[Speaker]: Good evening. It's such a pleasure to be with you. I'm going to make an argument today about how the world is organized or at least how different types of empires back in the day tried to organize it. It turns out that continental and maritime powers tried to organize the world in very different ways and that these have real uh implications in our own day. Uh and I'm going to be using terminology from geopolitics and also grand strategy. What is that? Geopolitics is the influence of geography on politics and grand strategy is grand in the number of instruments of national power that it integrates. And you're thinking, well, what are they? And think about who sits on a cabinet around a president who gets convened. Those are the elements of national power, right? So you've got the state department, diplomacy, the military, you've got finance, agriculture, you got a whole long list of people. and you want to integrate these uh these things. But before I get going, I'm going to give you a um a sneak detour, a really whirlwind tour of American history, which I'll get done really fast along with a tour of some of the great geopoliticians. And uh before I will after that appetizer, I will deliver the promised main course.

[Speaker]: Okay, this is June 6th, 1944, D-Day, Normandy landings, where sea power, maritime power meets land power. It turns out maritime powers are the exception and continental powers are the rule. Why? Because maritime powers, if need be, can defend themselves primarily at sea with their navies. Whereas a continental power simply cannot, think Ukraine, a navy is not going to save them from Russia. So uh this is the first distinguishing characteristic between a maritime and continental power whether it is feasible to defend yourself at sea or not. And from this comes some implications that if you sit in a continental world you had better have a competent army and if you're a maritime power to defend yourself you had better have a pretty good navy. But these implications go beyond the military to economics and politics as well. And I'll go into these, but I'm going to first start with the United States. And this is my really brief American history tour. Um here's North America. For our first 120 years or so, we behaved like a continental power. What did we do? We cleared the continent of Native Americans, Mexicans, to some extent the the British and the French.

[Speaker]: And we really didn't uh emerge from this continental shell to become sort of a nent sort of global power until the Spanish-American war uh 1898 when we picked up the Philippines um from from Spain. It was only then that America began to think more uh globally. At that time we're beginning to export, uh we're trading abroad and an American geopolitician who thinks deeply about this, Alfred T Mahan writes probably the preeminent book on seow written by an American, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. He's at the Naval War College in the late 19th century and he looks at this globalized trading system the British have created and the US has become dependent on exporting to its to stay to stay prosperous. And Man says, "The purpose of a navy isn't basically to defend your territory but to ensure that our commerce is not shut out from other people's shores." Right? The purpose of a navy is to protect global lines of communication and make sure trade flows unimpeded across the great commons of the world's oceans. Now, to man, the purpose of a navy is to command the seas to enable this.

[Speaker]: But since there weren't global gas stations and coing stations all over, uh it required navies to acquire bases abroad to to re-provision themselves. Okay, um but he also argues that uh there's this profound difference uh between those who have an access to sea lines of communication and those who don't. He looked up at Russia and he thought of Russia basically as a landlocked power up north in the cold. So they couldn't trade easily abroad. And its vast size made uh domestic land-based communication almost impossible. They didn't have a very good rail system at that point. So its people were effectively immobilized and Russia could not effectively create national wealth in his view. Why? Because historically to be a maritime power of the great stature of say a Great Britain or a United States, a maritime power has basically required certain uh uh elements to be in place. Number one, safe borders, not something Russia and China enjoy typically. Uh accessible coastlines, good deep water ports, rivers that drain the hinterland and exit on those ports. A commerce-driven economy and stable government institutions because money is skittish.

[Speaker]: And if government could be uh expropriate properties, uh banks and financiers won't finance commerce. And lastly, it required maritime ambition. And Man looked at Great Britain and later the United States and said, "Yeah, they sort of fit the bill." Not that Britain had deep rivers, but the rest they did. Um China currently has terrible borders, they're surrounded by nations that don't like them. Russia does not have a dense coastal population up north. And uh Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Dang Xiaoping, but recently Xiinping has been priv privileging the crony sector over the private sector. And neither one has stable government institutions. What's the litmus test for that one? That would be transparent regular elections and dictatorship for life does not remotely qualify. So, China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions. Uh but I'm not clear they actually understand what goes into uh an full maritime paradigm.

[Speaker]: Anyway, um there was a counterargument to man that comes a generation later by a Britain, Sir Halford McKiner, who's looking at the world and looking at Britain's problems and he thinks that actually Russia occupies the best uh geopolitical location in the world, not Great Britain because and this is a map from his 1904 article and he defines as the pivot area. Eurasia is the part of the world he's focusing on and it's where Russia is and he also calls it the great heartland and he said look that area the pivot area is the citadel of land power on the great mainland of the world it is the greatest natural fortress on the world why because it's insulated by mountains deserts uh frozen seas and rivers that uh exit onto the oceans and very inaccessible places during wartime time and therefore it is impervious to sea power that Britain can't really get at at this area and he said but if you occupy the heartland this pivot area you have the possibility for defense in depth strategic uh retreat and selfsufficiency so the heartland is not insulated by the sea it's insulated from the sea and a maritime power like Britain if it wants to influence the heartland land. It's got to do it on the periphery. In those days, it would be through having colonies in these very uh strategic locations. In our own day, would be having allies with bases in these locations.

[Speaker]: Uh this man Nicholas Spikeman was also very concerned about who controls Eurasia. He felt that the country that controls Eurasia could well control the world. and he had much to worry about when he completed his very important work in 1943, the year he dies. He's a naturalized American citizen from the Netherlands, then under Nazi occupation, and he felt that the Nazis had come really close to dominating Eurasia in 1941. And here's what he said. Despite occupying the uh the safest position of any nation in the world, we Americans have been involved in two devastating world wars in the space of a quarter of a century. And in the second one, i.e. the ongoing one, we are at one point uh and in serious danger of defeat. The expectations of US statesmen regarding the outcome of their actions were consistently wrong and their thinking about national security generally fail to provide successful answers. sound familiar?