Alfred Thayer Mahan, a 19th-century naval officer and pre-eminent military strategist, believed his young country was destined to be great because of its Navy. Toward the end of his service, Mahan, then a U.S. Navy captain, wrote a landmark book about the age of sailing ships. Read avidly by kings, prime ministers and presidents — including Theodore Roosevelt, Kaiser Wilhelm II and the young Winston Churchill — the book posited the idea of a free world anchored by American sea power.
Mahan believed America needed a large number of ships to fight decisive battles and to keep sea lanes open and international commerce flowing. This vision, which was both humanitarian and self-serving, soon came to pass, starting with the Spanish-American War of 1898, which Mahan avidly supported. After World War II, the U.S. Navy possessed some 7,000 vessels that went on to dominate the oceans for the next half century. The United States, with its blessed geography fronting two oceans, had embarked upon its imperial destiny, with the naval power to back up its values.
But there was a lurking paradox in this sudden explosion of American power. As Mahan wrote, “a peaceful, gain-loving nation” like the United States “is not farsighted, and farsightedness is needed for adequate military preparation.”
More than 130 years after Mahan wrote, the United States, in downsizing military expenditures after conflicts and fighting a series of distracting land wars in the Middle East, has proved his maxim well. The U.S. Navy is in decline relative to its own history and to the growth of the Chinese Navy, and has surrendered the control of the world’s vital choke points that it had at the beginning of the 21st century. The South China Sea, through which up to 40 percent of global maritime trade passes, in addition to oil and natural gas, is now dominated by China. The Strait of Bab-el-Mandeb, the crucial transit point out of the Red Sea, is harassed by the Yemen-based Shiite Houthis.
Now we can add the Strait of Hormuz to the list. Just 21 nautical miles wide at its narrowest, the strait offers oil tankers and other large vessels only a limited path through. Iran’s Islamic revolutionary regime, aided by a coastline of mountains and coves, has managed to effectively shut down the waterway with drones, speedboats and mines. American warships may be able to enforce a blockade, but the Navy still can’t open the Strait. And even then, this concentration of U.S. ships in the region is robbing the Navy of assets it should be using to patrol and project power in the Pacific. Whereas in the past the United States could cover all its bases or choke points, now in an age of gradual decline it has to make choices.
The global elite at watering holes like Davos and Bilderberg could never have prospered without the U.S. Navy, even if members of this elite are unaware of the fact. Though we live in the jet age, as much as 80 percent to 90 percent of global trade by tonnage is transported by water. That means the seas have to be relatively safe, especially around places such as Hormuz. The recent struggles of Dubai, an icon of globalization, demonstrates just how fragile our world is and always has been.
If the U.S. Navy doesn’t grow significantly in size, the outcome could be disastrous for the whole world. Free trade, global capital flows and migration — the root of America’s worldwide power — would be impossible without a great U.S. Navy. It’s that simple.
A decade ago I served on an advisory panel to the chief of naval operations, and often the themes of the discussions were ship collisions, breakdowns and the general difficulty of maintaining warships, coupled with the rise of the Chinese naval threat.
Moreover, as I learned as a teacher at the U.S. Naval Academy during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, it was the navies of China and India that had become avid followers of Mahan. His ideas languished somewhat at Annapolis, despite there being a building named after him. While the role of the U.S. Navy was, by then, already publicly diminished, Beijing and New Delhi were concentrating on naval expansion and warfighting. To compensate for its stagnating number of warships, the U.S. Navy was intent on partnering with allied navies as a means to mask its own relative decline.
In November 2007, in The Atlantic magazine, I warned of the Navy’s “elegant decline.” I emphasized that the number of hulls in the water would eventually be more important than the number of boots on the ground. But naval power was the furthest thing from people’s minds amid all the fevered discussions about counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to reverse the downward trajectory of our fortunes in the chaotic deserts of the greater Middle East.
