America Must Get Its Mind Right to Defeat China
As the U.S. Navy faces the return of great power competition, especially with China's maritime rise, it must overcome decades of post-Cold War neglect and reforge its strategic and operational capabilities.
Odd though it sounds to say, how a people remembers its history sometimes has decisive political and strategic import.
Today, as Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan might counsel, the United States has no benefactor—no Victorian-era Royal Navy—to buffer against danger while the U.S. Navy comes to terms with the end of the long calm lee of 1944 and 1991, arming itself for renewed competition and strife at sea. America has to regenerate its maritime enterprise on its own. And the hour is late.
James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. The views voiced here are his alone.
Image Credit: Creative Commons.
