The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2019

72 JULY-AUGUST 2019 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL U.S. Naval War College in the late 19th century, penned the influential work The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783 . Mahan’s central argument is that the global pursuit of sea power is inseparable from the pursuit of great power status. An instant hit in its time, Mahan’s treatise strongly influenced the thinking of early 20th-century sea power propo- nents like Theodore and Franklin Roo- sevelt. As Yoshihara and Holmes show, the great maritime strategist is now also influencing the Chinese. As they describe it, China’s “hyper- Mahanian” approach to sea power is a truly whole-of-government endeavor. China possesses the world’s largest Coast Guard, its largest fishing fleet, and by some counting methods, even its largest navy. This is all the more notable given how China was for mil- lennia a continentally oriented state, exclu- sively focused on land power. Modern China became a maritime superpower within the span of only two genera- tions, a truly historic achievement that is still very much in the making. The authors trace strategic pronouncements from the heads of successive Chinese administrations in the excellent chapter “China’s Strategic Will to the Sea,” clearly revealing the escalating importance of the world’s oceans to Chinese statecraft. As President Xi Jinping himself noted: “Building a powerful navy is an impor- tant symbol of building a world-class military, a strategic pivot for building the nation into a great maritime power and an important component of realizing the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”(emphasis added). The importance of the maritime domain to China’s rise is most evident in the economic sphere. China’s depen- dence on importing basic resources to sustain its economic growth rate is a principal driver of its maritime strategy. Reflecting this, China’s ability to pro- cess and generate maritime shipping exploded within the past two decades. The authors present stunning statis- tics: of the world’s 20 largest ports today 13 are Chinese. Chinese ports processed six times more goods in 2015 than in 2000 (topping at 7.8 billion tons of goods). And in 2005 China’s inland ports were able to process a whopping 97 times greater volume of shipping containers than just 15 years earlier. Today more than 85 percent of China’s imports and exports travel by sea. Chinese state propaganda and official pronouncements are rife with accusa- tions of “Cold War thinking” when describing U.S. national security policy in the Indo-Pacific. Despite denials from the United States that it is pursuing a strategy of containment, China perceives some- thing else. Three distinct island chains ripple out across the Pacific, from Kyushu through the Philippines to Singapore, from Yokosuka to Guam to New Zealand, and from the Aleutians to Hawaii. China feels surrounded by concen- tric rings of American power and allies, an “infrastructure of containment,” the authors state, contending that “the archi- pelagic concept casts a long shadow over Chinese strategic thought.” The geogra- phy of force projection in maritime Asia turned China’s historic military advan- tages on its head. When China was a continental power primarily concerned with invasions, it could take comfort in the vast strategic The first two island chains and major U.S. bases in the Pacific. CENTERFORSTRATEGICANDBUDGETARYASSESSMENTS