” means “not a valid target” doesn’t stand up to even casual analysis.
For what it’s worth, this isn’t theoretical for me. I’ve got friends who work in places that would be destroyed in the event of war. Unarmed civilians. And by and large they accept that they’re valid military targets. The USA still largely believes in a square deal, and if you work at a military base or the like you accept the risk.
“…and Trump declaring them to be terrorists does not make it one.”
As much as I dislike Trump–and the man is an existential threat to myself and people I love, so I dislike him a great deal–it actually kinda does. Groups that manufacture and distribute drugs have a long history of violence that can only be called paramilitary because they’re not recognized as a state. Congress has the authority to declare war, but it has long been accepted that the president can launch campaigns without Congressional approval. And if the USA declares a violent group that uses military and paramilitary tactics against the USA and others to be enemies, it does in fact make them valid targets. Their manufacturing is valid, their distribution is valid, their communications are valid, their administration is valid–everything that would be a valid target were they a state is a valid target. We can debate the morality of this (and let’s be clear, Trump doesn’t give a rat’s tail about the morality of this), but….well, Trump is, for once, acting on fairly well-established precedent here. We can deplore the action, but we must admit that he’s following the template that has been used for over a generation now.
@Dinwar,
And if the USA declares a violent group that uses military and paramilitary tactics against the USA and others to be enemies, it does in fact make them valid target
Except when Trump and his regime “declare” this, it often has no relation to reality.
“Except when Trump and his regime “declare” this, it often has no relation to reality.”
While I would love for this to be a trump card in this argument, it’s not. The fact is that the President of the United States has the authority to deploy military force. This has always been a hotly debated topic, but the precedents are numerous–Korea, Vietnam, the Iraq wars, Afghanistan, Kosovo, various actions in Cuba, and numerous other events have demonstrated that in fact, the person holding the office of President has the authority to commit the United States armed forces wherever he wants.
(Note that I DO NOT say he has the authority to declare war. And there are some limits Congress attempts to impose, but they’ve never been very strong or rigorously upheld.)
Do I think Venezuela is a valid use of this power? Of course not. But it’s a situation where my opinion isn’t really relevant. Again, precedent is clear: Trump is acting within his authority as President. That we dislike it is not a counter-argument to this legal fact.
If you don’t like what Trump is doing contact your Congressman and Senator. Write letters to the editor. Vote–in local and state as well as federal elections. But as long as Trump holds the office of POTUS and Congress and the Supreme Court continue to uphold this established precedent, he has all the rights and privileges inherent to that office, including deploying armed forces.
Please note that this is not the first time the President has committed armed forces in a way that many in the country object to. The War of 1812 wasn’t unanimously popular, for example.
@Dinwar,
So is the claim here “the Trump regime has both the legal and the customary authority to declare whichever foreign state, organization or individuals they want a threat to US security and engage in acts of quasi-war against them, without any evidence or reasoned argument whatsoever”?
If so, then you may well be right, but in that case that’s a striking and massive failure mode of the whole US political system.
Yes, US presidents have done foreign policy actions in the past that were arguably morally much worse than what Trump has done- the Vietnam/Indochina War, the aforementioned “dirty wars” in Central America, and let’s not even get into the wars against the Native Americans. But, at least those past presidents generally tried to pretty up what they were doing, and to offer some fig leaf of moral justification (and to be clear, I have a very dim view of people like Nixon, Reagan etc.). With Trump and his regime we seem to have really entered pure might makes right territory.
“If so, then you may well be right, but in that case that’s a striking and massive failure mode of the whole US political system.”
Sure. It’s the same problem every other political system has: People. This is why presidential elections are so important, and why the Founding Fathers attempted to put in place enough checks and balances to prevent this sort of thing. Typically presidents have restrained themselves, for a variety of reasons. Launching wars can be detrimental to one’s political standing–the USA loves a winner, and we consider a president who launches an unsuccessful war to be unworthy of re-election. Remember, this poisons those they endorse as well. Plus, many presidents genuinely were trying to do the right thing. But it’s not like the President has never pushed for unpopular wars before. You can go to Kent State and see the bullet holes for yourself.
Your last paragraph is rather grimly amusing. I know there are a lot of objections to Ayn Rand, but your last paragraph could have been lifted straight out of “Atlas Shrugged”–specifically the scene where Jim and Ferris were complaining about Mr. Thompson and his ilk, saying that back in their day at least the folks trying to rule had style. Note that the people saying this were not the good guys. For my part, I find myself unmoved by these sorts of arguments. A highway man holding a gun to my head is no less of a thug because he dresses nice and uses courtly manners (a real thing in the past, he became something of a celebrity). And a President launching an immoral war doesn’t become a better person because they lie about it. If anything, I could make the argument that at least Trump is openly doing these things–he’s not pretending to be doing something noble, he’s purely aggressive and acquisitional. If nothing else it makes arguing against what he does easier, provided one argues properly and does not indulge in isolated appeals to rigor and special pleading.
Just in case there’s any doubt; our host’s stated position is…really not in line with Dinwar’s.
https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social/post/3m6syl2qj6k2o
Were the fishermen part of the problem? How would we know?
Many of these drugs are illegal in most places, so the people manufacturing and distributing them hide them. It’s their job to ensure that a boat smuggling something is indistinguishable from a boat not smuggling anything; otherwise smuggling wouldn’t work. Ergo, the US destroying craft smuggling drugs or key personnel would look exactly like the US destroying random boats.
The fishing boats were involved in at least some of this previously. After all, they have the boats, and have a legitimate excuse to be in areas where a boat obviously running drugs wouldn’t be welcome. There are enough court cases on our shores for anyone who doubts this happens to verify it for themselves. Fishing isn’t going to get you rich, both due to climate change and due to overfishing; makes sense that the folks for taking a high-risk/high-reward opportunity.
I’m not saying that’s what’s happening. I’ve no insider knowledge. It’s just that these people have used these tactics before, and it’s at least likely that they are continuing to use them. If they are, again, it would look an awful lot like the USA just blasting random fishing boats out of the water.
The problem being that the US blasting random boats would look an awful lot like what is actually happening.
There’s not even been an accusation that the boats were carrying military personnel intent on combat; it’s exclusively been drugs that the administration has been talking about, and they haven’t exactly provided evidence any of the boats actually had drugs on them. We do not regard drug smuggling as worthy of the death penalty even when proven, and had been detaining and inspecting boats suspected of drug smuggling for a long time without a single ship being damaged. The boat strike was taking a ship by surprise in harbor; when interdicting ships the warship stands off a significant distance and either sends a helicopter or a small boat for the boarding, with the interdicted boat having heavy guns pointed at it at all times.
So what’s been going on off Venezuela and South America more generally is that the administration has been murdering a bunch of civilians who may or may not have been carrying drugs and put a legal fig leaf on this by declaring drug smuggling is terrorism and they have secret evidence the boats had drugs, and have done follow-up attacks on survivors that would be illegal even if they were enemy combatants, which they aren’t. And when they did recover survivors once, apparently the secret evidence wasn’t good enough for a criminal trial and they were released back to their home country without US charges or providing any evidence that would let their home country pursue a trial.
Yeah, it’s not even piracy. It’s just the US randomly killing people for no reason.
Fascist states kill people, including but not limited to their own people via negligence, in order to instrumentalize the deaths into propaganda. These fishermen died in order to provide the Trump administration with polling boosts and talking points; at the highest levels the people involved in ordering their deaths found the events to be extremely reasoned.
“…and they haven’t exactly provided evidence any of the boats actually had drugs on them. ”
Would you expect them to? Assuming this is based on some covert ops, revealing this information could compromise sources and result in a lot of people getting killed and/or the failure of the mission. It’s not like we haven’t, as a nation, killed people without telling the general public all the information before.
Keeping information secret has a name–OpSec–and has been a part of war for THOUSANDS of years.
Again, to be clear: I object to this entire campaign. But a lot of the objections being presented here are very inconsistent with how the USA demonstrably has operated during the entire drug war (meaning back to Nixon) and how the US military operates and how wars are conducted in general. Once you accept the premise that these organizations are enemy combatants, the rest more or less necessarily follows. It’s horrific, yes, but….well, war is about doing horrific things to other people. Unless you’re willing to argue for strict pacifism, I’m not sure the arguments presented have traction.
Well, I reject the premise that the unarmed boat smugglers are enemy combatants and think we should have the coast guard arrest them like we did until last year. As for armed operations against the cartels in other countries, the objective is usually to arrest them. If their supporters offer armed resistance, they’re enemy combatants then.
As for opsec, it is true that the military often doesn’t reveal everything, but them basically saying “take our word for it” and destroying the boats that would contain evidence they don’t have to keep secret and openly joking about how people aren’t going fishing because they think they’ll die does not exactly convince me there’s relying on ironclad evidence.
But the point is this *isn’t* war. Drug smuggling isn’t an act of war, at most it’s a crime, and should be dealt with as such.
“Drug smuggling isn’t an act of war…”
An organized group engaging in systematic violence against a state–which the cartels do–is often hard to distinguish from a war. More guerilla than most, but the tactics, weapons, and training are often similar enough that if you replaced “cartel” with “warlord” no one would notice. There are places where these organizations have replaced official government structures (Mexico had a problem with that for a long time, and this was prior to Trump’s first term), and many more where they are in direct, violent conflict with official government institutions (it has directly impacted my job more than once).
I’ll grant that it’s not an officially declared war, but neither were Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (either time), Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iran, the actions against Cuba, or any of the myriad of other conflicts the USA has engaged in. If you’re going to hide behind technicalities it’s only fair that you be consistent and admit that either 1) this is as much a war as any of those others, or 2) none of those were wars and therefore all were entirely illegitimate.
We’re not talking a couple of kids growing pot in their back yard here, nor are we talking about a few gang-bangers. We are talking large, well-organized organizations that de facto control large territories and populations with large, well-armed, and trained combat arms. The Taliban is a good example–they made a lot of money off opioids. And before you say it yes, I’m aware that the Taliban had other income streams and sources of legitimacy. So does cartels and other organizations. Drug-running is a revenue stream and a suite of methods that can be used for other things–in this case, a suite of methods that would necessarily (because this is what they’re designed to do) make it look like legitimate military targets are civilian fishing boats.
None of this is even hard to find. I grew up in a rural backwater and by the time I was in high school I was aware of these issues due to some of the things going on around town. If this wasn’t Trump I don’t think I’d be getting the pushback I am–especially the “I don’t agree with what the President is doing so it’s illegitimate” sort of nonsense that any high school civics class would demonstrate to be contrary to how this nation works. The proper avenue to attack this is the legitimacy of the GOALS–which, to be clear, are oil and distraction from Trump’s egregious and horrifying crimes. Attacking the methods is counter-productive, as it simply makes you look ignorant and foolish.
No, the continued blurring between legitimate war and crime is a *longstanding* problem that has caused longstanding issues (see: US just randomly killing people for with seemingly no justification) This didn’t start with Trump, nor did the complaints against it: The GWOT only intensified this, but it’s been a major problem since at least the 80’s.
Because what is happening is people being murdered without trial, simply on the governments say-so. Even if they *were* members of criminal organizations that would be questionable, but there’s often not even any proof that they are. And these kinds of random murders don’t even have a particularly good track record. (that requries more sustained efforts, patrols, territorial control, etc.)
“Would you expect them to?”
Yes actually. These are media people, not public service people; they do not generally refrain from leaking any other information. In the administration’s other illegal killings, in MN, one murderer was under a directive to document his actions with his phone camera for release on social media, and others were under that directive but had more trouble actually doing the video work.
“Because what is happening is people being murdered without trial, simply on the governments say-so.”
Yes, because that’s what war is. Or “police actions”, or “military intervention”, or whatever euphemism we’re using these days to avoid the fact that Congress hasn’t declare war. Once you accept the fact that the President, by historic precedent and law, has the authority to deploy military force, the idea that the people he’s deploying it against have a right to trial is rather silly.
Let’s look at the question from another direction. Fundamentally our disagreement is on where to draw the line between “This organization warrants military response” and “This organization does not warrant military response”. What are your criteria for determining where to draw the line? Many people obviously think Trump has crossed the line–but no one has actually said what the line is.
The problem is that I can’t see a very good criteria that excludes Venezuelan drug cartels. We can’t limit military intervention to state actors, because the definition of what constitutes a legitimate state is vague and often a matter of the rest of the world accepting you’re a state. I mean, is Taiwan legitimate? The PRC? They STRONGLY disagree on this. Likewise, there are plenty of non-state actors that have historically warranted military intervention. Rebellions are attempts to create new states, but can start before they are a state (Russia’s revolutions come to mind). Piracy also has historically been considered worthy of military response. Terrorist organizations are often non-state entities (though they may be state-sponsored).
And again, the boundary between drug cartels and states isn’t as clear-cut as people think. There are some that are both (the Taliban was the example I gave), and it’s hard to call a group that manages an area and exercises a monopoly on force within that area anything but a de facto government, even if officially some other entity governs the area. I don’t know that you can draw a hard line between “cartel” and “government” in any meaningful way; at the very least the boundary is fuzzy enough that any boundary is going to be somewhat arbitrary (this gets into how nomenclature works and how categories can be applied to gradual systems, which is a whole other rabbit hole).
The current way we solve this problem in the USA is that the President decides. There are limits, sure, but ultimately the President is the Commander in Chief and for generations has been authorized to deploy the military at his discretion. Disagreement with this is, of course, acceptable–the First Amendment is first for a reason!–but it would require changing the conditions, and we should properly evaluate a person’s actions based on when they operate, not retroactively apply future criteria to their actions. In other words: You can’t call a person a criminal today because they did something that’s illegal next week.
This isn’t a new argument. It’s one that the USA has been having since the beginning, more or less. It’s one of the arguments against having a strong standing central army. There was also an argument about whether states within the USA were allowed to fight each other–Ohio and Michigan, for example, tried to fight over Toledo (I like to joke that Ohio lost). So these are non-trivial questions in which reasonable people can disagree. But there’s a huge difference between disagreeing on how things SHOULD operate, and ignoring the longstanding accepted way things DO operate because you don’t like the guy doing them. The former is a good, even necessary discussion for a society that values liberty to have; the latter is Special Pleading.
> The current way we solve this problem in the USA is that the President decides. There are limits, sure, but ultimately the President is the Commander in Chief and for generations has been authorized to deploy the military at his discretion.
But this isn’t an ancient edict from on high. I think you’re conflating three things here. First the *ability* of the president to unilaterally murder people without congressional sign off is ancient, but that’s not what we’re talking about because that has nothing to do with legality. Second the *authority* of the president to order killing without a declaration of war is relatively new; it’s largely a product of the cold war, and that’s hardly what I’d call an unimpeachable tradition, particularly when it’s been on shaky legal grounds the entire time. But the *impunity* of the president to the *consequences* of ordering killing is extremely new, and has no precedence in law because it’s not legal. Legally the fact the president has a capability or the authority to use it doesn’t make his actions legal. That’s rather the point.
And legally-Congress declares war and authorizes force. Full stop. Even that’s not an absolute shield, as the constitution *still* holds, but at the very least that’s the first barrier to asking if something is legal: did Congress authorize it.
Outside of that, even if we accept that a commander in chief needs to have the authority to kill people even without congressional approval, that does not mean he needs immunity from prosecution for it. It’s perfectly acceptable for our society to have a commander in chief who can order a drone strike that needs to happen, then *hang for it*. Execution without trial is not behavior we should encourage, and anyone who isn’t willing to die for our countries honor isn’t fit to order people killed without trial.
Of course the threat of that is liable to have ample deterrent properties to misuse of the authority to begin with. Did those fishermen need to die? Despite any pleading to the gaps of our knowledge no, no they didn’t, and Trump and Hegseth knew that; that’s overwhelming what we’d conclude from the evidence. But even if we assume they did there were undoubtedly opportunities before and after firing the missile that could have dealt with the threat, and I bet the military would have found some undoubtedly clever way to avoid firing that missile if we occasionally hung at least a cabinet member when innocents die.
“But this isn’t an ancient edict from on high.”
Never said it was. And I’ve provided a number of ways in which it can be changed.
“First the *ability* of the president to unilaterally murder people without congressional sign off is ancient, but that’s not what we’re talking about because that has nothing to do with legality.”
Granted. However, that debate happened in the 1800s. The State Department rather definitively gave their opinion in 1912 (J. Clark, Memorandum by the Solicitor for the Department of State, Right to Protect Citizens in Foreign Countries by Landing Forces (1912)), and various updates to that memorandum have occurred, and other documents have been issued. Congress tried to limit these powers in 1973 (War Powers Act), but various presidents have found ways around that. If you wondered why Trump keeps doing cease fires, there’s your answer–a cease fire technically ends hostilities, and resets the 60 day clock.
It’s generally accepted that the President can deploy forces without Congressional approval in two situations: in response to an attack against the United States, and if the use doesn’t technically qualify as war. Both have been used extensively by various Presidents to deploy the military–Obama argued that bombing in Libya wasn’t a war and therefore needed no Congressional approval, for example. (Whether the UN approving the use of the military is valid or not remains an unanswered question.)
“But the *impunity* of the president to the *consequences* of ordering killing is extremely new, and has no precedence in law because it’s not legal.”
This is where I disagree. No one has presented an actual law or court case. Trump is using the same authority in Venezuela as Bush did in Afghanistan and Obama did to take out Bin Ladin and Clinton did to deploy forces is Kosovo and Bush did in Iraq and the other Bush did in Iraq and…. There’s actually a really long list, and I’d recommend looking into it if you’re genuinely worried about this sort of thing, as it shows the variety of ways nearly every president in living memory has gotten around Congressional attempts to limit war powers.
The consequences of deploying military force unilaterally are typically felt in the ballot box. None of those presidents got impeached for their wars. The other option is to go after Trump’s underlings, who aren’t the President and thus have much more limited authority and against whom Congress and the courts have multiple avenues of attack.
> This is where I disagree. No one has presented an actual law or court case.
All this proves is that the system has been broken for a while, not that there’s a legal reason not to prosecute. Bush and Obama are guilty, by a plain reading of the presidential war powers granted by the Constitution, of overstepping those powers and thus acting outside their station. However the political will hasn’t existed to hold them to account.
Trump’s behavior is an outlier even in comparison to previous presidents, so it makes sense he’d be the first to force the issue. There was a legitimate case that the intent of at least the majority of Obama and Bushes extra legal strikes was to combat actual terrorists, even if they ended up blowing up weddings; I think that happened with both administrations, without actually reviewing my memories. However there’s no possible justification for Trump’s actions, besides sadistic political games.
To harken back to a historical parallel, I think our host recently talked about the legality of the prosecution of the Gracchi brothers, Caesar, and Pompey, not too long ago on this blog. As many have pointed out Caesars acts were not atypical of a Roman consul in the late Republic; he waged illegal war, but many other Consuls, including Pompey and Crassus, did *precisely* the same thing when they interpreted their governorship as license to pursue causus belli deep into hostile territory.
So are we to conclude it was healthy for the Roman system of government that Caesar was not persecuted, or that he was immune to prosecution by implication of hypocrisy? Of course not, *everyone* was guilty and both Caesar and his opposition were a threat to the Republic. Cicero apparently damn well knew this, he was only tentatively allied to Pompey, and we can infer he wasn’t alone. The best solution for Rome would have been to prosecute the lot of them, and then start fixing the structural flaws that let it get to that point.
Of course those flaws were deeply entrenched, and the best chance to actually stop the chain of events leading to Empire was probably two generations passed by the time we get to Caesar, but we’re not Rome. We don’t need to make the same mistakes. The facets of Roman politics and society that kept that from happening don’t exist anymore.
I’ll grant that it’s not an officially declared war, but neither were Korea, Vietnam, Iraq (either time), Afghanistan, Kosovo, Iran, the actions against Cuba, or any of the myriad of other conflicts the USA has engaged in. If you’re going to hide behind technicalities it’s only fair that you be consistent and admit that either 1) this is as much a war as any of those others, or 2) none of those were wars and therefore all were entirely illegitimate.
I mean, I’ll very enthusiastically grant that all of those except Afghanistan and maybe Korea were illegitimate and morally outrageous. Korea you could at least make a case that you were resisting interstate aggression, and in the case of Afghanistan the US had been attacked first, plus the Taliban state was, and is, just so terrible that I think some kind of war for women’s rights was legitimate. That said, I think *most* US foreign policy since say the early 19th c (and yes I’m including relations with the Native American nations as foreign policy rather than domestic).
You’re right to point out the continuities, but the changes (and not in a good way) matter too.
Not that it matters, but the “legality” of licenses to operate boats hardly matters to criminals. The 9-11 pilots were not legally cleared for flying those planes.
I am not against trade in principle, but the purpose of the US Navy is not to protect global trade, but to inflict slaughter, ruin and starvation on any country that dares climb the value chain im ways that disript profit-making for the fortune 500, while doing so in a manner that is spectacularly expensive enough to be a source of stupendous profits for the military industrial complex in its own right, while not having to militarize and mass conscript the American working class.
You don’t need global strike capability to prevent states extracting tolls on straits. That can easily be accomplished by just allying the petulant rent-extractors neighbor and starting a regional proxy war. You don’t have to win it. You just need to make fighting it too burdensome for the toll-boothing country that they give up on the toll extraction in exchangr for peace.
Yoi don’t even need to do it alone. If most states benefit from global free trade they will be happy to pitch in.
Also, the vast majority of the modern economy is worthless bullshit that is at best unnecessary and at worst actively detrimental to objective human thriving.
Consumerism needs to die. Rich countries can and should go without strawberries in december and cheap planned obsolescence crap they replace every year.
Also also, price surges in gasoline are 99% financial speculation, not actual production decline. Global oil output fell by something like 2% during the 70s crises and prices shot up multiple times.
Strange the speculators, impose rationing and everything will be fine. Or you can all just stop enforcing car-dependent suburban abomination on yourself and build electrified mass public transit, like a sane country. Fuck cars.
> You don’t need global strike capability to prevent states extracting tolls on straits. That can easily be accomplished by just allying the petulant rent-extractors neighbor and starting a regional proxy war.
Without wanting to sound too sarcastic, have you been looking at the news for the last six months? Because a dominant story never really out of the headlines since 28th February has been the consistent _failure_ of the US to prevent Iran from doing this, despite employing far more power projection against Iran than a regional proxy war would be able to deliver with any reasonable choice of local allies. A year ago you could have maybe made this statement with a straight face, but now!?
(And that’s to say nothing of how incredibly hypocritical it is to argue in one breath that the purpose of the US Navy is global slaughter in the name of consumerism, and in the next breath that the trivial solution is to sponsor a regional proxy war – if the US had actually done that this February, you would be the first in line to tear them a new one for their militaristic warmongering)
Yes, because the US **started** the war. The US has no means to punish Iran for blocking the strait **more** than it was already doing when Iran was not blocking the strait.
Deterrence needs both the threats to be consistently applied when the targets don’t comply, and the threats to NOT be applied when the targets comply. But that’s something the morons in charge of the US cannot understand.
Also worth noting that the regional proxy in this case would almost certainly be Israel, and I have a sneaking suspicion that Neki would be against a US policy of sending even more weapons to Israel.
Again, the problem is that the US started it.
If Iran had just gone berserk.and said “we’re imposing giga-tariffs on all the oil now, deal with it” for no apparent reason, I wouldn’t have blamed America for bitch-slapping them around a bit.
> Also also, price surges in gasoline are 99% financial speculation, not actual production decline.
That is a pretty serious accusation against Ukrainian drone operators! Are you saying they haven’t actually managed to reduce gasoline production?
