Curtis24
01-14-2012, 01:47 PM
From George Friedman's "The Next 100 Years" - this is America's strategy to rule the world! ;)
I: The complete domination of North America by the United States ArmyHad the United States remained a nation of discrete states existing between the Atlantic coast and the Allegheny mountains, it is extremely unlikely that it would have survived. It not only had to unite but had to spread into the vast territory between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains. This gave the United States not only strategic depth but also some of the richest agricultural land in the world. Even more important, it was land with a superb system of navigable rivers that allowed the country's agricultural surplus to be shipped to world markets, creating a class of businessmen-farmers that is unique in history.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave the United States title to this land. But it was the Battle of New Orleans in 1814, in which Andrew Jackson defeated the British, that gave the nation real control of the region, since New Orleans was the single choke point of the entire river system. If Yorktown founded the nation, the Battle of New Orleans founded its economy. And what secured this in turn was the Battle of San Jacinto, a few hundred miles west of New Orleans, where the Mexican army was defeated by Texans adn thus could never pose a threat to the Mississippi River basin again. The defeat of the Mexican army was not inevitable. Mexico was in many ways a more developed and powerful country than the United States. Its defeat made the U.S. Army the dominant power in North America and secured the continent for the United States - a vast and rich country that no one could challenge.
2: The elimination of any threat to the United States by any power in the Western HemisphereWith North America secured, the only other immediate threat came from Latin America. In reality, North and South America are islands, not really connected: Panama and Central America are impassable by large armies. South America's unification into a single entity is remote. When you look at a map of South America, leaving out impassable terrain, you see that there can be no transcontinental power: the continent is sliced in two(by rainforests and mountain ranges). So there is no chance of a native threat to the United States emerging from South America.
The major threats in the hemisphere came from European powers with naval bases in South and Central America and the Caribbean, as well as land forces in Mexico. That is what the Monroe Doctrine was about - long before the United States had the ability to stop the Europeans from having bases there, it made blocking the Europeans a strategic imperative. The only time the United States really worries about Latin America is when a foreign power has bases there.
3: Complete control of the maritime approaches to the United States by the navy in order to preclude any possibility of invasionIn 1812, the British navy sailed up the Chesapeake and burned Washington. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was terrified that the British, using their overwhelming control of the North Atlantic, would shut off its access to the ocean, strangling the United States. It was not always a paranoid fear: the British did consider this on more than one occasion. This general problem was, in other contexts, the origin of the American obsession with Cuba, from the Spanish-American War through the Cold War.
Having secured the hemisphere in the late nineteenth century, the United States has an interest in keeping the sea lanes approaching its borders free of foreign naval power. The United States secured its Pacific approaches first. During the Civil War it acquired Alaska. In 1898 it annexed Hawaii. Those two actions taken together closed off the threat of any enemy fleet being able to approach the continent from the west, by eliminating any anchorage for supplying a fleet. The United States secured the Atlantic by using World War II to take advantage of British weakness, driving it from near the U.S. coast, and by the end of World War II had created a fleet of such enormous power that the British were unable to operate in the Atlantic without U.S. approval. This made the United States effectively invulnerable to invasion.
Complete domination of the world's oceans to further secure U.S. physical safety and guarantee control over the international trading systemThe fact that the United States emerged from World War II not only with the world's largest navy but also with naval bases scattered around the world changed the way the world worked. As I mentioned previously, any seagoing vessel - commercial or military, from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea to the Caribbean - could be monitored by the United States Navy, who could choose to watch it, stop it, or sink it. From the end of World War II onward, the combined weight of all of the world's existing fleets was insignificant compared to American naval power.
This highlights the single most important geopolitical fact in the world: the United States controls all of the oceans. No other power in history has been able to do this. And that control is not only the foundation of America's security but also the foundation of its ability to shape the international system. No one goes anywhere on the seas if the United States doesn't approve. At the end of the day, maintaining its control of the world's oceans is the single most important goal for the United States geopolitically.
