Against the Current: Continental Great Powers and Success at Sea

Can a continental great power like China also become a naval great power? And what would that mean for the United States?

One major question that preoccupies scholars and policymakers alike is whether China will surpass or challenge US domination of the international system; crucial to this discussion is the role of China’s developing navy, for no power has dominated global affairs for very long without a navy of the first rank. Yet, when one looks at the history of continental great-power naval development, one sees different outcomes. How a traditionally continental great power can simultaneously build one of the world’s great navies (a task I call military hybridization) and, in doing so, become a hybrid power is a puzzle whose answer is not systematically pieced together, even as military hybridity has been a highly consequential factor in world politics. What explains the variation in continental great powers’ hybridization attempts, and what are the lessons for international politics moving forward? Will China, a great power with perennial landward security challenges and little historical experience with blue-water power projection, succeed?

My book project investigates the variation in outcome of continental great-power hybridization attempts. I argue that two factors explain where a continental great power’s attempt at naval development will fall on the success-failure spectrum: strategy coherence and threat diffusion. I analyze the entire universe of continental great-power hybridizers from 1801 onwards and show how strategy coherence and threat diffusion explain the varying degrees of success in continental great-power hybridization, and how their application can offer a peaceful way forward for contemporary Chinese naval development and the US-PRC relationship in the twenty-first century.

An abridged version of the France case study appears in Paul Kennedy and Evan Wilson, eds., Navies in Multipolar Worlds: From the Age of Sail to the Present, Cass Series: Naval Policy and History 66 (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021). The France case is also discussed on the Center for International Maritime Security’s Sea Control podcast. An article derived from the book project is published by the US Naval Institute.

Presentations: American Political Science Association (2021), Cornell University (2019), International Studies Association (2019), Maritime Security Challenges (2021), United States Naval Academy (2019 and 2021), and Yale University (2018).