The Age-Old Contest Between Land and Sea

0:00I'm Dan Kurtz-Falen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview. The whole point of the maritime order is one country doesn't own it. If one country owned it, no one would join it, right? It is an aggregation of what we're all willing to put up with. What's the common denominator on rules that we can all more or less follow? That's the international order. All of us in the foreign policy world have talked a lot about great power competition over the last decade. But no one can entirely agree on the contours of today's competition. Whether it's a battle of autocracies and democracies, or revisionists and status quo powers, or whether, as the realists would argue, it's just states doing what states do.

0:48Sally Payne, a longtime professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College, sees something else going on. To her, the great power competition we talk about today is just the latest example of the centuries-old tension between maritime and continental powers. For maritime powers, like for most of its history, the United States, money and trade serve as the basis of influence, and that leads them to promote rules and order. Continental powers, like Russia most clearly and China in most but not always, focus their security objectives on territory, which they seek to defend and control and expand.

1:23From this divide rises two very different visions of global order. It also, Payne argues, in a new essay in Foreign Affairs, explains the basic drivers of today's great power competition. But as she looks at more recent developments, Payne lays out an additional concern. The United States has long been an exemplar of maritime power. But it is starting to behave in ways that suggest a shift away from the maritime strategies that have served it so well. Paine's focus on the contest between land and sea makes clear the stakes of that shift.

2:03Sally, thanks so much for joining me and for your essay in our current issue on how the battle between maritime power and continental power defines geopolitics in this era as well as past ones. It, of course, builds on work you've done for many years on this particular dynamic and the historical competitions where it first emerged. Thank you so much for having me. It is such a pleasure. It was an honor to have the print article. And then this is like double honor being with you now. Exactly, exactly. Well, as I read your work, going back before this particular article, it strikes me that you're in some ways reacting to the renewed focus on great power competition in both U.S.

2:39foreign policy circles and the discussion more generally, and finding yourself perhaps unsatisfied with the insight and assumptions and level of historical perspective that underlie that focus. So I'm curious to start, as you've watched this discussion develop and watched this renewed attention to power and competition start to redefine American foreign policy, what do you think most of us are missing about the nature of geopolitical power? Great powers have always been out there and competition has always been out there. So this idea that there's something new about great power competition, it's like yesterday's coffee, which isn't that great.

3:12But if I look at me, I spent graduate school studying two big continental empires, very effective ones, Russia and China. And then I wound up teaching at the U.S. Naval War College for a career. And then I was doing all these maritime case studies about Britain and the United States and how they could or couldn't leverage their navies and how other people could or couldn't. And that's where it became so clear to me from this serendipitous just having to work for the Navy, which I never expected I would, is realizing there are fundamentally different security paradigms that go with these powers that are independent of whether you think someone's a good guy or a bad guy.

3:54But with a geographical address, we've all got one, you have different security problems. As you watch policymakers in government, people in senior positions or formerly in senior positions, talk about competition and talk about geopolitics, do you think the understanding as it's shaping policy right now is roughly correct or is it kind of missing something fundamental about how those competitions work? Oh, I think it's missing something fundamental. Let's talk about our country, the United States. I'm not an expert in the United States, right? But if you look about our history, we start out as a continental empire, and Americans were all about territorial expansion.

4:33And then at the late 19th century, you get Alfred Thiermahan, who's by far the most famous person ever associated with the U.S. Naval War College, where I spent my career, who's saying, no, no, no, no, that power and the position in the world is not actually based on territorial extent, because Russia's really large and really poor. Other places really big, Brazil and Argentina, but you don't associate them as being a world power. So there's something else going on. And Alfred Thayer Mahan said, it's got to do with all the money you can make on maritime trade, because it's the oceans that connect you with the entire world.

