ISAS Working Papers

A recent Western visitor to a major annual security conclave in Singapore appeared utterly surprised at the extraordinary influence of the American theorist of sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan. Most western naval analysts do acknowledge the huge influence of Mahan on the evolution of naval thinking across the advanced world from the turn of the 20th century to its early decades. Most Western analysts also believe that Mahan, once described as the evangelist of sea power, is now passé. The sense of absolute military superiority in the United States and the West during the recent decades has tended to reinforce the proposition that the new wave of economic globalisation has made the geopolitics of the kind espoused by Mahan as being largely irrelevant to the ordering of the modern world. No wonder then that the Western observer was recoiling at the “unwelcome” comeback of Mahan’s conceptions of sea power and geopolitics in Asia.3 The observer argues that while the understanding of sea power and its uses has evolved in the advanced societies since the days of Mahan at the turn of the 20th century, he “is now hugely admired in Asia’s two most populous powers. For China’s strategic planners, securing sea lanes against hostile powers has become perhaps the chief preoccupation. For India’s, it is the growth of China’s presence in its backyard, in and around the Indian Ocean. In both countries Mahan is pressed into service in one planning paper after the next”.