> Global oil output fell by something like 2% during the 70s crises and prices shot up multiple times.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s financial speculation. It could also be a result of inelastic demand (i.e. car-dependent suburbanites can’t decrease their consumption no matter how high the prices go).
> Strangle the speculators, impose rationing and everything will be fine.
Russia is trying that. Fortunately it’s not working out for them.
> Or you can all just stop enforcing car-dependent suburban abomination on yourself and build electrified mass public transit, like a sane country. Fuck cars.
Yup. Can’t argue with that. It’s a good idea for so many different reasons.
“I am not against trade in principle, but the purpose of the US Navy is not to protect global trade, but to inflict slaughter, ruin and starvation on any country that dares climb the value chain im ways that disript profit-making for the fortune 500”
Do you know what the Japanese did to the American car companies in the Fortune 500 back in the 1970s? What did the US Navy do about it?
1978 is when Perry famously shelled Tokyo in order to prevent Japan from trading with the US. Do not fact check this statement.
Can’t believe they let him star in Friends after he did that to Japan.
dude was just that funny
You were kind of in the middle of a cold war and needed Japan as an antisoviet ally at that point.
Also, when the USSR was on its deathbed, you essentially ordered Japan to commit currency suicide, and because they were so obviously outgunned, they dutifully seppuku’d themselves.
The first point is artuing against, if not a strawman, at least a very weak version of the leftist position. Nobody who has seriously thought about things is arguing that a rapid collapse of global trade would be a good thing, or denying that it would kill hundreds of millions of people.
However, global trade as it exists now is part of a neo-colonialist system that maintains countries in poverty. When poor African countries have to plant cash crops instead of food, this puts them at the mercy of the European companies who own, if not the plantations themselves, at the very least the infrastructure needed to sell those cash crops and import food.
In many situations, the Ricardian comparative advantage relies on poor countries having no labour laws or environmental laws. So much mining is done is the global south because if the land gets polluted with heavy metals and the miners die early deaths, the company can get away with it. It’s not a situation that is better for everyone.
It is a bit similar to the situation of an isolated tobacco plantation owned by a slaver and worked by enslaved people. The workers are fed with food that the slaver imports with a small fraction of the revenue from the sale of tobacco. If the slaver disappears, the newly free people may find it hard to keep those commercial relationships, and will starve because you can’t eat tobacco. That does not make slavery good! The good thing would have been to have no slavery, and farms that can support the people so that they were not entirely dependent on imported food, even if it leads to less “revenue”.
It can be simultaneously true that global trade is tremendously unfair to poor countries and also that global trade is how poor countries get to stop being poor.
I do think that our host is making the process of export-oriented industrialisation sound natural and inevitable when it is neither of those things. I am less familiar with the Japanese example, but the other success stories he mentions – South Korea and China – both got there through a highly interventionist economic policy. The financial logic of the free market will rarely want to build labour-light capital-heavy industries in markets where labour is abundant and capital is rare. South Korea is today the free world’s leading steel refiner and shipbuilder, but those industries both got started in an era when South Korea was not a free country at all; they started with a strong, dictatorial state, insulated from civil society and thus able to strong-arm economic actors into investments that in a freer market would never have been made. Few postcolonial countries were lucky enough to have that kind of state, which is why the failures of developmental economics are so much more common than the successes.
But… but. Strong state interventions on investment choices may have been necessary for these countries to invest their resources correctly, but it is open international trade that led to these countries having resources in the first place. The South Korean economy had the money to invest in capital-intensive industries in the first place because its earlier labour-intensive industries were profitable, and those industries were profitable only because it was connected through international trade to more developed countries whose consumer demand propped up prices for basic consumer goods on the global market. Even after it had the money, it was only able to quickly convert the money into the actual expertise, machinery, and infrastructure of high-technology industry because those things were available on the global market to be bought with money. Dr. Devereaux is entirely correct on this point: the rapid pace of South Korean industrialisation would never have been possible without international trade.
Global inequities and the exploitative structures that creates might be a reason for poorer countries to be cautious about approaching global trade, but it simply cannot be a rationale for refusing to maintain this incredibly productive machinery of global trade, without which, as our host notes, so many more of us would be going hungry. I have no interest in, as you put it, “farms that can support [their own] people”. My vision for the future is not minting more quasi-autarkic Cubas or Irans, insulated from the admittedly brutish forces of open market trade. My vision for the future, rather, is turning the rest of the postcolonial world into more South Koreas.
Or, to put it this way, if global trade brings in revenue to the farm but the farm is run by slavers who misuse that money, it seems completely backwards to say that the root problem here is global trade bringing in the money.
Yeah, and like, part of why poor countries engage in global trade even with such unfair standards, is that it is still overall good for them. Obviously fairer and and more just trade would be better for them, but bad unfair trade is STILL better than no trade at all.
Do you realize that the plantation laborer in Venezuela toiling to grow cocoa for Nestlé has zero input into whether his cointry’s economy is focused on cash crops and oil exports?
The global trades is a good deal for elites everywhere, but it’s a terrible deal for the vast majority of the people of the global South. It’s also a bad deal for a lot of working class people in rich countries, as it basically puts all workers on the planet in competition with each ither, making it much harder for unions to win against capital.
Unless they have reintroduced slavery the plantation labourer working for Nestle is doing so because he prefers that to any of his other options, which suggests he benefits from their offering him that option.
Certainly, if Nestle were to withdraw from the country and fire him, the same people who excoriate them for employing him, would excoriate them for ceasing to employ him.
Nestle does actually employ slave labor in some countries, though not Venezuela to my knowledge. “Fair Trade” on chocolate is code for “No Slavery”. There has been pressure to eliminate it, but a lot of coca is grown in countries that can’t really enforce even human trafficking laws.
@guy,
I was surprised to see a reference to cacao and Venezuela in the same sentence, since I’d never even heard of Venezuela producing cacao (though to be fair, I don’t eat chocolate so I don’t really pay attention to the market).
Apparently Venezuela does produce a small amount of high quality cacao, but less than 1% of the world total- the vast majority is produced in Africa.
Wow you really hate the concept of people working together, don’t you?
And you’re raving about labour and capital being in conflict, using the Internet, which would have been impossible to build without both inputs.
“Nestle does actually employ slave labor in some countries”
guy, I feel it only fair to ask which countries, given that slavery is illegal in almost every country in the world.
Also, given that a country has slavery, why is Nestle the problem, rather than the government and legal system that legalised slavery?
@ad9 and as we all know, making something illegal is sufficient to make it not happen.
Also slave lavor is currently legal in the US. Check the constitution : involuntary servitude was only abolished outside of prisons. Many US prisoners are de facto enslaved, as they are forced to labour without compensation, and the demand for slave labour is a reason the US carceral system is so huge.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57522186
It’s a recurrant story in lots of supply chains. The companies don’t employ slaves directly but buy from sources that use slaves without making much effort to check if slaves are used. It’s usually formally illegal but in countries with weak or corrupt law enforcement.
Do you think that a Venezualan plantation laborer would be less under the thumb of the plantation owner if it were no longer possible to sell cocoa for cash?
I can’t say that cash crops are hugely beneficial to people so far under the thumb of their local big men, because the big men extract surplus when they can. Global trade is kind of irrelevant.
Or are you conflating the situation of someone living under a system of laws that enables them to keep some of what they earn from contact with global trade, with the situation of someone without such protections? Do you think such protections are meaningless?
What do you imagine a factory worker in Bangladesh would have to say about global trade?
@ad9
While it’s the case that there isn’t much global slavery in the form of people being formally, legally the explicit property of other people, there’s plenty of uncompensated labour that ranges from “people obligate family members to provide significant labour without paying them” to “people are stuck in situations where financial chicanery and flouting of labour laws by their employers means that they don’t functionally receive any wages (commonly with things like a process of debt with exorbitant and inescapable rates of interest)”, with no small amount of violent coercion involved across the spectrum.
A person might argue that slavery is an emotionally loaded term for describing these things. Another person might argue that using any term but slavery is trying to be evasive about the ethical implications of it. Either way, it’s still the case that a lot of people in the world today are doing work for which they are not receiving money, under the auspices of employers with a lot of power over them.
As I understand the above thread, when people say “Nestle employs slaves in Venezuala” what they mean is “Venezualans employ slaves in Venezuala”. Clearly we must blame Nestle for this rather than the slave owners or government. Otherwise we could not blame international capitalism rather than the owners or the government. And a government that I have been told repeatedly for decades is socialist, at that.
@AD9,
it’s not even clear to me that Nestle does employ slave labor in Venezuela. The cacao industry in Venezuela looks like it also includes a lot of worker’s cooperatives and public ownership or control, and is supervised by a state owned company, so it wouldn’t be that great an example of capitalism (for better or worse) to begin with.
@ad9 Unless they have reintroduced slavery the plantation labourer working for Nestle is doing so because he prefers that to any of his other options, which suggests he benefits from their offering him that option.
Ignoring the parts where they absolutely have reintroduced slavery for a second, your misidentifying a few key components.
First, the plantation worker does not need to be growing cocoa. If there wasn’t investment in cocoa there *might* be investment in other things, but irrespective of that the land might also be usable for private farm steading or herding, as it was often traditionally used. For the very poor, those who are working these plantations, their standard of living would likely be improved by owning even a subsistence level farm. Ignoring speculation we *know* that the process that *disrupted* these farms to create plantations was traumatic and not good for the farmers.
On the small, granular level these plantations are owned by elites and conglomerates, often internationally owned but usually local, with ownership stratified due to widespread bribes, corruption, and legacies of slavery and colonialism.
Where Nestle’s culpability is and where western capital generally is culpable is that these systems were often created recently, or have been perpetrated actively. In Nestle’s case *yes*, the people actually operating the slave plantations are usually locals, but those locals sell to western conglomerates who bribe officials to ensure that legal challenges to their land ownership are suppressed.
Further a lot of the movements that were created to try to redress these inequalities were labeled as socialist and suppressed by force, often by western backed dictators. This is directly the case with Mali, where there was a major anti communist dictator who purged dissidents in the 60’s, and to a slightly lesser extent the case in the ivory coast, where there has been a complex geopolitical scrum involving natalism, French intervention, and colonial land. To be brief, the ivory coast inherited plantations, the first president had a free trade and immigration friendly policy, and then it started to go to shit on his death in the nineties, with natalist movements and foreign troops clashing in several civil wars, all rooted in land use laws and the corruption therin, which is kept afloat by foreign capital. The colonial legacy here is in how the original plantations were set up, and how modern corporate influence is in perpetrating the land use system with government repression and in how the government was pushed by western governments and corporations to suppress socialist land reformers in the past and present.
And the nestle scandal is about the exploitation of Malian children by Ivorian owners on plantations. There’s even a separate issue where migrant farmers try to use public land to grow crops, including cocoa, but are repressed by the Ivorian government for not having valid land deeds, because they’re either farming on protected rainforest or corporate land. It’s a mess, but one created by western institutions, ultimately.
So it’s all deeply interconnected with colonialism and the legacies of colonial rule, as well as the cold war and US black and grey ops. Likewise there are black and grey degrees to which major corporations are liable for what’s happening today, but they basically always have some blame-and zero accountability under our laws. Less in the ivory coast here, which has its own quagmire, more in Mali which is pretty directly the way it is because of western backed coups.
Thing is free trade isn’t the issue. The ivory coast was *better* when it had free trade and migrant workers. The issue is the political and idealogical baggage associated with *capitalism* and how it influenced governments and corporations to exploit people, not the *trade itself*.
@Russ,
My vision for the future is not minting more quasi-autarkic Cubas or Irans, insulated from the admittedly brutish forces of open market trade
I’m not arguing with your general point at all, but it’s worth pointing out that Cuba is not quasi-autarkic by choice. They’ve always been interested in export trade (arguably over-specializing in one cash crop, sugar, during much of their Cold War history). The quasi-autarkic situation is one that was forced on them by the US embargo. Which strengthens your overall point actually, true autarky is something that few countries choose.
Did you seriously say that South Korea was “lucky” to have a dictatorial government that oppressed and murdered its population, and a “democracy” that is today so disfunctional that basically 100% of presidents are sent to jail after their term, most people have zero social safety net, and Samsung basically owns the government? South Korea has and apply the death penalty!!! How wan you consider it as anything other than a dystopia?
Being a liberal sure is one hell of a drug.
Do you think South Korea would have been luckier to have the government of North Korea?
If not, it was better off with the government it had than with the alternative.
Why are those the only two alternatives? Why did the United States choose to prop up a military dictatorship? hy do you love praising a military dictatorship which slaughtered its own people?
I’m not AD9 and don’t speak for them, but while I most certainly do not praise the South Korean government (past or present) for violations of democratic principles, or for being a corporate-dominated semi-dystopian state that has somehow managed to depress its birth rate below one child per woman…
It is, nonetheless, true that South Korea has at least managed to shift from having a population of deeply impoverished subsistence farmers towards a population that has electricity and access to modern medical care at least to some degree, et cetera.
Other nations have managed or are managing the same transition, but the really important point here is that regardless of which government is doing it, they all end up relying heavily on global trade.
Suppose we could saw every nation on Earth spontaneously have socialist revolutions in every country on Earth the Tuesday after next. It wouldn’t change this. The developing nations would still be relying on global maritime exchanges of material goods to have any chance of improving their standards of living.
And that’s the really important takeaway from this post: that global exchange of goods by sea is actually very important to the well-being of most if not all humans. Even impoverished humans in oppressed countries rely on such exchange as their sole source of many good things. And that while there are many valid reasons to wish that the maintenance of this exchange were not in practice guarded and guaranteed pretty much entirely by the US Navy… right now that is the case, even if it might change in the future.
Suppose we could saw every nation on Earth spontaneously have socialist revolutions in every country on Earth the Tuesday after next. It wouldn’t change this. The developing nations would still be relying on global maritime exchanges of material goods to have any chance of improving their standards of living.
+1000 to this. The benefits of trade don’t go away if you get rid of private ownership, or even if you get rid of market exchange.
“Why are those the only two alternatives? ”
Suback, I don’t know why they were the only alternatives in Korea, but it is a historical fact that they were, and you are denouncing one of them without quite managing to call the only historic alternative an improvement.
Perhaps you could point to Taiwan or Vietnam or another nearby country as alternatives. Which would you prefer?
@ad9 No they were not the only two alternatives, they were the only two governments ruling part of Korea after the Korean War. Both governments were the product of heavy interventionism by respectively US and USSR. Claiming it could never have been otherwise is denying the choices made by the US to impose a military dictatorship that was friendly to their interests.
@Simon_jester I absolutely agree that full autarky is not the way, however the current volume of trade and degree of specialization is in fact made to profit the most wealthy while impoverishing everyone else.
For example, it makes zero sense that we trade meat or fresh fruit over intercontinental distances. The only “comparative advantage” is a lack of environmental regulations that end up hurting everyone. It also makes zero sense that China overproduces cheap low-quality clothing and sends it overseas where large amounts of it will not be sold, but used in an accounting scheme for companies to dodge taxes. It makes zero sense that so many activities that are harmful to the climate AS A WHOLE are allowed to happen in countries without regulations against that, and then are sold in Europe through free trade agreements.
And of course, international trade on that scale strenghtens giant companies which are de facto accountable to no one. Our world has unelected leaders whose only language is money and against whom the common people, even if they form the majority in a nation, has functionally no recourse.
Subbak:
Meat and fresh fruit have been traded over intercontinental distances for centuries to the extent possible with the technology of the time. My great-great-grandfather fell out with his boss over the results of a shipment of Argentinian beef. This would have been circa 1860-odd.
It makes sense because of comparative advantages. Most notably, some stuff is easier to grow some places than it is others, or the industries are more established and costs are lower for various reasons.
It makes a lot more sense for Europe to eat bananas shipped from elsewhere than to grow bananas, for example.
@simulated knave
Or Europe could simply… Not eat bananas. Or if they do (bananas keep well and do not require the same refrigeration as, say, mangoes). Europe can grow plenty of delicious local fruit, and there is fruit available year-round with some greenhouse usage and intra-continental trade (like citrus from Italy and spain).
Meat in general is overproduced because of international trade. Argentine, Brasil and New Zealand overproduce meat compared to their local needs, which fuels the global climate catastrophe. If they couldn’t export that meat as easily, local activist movements everywhere would have an easier time keeping meat consumption to a sustainable level.
(Note: re Europe and tropical fruit, sbd may point out that my country, France, still has colonies in the tropics that it pretends are not colonies. Obviously I think the exploitation of workers for the benefit of the imperial core must cease, and the colonies must get independance if they want it AND reparations)
@Subbak
Call me disingenuous and arguing in bad faith if you must, but I cannot help but read your comment in any other way besides: “Why would the Europeans be rich and prosperous when they could be poor instead? Why should those haughty Europeans have access to (luxury) goods when they don’t deserve to and should be forced to live a life of ascetic restriction?”
In this case, there is a far more fundamental axiomatic disagreement. I believe that material wealth, in general, is good, and that people should, ideally, be constricted in their material consumption as little as possible (negative externalities notwithstanding). If you do not believe that people should materially prosper, then I’m not sure there’s any basis to agree on anything on this topic, as I’m not even sure what are your fundamental values, like, at all.
Being a liberal sure is one hell of a drug.
Bret explictly mentioned Vietnam as an example of successful export-led development. Vietnam is a left-wing party-state that doesn’t have jack in common with liberalism, or with the values that Bret (and possibly many of the commenters here) holds, but he mentioned it because you can’t *not* mention it, successful export-led industrialization is what it is, and Vietnam is unquestionably a success story. This isn’t really about ideology, it’s about industrialization (which is never a “nice” process, but is a necessary one, for all that).
In fairness, I should have mentionned that our good host is not who I was aiming at with that sentence. While I disagree with many of his liberal takes and often find them infuriating, I must concede he is almost always arguing for them in good faith and willing to concede that some things are subjective.
In any case, I don’t think the type of communism practiced in Vietnam is something to be emulated. They allow western companies to profit on the back of their poor population, with very little compensation. Yes, Vietnam is not liberal politically, but it is open to economic liberalism which is what I have a problem with here
There are ways to convince us of your point. A shorter version of “you are all idiotic liberals for disagreeing with me” is not one of those ways.
I’m not really in their side here, I don’t agree with left *or* right leaning Autarky at all, but if you can’t look past being called a dumbass that’s a personal failing. I hope we’re all here to learn something, and that will involve taking to people who occasionally disagree with you on a point they think you’re truly stupid for not understanding.
And sometimes they’ll be right. Not here, really, but it happens.
I’d suggest trying to view their exasperation as an endearing indicator of their earnestness. If they believe in what they’re saying enough that to communicate an emotional state in addition to a reasoning, even at your expense, then maybe they’re being honest about their beliefs. And maybe they have good reason for those beliefs. It’s certainly more respectful than someone *lying* about their beliefs, to themselves or you, even if it’s less polite.
And we have the example of Hong Kong post-WWII, which was open to free trade and whose government did no industrial policy. It also industrialised and climbed the value chain, as economic theory would predict.
I feel kind of bad that I only have ideas I want to talk about when our host does a post on a relatively modern topic. I suppose it’s a natural result of me being familiar with (by virtue of, if nothing else, living in it) some aspects of the modern world and effectively nothing at all of the premodern world in which his true speciality and interest lies, but still. Bit humiliating.
re: global trade is bad for workers
A quick Google tells me that the labour compensation share of GDP in India is 53.3% and that its real GDP growth rate is 6.5% p.a. That is to say, if Indian workers could seize with zero loss in efficiency every single bit of the economy that is directed towards ends other than paying them (a ludicrously optimistic scenario, but let’s assume) they can expect an increase to their consumption equivalent to… about ten years of ordinary, normal economic growth under international trade.
And as for workers in *rich* countries… hi, I’m a worker in a rich country. My country has a population density of 500+ people per square kilometre, and most of those square kilometres are at best marginally arable forested hills. Without global trade, I don’t eat.
re: but South Korea is a cyberpunk dystopia, which is bad
It is possible for things to both be bad in an absolute sense but also better in a relative sense when evaluated against some other, comparable thing. I don’t deny South Korea has many deep problems, but is the typical South Korean today not freer and more prosperous than the typical person in many other postcolonial economies? If the typical South Korean today not freer and more prosperous than the typical Korean at any other point in its history?
Why deny yourself a sense of pride, as a human being, in the things we as a species accomplished? Do you think it takes us away from the challenges of the present? That it breeds complacency? It is, in fact, precisely the opposite; nobody will solve the great problems of our own day if we do not first imagine them to be solvable, and no surer inspiration exists for their solvability than the enormous magnitude of the progress which we have already achieved.
re: what about Hong Kong?
According to the World Bank, as of 2000 (the earliest year in which data for Hong Kong is available), the GDP share of industry including construction was 34.4% in South Korea, 32.5% in Singapore, and 12.1% in Hong Kong. I can’t find comparable data for Taiwan, but the *workforce* share of industry was just shy of 40%.
Hong Kong was the obvious outlier in economic structure among the four Asian tiger economies of the late Cold War, and I am not sure that its model was scalable (South Korea, with its now-50 million population, is by far the largest of the four).
Obviously this is a major unsettled question among economics experts, of which I most certainly am not one, but I tend to find convincing the take (as expressed by, say, Ha-Joon Chang) that if our objective is not merely to make poor countries less poor, but to actually *catch them up* with rich countries, then there is no real substitute to capital- and especially technology-intensive manufacturing as a pathway to get there.
Counterfactuals of whether South Korea et al could have done it as quickly as they historically did had they democratised earlier and spent those critical years in the 1960s and 1970s with a government more responsive to worker and consumer sentiment haunt me in my dreams. I like to imagine that they could’ve, because I’m the sort of person who thinks that social and civil liberties are just as essential, if not more so, to dignified living as economic prosperity, but…
Yeah, it can work that way but doesn’t do so 100% of the time; it’s actually known as the “resource trap” in some cases, particularly for countries with substantial oil production. If a country’s natural resource is valuable enough, they can get fantastically wealthy off it and have little incentive to move up the industrialization ladder. Particularly for more autocratic countries where the upper class doesn’t really feel accountable to the lower class and would like to avoid that changing and is well aware industrialization often collapses autocracies. They can get as much money as they like selling oil, and use some of it to buy off popular discontent while being strategically valuable enough to the countries that would ideologically like to support democratic movements that they don’t want to rock the boat.
Of course, the oil eventually runs out and renewables are reducing its value, so Saudi Arabia and some others are now trying to use the oil money to pivot to higher up the chain while retaining control. Dubai seems to have mostly managed it so far.
So, to add to both the examples earlier and the naval theme of this week – commercial fishing in Thailand is believed to rely on migrants who entered the country on condition of debt bondage, and their conditions are effectively equivalent to slavery.
https://hir.harvard.edu/thailand-fishing-industry/
I recall I first learned of this situation via a longform article in The Guardian circa 2015, which cited a particularly gruesome case of one such indentured worker snapping and attacking (perhaps even managing to kill? I don’t quite remember) a captain of one such vessel; but it operated in a formation, so the ancient practice of tying a condemned with ropes to horses who would pull them apart got replicated with fishing vessels instead.
I’m confused. Who is forcing poor African farmers to grow cash crops instead of food? Or is this a rhetorical flourish for “poor African farmers are choosing to grow cash crops because the alternative, subsistence farming, is utterly awful, but growing cash crops makes them dependent on foreign buyers (as opposed to being at the mercy of the weather and all the other things our host has discussed exhaustively in previous posts on the plight of peasants)”?