5:06It is not land transport. And oh, by the way, choo-choo trains take up, I don't know, it's like 600 containers max. Whereas these big container ships now, the big ones take 21 ,000 containers. So no Belt Road, the land part, is ever going to do for you what a container ship does. So then the United States, after having a rethink with Alfred Thiermahan and then two world wars later, we're very much into a maritime security paradigm, which is instead of the United States taking over Canada, more gunboat diplomacy, see how much of Latin America you can take over, quitting all of that and going, that's a waste of money.

5:47Wars burn out money. They're negative sum. Whatever you get is damaged and therefore the loser's loss is bigger than what you get because you've damaged the goods. And say, no, no, no, the way to do it is through international law. We all agree on things about how we're going to trade. Your credit card works in whatever remote part of the globe. They don't cheat on the deal. And it's so much cheaper running things. And if you follow laws, it provides both the stable business environment that you need for predictability. and also it makes your costs so much lower. And this has been this wealth producing era.

6:23And if you look in European history, I look at it as a maritime era from the Napoleonic Wars to World War I where there are some wars in there in Europe, but not continent wide ones. And they're mostly just trading with each other, compounding wealth and not blowing up each other's industrial bases or for the United States, tremendously profitable for us and our allies from World War II until the end of the Cold War. So what we're doing now of tearing up our alliance system and also tearing up our scientific expertise is doing our enemies' work. It's profoundly frightening. And if you look how rapidly people are changing, it's incredible.

7:09A term I think it's useful for thinking about this is half-court tennis of my invention. So when you play tennis, you really ought to think of what's on the other side of the net. You'll play the game much better. The idea is we do some pronouncement out of Washington and we don't think about what any of the follow-on effects are going to be. And they're going to kill us. It's going to be so profoundly bad. And Americans understand this for football. We'll apply it to foreign policy. Football is a recreational sport. Foreign policy with nukes. We play this wrong, our world's going to disappear on us.

7:45I think the maritime vision of power and security, the theory of security that comes with that maritime role is pretty clear. How do you describe, you know, as maybe persuasively as possible, kind of steel man, the continental view of security and power? What would a kind of Russian or Chinese strategist say making the case for it? Oh, for Russia and China, they are located on the big Eurasian continent, by their sheer size, they have many neighbors, most of whom they don't much like, or they're very unstable. And then if they're little and you're worried about the instability creeping over, there was no maritime world of laws and things when they are forming.

8:29You know, this is hundreds of years ago, China, thousands of years ago. And so the security paradigm there is you have a really good army and anyone messes with you. You just, you so brutalize them, they do not come back for more. So yeah, that's the security paradigm. And it's reality, not choice, right? But post-industrial revolution, where you have compounding economic growth, it opens different possibilities. And if you deal with people by international law, it's just so much cheaper. I mean, you mentioned Alfred Thayer Mann, your predecessor at the U.S. Naval War College. I think about another theorist of geopolitics in that kind of early period in the early 20th century, Harold Mackinder, who talked about the importance of Eurasia, of the continental land masses, in some ways, some sense of battle between Mahan and Mackinder.

9:18Yeah, Mackinder's an interesting man. He's a Briton. His seminal article's written, I think, in 1904. So it just, it places him in history. And he's looking at railways transforming things. And he thinks, well, Russia with this interior position, how can britain influence that and he's missing uh actually yeah you're right russia can defend itself and if you're going to try to invade russia that's a true mistake but rather he's missing that it's these exterior lines of communication by oceans that's where all the money is to be made and if the russians could ever clean up their own commercial laws to make it something other than a mafioso, I'm throwing you out of the sixth floor window because I don't like what you just told me at the table, if they could get beyond the shakedown way of doing stuff that goes way back, it goes all the way back to the Mongol Empire when they were the tax collectors of the Mongols.

10:12They've been shaking people down for a long time. But you make a lot more money if you play by laws. We talk a lot in the foreign policy world, as you of course know, about the international order or the rules-based order. It's being probably dismantled as we speak. But when we look back to the kind of post-World War II development of that order, and especially the post-Cold War, it seems in some ways like it was trying to build maritime power principles into the way the international system functioned, right? It made everyone able to exist as a maritime power because there were rules of trade and everything else.

