Sea Power And The American Interest

From the Civil War to the Great War, the transatlantic commercial trading system that dated from the nation’s colonial times continued in America. By 1900, the sustainability of this Atlantic System was in the material interest of an industrial America on which its aggregate national prosperity depended. The principal beneficiary of this political-economic reality was the American moneyed interest centered in the Northeast, with New York City at the heart. Author John Fass Morton explains how this country came to put a value on commercial opportunities overseas in support of America’s steel industry. Europeans and Americans alike pursued informal empires for resource acquisition and markets for surplus capital and output. Morton looks at how U.S. policy found consensus around the idea of empire, taking stock of the opening of Latin American and Chinese markets to American commerce as a means for averting socially destabilizing economic depressions. Republican administrations reflected Wall Street finance and America’s other three Madisonian interests—commercial, manufacturing, and agrarian—with the Open Door and Dollar Diplomacy policies to establish fiscal protectorates in Central America and the Caribbean. Undergirding Dollar Diplomacy was their commitment to “a great navy” that would be the “insurance” for an ongoing American interest that Dollar Diplomacy represented. With the strategic arrival of the petroleum sinew and the Wall Street reassessment of the Open Door in China, the Wilson administration tilted toward protecting American investments in the hemisphere—notably in Mexico—with a “Big Navy.” With Wilson, a progressive foreign policy establishment arrived while continuing to reflect the transatlantic internationalism of the Northeast moneyed interest. As a twentieth century progressive institution, the Navy would thus sustain an American expansion that was now progressive. The Navy story from the Civil War to the Great War reveals a truth. The foundational and dynamic sectors of a great nation’s economic base—its sinews—give rise to policy consensus networks that drive national interest, long-term strategy, and the characteristics of its elements of national power. It follows that the attributes of sea power must be material expressions of those sinews, allowing a navy better to serve as a sustainable and actionable tool for a great nation’s interest.

This survey of American naval history features original chapters from key scholars in the field that trace the relationship between the American Navy and the position of the United States on the global political stage over the past 250 years. Places equal weight on the influence of major wartime campaigns and naval efforts to defend and expand America’s political and economic interests during times of peace Includes an array of illustrations and 56 new maps, seamlessly integrated within each chapter Each chapter features sidebars with biographical sketches of influential leaders and descriptions of weapons and technological developments of the era

The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future By Alfred Thayer Mahan

This book examines the strategic choices that American and Chinese decisionmakers face regarding sea power in the Western Pacific, shaped by geography, history, technology, and politics. In particular, the author explores the potential for cooperation on maritime security in the Western Pacific, and how the United States might pursue such cooperation as part of a broader strategy to advance its interests in the region.

A MILITARY CLASSIC The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future is a must-read for anyone studying military or policy history. DETAILS: Includes the Original Illustrations and Images of the Navy

Indications are not wanting of an approaching change in the thoughts and policy of Americans as to their relations with the world outside their own borders. For the past quarter of a century, the predominant idea, which has asserted itself successfully at the polls and shaped the course of the government, has been to preserve the home market for the home industries. The employer and the workman alike have been taught to look at the various economical measures proposed from this point of view, to regard with hostility any step favoring the intrusion of the foreign producer upon their own domain, and rather to demand increasingly rigorous measures of exclusion than to acquiesce in any loosening of the chain that binds the consumer to them. The inevitable consequence has followed, as in all cases when the mind or the eye is exclusively fixed in one direction, that the danger of loss or the prospect of advantage in another quarter has been overlooked; and although the abounding resources of the country have maintained the exports at a high figure, this flattering result has been due more to the superabundant bounty of Nature than to the demand of other nations for our protected manufactures.

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