The landowners are choosing that. Or the companies from rich countries who have an interest in cash crops being grown have all sorts of tools at their disposal to force any homesteaders to switch their land use, poor countries are also generally places were the state is weak and/or uninterested in the wellfare in its population, so massive multinational corporations can easily wield the law.
The landowners are choosing that.
African countries without a significant landowner class, including those where agricultural land was nationalized or where most of it remains under village/local/customary control, are still very much interested in exporting cash crops, and in the benefits of global trade. Pretty much all ideological stripes of African countries- the liberal capitalist ones, the Communist ones, the African-Socialist ones, the nationalist ones- have very much been interested in building up export industries. Maybe the Islamists and Christian fundamentalists, if they ever get to run African countries, might be an exception, since those ideologies are explicitly anti-modern, but hopefully we don’t get to find out anytime soon.
Not to mention, in order to produce more food in Africa you need capital goods like fertilizers, pesticides, machinery, and then more intangible things like mass education, communication and infrastructure networks, refrigeration, contraception etc., which all require money. You can rely on foreign aid for the money, or you can get it by producing goods for export, or you can try to generate it internally through “primitive accumulation”, but all in all, trade seems like the best bet. To me, but more importantly, to the African governments in question.
were the state is weak and/or uninterested in the wellfare in its population
I’ll agree that most African states are weak (again, strong states cost money, and the money needs to come from somewhere), but the idea that African governments are “uninterested in the wellfare (sic) of [their] population” is such a caricature that it’s not worth engaging with. Most of them? Seriously? Which ones? The right wing capitalist ones, the left wing communist ones, the centrist socialist ones? We’re talking about governments that (during the 1960-1990 era anyway) spanned the ideological gamut and agreed with each other on very little. Pretty much everyone in Africa, from the top government officials down to the peasant, can see the value of economic development through producing things they can sell on the world market. The exception, again, maybe being the religious fundamentalists who think the 20th century was a mistake.
The socialist and communist answer here is not that African countries should stop producing oil, or gold, or textiles, or cashews or coffee for export. It’s that the state, or maybe worker’s or peasant’s cooperatives, should own the cashew plantations and the gold mines.
The 1912 US Department of Agriculture yearbook describes exactly the same issue in the USA–poor farmers opting to grow crops for cash instead of food. This isn’t an African thing, it’s a poor farmer thing.
The logic is simple. Cash can be exchanged for food, equipment, services, etc. Food, on the other hand, just gets eaten. If you can’t afford to maintain the tractor you can’t grow food anyway; you NEED to have a certain amount of cash coming in if you want to remain alive. And this means prioritizing cash crops over subsistence crops. (Note that previous eras got away with prioritizing subsistence crops because their equipment was FAR less expensive and often made or maintained by the people doing the farming.)
I’m not saying there weren’t other factors. I’m familiar with sharecropping and Jim Crow and the rest. But those exacerbate the more fundamental issue: In order to eat farmers need to maintain expensive equipment, which takes money, so they have to prioritize cash crops to some extent, that extent varying on a case-by-case basis.
The result is that farmers will go without food in order to grow cash crops. Seems counterintuitive to see malnutrition in farmers, but that’s what the economics of the situation demand.
The result is that farmers will go without food in order to grow cash crops.
@Dinwar,
Or even when they are growing food crops, they’ll try to sell a portion. Or take some away from farming to do casual labor for pay. Or raise animals which are for selling, not eating. People really need cash in addition to food.
The land that peasants traditionally used for their own food was stolen from them under colonialism.
They were then forced to grow cashcrops for export, which caused starvation.
Those lands were rarely given back to the people.
Funny then that global poverty rates have declined massively since the 1970s (including in sub-Saharan Africa) and other indicators of well-being like life expectancy have soared
“The first point is artuing against, if not a strawman, at least a very weak version of the leftist position. Nobody who has seriously thought about things is arguing that a rapid collapse of global trade would be a good thing…”
A surprising number of people have not seriously thought about things, including extremely powerful people and their ideological supporters. This necessitates making some serious attempt to lay out the intellectual case for “seriously thinking about things.”
“However, global trade as it exists now is part of a neo-colonialist system that maintains countries in poverty. When poor African countries have to plant cash crops instead of food, this puts them at the mercy of the European companies who own, if not the plantations themselves, at the very least the infrastructure needed to sell those cash crops and import food…”
The problem is that any plausible path to economic autonomy for these countries relies on being able to industrialize. Cut global trade and they do not become ‘freed’ of an oppressive and exploitative system, because they lose access to the imports that, for instance, would enable them to sustain mechanized agriculture to grow their own food. These are not countries that can go back to feeding themselves via Iron Age subsistence farming; they have population densities far too high to make that sustainable thanks to the demographic changes caused by even very basic medical technology causing massive population growth in the late 20th century.
It is very much undesirable for humanity as a whole for countries to suffer economically because they are being exploited as agricultural or mining supports for the developed world. But cutting sea trade or making it far more expensive by enabling piracy and greater toll-collection would not bring us closer to a world where this doesn’t happen.
Working conditions and environmental protections are a part of compensation, with the laws regulating them being a form of collective bargaining (just via legislatures rather than unions). To be blunt, when starvation is a realistic concern (or even when starvation-level subsistence costs consume a very large share of household budgets, thus a small increase in household income is a large fraction of the discretionary expenses), most people will prefer to increase their income even at the expense of working themselves to an early death, and of harming the environment. It is only when a nation as a whole grows wealthy, when bare subsistence costs become a smaller share of household budgets, and thus a large share of the population has a large (not just in the absolute sense, but also as a share of total) discretionary budget, that they collectively choose to spend some of that on improved working conditions, and on making the environment more enjoyable, and so on.
You’re arguing with a strawman, no economist has been defending trade on Ricardian grounds since the 80s at least. Yes, we keep teaching that to undergrads for both good and bad reasons, without properly explaining why they are actually important, and that’s on us. And the pundit class that took a couple econ classes decades ago and never bothered to check in with the discipline despite being paid to opine (in large part) on the economy, but that’s on them and their readers for not demanding better frankly.
If you’re actually interested in why trade is important, start with Krugman 1979 (or the myriad of textbooks that propose the same content in a more digestible form) and go from there.
Oh, interesting. Thanks for the recommendation, I am not **that** surprised to see that Ricardo is discredited among economists but still used by pundits. However, given that our good host’s post links to the Wikipedia article on competitive advantage, you’ll forgive me for thinking that was part of his argument.
Or are you saying that competitive advantage is a completely different notion than comparative advantage ?
So your proposal is to bring back subsistence farming?
The Phantom Menace suddenly makes a lot more sense. Can we send in the Jedi?
The Jedi are in some ways a metaphor for the USA’s tendency to take popular military leaders and lionize them into moral beacons. Grant, Washington, but also Nimitz, Perry, Eisenhower, even Jackson for a while. Lincoln served as a militia officer in almost exactly the way the Jedi end up in the Clone Wars.
This is a very interesting post. But I wonder why the consensus that free trade in goods is a good thing has broken down in the first place?
I believe there is a connection with so-called trade agreements like NAFTA and TTIP. Those agreements are not only about trade. They also make it difficult and expensive to regulate genuinely political issues such as the environment, labour rights and health through democratic means, because they mandate rules on investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS).
When people are told that we can’t protect the environment against oil spills or regulate tobacco packaging because of a trade agreement, that is not a good look for international trade.
There was a strong mobilisation against TTIP from both the left and the right a decade ago, and Trump used it to get elected. In this respect, the MAGA movement has been able to profit from a reaction against political overreach by corporate elites.
I’m pretty sure the main reason in the US is that it used to be possible to get high-paying factory jobs in the US with a high school education and now there are a lot fewer and many of them require at least trade school. People blame this on free trade, though it’s in significant part because of technological advances in automation. Last I checked we’re producing more steel with a third of the workers we had in the good old days people are hearkening back to and think will return if they get rid of free trade.
Which in turn is an issue with capital accumulation. No one would be complaining if the automated factory jobs resulted in everyone having shorter work weeks and more free time as they received a payout from ownership stakes, but we’ve somehow ended up in a situation where less skilled labor demand results in less free time for skilled laborers. Because ownership is, of course, not anything close to equitably distributed. The families who lost their jobs to (or new families who couldn’t get them because of) automation didn’t gain passive income from the automated lines; there’s no system in our society to even begin implementing that. They just got screwed.
Agreed! Global Trade has become tightly linked as Global Elite Capture on *both* the Left and the Right; many on the Left, to simplify, view global trade as a hotbed of ruthless ruthless right-wing megacorporations exploiting the Global South with modern slavery, etc., etc., while on the Right, again to simplify, many view global trade as a a hotbed of… ruthless “liberal” megacorporations exploiting hard-working innocent workin’ folks. Through in some drug dealing and human trafficking and Global Trade has to be one of the most (misunderstand) but hated phenomenon across the political aisle!
And there’s a tragic element of truth to ALL of this. And the more big corporations nakedly break the rules (like ISDS and similar ‘free trade’ agreements), the more they alienate Western voters who, like our gracious host has said, ultimately benefit from global (bulk) trade!
Hopefully, maybe this current spate of trade wars can bring some perspective to voters (and elites)… Hopefully.
Completely in agreement here. The seeds of the disaster have been sown by the very people that were supposed to profit from the setup the most, because they wanted to profit even more, and started abusing the setup, thus shaking the trust in it. And then along come some ruthless opportunists who see a posibility to profit from completely destroying the trust in the setup – which they then proceed to do.
In a way, it’s a similar process as to what is happening on the anti-vax front. I seriously doubt that the antivaxer movement would’ve gained as much traction without the fradulent practices of the pharmaceutical industry first. Different situation, same story: powers-that-be start abusing their powers, trust gets eroded, opportunists come in and destroy the trust completely, total clusterfuck.
Ah yes, Trump has been elected because his voters were concerned about oil spills and tobacco packaging, really. This kind of sanewashing of MAGA was disingenuous in 2015, it’s an offense to the reader’s intelligence now.
Trump was elected because he genuinely thinks that paying for the good and services he contracts is freier (sucker?) behavior (see: his business conduct for decade), and decades of nationalistic brainrot convinced millions of Americans that yes, they wanted the world’s bounty of their shelves but it was somewhat so *unfair* that they had to pay (an ever-decreasing price) for it and they could not demand tribute on top of it. If only US politicians had been really interested in the welfare of Americans and twisted arms even harder, they could just make Toyota sell trucks at the same price, but also give richly paid make-work to every American that finds emasculating to work a service job and financing the American state on top of it. It’s not some based anti-imperial sentiment, it’s the resentments from the illiterate brutes at the imperial core who demand both the bounty created by voluntary exchange AND imperial extraction and are simply too arrogant to understand they can’t have both (or at least, the more of the latter one demands, the less of the former they’ll get).
This is not to say that existing free trade agreement are perfect. But notice that every colorable objection to them is not of the “free trade” part, is on the conditions imposed holding free trade hostage. A government genuinely committed to the welfare of its citizens could not really impose ISDS because the whole mechanism of of ISDS is essentially “you need to make give special dispensations to our companies, or we’ll use the power of the state to forbid our citizens to transact with yours”. It’s essentially just another form of the imperial core extracting tribute, except that the tribute is does not even pass through public coffers. The threat is credible only because the government’s (and the voters’) commitment to free trade is fledgling in the first place. Were American voters economically literate enough to *demand* their government do not impede mutually beneficial transactions with foreigners, such tribute could not be extracted, because no elected government could not credibly threaten to actually pull the threat and forcibly stop trade flows with non-compliant countries.
If you talk to voters in (for instance) Kansas, you will find that many of them, a controlling minority if not a majority, have very racist understandings of how Indian Reservations work. And, they want Kansas to work like they think a Reservation works (but for Whites, and also they keep their Senators because they don’t think about this too much and also they’re White and therefor deserve Senators). Many people in America have motivating racial identities, which doesn’t have to be a problem, but when that motivation is combined with and encourages ignorance you get all sorts of actions that are otherwise nonsensical.
There are institutions that the USA could seize money from to pay for public goods, and it could even do so with disparate racial impacts if the people so wanted, but it does Trump stuff instead because ultimately the MAGA folks need racism done by the government as much as they need help paying for things as that is how they feel value.
So, what I think is missing here is an analysis of the actual waterways we are talking about and how any US withdrawn would impact them. Especially if we’re looking at this from a perspective of what harm would be caused by the US transitioning from its current informal abandonment of its role as protector of global trade (Not just Hormuz but also the Black Sea, BAM and Somali coast disruption you mentioned) to a formal abandonment (by making a peace deal with Iran that lets them charge ‘legitimate’ tolls on ships using the strait of Hormuz).
In my mind under the system you’ve laid out there are three factors that would lead to a passage having its shipping disrupted:
• The lack of a global power protecting free shipping (check on everything if the USA withdraw from the role).
• A lack of a regional power that has the capability to protect shipping locally and an incentive to do so.
• The passage power (so the country bordering the waterway) either lack enough investment in global free trade to keep the passage open themselves or lacking the state capability to do it.
So under that criteria lets go over the relevant waterways your map shows up (working roughly North/West to East).
• Panama Canal: This passage already charges fees, even a withdrawn USA will still keep its own shipping flowing through the Panama Canal without disruption and European powers have enough Caribbean territories that they could power project into the region if they wanted to. The Panama government themselves are also deeply integrated into the global economy via both the Canal’s role moving physical goods and the global financial system (see the Panama Papers).
• Danish Straits, English Channel, Strait of Gibraltar: European powers are incentivised to keep the current system ticking over and are more than capable of securing said waterways. At most we might see further limitations placed on Russian shipping.
• Suez Canal and Bosphorus: Two waterways already charging fees, with the physical nations present being medium powers invested in global trade. Plus, European powers could easily project this far.
• Hormuz: Already closed due to the current conflict. Trade flowing here with tolls would still be more trade than is flowing at present.
• BAM and the Somali coast: These two waterways are already disrupted, you’re right that neither China nor Europe can project much power this way, but as the US has already basically given up here it’s unclear how much disruption would grow by formalising that abandonment.
• Southern India coast and Sri Lanka: India is invested enough in the global economic system to keep trade flowing here.
• Strait of Malacca: Possibly the most vulnerable, while the Malaysian and Indonesian governments are invested in the global economy it’s not clear they have the necessary state capacity to prevent non-state actors using their territory to disrupt global trade. However, this is an area where both India and China could power project if needed, that’s before we get into how Singapore is both perfected placed to operate as the base for an anti-piracy operation in the region and heavily incentivised to bring in an outside power to guarantee shipping if a threat did emerge.
• Taiwan Straits and the Sea of Japan: China, Taiwan, South Korea and Japan are all heavily invested in the system of global trade.
You’re thesis that military power is needed to keep sea lanes open and that there’s nobody to replace the USA as the guarantor of all global sea lanes it true, but I think it misses that Europe can take care of European (and Europe-adjacent) sea lanes, nobody (not even the US) can manage Middle Eastern sea lanes and Asian powers can take care of Asian sea lanes, at which point you’ve ticked all the big sea lanes off (I’m calling the Caribbean Europe-adjacent due to European territories there).
I think the big different with history here are twofold:
• Shipping can move much more easily via open water where it used to have to hug coasts. This dramatically reduces the number of physical locations where non-state actors can disrupt shipping.
• States have seen the benefits of globalised free shipping and build their economies with that in mind.
That makes the system much more resilient than in the past when a major power draws down its protection of shipping.
I think the concern in Asian and European waters is how much incentive they have to preserve trade between two countries that aren’t them and they may not like. If Denmark slaps a 5% toll on every ship going through the strait that isn’t either coming from or going to Danish ports they get a ton of money and the downsides are pretty indirect and diffuse while everyone else pays 5% more for everything that passes through the strait. Which is bad but not “build a navy that can cross the ocean to invade Denmark” bad.
For Denmark, 18% of value of all their exports comes from exporting shipping services. That is, they operate ~1,700 vessels which ship things for other countries.
https://shippingtelegraph.com/shipping-news/denmark-launches-new-strategy-to-expand-merchant-fleet/
If those other countries chose to respond to Danish tolls by boycotting Danish shipping companies, one could expect the value of their shipping sector to tank badly enough to offset any benefit from the tolls. (Not to mention that toll booths do not really employ many people, whereas the thousands of merchant sailors and support staff at risk of getting laid off in this scenario represent a potent voting bloc.) If at least one of those countries decides to impound a Danish ship that happened to be docked in one of its ports at the time, with crew aboard, then whichever Prime Minister came up with this idea immediately gets all the fun of a hostage crisis that’s totally their fault to deal with.
So is your theory then that there is no current Danish political party that supports reestablishing the Sound Toll?
Is this the point where you present a statement from some minor party or an individual MP in Denmark musing that it would be good to start tolling the Oresund again? I do know that an Indonesian finance minister had already mused that it would be nice if they could start tolling Malacca, but was forced to disown that immediately. I would not be surprised if something like that happened in Denmark, but that is orthogonal to my point, which presents the obstacles actual Danish decision-makers would have to navigate.
P.S. It is perhaps worth noting that just before this year’s round of bombing, we have actually seen the opposite proposal (albeit from Swedish rather than Danish politicians) – that of removing tolls from the Oresund Bridge (yes, it exists!), imposed in 2000 to repay its construction costs, now that it’s just about paid for itself.
https://www.newsminimalist.com/articles/center-party-politicians-call-for-toll-removal-on-oresund-bridge-42e13399
I agree we’d get there eventually, but as Bret points out: building navies is a slow and expensive process. If the US Navy just left the Red Sea alone and said ‘you guys sort it out’, and the EU, UK and Egypt put something together, that would be 3 fleet carriers, a few escort carriers and a decent amount of escorts. And we could do that, I guess, with one carrier on station and the other 2 repairing and refitting, bases along the Egyptian coast for resupply and a decent amount of merchant marine which in extremis could be purchased to act as fleet tenders. But firstly (and professional naval logisticians correct me here) this seems like a wafer thin administrative margin – any delay in repairs to one ship or any political wrangling and it falls apart. Secondly, this soaks up functionally all European naval capacity. Nothing to hunt Russian Grey Tanker Fleet ships, nothing to covertly help Ukraine find targets in the Black Sea and nothing to deter the US if it decides to have a pop at Greenland, French Guyana etc. which I fear is something the kind of administration which would cut the Red Sea loose from naval protection would do.
So – we need to be building more Queen Elizabeths, Charles de Gaulles and anything similar the Germans or Italians want to build. But good luck getting that through national parliaments…
Yeah, it would make much more sense if the EU were a federation. Which it also has several other (including fully domestic/internal) reasons to be. (Personally I see it as so good an idea as to be overdetermined, and I’m a bit confused for why AFAICT it doesn’t seem to get so much as a mention as a distant vision to work towards.) But if that happened, and given the recent commitment toward somewhat increased militarization, then — even taking into account a more land-focused force due to the proximity of Russia — the EU Navy should have half a dozen full-sized CVNs. (One fewer if the UK is kept out of the picture.)
I think the current problem is mostly that the EU’s structure was not well designed to convert into a federation. Traditionally more of a trade agreement than a government, even the elected members of european parliament are generally more diplomat than politician. To federalise it would need to adjust to function like a proper democratic government, with either a directly elected executive or a parliamentary democracy (in which the President/commission would need to actually be a elected member of the european parliament, not, for example, the defence minister in a different government).
Basically it would need the sort of top-down changes to how its government works that would let people actually run political campaigns against EU policies or politicians whilst they were still in the EU parliament rather than the current system where the EU parliament tries to negotiate the policy most likely to be accepted by its members, and then said members get to veto it country by country. Which is probably why MEPs are generally more diplomat than politician (they are only ever proposing proposals to the actual governments who get to vote on them) and why, though the Ursula von der Leyen was elected by european parliament to be president of the EU’s executive body, she was German Minister for Defence immediately prior. They even specifically rejected a candidate because they only had experience working as a member of european parliament and not, presumably ‘a proper government’.
@reganator5000,
Your point about the role of European Parliament in legislative process is outdated. Since Lissabon Treaty, the Parliament is, in almost all cases, a coequal body with the Council. The European legislation is always proposed by the Commission, but it needs to pass both the Council and the Parliament. In this regard, the closest analogy is the Second-Reich German legislative process, where Reichsrat had essentially an identical role to the Council: a body of the representatives of state governments who vote with the votes allocated to their state.
Yes – as a good European Federalist I entirely agree. But there is little political will, currently for the theoretically-agreed “ever-closer Union” – albeit the Great Brexit Shitshow has firmly squashed most secessionist tendancies. The policy platform “Let’s have a European army” died hard in I think the ’80s and would still be as popular as herpes today.
That said, I can see it becoming much more popular if the US continues along current trends. Which would be good for pressing European aims without relying on an increasingly erratic USA, but might lead to confrontation with the USA, which would, to put it mildly, be a Bad Thing.
I do feel a European navy might be an easier sell than a European army. It’s a thing that in some ways gets cheaper at scale (if only because you don’t necessarily need as many ships in total – if France and Germany share a navy then they both probably need less navy in total), it already involves even more international cooperation than military efforts, and navies historically have much less of a tendency to impose the will of governments on their civilians than armies.
Of course, ‘easier sell’ does not mean possible, and I can’t see the French or the UK being keen to draw down their navies further given their remaining networks of overseas possessions.
The sensible way to have a European army is probably, have each part of an existing army also be part of the European army. Mobilize the parts as needed, EU pays for them while they’re mobilized. But even that seems likely to be a hard sell.
So, uhhh, to carry out which missions specifically – to target what kind of expected opposition? Whether it’s Devereaux or the other people I have seen advancing this argument on Bluesky, it’s practically always operating in the abstract plane; some undefined people somewhere would do something which would conveniently happen to precisely fit the capabilities of USN as it presently exists.
Even the example of Somalia is particularly amusing; the actual flagship of the task force the US devoted to that was a San Antonio landing dock, not an aircraft carrier of any kind, as the blog post above might have led you to believe. (And no, unlike the later Wasp and America classes which do in fact have perfectly flat decks and so function like minor aircraft carriers, San Antonio is/was a fairly conventional ship which could never carry more than four helicopters.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_Task_Force_151
(I have even asked for examples of carrier-based planes carrying out any missions targeting pirates specifically (as opposed to bombing the one force in Somalia that might have had unified it, further inland), and so far none have been offered. (Which is really not surprising, since the suggestion of tasking the pilot of a supersonic jet fighter to distinguish whether a small boat overflown by that fighter at high speed might be a pirate one is exactly how you blow up fishermen even if you don’t intend to – which makes it all the more surprising that I’ve seen our host advance that argument in earnest.))
In all seriousness, we do not live in a world of pixels. Pirates do not just pop out of the ether once “global disorder” counter ticks past some arbitrary value. Actual people living in physical spaces constrained by geography and whose mindsets are shaped by history specific to their birthplaces (and I suppose the broader ideological currents of the era) have to decide to take up arms – and then to have the means to actually do so – which means that one should actually be able to identify such when asked! After all, the burden of proof ought to lie on the one arguing for a tool – in this case a carrier battle group – not vice versa.
And for all the laments that it takes time to build up a “power projection” fleet – effective pirate forces also do not pop up instantly! (Even off the coast of Somalia, the first known attack on a ship apparently dates to 2005 – 15 years after its central government fell!) As I wrote below, the starting capital of being a pirate on the high seas back then was a bunch of timber, and nowadays it’s thousands of tons of metal produced by only a handful of countries that generally have a vested interest in their customers Not Doing Piracy. (I do not believe Somali pirates ever managed to reach the high seas proper – in fact, the definition of “piracy” apparently had to be broadened to include coastal attacks to provide UN blessing for the subsequent naval missions.)
