The War of 1812 is a mindbender among naval wars. Seldom does a society mistake defeat for victory and codify the loser strategy as the playbook for future conflicts. But so it was for the United States for most of the nineteenth century. Americans celebrated a stirring string of single-ship battles early in the war, confusing tactical triumphs with strategic and political results. Forgotten was the fact that the foe, Great Britain and its Royal Navy, had mounted an effective blockade as the conflict went on—confining those U.S. Navy frigates to port and consigning them to tactical and operational irrelevance. U.S. commerce wilted. This was no victory.

If anything the War of 1812 was a guide to how not to wage war at sea. Americans reared on the minuteman tradition believed that the best strategy was to improvise a fleet at the outset of war, take it out to sea, and thrash the preeminent navy of the day. It was safe and economical to neglect the navy in peacetime.

Such a non-strategy amounts to begging for defeat, but it was enshrined in popular lore nonetheless. You still hear echoes of the boosterism. To this day tour guides on board USS Constitution at Charlestown Navy Yard inform visitors that the sail frigate is Boston’s only undefeated sports team. That’s true—but it obscures the fact that a lot of sea battles remained unfought because Constitution and other ships of war couldn’t get out to sea and into action late in the war.

They were strategically inert however impressive their tactical feats of arms.

Ultimately saltwater-minded historians, chiefly Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan, took it upon themselves to set the record straight—and convince their countrymen that sea power is not a birthright. They wrote histories of the naval war of 1812 to debunk mythmaking, instill a less sentimental, more accurate memory of the war, and imprint on the popular mind basic precepts of sea power. Namely that would-be seafaring peoples have to work at it. They have to make the conscious political choice for sea power, and reaffirm it again and again lest the virtuous cycle among commerce, diplomacy, and naval might sputter. The nation’s seaward quest could falter absent constant, painstaking industrial and military toil. In an open society like the United States, only popular resolve can impel labor of the necessary magnitude and duration.

TR and Mahan resolved to replace the predominant memory of the War of 1812, putting in its place a historical narrative meant to spur the nation toward saltwater primacy in the Western Hemisphere and perhaps beyond.

To see how weird that war’s legacy was, juxtapose it against the pattern typical after a smashing, unambiguous high-seas victory. Oftentimes a triumphal afterglow envelops a major success at arms, blurring the minds of the victors with regard to warlike affairs. They exult at success while braying to dismantle the armory that made it possible. Government and society clamor for a peace dividend, demanding relief from heavy expenditures on armaments and military campaigns. In extreme cases victors delude themselves into believing their victory is for all time—that history has ended rather than dropped into a lull before the next round of strategic competition and conflict. The tendency to cut back on military preparedness is even more pronounced when no new peer competitor has surged over the horizon or appears likely to. Victors may lay down arms—leaving themselves ill-prepared for history when it makes its comeback. As it will.

There are hazards to winning too big.

Oftentimes, moreover, sensational victories have perverse effects on navies themselves. Think about the Battle of Trafalgar (1805), where a Royal Navy fleet commanded by Lord Horatio Nelson pasted a combined Franco-Spanish fleet and set the gold standard for decisive sea combat. Not only did Trafalgar seem to ratify the British way of marine strategy and war, it eliminated the Royal Navy’s only serious rivals for maritime mastery for the better part of a century. The Royal Navy was hardly idle between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. But it mostly fought imperial police actions against outgunned antagonists.

With no peer competitor to keep it sharp—iron sharpens iron, as the proverb has it—Britain’s naval establishment succumbed to all manner of bad habits. Control-freakism took hold within the Admiralty and officer corps. Fleet commanders took to choreographing maneuvers intricately, starting soon after Trafalgar. Scripting subordinate commanders’ actions stultified enterprise and derring-do. It wrongfooted them for the rigors of sea combat, where individual initiative is at a premium. Unthinking obedience to orders was a must in the Victorian navy. So were immaculate paperwork, spit and polish, and other endeavors only loosely related to combat performance. Small wonder the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet underperformed when summoned to action at the Battle of Jutland (1916).

