What Teddy Roosevelt Taught Mao About Naval Power

By James Holmes,The National Interest

Theodore Roosevelt was an avowed Mahanian. He was also a closet Maoist! Or at least, his convictions about strategies for lesser competitors ran parallel to those made popular by Mao Zedong during the Chinese Civil War and Second Sino-Japanese War, as transposed to marine warfare by the Great Helmsman’s saltwater-minded successors.

Nor, as it turns out, should this synchronicity come as any surprise. Both Roosevelt and Mao coveted conventional triumphs on oceanic battlegrounds. The chief difference: spared decades of internal strife and foreign invasion, Roosevelt’s America had trodden farther along its pathway to industrial and military might than had Mao’s war-ravaged China. The United States could afford to mount a challenge for mastery of American seaways. China enjoyed no such luxury in its nautical environs. It had ground to make up before it could take to the sea in force.

Disparate national circumstances demand disparate approaches to designing, building and deploying fleets. You go to war with the navy you can afford.

Beyond the material dimension, the two strategists’ ideas about maritime combat were much the same. Once China made itself wealthy, it could bankroll a more forceful approach to naval development—an approach strikingly similar to fin de siècle America’s. Make no mistake: Roosevelt would have no truck with Mao’smurderously utopian purposes. But he would instantly recognize Mao’s operational and strategic methods—and might well endorse if not applaud them. As well he should, since these are methods that have borne the test of time.

Roosevelt entertained an offensive vision of American sea power, and thus regarded coastal defense as a fallacy of the first order. He framed his opinions about sea strategy and combat most succinctly in 1908 while chairing the once-celebrated, now mostly forgotten “Battleship Conference” at the Naval War College. Students and faculty convened in Newport that summer to evaluate technical feedback coming in from the U.S. Navy’s “Great White Fleet” during its world voyage.

While battleship design constituted the focal point for deliberations, President Roosevelt ascended his bully pulpit to hold forth about larger strategic matters. Matters such as this: a common question before would-be seafaring societies is whether they should content themselves with coastal defense, striving to shoo away threats from waters immediately offshore, or bid for something more ambitious. Roosevelt’s answer: embrace as forceful a strategy as your means permit.

And America’s economic and industrial means not just permitted but encouraged vigor and audacity. The United States at the dawn of the twentieth century commanded a far more fortunate strategic position than China’s at midcentury. It was an industrial society on the make. It stood at the verge of overtaking European great powers by such measures as steel production, a crucial index of warmaking capacity. It had commenced constructing an armored, steam-propelled, big-gun navy in 1883, and vanquished a European empire, Spain, in 1898. It could contemplate making itself supreme in American waterways while governing a modest Pacific colonial empire.