So, building a carrier fleet “just because it feels right” without thinking what it would do is very short-sighted. History is replete with countries devoting extensive resources to completely unused military capabilities and often paying great price for not using those resources on something much more suitable for their needs instead. The massively wasteful battleship programs of 1930s were perhaps the most disastrous for France, but also cost dearly for Italy (3 battleships larger than the Bismarck which ended up as a floating target for aviation), the USSR (whose Yamato-scale battleships were never finished, yet nevertheless sucked up a massive amount of resources that would have been better spent just about anywhere else just before the German invasion), and to a lesser extent everyone else. (How many more British tanks could have been sent to France if there was no Prince of Wales?) While the structural issues with the Soviet planned economy wouldn’t have gone away if it stopped pouring GDP into massive stocks of soon-obsolete weaponry (or sometimes already obsolete, even; towed anti-tank guns continued to get produced for a decade after RPG-7!), they would have been considerably less acute and there would have been more time to pivot. Etc., etc.
Nowadays, just about any kind of spending there is, for essentially every country, is in competition with what needs to be done for decarbonization, where every delay locks in consequences on a literal millennial scale. Even wars that actually do happen have fewer consequences than actual emissions that aren’t going away once released (not least given that just about any halfway plausible carbon capture proposal would have national-level costs of the same magnitude as military budgets, for centuries.) If a carrier group is built but never used, deploying that instead of e.g. replacing two dozen fossil-powered power stations is downright criminal negligence.
“the starting capital of being a pirate on the high seas back then was a bunch of timber, and nowadays it’s thousands of tons of metal
Er, my understanding was that many Somali-style pirates have small boats (possibly down to inflatables) and small arms.
To address the main point: to achieve policy concessions, preferably without firing a shot in anger.
Every so often, the SQC demonstrates that it still enforces rules such as “Iraq doesn’t get to invade and annex Kuwait”. Between this and trade being more profitable than warfare, most regional powers have chosen against trying to revise the international order by force. This looks like CVBGs being built but rarely or never used.
However, while all members of the SQC carry a trade carrot, currently only one member carries a big stick; and said member sometimes comes down with a case of isolationism. If this were long-term, and if no other member takes over the baton, then several regional powers will rediscover their ambitions to their neighbors’ land. (And those that are already open about such, e.g. China, shift toward acting upon them.) Interestingly, in such a world the middle powers would build larger navies than they currently do. (Currently, even if there were to be a war, the side opposed by the SQC has its navy sunk in short order. Investing — maybe not literal resources, but attention and policy concessions — into being the one the SQC allies with has a better return than building a navy of one’s own. Without a navally active SQC, the middle powers get to have a naval arms race for real stakes.)
I was very precise with my wording. I said “high seas”; none of Somali piracy had occurred there. From Wikipedia’s article on international piracy law;
Literally everywhere else, those boats would have been handled by coast guards. Re-reading the blog post now, I suspect this phrase – “the United States doesn’t operate just one navy – it operates two: the US Coast Guard would, for most countries, be the navy” risks providing one with a misleading impression that coastal countries do not generally have a coast guard or that they are fairly small if they do – in practice, as I noted in another comment, even middle powers have coast guard fleets numbering in triple digits (American coast guard reaches into four digits, to be fair, but this appears to have more to do with the level of private wealth which makes personal boat ownership a fairly (upper) middle-class thing (if all those “Trump flotillas” circa 2020 were any indication) and thus demands more sea traffic policing in general.)
Hence, if Somalia had a functioning government, it could have been flooded with cheap coast guard boats and paid to operate them at a profit to state budget, with a much lower long-term cost than all those naval operations – but it doesn’t have such a government, in no small part due to US’ own actions. For that matter, Somaliland is fairly stable and would have been virtually certain to accept this deal – but then this would have essentially committed the “status quo coalition” to formalize and eventually recognize the de facto dismembering of Somalia, which they were unwilling to do, for whatever reason (in sharp contrast with South Sudan, whose newly recognized statehood…didn’t exactly go swimmingly, even if the alternative might have been worse still.)
Let’s not pretend most of the air power used during Desert Storm was naval. As I already remarked on this blog, carriers only seem to account for around a third of the air assets bombing Iran this year. It appears to have been similar back in 1991. From the “Gulf War air campaign” Wikipedia page:
So, in raw numbers, it involved about 3 times more land-based aircraft than naval-based (i.e. the latter accounted for a quarter of air power). Now, a considerably larger fraction of the former were tankers, cargo planes and the like, but it’s not like the latter was all-combat (much of Marines’ air support consisted of transport helicopters, after all), so overall, carrier aircraft were in clear minority. Given how lopsided the outcome of Desert Storm was, it seems implausible to suggest their absence would have prevented the US from carrying out this operation or altered its strategic outcome.* As I commented in another thread, the US managed to carry out a totally militarily successful operation with purely land-based aviation support in Panama just two years before Desert Storm – and though much smaller and less complicated, it still involved 27,000 troops. (And it was carried out in a country only 6 times smaller than Iraq – almost twice the size of the Netherlands and larger than any single one of the Baltic states.)
You mean, like Israel is doing right now in Lebanon and Syria? (Never mind Gaza and the West Bank.) If anything, Desert Storm is much more of an exception than the historical rule; even if we set aside Israel (both more recently and post-1967/in the Lebanon of 1980s) the USN didn’t intervene in the Somalia-Ethiopia war over Ogaden, the war between Uganda and Tanzania or the decade-long war between Chad and Libya. All of those could have very easily ended with the aggressor country claiming its neighbour’s territory, and it was only the Soviet intervention in the former case, and Idi Amin/Gaddafi’s incompetence in the latter two which prevented that outcome. Once again, who is meant to be waiting on tenterhooks here?
If you mean Taiwan, it is nowadays largely implausible the USN intervention is going to change much there. For one thing, it can be blockaded from Fujian’s coast with anti-ship missiles alone, and there’s no plausible counter to that: this year had once again demonstrated all the air power the US could afford to bring down still failed to locate and eliminate the majority of mobile missile launchers even while operating with limited opposition. The PRC has more missile launchers than Iran; it not only has a modern air force, but it would have far more modern planes in the air than what the US carriers could realistically deploy (and the nearby land-based aircraft, for that matter – even assuming their airfields would stay halfway operable and that Japan would also throw all their 321 fighters into the meatgrinder instead of saying no or practicing force preservation) and they would be backed by a far modern and numerous air defence network than what Iran possessed. (Plus, it can replace all of this stuff faster than anyone else.)
Hence, PRC’s strategic goals appear to be focused on securing the 1997 Hong Kong scenario (or, to give a European example, the 1940 Baltics scenario – all three of those have capitulated to the USSR rather than face its wrath like Finland did.) They also appear to be quite well on their way in this regard – considering how this April, the leader of the KMT had literally traveled to Beijing and was photographed smiling and standing hand-in-hand with Xi Jinping!!!
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-10/cheng-li-wun-meets-xi-jinping-in-china-for-first-time/106542048
There is absolutely no way she would have done this unless she was confident her voters are fine with it and she won’t be punished for this at the ballot box overmuch. Right now, the KMT is already in control of the Legislative Yuan, so she just needs to win the Presidential to be in complete control – before she’ll most likely allow PRC troops and riot police to enter, ordering her own military to stand down. I am reminded here of the post on here on walled cities, where the purpose of fortifications was most often to allow the city to negotiate better conditions from the force besieging them, rather than to repulse the siege outright. If the contemporary KMT (who apparently dominate Taiwanese military leadership) think of their military equipment in the same manner, a lot of otherwise strange things start to make sense.
*Their presence certainly made it considerably easier and cost fewer Coalition casualties of course – but then again, it might have been easier still, by not needing to happen in the first place. That is, if the US wasn’t pumping up Iraq with funds and intel during its 8 years of war against Iran, let alone brought more economic pressure on those arming it (which was largely the USSR and the PRC, admittedly – but France also sold a significant number of aircraft and anti-ship missiles), we most likely wouldn’t have seen the invasion of Kuwait in the first place.
On further reflection, a few more points to add to my previous comment;
* To add to the list of territorial conquest wars the US(N) hadn’t been interested in stopping; the literal predecessor to Saddam’s attack on Kuwait, the Iraq-Iran War, had been one, with the key war aim of capturing Arab-plurality (and oil-rich) Khuzestan. Yes, someone is bound to tell me the embassy hostages justified the US rooting for Iraq rather than intervening to stop it, and it even makes sense on its surface; good luck squaring that argument with the whole Iran-Contras arms smuggling thing, though. (Which began almost as soon as the hostages were released.)
* The comparison of naval and land-based aircraft numbers had overlooked that the former also generally don’t deliver quite as much impact in ground attack. The difference between the payload of an individual F-14/18 vs. an F-15/F-16 (or an A-10, for that matter) is “just” a ton, which doesn’t much matter from one aircraft to another, but begins to add up across dozens of airframes. (Particularly since the F-14 payload was additionally reduced by having to carry LANTIRN pods to be able to do any targeted attacks on land at all.) Harriers (still the primary US Marine aircraft back then) straight-up carry about half of what F-15/16 do.
Admittedly, A-6 Intruder actually carries somewhat more than those (at the expense of being decades older, subsonic and quite vulnerable to enemy aircraft – if the other models haven’t handled them by that point.) Land-based aviation also featured a considerable number of Strike Eagles and F-111s, which carried about double the payload of Hornets/Tomcats, and triple of Harriers. (Never mind the B-52s; although they were limited to stand-off cruise missiles for much of the conflict.) Granted, I can see the irony that going to the point of counting payloads is falling into the “bombing to win” logic attacked both on this blog and by myself elsewhere. Either way; the page, with all the tables with numbers one might have never guessed, is perhaps some of the best of Wikipedia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_air_campaign
I forgot to address that point explicitly (in part because I’m not really up to speed on the naval procurement histories of e.g. the Gulf states or Bay of Bengal ones – and I suspect you aren’t either), but I’ll note that the present-day position of the USN very clearly fuels an arms race between it and the PLAN, with the latter aiming to foreclose the likelihood of the former blocking the Straits of Malacca (practically the only way it could meaningfully pressure it over e.g. Taiwan) and vice versa, so the comparison between the present and this counterfactual seems like a wash at first glance.
I just reread this line and realized that your read on the purpose of the USN is essentially the same as my read on the PRC’s military procurement strategy re. Taiwan. I suppose this means that we both agree with the general principle, but disagree about the particular applications and their utility or desirability. (I.e. it’s hard to see a more cost-effective way of “reintegrating” Taiwan for the PRC than via building up an arms overmatch which achieves that without fighting; for many of USN’s goals, this is much less clear.)
Also the St. Lawrence Seaway which is already tolled and has been demilitarized for 200 years. Why, the only thing which could lead to shipments out of Lake Michigan having to pay all the market will bear were if the United States were to pick a fight with Canada and that would never (aide leans down and whispers in my ear).
This is an unexpected treat for somebody who has a lot of interest in these topics of logistics and the capital investment in development and the ways the world still relies on food production.
Not to mention coming from one of those countries that developed specialised manufacturing, and works in such. (I make pharmaceuticals.)
This is all very thorough in an IR-theoretic sort of way. In practice, it’s much more ‘it depends’. It depends in particular on the interests and powers of states and the match of technologies. Up to c1890 Britain was quite sure it commanded the oceans. It suppressed piracy (a problem then mainly in the China Seas), but also imposed blockades or bombardments as it pleased on weaker states (see, eg Alexandria or Piraeus or Zanzibar) and was high-handed as far as neutral commerce with its enemies was concerned. From 1890 it was uneasily aware that it’s maritime dominance was weaker, but also aware that the great bulk of international trade was carried in British hulls. So agreed to restrictive rules of blockade. Which it cheerfully ignored in 1914 (British warships waited off New York to inspect US vessels for contraband as declared by the British, and Netherlands and other neutral imports were restricted to pre-war levels to ensure they did not act as conduits for German trade). Germany also ignored the rules. It was the same in World War II.
So, in practice, ‘freedom of trade’ is conditional on what it is practical to impose both on belligerents and neutrals having regard to relative power.
Piracy is essentially down to a lack of state control – not something to be remedied by bombs. Patrols can play a part. Convoy is an established effective counter-measure, but not one favoured by commerce. Assistance in establishing (more usually re-establishing) state control is very effective, but US efforts have so far been more in the opposite direction.
As far as ‘choke-points’ go – the Bosporus is under Turkish control by international agreement, Suez and Panama are canals and under state control, Gibraltar and the Sound not an issue. Hormuz and Bab el-Mandeb are issues of belligerency, and the belligerents operating firmly in accord with precedents established by the British and US – that they will not permit freedom of navigation to their enemies or their enemies’ allies (note that the Houthis allow Chinese ships through, the Iranians Iraqi vessels). Again, a problem where the relative balance of forces, as ever, is the deciding factor. Drones and missiles give greater reach and are difficult to impossible to counter in any cost-effective way. Occupation is not an option, again because the costs are too high. That leaves diplomacy. So not a naval problem. Where does that leave the US mighty fleet of carriers? A very large hammer without a nail.
“While obviously not all trade would cease if the United States dissembled its fleets, the crisis in Hormuz seems to make it fairly clear that maritime trade would be both reduced and quite a bit more expensive… If the trade lanes are not kept open, they may not close completely, but history suggests they will narrow… Now of course even in that future, global trade doesn’t simply stop altogether. It simply becomes more constrained, more limited and more expensive. Some goods become less available, ships have to take the long way around or pay expensive tolls, perhaps in some areas they have to mount greater security precautions and all of those costs get passed to the consumer.”
While this conclusion follows on from your premise, it neglects a lot of the reality of what has been happening the freight and charter markets. The crisis in Hormuz has been unique as far as recent maritime crises go (Covid congestion, Suez canal closure, Panama canal transit restrictions, Red Sea re-routing) as the trade has no alternative avenue to get out of the Persian Gulf, which has what has driven up the commodity and freight prices.
However, in all other instances, the shipping industry has been able to respond through the freight rate mechanism and re-routing, which has delivered the shipowners a massive war chest to spend on newbuilds. Even if you assume the current Gulf crisis continues, the cost of shipping is expected to go down, not up, in the coming years as a huge wave of new containership, gas carrier, tanker, and bulker tonnage is delivered and scrap prices remain unattractive. All of these crises have been a boon for an industry that would otherwise be under pressure from a glut of tonnage.
History actually suggests that seaborne trade is remarkably resilient during a crisis, becoming more expensive in the short-run but re-adjusting to a new market equilibrium in only a few years.
It absolutely is resilient, but the costs go up. That’s part of the point I am trying to make at the end – things aren’t going to collapse, but they will get modestly but noticeably worse.
A nitpick (but, when in Rome), he’s never Lord Edward Grey – that implies he’s a son of a Duke or Marquess. He can be Lord Grey of Fallodon, but because he is a baronet, is Sir Edward Grey.
He was a Viscount at the end, so Lord would be appropriate. Back when he said it he was presumably just The Honourable Edward Grey (as he was an MP).
No, “Lord Edward Grey” was never correct, the Lord is not interchangeable there with Sir or Mr.
As an MP he was never The Honourable E.G. as his grandfather had already died, but The Honourable Sir E.G.; when he joined the privy council he was The Rt Hon Sir E.G., and when he became a viscount he was the Rt Hon Viscount E.G., PC Bt.
>The PLAN has been sending task forces to operate in the Gulf of Aden since 2008 when the issues there became acute.
The reason the issues there became acute in 2008 have a lot to do with a disastrous, shortsighted taken in 2006, by the United States and Ethiopia, as *part* of the global war on terror.
One thing that worries me about your point that aircraft carriers have always been vulnerable, is that that they are so much much less expendable than they were for the US in World War II.
The difference is that today’s carriers, especially nuclear fleet carriers, have much longer lead times, need more specialized facilities for construction (though, of course, the US has incredibly limited shipbuilding of any sort), and cost so much more — even leaving aside similar time and money replacement cost issues for their crews and air wings — that losing one now would be a much bigger issue than the loss of even several was for the US during World War II.
Suppose a Nimitz-class carrier was lost today, even if the air wing and all hands survived…could the US actually plausibly increase the production speed of the Ford-class carriers beyond what’s currently scheduled for replacement of the Nimitz class as its hulls reach the end of their lifespans? It’s certainly not equivalent to the mass-production of the Essex class that made the losses of the Lexington, Yorktown, and Hornet in 1942 so easily survivable: by the end of 1943, they’d been replaced by five Essex-class carriers. And while the Essex class was ordered in 1940, its ships were generally completed within 18 months of their keels being laid down, with four or under construction at a time
Unless there happened to be a conveniently empty friendly-operated airfield (or several, given the size of its air wing and how small outlying airfields can get) nearby (and if there is, why is a carrier even used in the first place?), then no, that air wing won’t survive. I guess there could be a last-ditch attempt to force a civilian airport to vacate however many passenger plane runways it would take to host that air wing – the US tankers staying at Ben Gurion airport could perhaps be seen a precedent. However, it would most likely still take a traffic control miracle.
For what it’s worth, the Pentagon itself had claimed at the end of last year that it expects China to field 9 aircraft carriers by 2035. Assuming that it does not retire/sell/etc. a single one by then (since its initial aircraft carrier, Liaoning, is basically Kuznetsov’s upgraded twin bought from Russia in 2002, some have speculated it might get sold back to it later on – but it might as well be kept for e.g. pilot/flight crew training), that means 5 extra carriers to add to its present 4 over the next 9 years – i.e. one carrier launched every two years. If the schedule slips and they field 9 by 2040, that would be one launched every three years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_aircraft_carrier_programme
Actually, China currently has 3 aircraft carriers; I was counting the hull which we already know is well under construction (and is most likely to match the dimensions of the Nimitz/Ford, if not slightly exceed them) – but it is not remotely done yet.
https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/satellite-images-show-china-s-type-004-nuclear-aircraft-carrier-taking-shape-at-dalian-shipyard/ar-AA2aP6XS
Thus if the Pentagon estimate is proven accurate, it would actually be a slightly faster clip than one every two years.
I think you meant “comparative advantage”?
Fixed.
A solid analysis overall, but I have a few critiques:
1. The global network of allies and security partners you refer to is really the American Imperium, which is the sequel to the British Empire, with power changing hands during the two world wars. You come right up to the point of stating this, but seem unwilling or unable to draw the final connection.
2. The War on Iran is primarily Israel’s war. Since time is against the Zionist state, it makes strategic sense for them to make such a gamble. For the US, getting bogged down in yet another Middle Eastern conflict, and Trump reneging on his “no more forever wars” campaign promise, it is not so sensible; until you realize that the US was dragged into this because Zionism is a key supporting pillar of the Trump administration. It’s not just AIPAC, a large constituency of Trump support is Evangelical Christians, who are dedicated to Israel on ideological and religious grounds. With this context, their actions make more sense, especially if you add a dose of over-confidence in believing that Iran could be toppled, which was not to be.
3. BRICS (more specifically Russia/Iran/China) are building overland trade networks across Asia, including but not limited to the B&RI. This will allow them to bypass the seas, and any maritime sanctions imposed by the West.
This will allow them to bypass the seas, and any maritime sanctions imposed by the West.
it won’t, because as Bret noted, maritime trade is more efficient (including with respect to energy/fossil fuel) than overland trade.
A fair point, but I wonder how much of that discrepancy can be made up for by increased investment in overland infrastructure for a new Silk Road. The point being, maybe reliance on sea-routes plays some role in land routes having significantly higher costs.
The costs quoted are AFTER investing in infastructure; the US has a substantial road and rail network. Water being cheaper is because of physics.
Also if you’re trading with a non-adjacent country you end up with a potentially worse version of the problem because it’s very easy for any country in between to impose any restrictions it wants on the passage of goods and harder to make them stop doing it.
Also China sells a lot of stuff to the Americas and you can’t do that by land.
While I haven’t actually worked everything out, even to a Fermi level, part of the problem is physics. It’s really hard to beat out water on friction.
This suggestion that sea transport isn’t more efficient than land transport because of physical laws, but only because The Thalassocracy wants it to be that way, is giving a faint whiff of Dugin particles.
I’m not ignoring physics, and I’m well aware of the advantages of water-based transport, whether by river or sea. But it’s not that simple, and it’s not either/or. Yes, as Dr. Devereaux said, the US has plenty of road & rail, and shipping cross-country costs the same as shipping to a port worldwide. However, this can be affected by both physics, and by emphasis on sea-borne trade. The latter may have to do with US reliance on legacy infrastructure, and our seeming inability to build high-speed rail (which is for passenger trains, but still).
I theorize that modernized transport across Asia might be able to partially, though not fully, narrow the gap between sea & land trade.
In other words, sea routes may have a natural advantage over land routes, and that gap may be widened by reliance on the former over the latter. BRICS investing in land routes may bring them closer in efficiency to sea routes, even if they’re still the second-best option.
Most of the US isn’t reachable by sea, so we’ve invested extensively in transport infrastructure.
We don’t have high-speed rail but that’s not a big deal for freight. It’s a passenger thing because people care if their trip is a couple hours vs. an entire day. Nearly all freight does not.
“We don’t have high-speed rail but that’s not a big deal for freight. It’s a passenger thing because people care if their trip is a couple hours vs. an entire day. Nearly all freight does not.”
We don’t have high speed rail for a few reasons.
First, high speed rail requires extensive real estate. Not just the stations, though those are a nightmare as well; you have to have land for the rails. And in the USA that’s not just where the rails are; US law is such that a rail road right-of-way can extend significantly beyond the actual railroad. I learned from someone else’s rather bitter experience that a driller can lose their license if they drill in an railroad ROW without prior written approval, for example. This can have significant negative downstream impacts on a surprising number of people.
This isn’t insurmountable, obviously. But it leads to the second issue: High speed rail is competing against established transportation systems. I can fly anywhere I want in the USA. I can also drive anywhere I want. So the issue has never been “Have HSR or not”; the issue has always been “Add HSR to an existing system that works well for the people who use it, or not”. And I’ll happily admit that a big part of this is cultural. The USA is huge, on a scale that most Europeans really struggle to understand (which is, as an American, highly amusing), and part of that means we’re used to long drives. Driving 8 hours isn’t a problem for many of us.
The other cultural issue is independence. We Americans value independence–maybe a bit too much. But it means that we’d rather drive 8 hours than ride a railway for 8 hours. Flying is faster, but once you add TSA and baggage claim to the mix…..well, put it this way: When I had to make the choice, at 8 hours I’ve always chosen to drive. I get my music, I get to choose the route I want, I get to stop whenever I want. I can take a dog with me, or a cat, or (and this comes up surprisingly often in my line of work) potentially explosive canisters of gas. All of these are more difficult or impossible on trains (it’s how I got to drive 8 hours; NO ONE wants to drive with explosives, even if it’s calibration gas for a PID and as dangerous as a cow’s fart).
As for freight, we obviously move a lot by rail. It’d be impossible to power a coke plant (er…the steel-making kind, if that’s not clear) via semis. But we have existing rail networks for that that are operating well enough for our needs (otherwise we’d alter them). HSR doesn’t add anything to this equation except complexity, during construction, operation, and maintenance, as HSR will necessarily cross freight rail lines. This can, by the way, dramatically reduce HSR speeds, as in some states freight has right of way.
