Within scant decades, the Athenians refurbished their democracy, restored the long walls, constructed a new navy and assembled a new maritime league. They repaired all of the lineaments of sea power. True, the quarrelsome Greek city-states subsequently fell under Persian domination, and Athens ultimately ran into a buzz saw named Alexander the Great. That may testify to poor Athenian diplomacy and strategy, but it says little about the resilience of seagoing peoples.

Sea power, then, is not as perishable as Mayday maintains. Other examples of resilience come from American and British history, as ably retold by Mahan himself. A central theme of his Influence of Sea Power series is that British governments let the Royal Navy slip following the smashing victory over France in 1763. The 1781 battle of the Virginia Capes, when the Comte de Grasse’s fleet fought the British to a standstill—and thereby sealed off Lord Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown, allowing George Washington to prevail—marked a nadir of British naval prowess. But the Royal Navy bounced back within a year, crushing de Grasse’s fleet at the battle of the Saintes, far to the south in the West Indies. British naval might remained on the upswing through the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, when British mariners won the laurels Cropsey rightly acclaims.

Similar tales can be found in U.S. maritime history. Neglect of the U.S. Navy was commonplace in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, despite spasms of popular and elite enthusiasm for naval preparedness. During the Civil War, the Union Navy briefly stood at the forefront of technological innovation while boasting impressive numbers. But after the war, the U.S. Navy atrophied. Mahan, a veteran of Civil War blockade duty, wrote in his memoir, From Sail to Steam, that the service endured an interval of “dead apathy.” The fleet shriveled to about fifty creaky, largely obsolete wooden men-of-war by the late 1870s, inferior even to minor forces such as the Chilean Navy.

Congress inaugurated a naval renaissance in the 1880s, when it ordered the keels laid for the U.S. Navy’s first steel-hulled, steam-propelled battle fleet. The navy destroyed two Spanish fleets in 1898, wresting an island empire from that hapless power. Americans accepted a second-rank navy during the prelude to World War I. Only with the 1916 Naval Expansion Act did Congress and President Woodrow Wilson lead the Republic into its quest for a navy “second to none.” Even then, the sea services sank into another interlude of decline during the interwar years. The navy failed to build even to treaty limits until the late 1930s. Sea powers go through ups and downs, and they can restore their fortunes through determined effort.

Similarly, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force rose from the wreckage of the Imperial Japanese Navy within scant years after World War II. The Soviet Navy that mounted such a stiff challenge to the West in the 1970s and 1980s was a descendant of the Russian Pacific and Baltic fleets whose remains lay strewn across the bottom of the Yellow Sea and Tsushima Strait following the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905. Sea power can be rebuilt even if it slips owing to enemy action, slipshod decision making, economic malaise or other maladies that work against naval preparedness. Let’s not succumb to determinism.

IN ADDITION, no commitment or theater appears secondary or expendable for Cropsey. No foreign power seems capable of helping balance a hegemon or keeping order in its environs. No alliance or coalition is worthy of joint stewardship over all or part of the system of global trade and commerce. He discounts the capacity of any entente to balance China, for instance, and brands a combined fleet “as politically unimaginable as it is tactically unmanageable.” A power vacuum would be the “certain outcome” if Washington were to “vacate or substantially abbreviate its global maritime duties.” Even drawing down U.S. participation in the modest counterpiracy operation in the Gulf of Aden would have an “immediate” and “shattering” effect on the global economy, not to mention “longer-term negative effects on the region—and the world.” Grim stuff.

Cropsey is hardly alone in his reluctance to shed old or secondary commitments while concentrating policy energy and military resources on the most vital ones. Great powers appear to face a ratchet effect. The 2007 U.S. maritime strategy, for instance, purports to focus on the western Pacific and greater Indian Ocean. Yet its framers also declare that the sea services will maintain their capacity to seize command of any navigable expanse on the face of the globe—unilaterally if need be. The Obama administration’s pivot to Asia has encountered fierce pushback from “Europe first” advocates, who insist on retaining a strong Atlantic naval presence for—well, for some reason.

