To gain some purchase on the future of maritime strategy in Asia, accordingly, it
is worth asking briefly: what is sea power?
Great seagoing nations have been grappling with this question for over a
century. For Alfred Thayer Mahan, the intellectual father of the U.S. Navy,
amassing sea power meant more than raising and deploying navies or driving
enemy fleets from the high seas. Writing in the 1890s, Mahan portrayed sea power
as resting on the ‘‘three pillars’’ represented by international trade and commerce,
naval and merchant shipping, and overseas bases.^13 His contemporary Sir Julian
Corbett—who scoffed at Mahan’s work, terming it ‘‘shallow and wholly
unhistorical’’—preferred the termmaritime,which carried both military and
nonmilitary connotations, to the termnaval,which was more common in
Mahan’s writings despite his avowedly broad conception of sea power.^14
How could an aspiring sea power erect Mahan’s three pillars? Mahan famously
described a nation’s potential for sea power as a function of six broad attributes:
(1) geographic position; (2) physical conformation; (3) extent of territory;
(4) number of population; (5) national character; and (6) character of the
government.^15 Of these, the first four relate to a country’s more or less immutable
characteristics. Specifically, he asked, does the country have enough people,
resources, coastline, and prospective seaports to make maritime power a viable
concern? The last two traits, more intriguingly, relate to nonmaterial factors.
To what extent is sea power a matter of choice for a coastal state, and to what
extent is it a product of material factors?
This is a question worth pondering. Mahan suggests that peoples go to the
sea because they have the innate aptitude, or genius, for seafaring endeavors.
Acquisitiveness figures prominently in sea power, impelling coastal peoples to
enter into maritime trade and commerce.They acquire colonies and warships,
the other components of sea power, to further their quest for wealth and
security.^16 A recent scholar, Peter Padfield, turns Mahan’s argument around,
suggesting that proximity to the sea shapes national character, in turn giving rise
to a seagoing culture. Padfield ascribes modern Western dominance not to chance
or cultural superiority but to ‘‘the particular configuration of seas and land masses
that has given the advantage to powers able to use and command the seas.’’^17
Maritime geography, in this view, imprints a mercantile culture on a nation,
suggesting that sea power is indeed destiny. Whether sea power is a matter of
fate or deliberate policy is an elusive yet essential question for students of Asian
maritime power.
Can sea power be quantified? In one recent work, Geoffrey Till offers a set of
useful indices for estimating a nation’s seafaring capacity. His effort to show
how material factors influence nonmaterial factors complements the earlier, more
historically inclined work of Mahan. Till defines sea power as ‘‘the capacity to
influence the behaviour of other people by what you do at or from the sea.’’
The ‘‘constituents’’ of sea power include (1) population, society, and government;
Introduction 7