There’s a lot more I could say, but can’t. Suffice to say, unless you’ve been involved in one of these projects you are DRASTICALLY under-estimating the difficulty of building HSR in the USA. It’s not impossible, but it ain’t gonna happen in our lifetimes.
There is simply no space. Replacing a single 20 000 TEU container ship would require a 130 km long train. The modern Silk Road Yiwu–London railway line is 12 000 km long. If the trains were running back to back there would be room for less than 90 container ships on that railway.
And piracy on the rails would be much easier. Just steal one of the rail maintenance pickups, drive behind the train and climb aboard.
Depends heavily on the means of transportation and that in turn depends on what is being transported. Ships beat trains for bulk goods. But oil via pipeline can be cheaper. And electricity over high voltage lines is better than batteries on a ship.
A Neopanamax can theoretically stack 7,000 big-rig trailers. Made into a train with four feet of coupling per container, that’s a railroad train just under 60 miles long. For one ship. It gets shorter if you just design a new kind of railroad that is multiples of width and height, I think you don’t need a train car that’s fully the size of a panamax but it probably should be an initial design goal.
To beat the efficiency of gliding through water, you kind of need mag-lev. The B&R initiative could ultimately be a megaconstruction that puts a maglev loop of hundred-meter wide track connecting Beijing to Budapest and Tehran to Vientiane. I don’t know, that seems unlikely to me, but it would change the world.
Keep in mind, you can have parallel rail lines to increase throughput, so no need for fantastical rail gauges. Maglev is promising technology, though.
Overall, this has been a solid critique of one of my three points. While BRICS can’t fully replace seagoing trade by pivoting to the new Silk Road, it can at least partially do so, especially with better infrastructure and technology. As Dr. Devereaux says, the Chinese navy is not yet ready to replace the US navy in guaranteeing freedom of navigation, but it may be able to augment the BRICS trade network with necessary ocean corridors.
“3. BRICS (more specifically Russia/Iran/China) are building overland trade networks across Asia, including but not limited to the B&RI. This will allow them to bypass the seas, and any maritime sanctions imposed by the West.”
It’s always possible to bypass the sea but it’s very, very expensive to do so both as a capital and operating cost. Countries have been trying to establish overland trade network backups to their naval routes for millennia, going back to Egyptian rival states on the Nile. Backups can lessen the strategic implications a little bit but except in extremely local circumstances they dont remove them. A continent spanning trade network is far from extremely local circumstances.
And this initiative will be even more compromised by the diametrically opposed interests of the parties involve. China would love it if all of Russia’s oil and natural gas was directed to overland infrastructure that went to China and only China. Russia would not be a fan of that arrangement; it would mean higher operating costs and handing China all of the bargaining power for prices. So Russia is always going to want to keep shipping by sea and China is hardly going to be paying the ruinous expense of making a continent spanning pipeline capable of carrying 10 million barrels a day only to have it sit idle whenever Russia exports to someone else.
You seem to be underestimating the increasing cooperation of BRICS.
Well, so far, Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline remains stalled because China believes time is on its side and the longer it waits before making a deal, the lower price it can get before locking in a contract…
https://asiatimes.com/2026/07/power-of-siberia-2-deadlock-cracks-russia-china-no-limits-pact/
There may be frictions like this, but there’s also bridges across the Amur river, and similar developments.
As @AWJ and others have already observed, cooperation can’t change the laws of physics.
Cooperation also can’t change geography. Brazil has no land border with the other BRICS countries, nor does South Africa. India has a land border with China AKA the Himalayan mountains.
“RC” can transport oil, gas, and goods by land; BRICS cannot.
“RC” can transport oil, gas, and goods by land; BRICS cannot.
Plus, even “RC” transport would be highly inefficient, since transporting goods from St. Petersburg to Shanghai or Guangzhou means literally traversing the better part of the Eurasian landmass. You could do it, but why would you?
As I said, I use BRICS as a term of convenience for the alternate power bloc centered on Russia/China/Iran.
In any case, I’m thinking modernized land routes might make the new Silk Road viable, even if it can’t match sea routes in terms of efficiency. As for why, it’s to build their own trade network and increase their immunity to Western sanctions (which they already evade to a limited extent).
The old Silk Roads (I prefer the plural) featured just as much sea travel as land travel on many routes – and were optimised specifically for moving relatively small quantities of _extremely_ valuable goods. That both reduces the proportional cost of land transport vs the cargo being carried, and means the lower capacities are less of a problem.
Meanwhile, from a sanctions perspective, _how_ you transport it is rarely relevant. US sanctions apply just as strongly to trade with Russia whether you move it in by ships (see shadow fleet) or pipeline or truck. The biggest thing to do for sanctions immunity is to build an alternative _payment_ network that can bypass US influence over payments infrastructure.
@xcalibur, a “BRICS” meaning a power block centred on Russia, China, and Iran that relies on land transport instead of sea has also can’t reach newer BRICS member states Egypt, Ethiopia, the UAE, and Indonesia. If only three of the ten countries in BRICS benefit from improved land transport, I don’t see why the other member states will want to cooperate.
OK, Russia and China can and probably will set up better land links between them. Who else can they trade with, absent sea transport?
The Iranians don’t actually like the Russians, there’s a lot of recent (as in 20th C) violent history between them, but the Islamic government doesn’t have a choice. Even so, Iran would be better off shipping oil by sea than by pipeline.
The states between Russia, China, and Iran that the old Silk Roads ran through are former colonies of Russia, or sometimes China. They generally don’t like their former masters, but also don’t have much choice. None of these countries are rich.
Without sea transport, BRICS can’t trade with the entire continents of Africa, North and South America and can’t trade with the very large (and increasingly rich) population of South East Asia.
I don’t see other states rushing to join a BRICS because “we have efficient land transport between Russia and China!” Heck, I can’t even see China spending much on this, compared to the money they can make by seaborne trade with everyone else.
scifihughf: Good points overall. So even the major powers of the Asian landmass would have to supplement land routes with sea routes. I believe they do have plans for a link across the Caspian Sea, which would cover one leg of the distance at least. But yes, to tie in Indonesia, the Middle East, etc, they would need sea routes as well, most likely relying on the Chinese navy.
China will continue trading with both sides for the time being, but if matters escalate, their loyalty is to BRICS.
While BRICS has come a long way since its origin as a Goldmann Sachs PR vehicle to raise the profile of secondary capital markets, I don’t think evidence suggests that it is a serious political or economic alliance beyond the existing common economic and imperial interests of Russia and China, who – much like the Trump regine – largely prefer bilateral coordination to international bodies anyway.
BRICS cooperation beyond R+C has always been paper thin, and barely rises above the level of joint declarations, if that.
Russia is hard pressed to do much of anything right now, due to Ukraine systematically destroying their industrial capacity. That is in addition to the people getting put through the meat grinder on the battlefield.
Following our host on Bluesky over the past few weeks had already provided a preview of this post. I also already happened to argue against just about every point brought up in the latter half of it (granted, mostly with other pseudonymous accounts) but I suppose it’s nice to be able to lay every argument out start to finish, and without character limits (though also with few links/media).
(As an aside: I’m heartened that a lot of the points I’m about to made have already been invoked by the other commenters – if perhaps not always in the same fashion I would prefer.)
Anyway, skipping past the general explainer on trade, naval and otherwise (which I don’t really have an issue with), we have:
It had also been the historical pattern for ~90% of the population to till the land, and for half of every generation to perish before turning five – the Peasant series got that point across quite well. Why would we assume that e.g. the Late Bronze Age or the Wars of the Diadochoi provide a relevant guide if the then-omnipresent background of both those periods had been replaced by something radically different? I’ll come back to this question later, but please let it sit and simmer for now.
…Haven’t all of those elements existed during e.g. the Hundred Years’ War period? Now, piracy was certainly present back then as well* – however, it certainly wasn’t a Golden Age of it – because there weren’t yet any “New World” colonies whose wealth got plundered on land and then had to be transported into the imperial core via the sea. On one hand, you can argue that we have more stuff transported via the sea than ever before; on the other, wire transfers have eliminated the possibility of capturing e.g. a gold-laden ship, so the margins are nowhere near what they were then.
And crucially, none of the overseas colonies had a choice in whether or not they would keep shipping their wealth to the imperial core; not unless they actually managed to rebel. Conversely, the rival colonial powers didn’t have many options to interrupt that flow besides physically attacking it; initially via sponsoring privateers like Francis Drake, and later on via massive investments into the fleets of fast ships intended to prowl the sea lanes (or “cruise” them, if you will – exactly where the term cruiser came from, before it mutated into “the heaviest gun/missile ship it makes any economic sense to build”.) This was the context Alfred Thayer Mahan (September 27, 1840 – December 1, 1914) lived and breathed when he wrote his oft-cited book.
Nowadays, the final vestiges of overseas colonies (Curacao, The Falklands, French Guiana, etc.) are generally very small (well, French Guiana is the size of e.g. Austria or South Carolina, but that’s mostly forest and it has a smaller population than Tallinn, Estonia or Bakersfield, California) and so economically insignificant. If country A and country B are separated by an ocean and country C wants to sever their trade to harm A…it can just cajole/intimidate B with any number of measures, and then ships simply won’t leave its ports to go towards A; none of them need to be physically interdicted. Hence, I’m deeply skeptical you can actually cut-and-paste lessons from Mahan, who lived when this simply wasn’t an option, into a world where it absolutely is.
Hooray! Go, young navy! And like with every other mainstream American analysis, this post skips right past what happened a mere 15 years later – the rapid conquest of the entire Algeria by an unpopular King in his 70s (hmm, why does this bring present-day figures to mind?) who got overthrown a few weeks later anyway – but Algeria remained occupied by France for over 130 years. Given that up to a third of its entire population was murdered well before the end of the century, I’m shocked the extent of the consensus that “the right side” won “the Barbary Wars”. If the stars in 1815 had aligned so that “the shores of Tripoli” were instead soaked in US Marine blood, and Algiers had afterwards managed to fend off American and European attacks for a few decades longer (the sheer disparity in population sizes probably still dooms it sometime before WWI – even it happens in this timeline) – would that world actually have been worse than the present? (Admittedly, pre-colonization Algeria had actively practiced slavery – but then again, so did the contemporary United States.)
So…are we just supposed to accept the implication here that a) the UK/France/Denmark are likely to start charging tolls through their respective waterways; b) the US is at all likely to bomb any one of them if they did so (especially if its own ships got a carve-out)? Let’s be honest, b) in particular is ridiculous, and is clearly disproven by the way the US had aided and abetted the Taiwanese dictatorship in its blockade of the PRC – even when it had targeted vessels connected to non-aligned or even Western European countries.
I presume this and everything which follows is all very Mahanist, and there’s a whole lot of impressive numbers listed…except for ones which would demonstrate any of this genuinely matters in the world as it actually is today.
I.e. let’s re-read this part: “bombard key cities”. The choice of the verb is clearly meant to parallel the aforementioned Bombardment of Algiers and implies that such a success is possible in the present day. Now, how large was the population of Algiers in 1816? I confess I cannot find an estimate for that year specifically – but according to “Algiers: Colonial Metropolis (1830–1961)” chapter in a Colonial Cities textbook, its population was at ~30,000 sometime after the French conquest – presumably in the earlier years, as Wikipedia cites an 1888 book claiming its population was 56,000 that year. Even if we assume that the 1888 figure is more representative of independent, “pirate” Algiers at the peak of its power, it would still be a fairly minor settlement by today’s standards – roughly the size of Bakhmut or Pokrovsk. As we all know, either one of those places had experienced far, far, FAR more bombardment than what all the aircraft carriers on Earth put together could achieve – with negligible strategic implications. The other commenters have already noted that the Strategic Airpower Collections is conspicuously NOT cited here; this comparison merely underlines the point.
Yes, a Marine Expeditionary Unit, which brings to bear the whopping combat power of…2,200 troops, 20-30 APCs/IFVs, 6 (!) M777 howitzers and 8 (eight) mortars. Let’s be generous and assume all of this is doubled when it undergoes wartime-level mobilization – we are still left with quantities that are chump change by Ukraine War standards – one look at Oryx shows either side routinely loses this much equipment in a week or two at most. In Ukraine, many multiples of this are needed to take the proverbial Bakhmut (or Rabotino, for that matter); yet for the thesis to hold, it must be possible to subdue an entire country via however many of these you can deliver. Even with the most optimistic assumptions about air cover effectiveness, these are exceedingly unlikely to take and hold the entire country – and if they can’t do that, they’ll get defeated in detail. (“What’s the point of taking Kharg Island only to get shelled offshore?” is a principle that applies to however far however many MEUs could be delivered might get before their legs run out.)
Now, sure, just a few thousand marines won those Berbery Wars. Of course, they did so when the population of the entire Algeria hovered around 2 million. Once again, it appears to me that the naval stratagems from the era when the entire global population was well below 2 billion (that point was only crossed in 1927!) are not applicable for the world with over 8 billion people in it. The flip side is that tales of piracy from when the global population was in a few hundreds of millions (apparently, it was in the 500-600 million range during the “Golden Age of Piracy” period), are similarly unlikely to be relevant – especially given that the starting capital of being a pirate on the high seas back then was a bunch of timber, and nowadays it’s thousands of tons of metal produced by only a handful of countries that generally have a vested interest in their customers Not Doing Piracy.
Left unsaid is what it had taken for that piracy to intensify: the initial collapse of the Somalian state by the end of the 1980s, followed by the continued failure to unify the country – in large part because Ethiopia invaded to combat a force known as the Islamic Courts Union AND by 2006, they have convinced Bush II Administration that destroying the ICU was essential, so bombs, drones and Tomahawks (yes, if you think this Administration is being wasteful with those, consider what Bush II spent them on) started to fly. Absent that intervention, an Islamist-led Somalia in 2000s would have had at least as many incentives to cooperate in the global system as the contemporary Islamist-led Syria, and so it would have been motivated to “destroy the bases” of any pirates on its own. Of course, a unified Somalia that is once again capable of contesting Ogaden is the last thing Ethiopia needs, so getting the US to carry out its dirty work at the expense of global trade appears to have worked out splendidly for it. Hence, power projection of the US navy in Somalia effectively only (incompletely) fixed the very problem that power projection caused.**
This brushes over a very, very inconvenient fact that the apogee of these attempts – last year’s “Rough Rider” – had involved two aircraft carriers (about as many as can be realistically deployed by the US nowadays – especially without pulling out of Asia – since those ships are ~40 years old on average and the rest are under repairs or the like at any given time) bombing with everything they had. The most obvious test of “just bombard them”, against one of the weakest, poorest coastal states there is – and it effectively ended with status quo ante.
See a few paragraphs above for my opinion on how much effectiveness we could actually expect that counterfactual. The Houthis know how to use drones as well – and even if they haven’t, why exactly would it have been more effective to send the Marines in a few ships that would be targeted along the way with every anti-ship weapon they have, as opposed to…using planes and other ships to land a ton of ground troops in Saudi Arabia and invade Yemen from there, with much easier supply lines as an obvious bonus? (The whole argument about the essential role of Marines loses a lot of its luster when you consider in how many cases it would be far more practical to deliver ground troops to a neighbouring country and attack in conjunction with it. If your diplomacy isn’t good enough to achieve that, your marine invasion will probably be drowned in blood also.)
This is stated as a fact, but is at most an interpretation. An alternate interpretation is that the greatest deterrent to Iran attempting to toll Hormuz at any time in the past had been the very distinct prospect of the USSR/Russia invading like it did during WWII. As recently as in the mid-2010s, Putin had delayed the deliveries of S-300s to Iran that were already paid for after a meeting with Netanyahu; a coalition of all the countries that didn’t want to pay Hormuz tolls sponsoring a Russian invasion seems fairly achievable in this light. The current situation where Russia had lost both the capacity and the will for such is therefore very, very recent. (Though, it’ll likely stay permanent once Iran properly nuclearizes in the foreseeable future.) Another alternate interpretation is that the prospect of imminent relief from the thousands of sanctions imposed onto Iran (which have led to, amongst other things, passenger planes crashing and killing everyone aboard due to the lack of spare parts, or haemophiliac children dying because their medicine was declared “dual use”) had motivated its leadership to avoid doing anything which risked sabotaging that.
…Is the implication here that the US which wasn’t retrenching and was truly committed to the global maritime system would have now been bombing Ukraine until it agreed to stop striking Russian ships? Because, surely it couldn’t have escaped you that this is the way these passages read on paper? Or is the suggestion that Ukraine would be tempted to toll Black Sea trade after the war and the best leverage the US would have in that case is its navy and not…all the financial levers? (P.S. If that very suggestion sounds revolting to you, now consider how it feels to many people, particularly in the MENA region, when they hear the Houthi campaign that’s intended to achieve very distinct and concrete political goals that many people agree worldwide described as purely a problem to be resolved with coercive power.)
While the argument for humanitarian capacity of naval projection is appreciated, this is a questionable example to pick. The notion such limited assistance represents the lack of capability as opposed to a lack of will to do much for the sake of a state which hosts US bases and very, very explicitly aligns itself with the US as part of the “First Island Chain” containing China (this isn’t a moral judgement but a factual description of geopolitics) is betrayed by a simple comparison with the amount of aid China sent to a much further away Haiti after its horrifying earthquake 3 years prior to that.
https://reliefweb.int/report/haiti/disaster-relief-chinas-first-batch-humanitarian-aid-haiti-shipped
All in all; like some of the other arguments on Bluesky, the above is a good recitation of Mahanist points which generally fails to reckon that we live in a world completely demographically, economically and technologically different from Mahan – and also fails to offer a scenario within the Actually Existing Geography where a crisis would arise to which a Navy that is Actually Likely to be constructed and deployed is in fact the best solution.
* In fact, there is a remarkable case of Jeanne de Clisson, whose Breton husband was executed as a traitor to the French crown a few years after the war began – so she sold the castle and the rest of the estate to pay for three ships and dozens of aspiring murderers to fill them with, and ravaged shipping in support of the English. (She also nearly made it to 60 years of age – easily outliving e.g. nearly every reigning Romanov, in spite of living at the time of The Black Death.
**Now, the initial collapse of Somalia was precipitated by its failure in the 1977 Ogaden War the Barre regime started – which led to pro-Barre Ogadenis fleeing to Somalia en-masse, inflaming existing tensions to the point Barre used many of them to carry out a genocide that led to his downfall. Admittedly, that didn’t have much to do with the US – in fact, on the contrary, it is best attributed to the USSR suddenly switching sides, abandoning its previous alliance with Somalia because the charismatic Mengistu seemed like the ideal of an African Communist to Brezhnev’s Politburo (and they eagerly accepted his explanation Red Terror was necessary in Ethiopia like it was in the USSR itself – even as they toppled Amin in Afghanistan for intending the exact same thing a few years later, precipitating the entire disaster of an invasion) – and convincing Barre taking Ogaden was a now (while Ethiopia was weakened by internal violence and hasn’t yet received much Soviet support) or never decision.
And yet, the only reason it even mattered is because the late-1970s USSR was in fact capable of projecting great power to the Horn of Africa – briefly deploying marines to evacuate its personnel from Somalia, and then sealifting all the equipment to Ethiopia which turned the tide. Essentially, Somalian piracy exists because there was far too much superpower projection in the region, not too little.
While I like most of the post, in part of it you question the US ability to invade Iran and in another part you say that it probably didn’t toll the strait due to the possibility of getting invaded. I assume you imagine Russia was providing this threat of invasion, but there’s no way they could do that while also being neck deep in their ‘special military operation’, right?
It would be a lot easier to land forces in Iran to disrupt their bombardment of the strait than to destroy the state. It would also be robustly bad for Iran in a way that the status quo wasn’t. And if Iran just started shooting at tankers unprovoked there would be somewhat more American public will to accept casualties to make them stop.
I suppose that is true in a relative sense – but then the still-functioning Iranian state starts bombarding those forces instead of the Strait. The seemingly common notion everything listed below can be destroyed from the air within an acceptable timeframe seems…ambitious, to put it mildly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_equipment_of_the_Iranian_Army#Artillery
The historical anti-pirate operations usually did not destroy the entire army of the targeted state or even a large portion of it; they sank the ships used in commerce raiding, messed up the port, and left with a warning they’d come back and do it again if there was any trouble.
“The historical anti-pirate operations”…the whole point of the top-level comment I wrote is that we have zero, zilch, nada evidence that those historical patterns still hold true today! It might have worked back the port to be messed up had a population of a few thousands or tens of thousands at most; nowadays, you are talking about hundreds of thousands (i.e. Bandar Abbas, which I presume you all know sits at the approximate center of Hormuz coastline, has a population of ~250,000) or even millions. (i.e. modern-day Algiers has a population of 3 million in the city proper, and around 4,325,000 with its outlying suburbs included).
I think the closest we actually came to testing this theory was with the Suez Crisis and the Six-Day War. In both cases, Egypt had closed the Straits of Tiran to Israel. In both cases, Israel (alongside the Brits and the French the first time around) proceeded to smash the Egyptian air force, inflict substantial casualties on the ground and open the Strait…by physically capturing the entire Sinai Peninsula. In both cases, Egypt retaliated by closing the Suez Canal – and the second time, it had essentially taken Israel signaling it would hand back the entire Sinai in a few years’ time (not to mention a second war which came very close to losing Israel a lot more than what it conquered in 1967) for the closure to stop. (4 years passed between the end of the closure and the start of Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_of_the_Suez_Canal_(1967%E2%80%931975)
That is, the Egyptian will to fight and interdict shipping was not broken by the (very, very substantial) material damage. It had taken continued occupation to deny them the physical capability to close just one of the two pivotal waterways. After the Sinai was returned to Egypt, it had been an ongoing process of “taming” post-Nasser Egyptian military with treats (i.e. ~1,200 Abrams tanks, 220 F-16s, a couple dozen Patriot batteries, and probably a bunch of other stuff I’m forgetting) to have reasonable confidence they are not going to close the Straits of Tiran again. Again, Egypt was attacked with forces far more formidable than any present-day MEU – and it wasn’t remotely enough to do what the theory is meant to predict.
P.S. This history is what made it quite surprising for me to see our host recently echo the populist proposal of ending CENTCOM over on Bluesky. CENTCOM was founded in 1979 (under Carter, for those who still think of him as a cartoonish pacifist) – the same year as Israel began to hand back the Sinai, in line with 1978’s Camp David Accords. It seems like one can very easily make the case the primary (now-forgotten) purpose of CENTCOM is to keep Egypt from fighting Israel. Nowadays, one can easily imagine a post-CENTCOM Egypt rapidly becoming a post-Sisi Egypt – and that post-Sisi Egypt going for a tactical alliance with Iran. Iranian ballistic missiles currently find it difficult to hit Israel due to the distances involved, which forces the use of comparatively expensive and rare munitions.
If Egypt were to allow Iran to station its missiles there, its attacks would become at least as effective as those on the Gulf states – and the Iranian missile crews would have the aforementioned Patriots and F-16s providing air cover. Vice versa – a ground attack with Egyptian tanks could well be simultaneously reinforced via Iranian ballistic missiles hitting the Israeli rear. (Moreover, Patriot performance in Ukraine suggests that Egypt might well manage to intercept most of Israel’s nukes – some of which are just gravity bombs on F-15s, or the same cruise missiles whose air-launched version reportedly got intercepted by an ancient Pechora, never mind the Patriot. Whatever does get through is still going to kill a lot of people – but since Iran itself is very likely to nuclearize by then, it’s entirely possible Israel would rather be defeated conventionally then trade nuclear hits on maybe a dozen Egyptian cities for the annihilation of its only 3 cities of note (Tel Aviv, Haifa and Beersheba – Jerusalem is extremely unlikely to get nuked.)