This is troubling, since the most accurate measure of our national capacity has always been sea power. The U.S. Navy is the nation’s primary strategic instrument, not our nuclear arsenal. Nuclear weapons are like trophy items that can never be used, according to Western military doctrine since the end of the Cold War, whereas the Navy is our “away team,” as a Pentagon official once told me. You can move an aircraft carrier strike group — with its cruisers, destroyers, frigates and submarines, not to mention its thousands of officers and sailors manning enough weaponry to destroy a city — halfway across the globe without a debate in Congress or in the news media. You can’t do that with land forces.
But it’s all frightfully expensive. A single fully operational Ford–class nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, with its up to 90 fighter jets and helicopters, costs almost $20 billion. The United States maintains 11 carriers at any one time. The cost of a new ballistic missile submarine can be over $10 billion, and that of a new guided-missile destroyer well over $2 billion. The Navy operates roughly 70 submarines (most are cheaper attack submarines, not ballistic missile subs) and 80 destroyers, plus cruisers, frigates, supply ships and more.
All these vessels get old and have to be replaced every few decades. The cost of maintaining our Navy, let alone improving it or expanding it, is a matter of trillions of dollars. It is no exaggeration to say that the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could have built a whole new Navy.
The Yale historian Paul Kennedy in his 2022 book, “Victory at Sea,” shows how America’s rise as a great power can be told through the number of warships it built. Whereas the Navy had under 800 ships at the beginning of World War II, it had nearly 7,000 at the end, while the other competing world navies had collapsed or were severely reduced in size. Now we have, at the latest measurement, about 290 ships in active service. Though they have vastly more firepower than the fleet of the mid-20th century, only about a third of them are deployed on the high seas at any time, since another third is on training maneuvers and another third is undergoing repairs. By comparison, the Chinese Navy has grown to around 400 ships, plus hundreds of supply vessels. Though the quality of our Navy is higher, China has been swiftly closing that gap, too.
It was during the Obama administration that the Chinese intensified occupying islands and smaller geographic features in the South China Sea, as well as building military installations and deploying more of their naval forces there. Because the aggression has been so calibrated and gradual, the U.S. Navy has had a difficult time responding without seeming to overreact and provoking conflict. America still hasn’t quite figured out how to deal with this challenge.
Keep in mind that as a fleet stagnates, quantity increasingly equals quality, since a warship cannot be in two places at once. The U.S. buildup near the Strait of Hormuz hurts our deterrence against China in the South China Sea and near Taiwan. And this is to say nothing about our current long deployments that have led to maintenance problems and put undue stress on crews and their families. The Gerald R. Ford, an aircraft carrier deployed in the Middle East with a crew of over 4,500, has been at sea for 10 months now, a post-Cold War record.
It isn’t clear that America could build a new Navy even if it had the funding and political will. Over the decades, the number of private and public shipyards has dropped, and the ones that remain have increasing trouble retaining their work force of welders and electricians, which means the knowledge base for these specialized shipbuilding skills shrinks and ages. It hasn’t helped that in 2025 the Navy canceled most of the Constellation-class of frigates on account of enormous cost overruns. The intractability of the problem was a factor in Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s recent firing of Navy Secretary John Phelan, whom Mr. Hegseth felt was not moving fast enough to rebuild the fleet.
Amid all this, China’s naval buildup has continued apace. Its efforts began in earnest following the Clinton administration’s muscular deployment of not one but two aircraft carrier strike groups near the Taiwan Strait during a 1996 crisis. The Chinese were shocked at the administration’s bold move, and determined that never again would they appear so weak and vulnerable. The result is now a rival navy bigger than our own. The United States probably could not get away today with a commensurate show of force near Taiwan without provoking armed conflict.
At the Bab-el-Mandeb Strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, Yemeni Houthis, a revivalist Shiite militia, have used drones and missiles to attack nearby shipping. The U.S. Navy, in an attempt to protect the waterway, has fired missiles from its destroyers nearby against the Houthis, but it would take a larger war to solve the problem. The Houthis can fight inexpensively compared to our multibillion-dollar destroyers. The transformation of war also favors poorer states and guerrilla groups.