Cropsey’s logic is unassailable if you accept his premises. If the United States refuses to disentangle itself from any theater or contingency, if its military resources keep dwindling and if it cannot entrust part of the load to others, then it will spread itself thin trying to uphold its interests. Forces that try to do everything, everywhere, end up accomplishing little, anywhere. Commanders and political officials on every scene will clamor in vain for more ships and planes. Top leaders will find themselves compelled to shift resources around in an effort to accomplish the same expansive goals with less.

But is there really no alternative to U.S. marine hegemony, in the same form we have seen it in since 1945? It’s worth looking back, and ahead, to get some purchase on this question. Looking back, we see that before the Two-Ocean Navy Act of 1940, when Congress ordered construction of a Pacific navy, few could imagine that the U.S. sea services could manage all of the earth’s seas. Mahan saw the U.S. Navy mainly as a force of the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, shooing hostile—probably German—fleets away from sea-lanes leading to the Panama Canal, and thence to the Far East. Along with kindred naval enthusiasts such as TR, he fretted over the prospect of European naval stations athwart southern sea lines of communication.

Mahan’s vision, then, was one of regional preponderance, not global supremacy. America need not rule the waves—or not all of them, anyway—to make itself a seafaring power of consequence.

Naval officials of Mahan’s day argued ceaselessly about where to position the fleet to manage risk. How could they apportion assets in peacetime to enable the fleet to combine quickly for wartime action? To what degree could detachments be dispersed between the Atlantic and Pacific, and between the eastern Pacific and Asiatic stations? For example, shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Mahan exchanged notes with former president Theodore Roosevelt and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt on where to station the battle fleet. They decided it should remain concentrated, and thus superior to any single foe. Moreover, it should drop anchor in Pacific waters, lest Imperial Japan make mischief as European navies evacuated the Far East to prosecute the European war. Should the unexpected occur, the U.S. East Coast would have to take its chances until the fleet could reposition itself.

This more fatalistic and realistic attitude toward risk is worth rediscovering in today’s strategic debates. U.S. leaders should learn to say no to new commitments while divesting themselves of legacy obligations.

Looking forward, it can be seen that these are challenging times for good order at sea. Cropsey rightly maintains that a single trustee has overseen the nautical order since Great Britain rose to world power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, supplanting the Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch. As Walter Russell Mead documents in his book God and Gold, Britain in effect passed the torch to the United States sometime in the early twentieth century. The “weary Titan,” in Joseph Chamberlain’s memorable phrase, had exhausted itself in a naval arms race against Germany and in the two world wars that followed. Cropsey also notes that there is no successor-in-waiting to supplant the United States. Over time, China may amass the capacity to manage the system. Thus far, however, Chinese leaders have evinced little appetite for policing the briny main beyond Asia. Furthermore, Beijing scarcely shares the liberal vision of a Washington or London, predicated on freedom of the seas. Whether anyone would want to live in a world dominated by the People’s Liberation Army Navy, rather than the U.S. Navy, is a question worth pondering.

Still, alternative models of custodianship over the commons could emerge. The choice need not be between a single world-straddling hegemon and a war of all against all on the high seas. Why not experiment with a multinational guarantor of maritime security, or with a patchwork of regional alliances and partnerships—an idea countenanced by the 2007 maritime strategy? Fashioning such arrangements would doubtless be messier, and certainly less uniform, than superintending a Pax Americana. Coalition politics are like that. But it behooves pundits and practitioners of sea power to think ahead to a world where the United States remains first among equals—where it encourages local powers to shoulder constabulary duty in their neighborhoods while consolidating its own effort and assets where compelling political and strategic interests lie. Judging from official statements of purpose, that means East and South Asia.

Pullquote: The benefits of policing the global system are remote and abstract, while the benefits of pulling back are concrete and quantifiable. No wonder naval proponents fret about what the future may hold.Image: Essay Types: Book Review