The scenario above would likely be welcomed by a lot of people – but I do not think our host is in their number, so it’s surprising he doesn’t appear to pay much attention to this scenario? (IMO, far, far more plausible than “places with no recent history of piracy are going to take it up the moment USN readiness progress bar drops to 20% or w/e”.)
Of course not; post-“SVO” is exactly the situation which I call very, very recent, whereas the line in the blog I quoted appears to refer to the entire period from the end of the Iraq-Iran War till present. (And technically, Pahlavi’s Iran had a fairly similar incentive structure that might have had motivated it to toll the Strait – yet it was even more at risk of a Soviet invasion if it had done so.)
I think an additional reason to question the notion the US Navy had been the primary deterrent for Iran is that in the final year of the Iraq-Iran war, that Navy actually did do a punitive raid, titled Operation Praying Mantis. That took place on April 18, 1988 and was a near-perfect tactical success for the US – yet it had still taken 4 more months for the war to end, and as you can see from the table, Iran continued to actively attack shipping (though not as actively and effectively as Iraq) in the days and weeks after that operation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tanker_war#1988
The US cannot, apparently, defeat Iran if Iran is fighting for its survival (witness, well, the thing that is happening now)
However, if Iran were to have closed the strait unprovoked with the intention of gaining some kind of benefit, the US would have brutalized it (again, witness the thing that is happening now!) and Iran would have ended up worse off than if they had Not Done That.
Like… Iran is not happy about the current state of affairs! They would prefer not to be fighting the US even if that means they didn’t have the ability to charge tolls on the Strait of Hormuz… but, well, the US did not give them a choice, so Iran is going to fight.
The US is messing Iran up, despite the fact the US is also going to lose this war. If the US had entered the war in response to Iranian actions with a limited objective, it would have been possible for the US to win, because Iran would be able to lose non-existentially.
abandoning its previous alliance with Somalia because the charismatic Mengistu seemed like the ideal of an African Communist
Was it purely about ideology and charisma, or it did it also reflect the fact that Ethiopia seemed like a more promising bet than Somalia as a country, with a larger and more educated population and with more potential for agricultural and industrial development?
It was certainly rationalized in this manner: yet I am deeply skeptical their decision-making wasn’t ultimately emotional due to the contrast with the contemporary Afghanistan. Amin literally had the same aims as Mengistu; yet, Brezhnev and his inner circle actually preferred the non-Communist yet affable Daud to even Taraki, the initial 1978 “Saur Revolution” leader; never mind Amin, who was considered too unstable to keep in power while doing, well, effectively the same things as Mengistu.
https://archive.is/555v0
In hindsight, they managed to do exactly the wrong thing both times: even from a pure calculus standpoint, backing Mengistu lost bases in Somalia without gaining much in Ethiopia, since its entire coastline eventually seceded as Eritrea; the USSR would have probably been able to expand its naval footprint at a much lower cost by throwing its backing to the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front instead. Morally, I suppose the intervention in Ogaden did reinforce the post-WWII international relations norm against territorial conquest: but if we assume Somalia was highly unlikely to spiral towards its present state if it hasn’t lost, then the price was clearly too high; Ogaden ending up as yet another disputed territory within a functioning Somalia, with a bunch of UN peacekeepers peppered between the Somali and Ethiopian troops would have almost certainly been superior to the present state of the region. The less is said about the folly of Afghan intervention, the better.
The perfect epitaph for Trumpism will be to observe the simple fact that it lead to the US to actively spending military and economic resources to destroy a system that it was actively spending military and economic resources to sustain. War can only have one side win but it can have both sides lose and right now we are both sides of a mutual defeat.
“To expand briefly: voters quite reasonably do not have time to be educated on every issue. They take their cues from their elites, from the political and cultural leaders who they understand to have a similar worldview as their own. If the political elites all seem to accept something, the public will generally accept that as true (that’s why it is so useful to be able to present things as ‘bipartisan’ in the United States).”
I think we should start seriously questioning how true this description will be going forward. Voters have been handed *lots* of reasons to doubt the bipartisan consensus lately. Most obviously there is the Israel issue where a large number of voters (myself included) have belated realized that the bipartisan consensus have been selling us a complete load of BS for decades about a centerpiece of our foreign policy. And the voters realized this far faster then the bipartisan consensus has shifted. It’s hardly only Israel though. The news media apparatus that served to convey the bipartisan view of reality to the voters has gone to great lengths to shred their own credibility by simultaneously platforming all the lies that got Trump elected and acting like they were the center of the anti-Trump “resistance”. Housing prices are absurdly high while the bipartisan consensus is completely asleep at the helm and instead vast money is getting poured into an AI datacenter bubble that the public detests.
This isn’t to say “both sides” are equally culpable here. But it’s certainly a case that neither side has covered themselves in glory.
On a side note, Paul Krugman states that the price of crude oil and even more diesel is currently partially disconnected from sea trade because Ukrainians destroyed a significant percentage of the world refining capacity in Russia.
Thus the “refining spread” has never been bigger.
We are piling up problems caused by the current US administration isolationism.
Mostly solid analysis until we get to the question of why the US Navy is having issues maintaining the freedom of the seas. The fact is that the “bipartisan elite consensus”–in terms of what people actually do, rather than what they say– for the past thirty years has been to ignore the US Navy’s role in maintaining the foundations of the United States’ prosperity. We are still using a destroyer design from the 1980s as our primary platform (yes, the Zumwalt class is new, but there are only three of them), appropriations to the US Navy have fallen in real terms for decades, there has been little to no accountability for utter catastrophes like the Littoral Combat Ship, the Navy’s logistical capabilities, from shipyards to support ships, have either been allowed to wither or been actively dismantled, and ship design is regarded as a place to let perfect be the enemy of good enough (see the failure of the Constellation-class frigate to even get built), and we simply do not have enough ships.
Fortunately, it seems like some people are starting to wake up to this, but even then you’re getting proposals like building this new battleship instead of focusing on the unsexy but vital things like forward bases, ammunition, fuel, and parts stocks, crew quarters, and procurement processes.
And while, fortunately, the people who are waking up to this are a bipartisan bunch, the opposition to them is also bipartisan, as sclerotic, broken institutions defend themselves against any sort of reform and politicians make funding decisions with the attitude of “apres moi, le deluge.”
I don’t think Brett would disagree with you on the need for more investment in the Navy, he’s argued the same thing elsewhere.
Though the most well-funded navy in the world won’t do anything to support global trade if it’s being used for the opposite purpose instead.
Oh, he certainly wouldn’t disagree with me on that; where I disagree with him is the implication at the end that the issues are the result of recent events, rather than recent events revealing deficiencies that have long been warned of but no one has done anything about.
I don’t think the bipartisan elite consensus pre-Trump turned away from having the navy being important and presidents and key legislators of both parties have been talking about needing more hulls.
The underlying problem isn’t that the leadership thought the Navy wasn’t worth investing in, it’s that there’s a badly broken procurement process they’ve struggled to fix for a number of reasons, combined with commercial shipbuilding shifting away from the US and thus meaning there’s not a lot of yards or trained hands that can be co-opted for military construction on occasion without having to keep the workforce employed by the navy exclusively all the time, which has been the backbone of big navies in general. The Zumwalt, LCS, and Constellation programs were all intended to result in large classes but all simultaneously went way over-budget and failed to deliver the desired capabilities. This isn’t exclusively a naval problem, as the army has had a lot of dead “vehicle of the future” initiatives. And the F-35 of the present day isn’t as bad as its popular image but its development process was extremely rough.
“presidents and key legislators of both parties have been talking about needing more hulls.”
Again, look at what they *do*, not what they *say.*
And even then, though perhaps I missed it, I haven’t seen any POTUSes really pushing for a strong navy. Last candidate I remember saying anything about that was Romney back in 2012, and IIRC he was roundly mocked for it.
They’re politicians, saying things is part of their actions. In general, when a politician lies about a policy goal what they lie about is the magnitude of their commitment to the goal, not the goal itself. When they don’t accomplish the policy goal either they traded it for some other goal or they failed, and politicians have an unfortunate habit of not wanting to be caught failing so they keep quiet about it.
An additional problem in America at least is that it used to be possible to get a comprehensive understanding of what policy goals a politician had spoken about from the newspapers. Now, you don’t know what the last two Presidential candidates said about the Navy because you personally didn’t walk into a campaign office in a swing state and speak directly to a human staffer to sign up to get a one-page policy pdf emailed to you followed by infinite fundraising emails.
Slight correction on aircraft carriers- I am not sure if any aircraft carrier currently in service is strictly-speaking diesel powered, at least in the sense of being mostly propelled by diesel engines (either mechanically coupled to the propellers or generating electricity for electric motors).
The Russian and Chinese (AFAIK) carriers, and one of the Indian carriers, are oil-fired steamships. The other Indian carrier, one of the Italian carriers, and both Japanese carriers are powered by gas turbines. The British carrier, and I think the Spanish one and the other Italian carrier, have a combination of gas turbines and diesels- in the British and Spanish case, all connected to generators to power the electric motors that actually move the ship. Diesel power is more efficient, but the more powerful gas turbines are needed to get the ship to high speed- useful not just for getting places fast and avoiding attack, but also for *launching aircraft* by steaming into the wind at full speed to generate a headwind over the deck, meaning that the aircraft wing generates more lift and it can take off with a heavier load of fuel and weapons.
Of course, from a logistics point of view the difference is fairly academic- whether oil-fired steam, gas-turbine or diesel powered, all non-nuclear carriers need to be supplied with fuel for propulsion, while nuclear carriers don’t.
A gas turbine engine can still be diesel-powered in the sense that that’s the fuel it burns, even though it’s not a diesel engine (Originally designed by Rudolf Diesel to run on peanut oil).
Likewise, the oil burning to raise steam on the Indian carriers is also diesel.
On the other hand you can run a marine diesel engine on non-diesel fuels like bunker oil.
In the context of global logistics it seems more reasonably to classify ships based on what fuel they burn than the thermodynamic cycle.
The cost factor is large. The US exports about $3 trillion and spend about $3 billion on the Navy. While the REST of the world would be poorer if the US Navy disappeared, the US might be richer. If piracy imposes a cost basis to goods … then that economically should be compared to the cost of prophylaxis against piracy.
It is also the case that regardless of the fact that projection of power requires the aircraft carrier fleet … it the technology changes of modern war make that fleet vulnerable to sinking, then it is no longer effective. Ukrainian sea drones are effectively negating large ships. Any ship is vulnerable to a sea mine, or a torpedo, or a missile.
One can point to the enormous value to mankind of peaceful trade, but mankind is warlike. The US has been bearing the cost, and it may not be worth it to the US.
“it the technology changes of modern war make that fleet vulnerable to sinking, then it is no longer effective. ”
No, I don’t think that is correct. Warships have *always* been vulnerable to sinking. Mines and torpedoes have existed, and have been sinking capital ships, for more than a century. (The first aircraft carrier ever sunk in combat was sunk by a torpedo.) What makes ships obsolete is that they are no longer effective – that either there is something else that can do their job better, or there is some change in technology that means they cannot do their job at all, or their job is no longer required.
It is far from clear that modern technology – drones or ASBMs – can sink a carrier at all (it’s never happened, after all), far less that they are so effective that carriers can no longer do anything useful.
True. The job they are tasked with is not to fight a high technology opponent with economic resources. Fighting Houthi Pirates, or Iran, does not expose the Navy to the things they are vulnerable to.
Warships have always been vulnerable to being sunk … in battles. And the situations we are concerned with in maintaining free open seas is not the same as a battle.
The technologies that make Navies vulnerable are rapidly changing. It certainly appears that technologies are changing. And that remote control lethality is getting better and more lethal.
I worry about hypersonic missile technology making the defense of ships impossible.
This works in the Black Sea, which is…48th by size. It has a slightly smaller area than the country of Iraq, and is about 9 times smaller than the Arabian Sea and 8 times smaller than the South China Sea, to give but two examples. Larger seas necessitate larger vessels both to have sufficient onboard power to traverse such distances and to withstand the much rougher sea states. (I.e. even Taiwan probably wouldn’t make much use of Ukrainian drone models, as the Taiwan Strait is infamously rough for all but two months of the year – to the extent some analysts have argued a even naval landing with full-scale ships is still implausible outside of those two months.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_seas_on_Earth#Largest_seas_by_area
You’re overstating the advantages of nuclear-powered carriers. The USN operated both conventionally- and nuclear-powered carriers side by side for over forty years, including in Vietnam and Gulf War 1, and the lessons learned were mostly summarized by the GAO in a 196-page report in 1998 (NSIAD-98-1), as part of the process for deciding whether the successor to the Nimitz class would be nuclear-powered.
https://www.gao.gov/products/nsiad-98-1
In summary: nuclear power doesn’t provide a carrier with better sortie generation, power projection, or meaningfully better sustainment. The last because the carrier still needs a regular supply of munitions and jet fuel, and the carrier’s escorts still need fuel, all of which must be supplied by ships at sea or at naval bases. Sure, a nuclear powered carrier can run ahead of its escorts and arrive on station sooner, but that provides you with flexibility of response, not sustained power projection.
So projecting power still requires an extensive fleet train and network of bases regardless of the carrier’s power plant type. Part of the problem for the US is that Iran has struck at our network of naval bases in the region, pushing resupply and maintenance out and placing a heavier burden on replenishment ships that we don’t have enough of.
The PLAN’s limit on power projection is a lack of naval bases and a limited fleet train, and lack of experience in global operations.
Your own post kind of contains the key issue here. A carrier battlegroup needs sustainment (including fuel for the escorts), but those requirements would be significantly greater
The difficulty of maintaining a supply line, whether on land or to a battlegroup at sea, can be approximated as the product of two imagined numbers. One number is “how much” and the other is “how far.” Doubling the distance your supplies have to travel will double (or worse) the difficulty of sustaining the supply line; doubling the volume of supplies required has the same effect.
Making the carrier (and submarines) reliant on a steady supply of fossil fuels to move means that the battlegroup is placing a heavier strain on supply lines that are in turn vulnerable to being placed under still greater strain by enemy action. The Abraham Lincoln’s infamously poor logistical situation, for example, is imposed on the ship in large part by difficulty getting supplies to them, which have to be staged from distant Diego Garcia and not from nearer US bases that have been struck by Iran. How much worse would the situation be, from a purely military standpoint, if the ship was also relying on regular fuel resupply from a fleet oiler just to be able to go on moving?
The Lincoln is dependent on oilers anyway because its escorts still require fuel. Note what the strike group is not running out of: jet fuel, fuel for escorts, munitions. Because those are things that are critical for the mission. Supply for the crew always gets dire towards the end of a deployment; it’s worse for the Lincoln because the usual method of getting crew shore leave and resupply: docking at a friendly local naval base for a few days, is not available due to Iranian drones and missiles, and it’s been continuously at sea well beyond anything sane or sensible.
The US Navy literally ran a live, multi-decade experiment in comparing nuclear and conventional carrier operations, and found that nuclear power did not meaningfully improve sustainment.
Because the strike group requires ship fuel anyway, the carrier’s air group guzzles jet fuel and munitions, and the marginal cost of extra bunker oil and the shipping to carry it is pretty negligible. The aircraft carrier’s hull is part of a system that includes its air wing and escorts; their needs have to be considered together.
Now consider opportunity cost.
A nuclear-powered carrier costs 25% to 50% more than a conventional carrier. The Navy in the 90s argued for the lower end; the GAO for the upper end. Nobody argued for less. Same sortie generation, same air group size, same catapults to launch the heavy aircraft which is the capability that defines ‘true’ fleet carriers. Several billion dollars in savings per hull buys you a lot of fast oilers that can keep up with a carrier strike group. There’s a reason the British looked at the cost of nuclear power for the Queen Elizabeth class and noped out.
Note that submarines are a very different animal. Nuclear power completely alters what a submarine can do, because its capability is wholly defined by its power plant. Nuclear power gives a submarine unlimited range, high speed, unlimited endurance while submerged, and near-silent operation. A conventional sub has none of that.
Compare to what nuclear power gives a carrier: extra solo range and a mildly smaller logistics footprint.
The nuclear submarine is part of the triad of nuclear weapons delivery. So the “run silent, run deep” is particularly necessary. I would wonder if a tactical attack sub would be fine with batteries. The increasing reliability and power density of batteries is seen in electric cars.
I would think that if you simply wanted a U-boat strategy of sneaking up on enemy craft and torpedoing them … batteries would be fine. The U-boats used diesel when at the surface with air for combustion and TERRIBLE batteries for submerged operation.
The submarine of the nuclear triad is not really used for the conventional submarine mission, so yes the nuclear power plant has a great advantage for power during months of submersion.
You don’t want to ever have to surface a sub in wartime because they’re sitting ducks to air attack. It was a major problem for U-boats in WW2 and that was when aircraft had much worse detection capability. Even if they can dive before getting bombed the enemy knows there’s a sub operating in the area now.
I’ll also add that diving offers rather limited protection nowadays: anti-submarine patrol planes have been carrying missiles tipped with torpedoes as their warheads since the late-1960s/early 1970s. (i.e. the Soviet APR-1 dates to 1971 – and it was intended to be able to hit a submarine at depths up to 420 meters.) Worldwide, the more recent designs are supposed to reach more-or-less the entire operating depth of the sub.
And when on active patrol, these planes also keep dropping buoys which radio them back if they detect anything.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonobuoy
“I would think that if you simply wanted a U-boat strategy of sneaking up on enemy craft and torpedoing them … batteries would be fine.”
Yes, and no. Diesel-electrics running on batteries can actually be quieter than nuclear boats, because you don’t have reactor flow noise to worry about. But what gets you in that case is submerged endurance and speed – if your strategy is to attack convoys in the middle of the Atlantic, how are you going to *get* to the middle of the Atlantic? Nuclear boats can go all the way there underwater at 20 or 30 knots. Diesel-electrics can’t. AIP boats might have greater underwater endurance than diesel-electrics but it’s not unlimited and they’re also still generally slower than nuclear boats (which means more time in transit and less time on station). This one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_214_submarine has 1200 nm submerged range at four knots, for example. Not great for going out to do business in great waters.
So if a boat isn’t nuclear, it’s more or less limited to coastal work – which might be all you want to do, if you are, say, a Baltic nation.
Your contention about maritime shipping being cheaper has one important exception. Sending goods by ship from a US port is the cheapest option unless it is going to another US port. This is due to the Jones Act, which says that all such shipments must be on US built, US flagged, and US crewed vessels. There are nowhere near enough Jones Act compliant vessels to meet demand, sending costs through the roof, especially for specialized cargo such as fuel. One illustrative example is that there are zero Jones Act LNG tankers, which puts us in the position of exporting most of our LNG and relying on imports for domestic demand.
Fascinating, and it illustrates the question of why, again, we didn’t craft a United Nations world government when we might have — or could again if we had the will — so that a global maritime security apparatus could have been created and maintained, for the benefit of all.
One can only dream one’s Star Trek universe-level dreamy dreams.
I do not think that there was ever the will to relinquish sovereignty among a majority of great powers, nor will there ever be.
“the last few years have thrown up considerable challenges to this notion, as we see states and non-state actors doing exactly that in the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf – and regional powers unable to resolve the problem”
This seems mostly like a problem with Iran and Iranian proxies, not a general rise in rogue powers who want to disrupt trade.
(Ukraine targeting Russian ships does not count, since Ukraine is leaving everyone else’s ships alone and Russia invaded Ukraine so the latter has cause to target Russian shipping)
It seems strange to use Iran’s disruptions of trade chokepoints as a portent of things to come due to US abandonment of enforcing freedom of navigation, when the US’s efforts are focused on fighting Iran (and recently on reopening Hormuz).
Also, we did not see signs of rogue powers shutting down the other trade choke points (Panama, Suez, Malacca, the Turkish straits), and only being held back by the US. Instead, it looks like the benefits of trade are considered worth it to the countries on the chokepoints. It could still be the case that Egypt, Turkey, Panama, etc. are eagerly waiting to impose tolls and/or unfurl the jolly roger, and it is only the US Navy that is keeping them in line. However, I think it is far more likely that the old economic incentives have flipped, in much the same way as Prof. Devereaux described in his Victoria II post
https://acoup.blog/2021/08/20/collections-teaching-paradox-victoria-ii-part-ii-the-ruin-of-war/
The industrial revolution increased the ROI of peace and increased the costs of war, such that now most nations do not want to conquer one another. If the same is true of trade, then maybe Egypt, Panama, etc. now find it more profitable to not cause trouble, such that even US retrenchment would not lead to the end of freedom of navigation. In that case, the only regimes that would still cause trouble for freedom of navigation are
a. fractured and broken failed states like Somalia, and
b. ideologically driven rogue states with imperial ambitions who think that suffering and struggle are holy, like Iran.
That is what we see today.
So, the rest of the world might not block freedom of navigation even if the US really fully retrenches and stops enforcing freedom of navigation. Tolls and piracy are simply not worth it.
Failed states are pirate havens. As for Iran, the Strait was open until it was attacked. In line with all preceding practice (and all forecasts) it was then closed in consequence of hostilities. Should hostilities cease – that is, should the US and Israel make peace with Iran – then there is no reason to believe that the Strait will not re-open. The same is true for the Red Sea: a coalition of states led by Saudi Arabia and backed by the US attacked the Houthis. Again, a peace is perfectly achievable, albeit not on terms that the coalition or the US might desire, in which case the Red Sea would again be free for navigation. In short, if warfare is a continuation of politics with an admixture of other means, then attention needs to be paid more to the politics than the weapons.
The only caveat being that there is a reason to believe the Strait of Hormuz will not be re-opened by Iran in the event of hostilities ceasing – the Iranian government stating that it won’t be re-opened to free passage in proposed peace agreements. I mean, the US and Israel could test this by stopping their attacks for 6 months and seeing if they simply change their minds of their own accord, but it makes sense to take the Iranian government at least somewhat at its word about what the Iranian government will do.
Yes, if the US hadn’t attacked Iran, the strait would still be open and free from tolls, but Iran is now in a position where they have realised they can maintain control of the strait under as much pressure as the US is immediately capable of exerting (the US military might be technically capable of land invasion if they were somehow tricked into working for a different country for a few years, but the actual USA that really exists cannot currently invade Iran).
Iran has stated that the Strait will be open other than to US and Israeli vessels, and that fees will apply. The US and Israel have a history of unilateral attack on Iran, and neither is willing at the moment to commit to permanent peace. Again, if force is not going to solve this problem, diplomacy might. Iran has been willing to make concessions before, and might well do so again (although the bar is now, from their point of view, a good bit higher – once bit and all that)
The problem with “stopping their attacks for 6 months and seeing” is that Iranian regime no longer expects the US to not engage in an attack designed to destroy the Iranian regime.
Iran did not ever take the Straits as a region of control because they feared the US would attack them if they did. Now that is no longer a concern. The US already attacked.
The US under Trump has proven that they cannot be trusted in negotiations. The Memorandum of Understanding was quickly violated by the US-Israeli side.
Well, Iran wants reparations for the damages it has sustained in this war (and which it continues to sustain from the ongoing blockade), and it often frames the toll as continuing as long as it would take for them to recover from the damage and not for much longer.
Granted, some of Trump’s proposals have in fact included the payment of reparations (was it $500 billion or something?) – but given how long it’s taken for Iran to wrangle a much smaller sum which represented decades-old debt – and how it became a viral attack on the Obama Administration anyway – it’s hard to begrudge them being skeptical of such promises.