10:44It's not going to be dismantled. The United States may decide that it wants to leave it, which would be an incredible way to really injure our own national security. The United States has decided our allies are not so good. We're treating them like enemies by doing these ruinous tariffs on them. And the reorganization is so rapid. The fighter jets that they no longer want to buy from us, losing all those markets. Brazil is going to sell sorghum straight to China because the Chinese aren't going to buy ours. And there's this reorganization, like there's the Baltic Nordic eight within the EU that are all small, but they're thinking very deeply of what the security structure looks like.

11:31It will take Europe, I'm going to make it up 10 years to reorganize it. They will, we won't be part of it. So they will be stronger and we won't. When I talk about continental maritime powers, in the Naval War College, the first assignment in the strategy department is Thucydides. The man's been dead for over 2 ,000 years. He's talking about continental and maritime strategies. It goes back a long way. And this development of a rules-based order, it used to be done through empires, right? Roman Empire, Roman law. So this rules-based order is not going away. It's an evolution. Think of all the institutions that have been built since World War II.

12:17I mean, this is the great legacy of the greatest generation in the West. These are the people who suffered through World War I as young people, the Great Depression as people your age-ish, and then had the sorrow of being the strategic leaders of World War II. They decided institution building was the way to go. And that legacy remains. And it will continue to remain. And yet it has its ups and downs. And the United States is being incredibly foolish right now. Whatever problems Americans think they have, they're misidentifying the solution. How do you see the Chinese reaction here? China seems, as I read your work, your piece in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, a really interesting case in that it has struggled to become a maritime power, even as it seems to recognize some of the advantages of it.

13:03It's understanding there is a maritime rules-based order. And the reason I say it's maritime is because we all connect with each other by sea and also the cables, the cables that provide the information run under the sea. This is a maritime order. Now, all the countries there aren't islands. There's hardly any country that's fully can be maritime. Japan and Britain And the United States has these really long borders with Canada and Mexico. If they ever go really hostile in a way that's very threatening to us, game over on maritime stuff. But this rules-based order that's maritime, it means if you all gang up together, you can deal with the bullies, us included, if our country becomes a bully.

13:52because we're big, but we're not bigger than everybody else. So China could also join this order. This was the great hope, and they're not interested. I suspect they want to build a Chinese-based order, and China is the central kingdom, and run it all through bilateral relations that run through Beijing, but they're not nice to their neighbors. It's basically, we're big, you're small, and just do what you're told. And then they had these long borders, which if everything goes to whatever, and there's some major global war, you better believe their enemies will be infiltrating everything under the sun over those borders, right?

14:37And the Ukrainians have shown us how the little things like drones can really wreck you. And so it's such a tragedy. China was doing so well by joining the party. Russia would do so well if it would only join the party. And now we're exiting the party. It's a mistake. How do you assess Chinese strategy under Xi Jinping, and especially since Donald Trump has come back into the presidency? When I look at China, it has three pillars of legitimacy historically. At least this is what I think others can disagree. One is ethical rule, and that's where the communists just cleaned up on the nationalists, right?

15:13Well, that's gone because they're just all known for corruption these days. Another one was economic prosperity. Boy, did Deng Xiaoping deliver on that and his successors. It's been the miracle of China joining the maritime order, compounded growth. It's been great. Well, that's done, particularly since Xi Jinping is going to spend all his winnings on his foreign policy agenda. And the third one is territorial integrity. And that's where he's at. And that's where Taiwan Juan comes in. I think they want to maintain the monopoly of the Communist Party rule. And so they've now got an educated enough populace where the normal thing is people want to have more say about their lives.

15:51The answer is they aren't going to do that. And then that's all the crackdown. And so to me, it's a dead end. It's a tragedy. It's not going to make China great. If it continues, it'll probably lead to some really big wars. And then the great question on these big wars, you can just see them as they're gathering. Oh, and another leader who's taking down this country, Benjamin Netanyahu. You look at these gathering wars with people who are not thinking about the next generation. That's what a statesperson does. But they're thinking about me staying in office. I noticed that you left Vladimir Putin out of your rogues' galley of leaders.