In the middle of the 19th century, the British Royal Navy, acting in league with the British East India Company, was able to protect the Arab sheikhdoms and emirates of the Persian Gulf. This ensured the safety of the trade route from the Mediterranean to the crown colony of India. The choke points were all secured by virtue of European imperialism.
The Princeton scholar Aaron Friedberg argued in “The Weary Titan” that the decline of the Royal Navy, the guarantor of British imperial power, began at the turn of the 20th century when it became clear it couldn’t perform all its tasks simultaneously. Britain thus began to look for help across the Atlantic Ocean just as Mahan was urging a greater U.S. naval presence overseas. Because Britain (with all of its faults) had help from another and bigger freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon empire in the making (with all of its faults), it could go on to win two world wars even after half a century of decline had set in.
We may not be so lucky. China and Russia are revisionist rather than freedom-loving powers. Protecting a global system against their intervention cannot be done without a great, expanding Navy. And our Navy is not expanding and is increasingly stretched thin. (In his first term, President Trump proposed a much larger Navy with over 355 warships. Whether any of this actually happens will be determined by partisan politics and available money in a debt-ridden economy. It doesn’t help that on account of Mr. Trump’s vanity, he is insisting on a new “Trump class” of battleships.)
The warming of the Arctic Ocean on account of climate change will make the situation more acute. China is already directing naval energies toward the Arctic. And Russia, a partly landlocked power in the north — where its ports are blocked by ice half the year — could see its naval power increase significantly. Any way you look, we are heading toward an unstable multipolar environment.
With the transformation of warfare giving an advantage to weaker forces, China’s rise as a great naval power, and climate change favoring Russia, the U.S. Navy in coming decades will be hard-pressed to maintain its dominance. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were in many ways disasters, but they supplied the Army and Marine Corps with invaluable lessons. By contrast, the Navy, virtually abandoned in the public eye during a decade of Middle East wars, has not fought a fleet-level engagement since the Battle of Leyte Gulf against the Japanese near the Philippines in 1944.
Our Navy may appear dominant at the moment, especially amid President Trump’s and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s bluster and proposals for more ships. But don’t be fooled.
The 1956 Suez Crisis has been invoked as a comparison with America’s current operation in the Persian Gulf. After all, both involved principal maritime choke points and the contest over who should control them, Western forces or local powers. Suez, moreover, was a military success but a political failure. The British, French and Israeli militaries were able to control the canal zone, in a bid to stave off Egyptian nationalization of the waterway, but had to retreat in the face of President Dwight Eisenhower’s demands and the ability of Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to rally his population.
Though the final outcome of the Iran war is still unknown, even if America wins, it loses. The conflict is part of a process of being militarily and economically distracted while China and Russia threaten the global system.
Mahan was born in 1840 at West Point, the son of a professor at the United States Military Academy. His middle name, Thayer, honors the “father of the military academy,” Sylvanus Thayer, who brought the institution up to modern standards. His great, burgeoning Navy may sound like a warmonger’s dream. But Mahan was a realist. He wanted a great fleet for a purpose, because he believed in America’s spiritual mission.
What kind of world do we want to live in? A world united by democracies that uphold a certain standard of human rights is incompatible with a weak Navy. That’s because a stable, humane world requires economic prosperity. That, in turn, requires relatively unimpeded intercontinental trade and commerce. And that requires secure waterways.
Secure waterways helped make America great in the 20th century, and if America and the world are to continue to prosper, safe seas will be necessary throughout the 21st. It is easy to say a coalition of world navies can do this. The reality is such a coalition requires a leader. If the 21st century is not to be impoverished, Mahanian thinking will need to be at the heart of it.
Robert D. Kaplan is the author of the forthcoming “China Whisperers: The Voices That Have Shaped America’s Views of Its Chief Geopolitical Rival.” He is a distinguished senior lecturer at the University of Texas, Austin.
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