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/fact-check-did-obama-give-iran-1-7-billion-in-cash/
@AF,
Minus the bit about Iran being “ideologically driven rogue state with imperial ambitions”, at which I just roll my eyes, I very much agree with your general sentiment here. I don’t think we need US hegemony (which I abhor) or “world government” (which depending on what that means, could be a cure worse than the disease), or “European federalism” (which would erode the European nation states that were won at the cost of so much blood and struggle). What we need is for the economic incentives around tolls and piracy to change, which they largely have done (as you point out). That having been accomplished, I think regional powers like China and India and the United States, and some level of naval/military cooperation among the larger or wealthier Western European countries, and UN peacekeeping forces with actual naval strength, could accomplish freedom of navigation and deal with threats as they come up. The capability to solve these issues exists, it’s more a matter of political will, no need to make such fundamental (and in my view undesirable) changes as getting rid of nation states.
“how anti-piracy campaigns succeed: he targeted the pirate’s coastal bases”
Historically targeting coastal bases required Navy (ships, marines, etc.) but that’s no longer the case. It could be replaced by nukes delivered by ICBMs. While today it is not really a politically palatable option, that could change.
I find it extremely unlikely things will ever change to a point where nuking somewhere over piracy is ever considered politically acceptable and does not at a minimum get you a reputation as a crazy nuke-happy place. It will also de facto limit your ability to use conventional missiles or bombers, because everyone will be worried they might have nukes on them and thus potentially panic and launch a retaliatory nuclear strike if they see your conventional missiles anywhere near them.
Railways yes, but “internal combustion engine” is not the correct thing to point to. (Partly: ships moved over from steam engines to internal combustion engines, too.) Very approximately, if trucking had to happen over gravel roads, and so had to happen at, say, a quarter of the speed it actually does, we’d be right back to 20:1. The multiplier shrank because overland, we could build better infrastructure (railways and smooth, high-speed roads), whereas for oceanic shipping, we couldn’t build better water. (Other than a few famous canals, but those cut the distance, not the cost per ton-km.) (Inland waterways do have significant improvements.)
“
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If we’re measuring in TEU, trucks can carry 2. (I would apologize, but this place is A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.)
“and of course you cannot move iron ore or consumer goods or grain via pipeline”
[mad grin] Not with that attitude. IIRC there were/are some systems (built by wacky Soviet engineers) for moving bulk cargo (mostly coal and various metal ores) by pipeline. Some versions used a watery slurry, others formed the material into several-ton briquettes (in effect a vehicle for the pipe). Evidently, they weren’t successful enough to displace either conveyor belts for short distances or railways for long distances.
There was a coal slurry proposal earlier this century that was quashed by the passage of the Great Lakes compact; I don’t know how real the pipeline proposal was but I remember opposition to it was instrumental in getting the compact implemented.
John Quiggin has written a bunch of posts critiquing the perceived value of navies in the current age; I think this one [https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/the-lessons-of-project-freedom] best summarizes his views (highlighting both the Ukraine experience and implications for Taiwan). It does seem from current events that present surface navies, the USN included, are not capable of useful power projection or commerce protection against the threat from drones (air and maritime) and missiles.
The problem is really that there’s no real alternative: A carrier is still the best way to get an airbase where you need it. (within certain constraints) sure, theroetically you can use land based aircraft, assuming you have an infinte number of airbases scattered over the world.
Thus far you cannot replace that with drones. (though we might in the future). The technological gap has clearly narrowed: There are now zones that are too dangerous to go. (then again, there have always been those zones, they’re just larger now) That is not *insignificant* but it’s not as revolutionary as that.
And of course, there are still threats on the high seas, well outside of land-based drone systems (at least those with capabilities of targeting ships as opposed to static installations) now that might lead to a shift to drone-based ships, etc. But again, that’s a shift in how navies are armed, not making navies obsolete.
I don’t think the lesson of the Iran war is that navies are useless now; the US navy has enforced a blockade of Iranian shipments and launched heavy bombardment of Iran. Iran tried to sink them with drones and missiles with an extensive bombardment at the start of the war but failed to inflict any damage. The US failing to accomplish its strategic objective, but you could never effect regime change with just a navy.
It is true that they’re unable to safely operate within the strait, but that’s deeply unfavorable terrain for them where their anti-missile defenses have a very limited engagement window, and even given that some of them did pass through successfully under fire. For large chunks of history navies had extreme difficulty defeating shore fortifications and thus passing through straits they covered, but the Royal Navy was still useful in the Age of Sail.
And the lesson of Ukraine seems to be that the Russian navy is deeply incompetent.
TBH the Ukrainians are also basically operating against a navy within striking range from thier land-based (or very short-range) assets. It’s *very hard* to protect your navy when your major ports are literally within shooting range.
It’s worth remembering that in all likelihood, less than half (and perhaps only a third or less) of the total volumes used in the bombardment of Iran came from the US Navy; Israel’s air force alone is around 3 times larger than the carrier-based aviation deployed in the conflict (assuming that on average, two carriers were used plus one or two landing docks with a much lower capacity – I don’t think three carriers at once were used for very long at all), and the US also brought to bear as much land-based aviation as it could as well. While some of its operation was hampered by Iranian missile strikes, I think that strike aircraft were always operating from sites too hardened to be affected by the Iranian missiles; the hits they scored were instead on the (really expensive) support aircraft which could not be fit into those. There have even been strategic bombing raids from Diego Garcia – while Iran actually managed to launch two missiles at it, they really needed a lot more. On the flip side, I believe nearly all the cruise missiles were launched from the naval platforms, but as the post itself notes, aviation is just a more efficient platform if it can operate safely.
This part is crucial, because there are really two ways to render a carrier irrelevant. The first is to directly sink or cripple it; the second is to take out its air wing, or at least deter them from attacking. So far, I believe the latter had only happened once – in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the Japanese “only” lost 3 carriers out of the 9 committed (although three more were damaged) yet they had a total carrier capacity of 450 aircraft and lost at least 550 (i.e. this is including the nearby land-based aircraft.)
There are several reasons why this occurred (i.e. by mid-1944, US’ Hellcats were generally superior to Zeros; Japan once prided itself on the most heavily-trained air force of the period (>700 flight hours vs. 400-500 for the US, UK and Germany, and way less than that for the USSR) but lost nearly all those pilots by then and the newly enlisted pilots had much less experience; Japanese defensive plans were leaked) – but perhaps the most important one was the development of proximity fuse, which rendered formerly iffy contemporary anti-aircraft fire so reliable the Japanese found kamikazes the only plausible counter to it. This demonstrates how the effectiveness of a carrier is deeply conditional on the opposition it faces.
Since WWII, we have effectively seen this arms race (TL;DR at the end):
* Immediate post-war period: first-generation jet fighters render WWII Bofors/Oerlikon/Breda-style AA guns obsolete for ship defence (although on land, where one missed hit won’t take out hundreds or thousands and so performance requirements are less stringent, Soviet equivalents see some effectiveness in Korea) and render turboprop fighters obsolete as well. Heavy jet bombers render virtually all large-caliber air defence guns irrelevant.
* Late 1950s: first-generation anti-aircraft missiles render the aforementioned heavy jet bombers nearly obsolete and force lighter jets to enter the range of those WWII-style guns to literally fly under the radar. (Hence, they suddenly once again become greatly effective in Vietnam.) The first heat-seeking missiles that are useful vs. fighters, though their effectiveness drops off badly in hot conditions. The US gets consistent AWACS coverage everywhere.
* Early 1960s: air defence radars become much better at detecting low-flying aircraft, forcing them to go low enough to be at serious risk of terrain collision. Anti-radiation missiles are developed to target air defence radars, but the experienced operators are often able to throw off their aim anyway. In the air, non-supersonic jet fighters are considered irrelevant. (Ground attack is very different since it’s very hard to hit targets more resilient than planes at supersonic speeds.)
* Late 1960s: The first really long-range Soviet air defence missile (S-200), which cannot be reasonably countered with anti-radiation missiles. Electronic warfare complexes greatly reduce the effectiveness of early anti-air missiles. The first shoulder-launched anti-air missiles enter service, but are highly inaccurate. Fighters get radar-guided missiles effective beyond visual range (10-12 km at most) but they aren’t yet very effective. Somewhere around this time, virtually all new ships entering service have air defence missiles and fighter aircraft get decoys for heatseekers. The US begins deploying observation drones.
* Early 1970s: By now, the major air forces wield fighters whose radars are capable of detecting aircraft flying lower than themselves, so sneaking under the radar is only possible if such interceptors are not present/have been eliminated. They all wield BVR missiles, whose effectiveness keeps growing. Ground vehicles with larger heat-seeking air defence missiles are developed and render gun-based air defence mostly obsolete as well. The US develops an electronic warfare plane small enough to be carrier-based (EA-6 Prowler) and effective enough to suppress all previously developed air defence radars. Strategic bombers mostly switch to lobbing long-ranged cruise missiles (including Soviet anti-ship missiles) to stay relevant. Data integration on the US Navy is refined.
* Late 1970s: Soviet air defence missiles of this era (S-300, Buk) gain a lot in both range and EW resistance. MANPADs are refined and become consistently deadly. As air combat became BVR, the US deploys the legendary trio of “teens” (F-14/15/16), which mark the first carrier of very long range (~200 km) anti-air missiles and more-or-less the first two fighters designed for 9 g turns, which the earlier missile generations (both air and ground-launched) struggle to keep up with. All three also have long-range radars, which renders their advantage over the previous aircraft overwhelming.
* 1980s: The USSR attempts to keep up with F-15 and F-16 via Su-27 and MiG-29, but the only plane where it manages to fit a high-power radar is the terrifically expensive MiG-31. The US gets long-ranged anti-air defence for its ships (Aegis), and a carrier-based aircraft with capabilities approaching (but still rather behind) F-15/16 (F/A-18). Effective observation drones spread from the US to Israel and Iran, to give but two examples. (The USSR had been actively pursuing the dead end of jet-based observation drones.)
* 1990s: The USSR collapses, and neither the PRC, nor anyone else is yet in a position to enter arms technology race with the US. The first stealth aircraft is deployed, but it’s a pure bomber.
* 2000s: MASSIVE leap in radar technology with AESA radars, which make tracking targets at ~200 km ranges routine (and are also much harder to jam.) The first stealth fighter (F-22) and the second “EW fighter” (EA-18 Growler). Air defence systems become much better at intercepting missiles – gaining effective anti-ballistic missile capability for the first time. AWACS technology begins its proliferation to nearly every middle power.
* 2010s: The second US stealth fighter (F-35) and the first to be carrier-capable and to be built in serious numbers. First Chinese stealth fighter (J-20) and EW fighter (J-16D). China becomes capable of building its own jet fighter engines (a feat only the US, USSR/Russia, the UK and France could do previously.) AESA technology spreads from the US (which retrofitted virtually all frontline fighters with it) to China and Europe; Russia is not yet able to replicate it, but the “hybrid” radar on Su-35 is later proven to grievously outrange pre-AESA F-16s provided to Ukraine anyway.
https://archive.is/h4qJq
2020s (to date): Drones (enough said?) and the expanded proliferation of all the aforementioned technologies. I.e. Russia (occasionally) fields a sorta-stealth plane, China’s carrier-capable stealth plane (J-35) is in service, and Turkiye and South Korea are actively testing their own (albeit reliant on US-made engines.) Somewhere around half of the European fighters and practically all frontline Chinese ones have AESA radars (same as many of the Chinese navy’s destroyers – unlike the US); the technology is now available in comparatively cheap Pakistan-built fighters. Chinese air-to-air missiles sold to allies have AESA warheads, allowing them to lock in much earlier and making them very hard to dodge (as proven over India/Pakistan). Russia’s simpler long-range missiles are easier to shake off, but deny pre-AESA fighters any ability to close in (see the link above). China’s AESA-based air defence missiles begin to get exported more widely.
TL;DR: A very significant reason for the seeming supremacy of contemporary carriers is that since Korea, they were always deployed against adversaries a step or two below them on the technology ladder. I.e. Vietnam only had the first-generation S-75s and shoulder-launched Strela-1s of limited effectiveness: it could have been provided with missiles as advanced as S-200s as early as 1967, but those were held back “as a strategic secret” until finally getting exported to Libya in 1980s – Reagan’s 1986 bombing raid then proved S-200’s radars were already getting suppressed by 1971’s Prowler. Saddam’s Iraq did not even have S-200s, and its most advanced fighters (MiG-25 and MiG-29) were too badly outranged radar-wise. Libya in 2011 had actually gone backwards over its 1980s capabilities as part of the general corruption and complacency of Qaddafi’s final years.
Nowadays, though, we are rapidly entering an era where just about any country that can afford to field fighter jets at all would have bought AESA-equipped fighters with long-range missiles from either Pakistan or China (or perhaps France – at least if that country is India) at a minimum: that alone renders the bulk of the present-day US carrier aviation, F/A-18, grievously vulnerable when trying to attack such countries. Carrier-capable F-35s are spread fairly thinly across every US carrier in service; the current ~110 would barely fill two carriers out of 11, so instead they only amount to about a fifth of the strike force. I.e. in a purely naval operation which does not involve airfields on the ground, 12 F-35s (perhaps 24 if two are deployed – deploying three or more at once is largely unrealistic nowadays), would have to hunt down AESA fighters several times their number before Growler-backed F/A-18s could even hope to start working on air defence – and both would have to be done before hitting any other targets. This is also assuming such fighters would not be able to use their (initial) numerical superiority to attempt an effective attack on the carrier with anti-ship missiles.
Even a fully F-35-equipped carrier or two would already, as of today, have its air wing outnumbered by Chinese stealth fighters in a head-to-head fight. In the upcoming decade, countries like Pakistan and Egypt would have about as many J-35s as would fit on a single carrier, the aforementioned Turkiye and South Korea would field their own, etc. This is without even getting into the very distinct possibility AESA-based air defence (not encountered by the US to date) could evolve to track stealth fighters effectively. The upcoming so-called “6th gen” fighters are supposed to provide yet another technological leap over the opposition…but all of the known models to date are far too heavy to be carrier-based. (The US does have a program for such a plane, F/A-XX, but its development is currently proceeding very poorly.)
In all, as the other countries grow richer and technology proliferates, it’ll likely become harder than ever to deliver meaningful power via an aircraft carrier, not easier.
Why don’t we see more canal-building projects?
Do cargo ships still travel up the Mississippi River?
Digging canals and keeping them from silting up, plus running locks if there’s elevation changes, is incredibly expensive. Putting in a railroad is a lot less capital-intensive, and the cheaper cost per cargo container usually doesn’t justify a canal, especially because the government that would front the money for the canal doesn’t pay the per-train costs.
The Mississippi is indeed still a major corridor for water-borne freight (on barges) and it’s notable on a map of US freight flows that the parallel railroad lines carry less as a result. https://www.bts.gov/geography/geospatial-portal/freight-flows-highway-railway-and-waterway-2018
I think most canals which are profitable have already been built. Most proposed canal projects which have been stuck in approval hell for decades is because those would only be marginally profitable, and thus the likeliest outcome is that they will remain stuck in approval hell.
As for riverine transport, that still exists. For now. Especially in Europe, this summer’s drought has revealed that many rivers are no longer reliable transport routes as their water falls below the required height to support shipping. Which should have been a wake-up call to actually get serious about climate change, but the media consensus was to go “Hey look at all those cool historic artefacts revealed by the falling water level” instead.
I think most canals which are profitable have already been built. Most proposed canal projects which have been stuck in approval hell for decades is because those would only be marginally profitable, and thus the likeliest outcome is that they will remain stuck in approval hell.
There are at least two gigantic, continental-scale canals that have been proposed (and not gotten anywhere so far), but the goal wouldn’t really be shipping, it would be to “rescue” severely depleted watersheds. One idea has been to devert one of the major Siberian rivers (maybe the Ob or the Yenisei, i forget which) to refill the Aral Sea, and the other has been to divert the Ubangi River (northern tributary of the Congo) into the Chari River to refill Lake Chad.
Hey, major river flow is projected to increase in Colorado and across Canada, India, China and Russia! (with the exception of St. Lawrence in Canada and Heilongjiang/Amur, shared by the latter two.) As for those rivers across the EU and South America…nothing lasts forever, right? /s
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-025-01134-5/figures/5
*There is the major caveat that with virtually every major river whose flow is projected to increase in models, the same models have so far projected larger increases in flow than what has occurred to date. (Hydrology is hard!) Canada’s Nelson-Churchill river basin is apparently the only one that is projected to increase and whose flows haven’t been overestimated in the past. Granted, this is referring to multi-model average, and some institutes’ models perform better at simulating rivers (or at least, certain countries’ rivers) than the rest, but this is too deep to head into for now.
In addition to what others said, consider what putting in a canal would actually mean.
First, without getting into construction issues, you’re making another competing transportation system. You have rail, trucking, and air transport, with river transport already in many areas. These have been around long enough to have fairly established routes and processes. Is adding a canal that valuable? Plus you have to build a bunch of bridges and crossings and other structures, each of which is a major undertaking on its own–easily in the millions of dollars. Especially if you have large ships going under the bridges.
In terms of construction, canals are very much like railroads. First thing you need to do is get a bunch of land. Eminent Domain isn’t hugely popular, and not likely to win you any favors with the voting population, especially when again, we have multiple other methods for transporting goods. You’re going to have to negotiate for every lot. I’m not sure what the right-of-way laws are like for canals, but it’s going to be significantly bigger than the actual canal, which is, again, not going to make you real popular come election time.
Then you have to dig it. It’s not impossible, but it’s MUCH harder to dig than people think. You can’t just have a bunch of excavators go to town; you’ve got to plan the excavations. What are you digging through? Do you need excavators or explosives? Then what do you do with the material? You’d be surprised how much soil is contaminated. If you’re in a city the soil will absolutely have chlorinated solvents (PCE, TCE, and the like) and BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene, which are spilled gas/diesel), and are likely contaminated with PCBs and asbestos. Not many construction crews are 40 Hour trained, and this stuff WILL kill you if you don’t handle it properly. Agricultural land is contaminated with pesticides and herbicides, often including arsenic. So getting rid of the soil is a nightmare.
Then you have to add the water. I don’t care how you build it, your canal will leak–meaning it’ll become part of the groundwater system. Not such a problem in, say, Ohio, where the area wants to be a swamp anyway, but in many areas the ground will drink the water like a sponge. That’ll have ecological impacts far beyond what you expect, and massively increase costs.
Then you’ve got maintenance and other costs. The USA isn’t so good at that.
Is it worth it? In most places no. If the Panama Canal stops working–a likely event–than maybe some new canals will be built to take up the load. Any canal is better than the Cape. And if it’s a small jump between bodies of water it can be worth it. But continent-wide canal networks are generally going to be a bad option.
The big problem is climate change. It’s not the topic of this essay, but it deserves a comment.
According to what the Duck AI horked up, global shipping generates about 3 percent of greenhouse gases, while the US DoD generates 5-6% of greenhouse gases. Believe it or not. Obviously, a lot of the latter is not from the Navy, but most naval vessels are fossil fueled.
These both, obviously, need to change, and the sooner the better. What they will change into is unclear, although ship power will have to be some combination of wind, nuclear, battery-electric power, and some version of “green petroleum” that passes the reality test. Almost certainly cargo ships will have to be smaller (and not just for fuel, see next paragraph) and it is unclear if a global projection military like the US Navy will even be possible by the end of this century, probably sooner.
The problem related to climate change is sea level rise. We’ve baked in something like a meter of sea level rise globally by the end of the century. And, as we saw with Nepal this week, a big glacier giving way can have huge effects very rapidly, and we’ve got lots of glaciers and ice sheets close to giving way and adding unpredictably to sea level rise. In a worst case of a large ice sheet leaving the land and going into the ocean, we could have sea level rise of some large part of a meter in a matter of weeks or months: too slow enough to evacuate, too fast to counter.
Sea level rise will flood ports. Anyone noticed there’s a global shortage of sand suitable for cement and concrete? Yeah, long story short, huge, bespoke ports for huge, bespoke ships will get trashed in coming decades. This includes ship-building ports, incidentally. Not only will they get flooded, their owners will have to compete for materials to rebuild them, because we’re short of those too. And they’ll likely have to keep rebuilding them every few decades, unless we can figure out how to make floating ports that are also highly resistant to cyclonic storms.
To put this together into a picture, even without the current deplorable US political system, our current US Navy probably will have to shrink due to climate change and sea level rise. Whether it can shrink and still maintain its role in policing the global commons of the high seas is something I can’t answer.
If global trade decreases and/or fragments due to climate change, the biggest consequence IMHO is going to be increased famine and food insecurity, building off the food movement system mention in the main essay. This, in turn, will probably provoke the biggest human migrations our world will ever see. And when these migrations are resisted by wealthier states (and they will be), the migrants will organize into hordes, and we’ll get a replay of the fall of empires (Roman, Imperial Chinese, etc.).
My preferred solution to this is to somehow keep global trade open while somehow making the ships and the navies climate change neutral. And I have no idea if this is even possible. But I’ll hope for it nonetheless.
Yeah, we’re going to miss global trade when much of it is gone. Prices are fated to rise, and someone is going to go hungry. They won’t be happy about that. The natural human tendency to turn inward and trust alpha males when times get tough is working against us now. As we’ve been discussing in Charlie’s blog, the next round of elections is pretty critical.
OTOH: Every disaster is an opportunity for reform.
Ayup, especially about the elections. I still harbor real fantasies (meaning they really are fantasies) that the US military-industrial complex can be starved down towards a realistic scale. The military may be apolitical, but the arms industry is most decidedly political, and that’s a problem.
Anyway, N.B. for Bret: Charlie’s blog is Charlie Stross’ Antipope. You’ve got a fan club over there. Cheers!
The military industrial complex was captured by big tech some time ago – all the weapon systems are networked now. Musk had the power to determine who would win the Ukraine-Russia war, and almost did when he turned off starlink. On the other hand, that means we really only have to bring one industry under control, the others will fall in line.
“The problem related to climate change is sea level rise.”
Eh, probably not. Sea level rise will be relatively slow, and while it’ll inevitably cause some problems it’s not like a meter of water is going to rush into the ports. We have time to adapt and we know reasonably well where the problems will occur; it’s a question of political will.
The real dangers here are shifts in weather patterns and increased extreme weather.
Most of our farming is still done by putting seeds into the ground and hoping Mother Nature takes care of them. And irrigation is going to become a huge issue at some point–unrelated to climate change, a lot of major aquifers are drying up. This means that while some areas are going to become much easier for agriculture, other areas are going to become much less amenable to it. And this is going to cause some serious restructuring of the global trade networks. We may be able to handle that, but there’s going to be a lot of people losing a lot of money which is always chaotic.
There are also changes in oceanic gyres and thermohaline circulation to consider. It’s easier for a ship to go from Florida to Ireland than from Ireland to Florida because of the Gulf Stream. Global shipping exploits this to save fuel. If those currents change, shipping patterns will have to change as well.