16:25I assume he was meant to be there. Oh, yeah, no, he's definitely, he's obvious. As you've watched Ukraine, do you see that as a harbinger of further attempts at territorial contours to come? Has there been some change in norms around use of force? Oh, okay. Let's go for concepts I promised. So one is maritime continental. One continental outlook is looking at the territories, what you really want. So that's why I want Taiwan or I want Greenland, whatever it is. And maritime is, no, it's all about making money from trade and reducing transaction costs through laws that we can more or less adhere to.

16:58Another one is limited and unlimited objectives. What's an unlimited objective? An unlimited objective is when your adversary is going to vaporize you at the end of the day. Or at least minimum, it's going to overthrow your government. Okay. A limited objective is something different from that. So you can go back to Bismarck. It's, I want these two provinces, and then it's over. And the Danish government or the Austro-Hungarian government are still going to be in place at the end of the day. So if your adversary has unlimited objectives and you compromise with them, you are setting them up to come back for the kill.

17:39So it's very important in your assessment of others is to determine where it's at. OK, Vladimir Putin, I believe. And then you have to keep reassessing because no one knows for sure. Right. You're not in his head. I believe has unlimited objectives for not only Ukraine, but many countries in Europe and probably for the liberal democratic order itself. I also believe that China has an unlimited objective vis-a-vis liberal order. Now their counter argument would be, hey, you've got an unlimited objective against us because you don't like dictatorships. But it's important to understand that. And it means that compromising with these folks on serious stuff is dangerous.

18:24You need to be very thoughtful. On the other hand, backing them into a corner is also insane. Because the one who's on the losing side, their last thing is going to be a nuke. And that's the problem. So all the wonderful political scientists who think they've got deterrence clovered, They're wrong. A cornered dictator will use it as their last item. And you think we're going to be rational after that happens? And then what happens? So we've got irresponsible leaders all over the place. So irresponsible leader A does new. What do you think irresponsible leader number two is going to do? It's going to be over.

19:04Another framework I think is really helpful is thinking about the tactical level, the operational level, and the strategic level. It comes from warfare. At the tactical level, you have a tank. It has certain capabilities. It's sure so far, something of whatever caliber is needed to take it out. You have a little tank unit, and that unit has certain capabilities. But then you want to apply it to a military operation. This is the operational level, which is either a battle or a campaign. And then you're going to be having tank units and air units and all these different things. And then you're going to have an operational objective.

19:40Presumably, it's going to be take that hill or prevent somebody from taking that hill, something of that level. So tactical level, operational level. What's the strategic level? Like, why are you sending tanks in the first place? If I apply that set of questions to some of the avowedly continental powers that you address in the piece, maybe Russia and Iran being the first of them, it seems, you know, you argue persuasively that they would be more prosperous and probably more secure today if they had followed their rules-based system and kind of taken part in this order in a cooperative way. Why didn't they?

20:11I mean, if you look at the choices that those leaders made, they're not complete idiots. What were they doing? Was it geography? They're not complete idiots. They're continentalists. They want to stay in power, right? Look what people are willing to do to stay in power. It's really hard to transition from continental to maritime if you're in a really rough security environment. And most of these places, these leaders, they're dictators. They have really extensive political police, secret police to keep themselves on the throne. They personally, well, may not be better off by joining the maritime order.

20:49And so it takes civil society and others to make it happen. If you think about... So it's a tension between national interest and the political imperatives for the leader in that case. Yeah, they're at the operational level and it's all about them. You know, there's a sense in much of the American foreign policy community at this point that it was a mistake over certainly the 1990s and aughts of maybe going back even further to the initial opening to China. No, I mean, really going back at this, this is about China specifically, did, you know, there was this sense that the U.S. should support China's rise and engage with it diplomatically, economically, that it would become more of a maritime power in some sense, and that would ultimately be good for the order and for us.