What historian Andrew Gordon terms the long calm lee of victory is an illusory calm. It lulls a navy into complacency. A lee is the downwind side of a landmass or other large object. Its bulk blocks out the elements or, in Gordon’s metaphorical sense, the hard realities of oceanic warfare. But the wind eventually shifts to some other point of the compass. The lee ceases being a lee. Heavy weather resumes buffeting the service. History’s return comes as a shock to any institution grown accustomed to sheltering from martial reality. That institution can either regenerate capability and unlearn bad habits in a hurry—or lose.

Much as history confronted the Royal Navy anew in the North Sea back then, the rise of a strong, seafaring, domineering China confronts today’s U.S. Navy with its own return to history. If Trafalgar shielded the Royal Navy from the clangor of high-end combat for decades, the U.S. Navy has long operated in the dual lee of the Battle of Leyte Gulf (1944), whose eightieth anniversary the service observed last month, and of the victory-by-default in the Cold War thirty-plus years ago (1991). Generations of naval magnates have succumbed to bad practices similar to those documented by Roosevelt, Mahan, and Gordon.

It’s not hard to see why. The U.S. Pacific Fleet, overseen by Admiral William F. Halsey Jr. and Vice Admiral Thomas C. Kinkaid, crushed the remnants of the Imperial Japanese Navy at Leyte Gulf. The Pacific Fleet sank its major rival and in turn deprived the U.S. Navy of a peer competitor until the rise of the Soviet Navy in the 1960s and 1970s. Leyte Gulf is America’s Trafalgar. Victory let the U.S. Navy transform itself into a transoceanic force able to project power onto foreign seacoasts—Korea, Vietnam—with impunity. After all, no one had coastal weaponry sufficient to deny the U.S. fleet access to offshore waters needed to radiate power inland. The dearth of an antagonist possessed of comparable might and fighting prowess dulled doctrine, combat methods, and habits of mind necessary to vanquish one.

The Cold War denouement compounded the legacy of Leyte Gulf, and it was something like the aftermath of the War of 1812. Americans mistook defeat for victory after the War of 1812, but after 1991 they mistook a no-contest against the Soviet Navy for a triumph of seismic proportions. After all, American and Soviet fleets never met in action. The Soviet Navy quit the field without a fight. No one knows who would have prevailed in battle.

And yet Americans and officialdom responded as though their navy had won a victory at arms comparable to Trafalgar or Leyte Gulf. The predictable calls for a peace dividend issued forth. In 1992 the U.S. sea services in effect proclaimed that naval history had ended, and that they commanded important sea expanses more or less forever. With no adversary of Soviet proportions left to fight, they dismantled parts of the arsenal necessary for antiship, antiair, and antisubmarine warfare. They more or less stopped honing tactics, techniques, and procedures for fleet-on-fleet clashes that would, after all, never happen according to sea-service leaders. Instead the service turned its attention and energies to projecting power ashore from the offshore safe haven that was the sea.

It's worth noting—and Theodore Roosevelt and Alfred Thayer Mahan would doubtless concur—that the United States had gotten lucky after the War of 1812. Fortune favors fools, drunks, and the USA. The new republic got away with misconstruing the war’s lessons because for most of the century it had a silent partner in its maritime defense, namely Great Britain and the Royal Navy. Britain had reasons of its own for keeping rival European empires out of the Americas, and a fleet able to enforce its will. And that’s precisely what it did. The United States was a fortunate beneficiary of British maritime policy and strategy, freeriding on the erstwhile mother country.

But the Royal Navy bulwark began to crumble toward the end of the century, especially once imperial Germany resolved to construct a battleship fleet in the North Sea, aimed squarely at the British Isles. The decline of British sea power left the United States little choice but to fill the void that ensued as the Royal Navy drew down its presence in the Western Hemisphere. Washington DC had to take up responsibility for U.S. nautical security, and lay down ships of war to make good on its policies. But before that could happen American society and government needed to unlearn false lessons from the War of 1812—clearing the cultural and political impediment to sea power that so vexed navalists during the age of TR and Mahan. Apathy would no longer do. Americans had to take the seaward project seriously—and throw their political weight behind it.