Increased extreme weather is what’s going to cause problems for ports. Sea level rise doesn’t mean that a meter of water slams into a port; increasingly strong hurricanes, on the other hand, can include storm surges of a meter or more, fairly easily. And that’s not really something we’re equipped to handle. We can’t handle hurricanes NOW–see New Orleans and the hurricane that hit New York about a decade ago (a 500 year storm). And frankly we as a society are rather stupid. We build expensive structures on barrier islands, which are inherently mobile geologic features; this is something Monty Python made fun of (“I built my castle in a swamp!”), and yet we do it every day. Ports and trade infrastructure at least have some excuse–you need ports to be on the water, after all–but still, there are reasonable precautions we can take and we’re not taking them. You’d think that after Katrina folks would listen to the geologist (the disaster was predicted well in advance, including how the levies would fail), but that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The other problem with extreme weather is inland. It’s not just the ports that get hit. And we’ve built up a lot more since the 1800s, pretty much everywhere. A storm that would have caused some unremarkable local damage can now be catastrophic simply because there’s more stuff to hit. And increased storm events can increase erosion. This is used to date paleosols (fossil soils); Ponti has some good works on the topic if you’re curious. In the Pleistocene it wasn’t so bad; in the Anthropocene, there’s just not a lot of areas where a massive landslide can occur without causing significant trouble for humans.
Right; though I don’t even think you would need a hurricane for many of the ports. For instance, Europe does not really have hurricanes and is not expected to see many more of them in the foreseeable future; yet, according to this paper I just found:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41278-018-0114-z
Now, just in case, this is a relative increase – i.e. the 2030 number of ports hit by such levels will less than double, rather than 80% of all ports getting hit. This paper already proceeds to discuss that ports often already have protections against storm surges and the like, so it’s hard to estimate the damage and/or the cost of adaptation for a specific port based on global levels alone.
Having said that, here’s another remarkable stat (for Europe specifically).
ESL means “extreme sea level” – i.e. under the scenario we are actually on, where most people (including e.g. Liberal Currents crew who now represent the center of political thought on Bluesky) are largely content to let the market work, with perhaps a splash of subsidies or two like the IRA, what is currently a once-in-a-century flooding of the European ports will occur once in every 3 years.
Nevertheless; “heteromeles” proceeds to speculate on the impacts to food security – and I have already posted a year ago on here that under most projections of climate change, food insecurity will most likely decrease substantially over the next 25 years, rather than increase. I guess it’s possible to posit those projections neglect the damage to ports (there have already been precedents, unfortunately; i.e. the whole deal with wet bulb temperatures wasn’t considered at all until around 2011, and we have recently learned damage estimates from wildfire smoke in the US weren’t counted in economic projections of climate damage, and now they already exceed all of those other costs combined) – I’ll also note that assuming hundreds of scientists who have often devoted lifetimes to studying agriculture, food supply, etc. have all collectively neglected something this fundamental in their calculations is not very likely statistically and is a quite corrosive assumption to make.
P.S. Needless to say, if food insecurity does in fact decrease in the near future, the whole “migrants will organize into hordes blah blah blah” becomes yet another fantasy by those missing the perceived excitement of living in a post-apocalyptic movie.
Could you repost some of your links? I must have missed that post of yours a year ago.
The paper I refer to is linked in this comment, under the second entry in the Peasant series. (You’ll see a lot of other links throughout the thread, ofc.)
https://acoup.blog/2025/07/18/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-ii-starting-at-the-end/comment-page-1/#comment-84944
Now, that comment is narrowly focused on the specific question brought up in the discussion – the extent of project food demand growth by mid-century – so I only point out the part about future malnutrition generally expected to be lower than present almost as an aside later in the thread.
To elaborate: SSP3, euphemistically summarized as “Rocky Road” in the official policy documents, had been envisioned as a scenario of global chaos and “fragmentation”, with extensive disruption of global trade, foreign aid, etc. – which certainly sounds very familiar now! On the other hand, it also involves some aspects that are extremely unlikely to happen nowadays – i.e. global population growth at such rates that it hits 12 billion by 2100. (Which I think assumes the total, persistent defunding of family planning initiatives in the developing countries – but even so, it still substantially underestimates the decline in birth rates in the decade since it was finalized.)
Anyway, the most relevant part to consult in the linked PDF is Figure 4, which shows virtually all the scenario lines below the 2010 hunger levels in 2050. Even the median for SSP3 is still somehow below 2010 – as are all but one of the sub-scenario lines. (Admittedly, that graph also shows the real-world line diverging away from that projected trend and beginning to curve up after 2016 or thereabouts.)
“Having said that, here’s another remarkable stat….”
My objection here is that it’s not actually a statistic. It’s a prediction. We don’t know how accurate that prediction is. Such predictions are based on a significant number of assumptions, and many are based on the assumption that things will remain as they are. Perfectly reasonable of course–you can’t model for changes that you can’t identify–but it does mean that models tend to be inaccurate.
It’s absolutely critical in these discussions to separate data from interpretation. Any projections about what will happen are by definition interpretations of the data, and should not be treated as facts. Obviously often these interpretations are correct–geologists were spot-on with how Katrina damaged New Orleans, for example. But it’s still very important to not treat interpretations as facts.
I have never seen a GCM able to accurately predict OIS-11, which is typically what they use to calibrate these models. This strongly suggests that there’s aspects to this system we do not fully understand yet, which makes sense, as we’ve only seriously been thinking about climate for a few decades.
“Right; though I don’t even think you would need a hurricane for many of the ports.”
Agreed. Changes in weather patterns can have significant impacts. A colleague of mine had to do some work on an island, for example, and the timing was dictated by when the port was no longer frozen–they had to barge out equipment, and the port had to be relatively ice-free to do it. Increased average temperatures mean shifting weather patterns, including increased instances of cold weather as jet streams weaken and polar air migrates south.
That’s just one example of how non-storm effects can impact ports. There are….a lot more. Increased sedimentation is going to be a problem, as it can choak rivers (we’re really bad at managing sediment loads). It can also impact the infrastructure feeding into the ports. Shifts in biology can have significant impacts, as some of those critters clog up infrastructure or damage it. And so on.
This is, frankly, one reason I rarely discuss climate change, and typically only do so with others with a background in paleoclimatology. This stuff is insanely complicated, and far too many people have opinions that are held far more strongly than their understanding of the data can justify.
IMO, the whole point of using DuckDuckGo is that it is by far the best browser for avoiding LLM gunk, but oh well…Wordpress limits me to one link per comment, but if you look up “How big are global military carbon emissions?” by Scientists for Global Responsibility, it provides an estimate of 5.5% of global emissions for ALL the world’s militaries (as of 2023), not just the US.
Either way, did it not also tell you that around half of the CO2 emissions are taken up by the land and ocean? From what I recall, once emissions decline to about a third of the present level, (geologically) rapid warming will cease, and we would “only” experience atmospheric warming from the heat already absorbed by the ocean equilibrating with the atmosphere over the next several centuries. I think if we achieve that in the near future and then stop there (rather than proceeding to net zero, effectively eliminating/offsetting all emissions somehow so that the present-day carbon sinks can start to outright reduce atmospheric CO2 levels), such warming will amount to several fractions of a degree; if we proceed at a current path which stops only a little short of 3 C by 2100, then 2300 would most likely exceed 4C due to the same equilibration, but 2500 and beyond probably doesn’t warm much further. In short, while it would be great to entirely decarbonize everything naval, it’s not quite do-or-die. (Though I guess no-one would bother to do it unless they believe it is…)
The IPCC AR6 says that the lowest-emission scenario (i.e. the closest to what can be said to be already “baked in”) would amount to a little over 50 cm…relative to 1900.
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/figures/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM_Figure_8.png
Relative to the present, it would amount to around 30 cm (since about 20 cm of sea level rise has already happened.) On the other hand, even the highest-emission scenario (where the emissions just increase and even accelerate indefinitely – an outlook so unlikely, that scenario is finally getting shelved from the upcoming report) most likely results in about 90 cm by the end of the century (again, relative to 1900.)
The middle scenario which we currently seem on, and are apparently too stupid or selfish to push down further (since e.g. the lower emission scenarios involve things currently considered verboten, like the reduction in global meat consumption even if it has to involve culls of excess livestock) would result in something like 75 cm relative to 1900, and so about half a meter relative to present. The real problem is that all of this accelerates exponentially in the future; i.e. by 2300, even the lower-emission scenario could well reach 3 meters, whereas the highest one would reach 7 meters under the same assumptions.
I don’t think that’s been part of any papers published by actual glaciologists. (There’s that decade-old Hansen paper which predicted that, but it also predicted Antarctic sea ice trends countered by observable reality.) This sounds like a very exaggerated version of the DeConto-Pollard scenario, which is itself controversial and far from proven; according to the same report graphic I linked above, it is considered unlikely to trigger within this century outside of that highest-emission scenario, and if it does trigger under those conditions, the most likely impact is ~1.75 m in this century relative to 1900 (i.e. ~1.5m relative to present); dramatic, but still a couple orders of magnitude below what you have just suggested. (Though by 2300, that same scenario could well reach 15 meters. Then again, worth recalling that 2300 in the highest emission scenario assumes something close to 10 C, from quantities that amount to just about every single extractable fossil burned; yet another reason it’s been discarded.)
“Anyone noticed there’s a global shortage of sand suitable for cement and concrete?”
Sand is heavy and cheap. There is a shortage of sand in places and a surplus in others. The problem is that concrete has usually been inexpensive.
Such a view oversimplifies things substantially.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20191108-why-the-world-is-running-out-of-sand
The entire article is jam-packed with information and is absolutely worth reading. That said, it also clearly suggests port renovations, of all things, are not going to run out; especially not when we still have land reclamation projects which consume orders of magnitude more of it.
Right. There is appropriate sand in Australia but not in Dubai. There really is a lot of sand available … it is just in the wrong places.
ECONOMIC and REGIONAL scarcity exists. But in reality, the earth is loaded with silicates that work well for cement. I understand the point is a bit nit-picky, but the really is that there is often a regional scarcity of $40 per ton concrete sand.
It is not unlike oil, where the cheapest and easiest wells are insufficient, so we drill in the ocean, frack in odd places, and extract. But the modern price of oil supports that.
“But aircraft carriers have always been vulnerable – look how many of them the RN, USN and IJN lost in WWII! The question is not ‘is the carrier vulnerable?’ but ‘what role does the carrier serve and can any other ship perform it?’”
This has always bothered me a little. True, that’s a very important question, but sometimes it’s the vulnerability issue that’s decisive. As was noted in the series on how “courage in battle” is not a single psychological attribute but a variety of useful traits, nothing we have in modern warfare has quite the same psychological shock effect as an actual cavalry charge. Being able to produce that shock effect would in fact be useful. But since trying to do that would result in crippling casualties for the cavalry force most of the time in most situations these days, we don’t see cavalry around much anymore.
That’s potentially possible, but we have just done an extended test of whether you can actually sink a US carrier with missiles and drones and Iran was not able to despite trying pretty damn hard. We have anti-drone and anti-missile defenses in carrier groups capable of stopping a pretty big strike, and not using carriers would not mean we don’t need them to protect whatever we use instead. Also, if we ditched carriers we would not be able to put big radar systems in the sky to let us see enemy ships and missile launchers from further away than they can see our ships without using their own aircraft, which we could use carrier fighters to shoot down. And the radar gives us earlier warning of incoming missiles and drones, making them easier to intercept.
I do think we need a cost-effective anti-drone system for our ships, but I think it is plausible we could make one.
Well, Iran is really not representative of the cutting edge of modern anti-ship capabilities. Virtually all of its anti-ship missiles with any real range are the reverse-engineered versions of China’s late-1990s YJ-7 or even its late-1960s “Silkworm” (the actual name apparently translates to “Upstream”.) Both of those are subsonic, traveling at below Mach 1; meanwhile, China itself had been fielding a missile which moves at 2.4-4 Mach for the past 15 years. (And also has a range about 1.5X greater – 450-500 km vs. 330 km or so. Notably, the US aircraft carriers generally try stay over 300 km away from the shore in this conflict, AFAIR.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YJ-12
Last year, China unveiled the even more advanced YJ-15 with ramjet engines; which is suspected to have at least double the range – (i.e. 4X or even 5X more than Iran’s newer missiles). Yet, just the YJ-12, which is standard issue by now, is already said to be dangerous enough that
P.S. This missile has a land-based version by now as well.
How does the missile know where the carrier is?
The general area where the carrier is likely to be* is programmed into the missile, and once it approaches that area, its own seeker warhead activates and does the rest of the work with its onboard sensors. As I said, it’s essentially the most complicated kind of missile – and yet, this principle worked since the 1970s, when such models began to replace the earlier ones that needed to have their target painted with shore/ship/plane-based radar. It works so well that China has managed to convert a full-on intermediate-range ballistic missile (of the kind which spends much of its journey in space) that was initially intended to deliver nuclear warhead to Guam to be able to maneuver and hit an aircraft carrier once it re-entries.
https://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htada/articles/202507110192.aspx
*The quote above describes the immense effort the Chinese have invested into target acquisition for those anti-ship ballistic missiles, but the prize for that is a capability to hit a carrier long before any of its aviation is in range. If you can stomach the carrier getting the first hit in, simply knowing the planes’ range and where the carrier is not (i.e. where it hasn’t already been observed from the shore) leaves fairly few options for where these planes could have launched from. Even if you only narrow it down to, say, three 50-km wide circles, if you have enough missiles and don’t want to wait for confirmation, you might well launch your second strike at all three. Moreover, even commercial (non-US) satellites can spot a carrier once it’s settled into its operational tempo – so long as the entire battlegroup does not drastically reposition within every 24 hours or so. Even if it does (at a great added strain to logistics), then you only need one agent with a willingness to risk their life on literally any craft (including speedboats/fishing boats/etc.) to come across a battlegroup, get a visual and radio it back.
P.S. Worth noting that China is far from the only one with supersonic anti-ship missiles with high capabilities. Russia’s P-800 Oniks had been in service since 2002; there haven’t been many opportunities to use them vs. ships, but when they were launched at Ukraine, only 12 missiles got intercepted out of 211 as of mid-2024 (according to Ukraine’s own interception data); i.e. a 5.7% rate. India’s BrahMos was co-developed with Russia and is meant to be an upgraded version of this same missile. When they lost around 5 planes to Pakistan (including 1-2 Rafales) with no loss to the latter, they had to pull out all the (non-nuclear) stops to save face and so these missiles were launched at land targets in Pakistan. Again, no interceptions – even as Pakistan’s exported Chinese air defences (admittedly much less numerous than Ukraine’s fairly massive late-Soviet network + the Patriots complementing it) did manage to down a Storm Shadow (stealth cruise missile) fired in the same barrage.
There’s a big difference between “torpedos can sink battleships under the right circumstances” and “therefore we should stop building battleships and use torpedo boats exclusively” and Jean Ecole was the latter. Even if you don’t have overseas ambitions you have stuff for your fleet to do that’s not stopping the enemy from seizing the ports they’re blockading. Yes, battleship fleets had to adapt to counter torpedoes but that did not make battleships obsolete any more than anti-tank rockets rendered tanks obsolete.
There is actually an interesting point with this whole comparison to tanks: in a sense, the post-WWI legacy of Jeune École had been doubly toxic for the French military.
Firstly, they applied some of the worst possible lessons of that period to tanks. I.e. the approach they settled on was a large number of very light tanks (R-35 and H-35 both represented an evolved Renault FT with fairly heavy armor for 1930s and somewhat better speed, but almost no other improvements and zero modernization potential besides some tinkering with its gun and engine) backed by a much smaller number of “land battleships”: the B1 design entered development as soon as WWI ended and spent almost 20 years in development hell, before finally entering production…at a rate of three per month. (Scaled up to 9 per month after Poland fell – not that it made much difference, particularly given their awful reliability.)
The great irony is that almost a full decade before WWII, the French already had D1 and D2 designs which were far from perfect (like everyone else in the early 30s, the French lacked the ability to produce good engines at scale and so that tank was reduced to ~25 km speed), but were nevertheless far more capable than anything else they built (perhaps with an exception of AMX 30 design, which the French mostly produced for Belgium in very small numbers), with a great gun and armour by 1930s standards, and were effectively the best tank in the world up until Matilda II or thereabouts (before all these designs were rapidly exceeded by T-34 and upgraded Pz. IV, and by the Sherman some time later.)
And on the other hand, they were determined to make up for so much of their fleet being reduced to a bystander role, and so, even before Hitler took power, they began to build Dunkerque and Strasbourg battleships, and then responded to the upcoming Italian battleships with even heavier Richelieus. All of those had been completely, utterly useless; the latter two fled the French defeat in an unfinished state, and the former two did practically nothing before one was bombed by the British to deny it potentially falling to Germany, and the other got scuttled of French own accord.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunkerque-class_battleship
For all that people knock the Maginot Line, it was so much more useful than these; if anything, France would have most certainly been far better off if all the thousands of tons of armor-grade steel used up on those instead got used to create if not more tanks (given that French tank fleet already substantially outnumbered the German one in 1940 – only for much of it to run out of fuel/break down far away from the fighting, much like with the Soviet one a year later), then more immobile fortifications (“tank turret” bunkers had been quite popular in this period for a reason!); if they had the sense to place at least some number of such (and they would have had hundreds, if not thousands, depending on what kind of a smaller ship gets built as a replacement; even light aircraft carriers would have consumed a lot less metal) where their defence ultimately got broken in the Ardennes, we would probably not be describing that conflict as a “WWII” at all nowadays.
“nothing we have in modern warfare has quite the same psychological shock effect as an actual cavalry charge. Being able to produce that shock effect would in fact be useful. But since trying to do that would result in crippling casualties for the cavalry force most of the time in most situations these days, we don’t see cavalry around much anymore.”
But it’s not just about the casualties – a cavalry force that tried a charge on a modern battlefield would not actually produce that psychological shock effect, because it would be destroyed while it was still hundreds of metres away from the enemy, and you need to see the horses coming right at you to feel psychological shock. Above a certain level, “vulnerable” means “ineffective” simply because it gets inevitably destroyed before it can have effect.
Artillery and airstrikes. Far more shock effect than cavalry ever had.
I’m not sure how you would go about measuring shock effect and comparing it, particularly with regard to things that no longer exist, but I’m not sure that’s unequivocally true: lots of examples of infantry breaking and running in the face of cavalry; lots of examples of infantry hunkering down and standing firm in the face of artillery and airstrikes.
I think it’s pretty much impossible for us today to imagine the psychological effect of a cavalry charge. I’ve only ever seen a dozen or so horses at full gallop at once (at the races) and the sound is memorable. I’ve never seen police horses used for public order duties. And a cavalry charge would be not dozens but hundreds or thousands, coming *at you*, ridden by men armed not with batons (which are bad enough) but with sabres and lances, armoured men intent not on beating or dispersing you but on killing you. Even in the face of tanks you could try to hide and rely on their limited visibility. Cavalry, you can see their eyes, and they can see you.
When a soldier sees tanks for the first time in his life, rationally weighing how much visibility it has is about as difficult as realizing that horses are not battering rams and will stop before spears. Fear of tanks had absolutely been a big thing – to the point a lot of the initial suggested anti-tank tactics (i.e. trying to throw grenade bundles at the tracks) were less about actually preparing infantry to disable tanks, and more about convincing the individual soldiers they had a chance so that they won’t flee en-masse. Even WWII anti-tank rifles were often more of a placebo, especially as the tanks themselves had improved rapidly (though that depends a lot on the theater, given the differences between both tank and ATR models.)
Still, it probably is easier to get soldiers conditioned to tanks than to (pre-firearm) cavalry. I.e. the USSR produced T-35, that obviously impractical five-turret monstrosity, largely because Tukhachevsky was convinced seeing several of these spearheading an advance of a dozen or two smaller models would break any army’s spirit. The few actually constructed models ultimately broke down too often to do much of anything, but the more practical three-turret T-28 did see mass deployment in the Winter War (a year later, most of them were also out of service) and the psychological impact was far from what had been hoped for.
P.S. Speaking of placebo military technologies; I keep thinking of the time someone sanewashed Trump’s Golden Dome by arguing that during the Cold War, there was no effective missile defence either, but much of the public thought it already existed (apparently true in 2000, but not sure about the earlier periods) and so they backed aggressive foreign policy. Thus, while Golden Dome would obviously never actually be effective, if Trump successfully cons the public that it works, it would restore their appetite for standing up to the other nuclear powers. It’s just a staggering argument in so many respects.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1555/Public-Supports-Concept-Missile-Defense.aspx
You’ve mentioned mainly container transport, and oil (topical at the moment obviously), both of which are obviously important to the world’s economy.
But dry bulk goods are arguably even more critical. It’s bulk carriers that move half of the world’s goods and constitute close to half of merchant dwt. Container ships transport something like 60% of the value, but besides oil it’s massive quantities of things like grain, iron ore, cement and coal which are absolutely essential to modern society.
And if containerised freight by sea is three times cheaper than rail, bulk is *massively* more so (simply because of the size of the holds of the ships), and even more so compared with road transport. Quite apart from the fact that it passes between regions that can *only* be connected by sea (Australia and China, Brazil and China, the US and Europe)
Bulk carriers make the world go round.
This is all a very nice, well-thought-out explanation, but have you considered that we should just incinerate global trade and the international order anyway because I’m bored and want to pretend I’m doing something cool?
Do it!
A couple of comments about two of the maps:
In the food exporters vs. food importers map, the deep red food importers fall into two categories: First, largely desert nations like Botswana, Libya, Ethiopia and the nations of the Arabian peninsula, dependent on food imports to sustain an economy and population beyond the level of nomadic herders.
Second, the island nations of Taiwan and Japan, modern advanced nations which now have populations substantially in excess of what their agricultural area and fishing fleets could support. Case in point: during World War Two Japan was starving just from having its trade cut off. Japan’s population in 1945 was 72 million people. Today its 123 million people. About the only people who don’t worry about Japan’s declining birthrate are planners who have to consider what would happen if Japan was ever cut off from trade by a war.
In the global commercial shipping map, a notable amount of traffic still rounds the Cape of Good Hope south of Africa, but vanishingly little around Cape Horn south of South America. Good Hope lies a bit more than 34 degrees south, while Cape Horn is at about 55 degrees south. That’s just how terrible the seas around Cape Horn are, and why the Panama Canal made such a huge difference.
Regarding Cape of Good Hope vs Cape Hoorn: There are also a lot of routes that are not that much longer (or even shorter) going around Africa instead of using the Suez Canal, and might be cheaper besides. There are very few routes that would actually profit from going around South America instead of using the Panama Canal. So I guess the the difference between 34°S and 55°S is less about the conditions but more about the raw added distance (although the weather will play a role as well).
> 80% of all goods transported globally move by sea … four times more goods move by ship than by every other alternative system of transportation combined
I clicked through but couldn’t easily find an answer to this: if a good moves by both sea and truck, how is that counted? If it’s counted as +1 for each, then the “four times more” is false, since the non-sea alternatives don’t sum to 20%.
Of course that doesn’t make us less dependant on sea transport.
> 80% of all goods transported globally move by sea … four times more goods move by ship than by every other alternative system of transportation combined
“four times more” feels like it can’t possibly be true, because presumably most goods need to make their way to and/or from a port by some non-sea method?
I clicked through and couldn’t see how the 80% is calculated. Three plausible-to-me guesses for what happens if a good is transported by multiple methods:
* It’s counted multiple times. Then the total isn’t 100%; e.g. you could have 80% sea, 60% truck, 30% rail and 5% air.
* It’s only counted against the one that takes it the largest distance.
* It’s counted fractionally by distance (e.g. it gives +0.9 to sea and +0.1 to truck). I think this is the same as what you get if you calculate “ton-miles moved by sea, ton-miles moved by truck, etc.”. Then clearer wording would be “goods move four times more distance by ship than everything else combined”.
Not that it matters much. However it’s counted, if these goods couldn’t travel by sea that would be a giant problem.
(Oops, I thought my first comment hadn’t gone through so I tried again. I guess it just was in a mod queue or something.)