21:31Do you think that was a mistake? Was it inevitable in some sense that China would make this turn? I think, well, and you can make the parallel argument about Europe hooking its energy supplies to Russia. Same idea is surely they'll join the party. And of course, that's not who they are. But I don't think you would have known conclusively that's not who they are without trying it. And then if you don't try it and do it, you will never have the political will to counter it. We'll be back after a short break. What if you could explore places in the news like a reporter does? I'm Nicholas Wood, a former journalist with the New York Times and BBC.

22:13And 16 years ago, I created the travel company Political Tours. Our small groups are led by top correspondents around the world. In the next few months, we're off to Mexico, followed by South Africa, Japan and the French presidential elections. Come and join us. Go to politicaltours.com. That's politicaltours.com.

22:34S. C. M. Paine:This September, Independent 20th Century presents more than 130 artists at the legendary Broyu Building at 945 Madison Avenue. The show will fill four floors of the modernist landmark on Museum Mile. See why Art News Magazine calls Independent 20th Century a staple of the season and experience historic modern art from around the world in one of New York's most iconic spaces, September 24th to 27th. To learn more, visit independenthq.com.

23:31And now back to my conversation with Sally Payne. You did some of your early historical work on the Sino-Russian relationship going back deep into history. Do you see the current Sino-Russian relationship as an enduring one? Or do you see kind of deeper touches there that will ultimately upset it? Oh, they're enduring neighbors. China's going to eat Russia's lunch. And it probably already is. And we're not privy to what all these deals are. but China and Russia are neighbors forever. The Russians treated China terribly when they were in the driver's seat. And if you think the Chinese have forgotten that, come on.

24:11No, they haven't. But Russia, it's great sort of having them pinned in this conflict with Ukraine, which also pins the West and just feed Russia enough to bear all the costs. And then China can go empire build near where it is. And then it's quite enjoyable for China to watch the West tear itself apart as much as possible. And the United States has been very helpful in this endeavor. But it's really bad news for Russia. And now there are gas shortages and things, and it's unclear how much control Putin really has over Siberia. Can you imagine China taking territory from Russia in the Far East in the next couple of Oh, easily.

24:54But this is the rules-based order. It means the fundamental principle that endured for a long time was just because you're big, you can't devour small countries. Sovereignty is the most fundamental principle of international law is that you have sovereignty over your own territory. but if you go into wars right the territory changes and vlad the bad decided he wanted to try a war ukrainians relieved him of many of his strategic bombers right that he can't make more of we don't know what his deterrent looks like china's building up a huge nuclear force we always think it'd be used on us but you know there are other possibilities yeah it's a mess it's much better to trade with each other than to get into this and so when we run these tariffs on other people, we aren't thinking, how much does wrecking their economy matter to them?

25:46A lot. So that means you're going to get quite a reaction from doing it. So you need to get beyond the half court to think about the other court. And Americans need to stop tearing each other apart. We're all on the same boat. When it sinks, whether you like the other party or not, we shall sink together. I mean, Japan seems like an interesting and distressing echo when you look at the shift in the early 20th century before World War II. You argue that Japan had prospered under a maritime trading order and then suddenly made this continental term. What in the Japanese case drove that shift? We passed the Hawley-Smoot tariff or the Smoot-Hawley tariff, whichever way you want to call it.

26:30Hawley and Smoot decided that for the Great Depression, The solution was tariff walls. And we need America first, protecting U.S. jobs. And so, right. Except what do you suppose everyone else is going to do when we cut off our markets? The Japanese go, well, we need an empire. No choice. So they invade Manchuria. And you could argue that that's the beginning. And it's in 1933 that Hitler comes to power. We've tanked their economy. Clever us. And it's not just the West in general goes protectionist, sets the hothouse conditions for world war. Tariffs is not the solution. In a sense, you're taking away the maritime path to power.