Word of US Naval Decline is Premature

Robert Kaplan sounded the alarm of "America's Elegant Decline" in the November 2007 issue of The Atlantic, warning that the relative decline of US naval power was already well under way, nibbled away by a shrinking budget, rising costs, and threatened by rising naval powers. A mixture of fact and alarmist fantasy, making the absurd claim that the US Naval officers name buildings after arch-theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan and merely pay him lip service, while the real Mahanian warriors are now to be found in China. The article reveals a profound misunderstanding of the true extent of modern American naval dominance, and a poor reading of history.

The British Example

As the sole great naval power in history, studying the role of naval power in the rise and fall of the British Empire is at the heart of any lessons history has to teach on naval affairs. The Royal Navy was the first blue water imperial navy in the modern sense of the phrase, and interestingly Kaplan draws no meaningful direct comparisons between it and the current US Navy's situation, limiting himself to general statements and pithy quotes about the decline of Pax Britannica.

The often imagined predominance of the Royal Navy is, in fact, a reality of its post-Napoleonic 19^th Century period. It spent the 17^th and 18^th Centuries fighting to achieve that global supremacy, and was outnumbered at different points during its wars to overcome the navies of the Dutch, French, and Spanish. It very rarely was able to simply out-build its rivals in a straight arms race. More often, Whitehall had to rely on their rivals dividing their resources, and when that did not work the Royal Navy sank, burned, and captured its way to the top.