The prevention of any other nation from challenging U.S. global naval powerHaving achieved the unprecedented feat of dominating all of the world's oceans, the United States obviously wanted to continue to hold them. The simplest way to do this was to prevent other nations from building navies, and this could be done by making certain that no one was motvated to build navies - or had the resources to do so. One strategy, "the carrot", is to make sure that everyone has access to the sea without needing to build a navy. The other strategy, "the stick," is to tie down potential enemies in land-based confrontations so that they are forced to exhaust their military dollars on troops and tanks, with little left over for navies.
The United States emerged from the Cold War with both an ongoing interest and a fixed strategy. The ongoing interest was preventing any Eurasian power from becoming sufficiently secure to divert resources to navy building. Since there was no longer a single threat of Eurasian hegemony, the United States focused on the emergence of secondary, regional hegemons who might develop enough regional security to allow them to begin probing out to sea. The United States therefore worked to create a continually shifting series of alliances designed to tie down any potential regional hegemon.
I: The complete domination of North America by the United States ArmyHad the United States remained a nation of discrete states existing between the Atlantic coast and the Allegheny mountains, it is extremely unlikely that it would have survived. It not only had to unite but had to spread into the vast territory between the Alleghenies and the Rocky Mountains. This gave the United States not only strategic depth but also some of the richest agricultural land in the world. Even more important, it was land with a superb system of navigable rivers that allowed the country's agricultural surplus to be shipped to world markets, creating a class of businessmen-farmers that is unique in history.
The Louisiana Purchase of 1803 gave the United States title to this land. But it was the Battle of New Orleans in 1814, in which Andrew Jackson defeated the British, that gave the nation real control of the region, since New Orleans was the single choke point of the entire river system. If Yorktown founded the nation, the Battle of New Orleans founded its economy. And what secured this in turn was the Battle of San Jacinto, a few hundred miles west of New Orleans, where the Mexican army was defeated by Texans adn thus could never pose a threat to the Mississippi River basin again. The defeat of the Mexican army was not inevitable. Mexico was in many ways a more developed and powerful country than the United States. Its defeat made the U.S. Army the dominant power in North America and secured the continent for the United States - a vast and rich country that no one could challenge.
2: The elimination of any threat to the United States by any power in the Western HemisphereWith North America secured, the only other immediate threat came from Latin America. In reality, North and South America are islands, not really connected: Panama and Central America are impassable by large armies. South America's unification into a single entity is remote. When you look at a map of South America, leaving out impassable terrain, you see that there can be no transcontinental power: the continent is sliced in two(by rainforests and mountain ranges). So there is no chance of a native threat to the United States emerging from South America.
The major threats in the hemisphere came from European powers with naval bases in South and Central America and the Caribbean, as well as land forces in Mexico. That is what the Monroe Doctrine was about - long before the United States had the ability to stop the Europeans from having bases there, it made blocking the Europeans a strategic imperative. The only time the United States really worries about Latin America is when a foreign power has bases there.
3: Complete control of the maritime approaches to the United States by the navy in order to preclude any possibility of invasionIn 1812, the British navy sailed up the Chesapeake and burned Washington. Throughout the nineteenth century, the United States was terrified that the British, using their overwhelming control of the North Atlantic, would shut off its access to the ocean, strangling the United States. It was not always a paranoid fear: the British did consider this on more than one occasion. This general problem was, in other contexts, the origin of the American obsession with Cuba, from the Spanish-American War through the Cold War.
Having secured the hemisphere in the late nineteenth century, the United States has an interest in keeping the sea lanes approaching its borders free of foreign naval power. The United States secured its Pacific approaches first. During the Civil War it acquired Alaska. In 1898 it annexed Hawaii. Those two actions taken together closed off the threat of any enemy fleet being able to approach the continent from the west, by eliminating any anchorage for supplying a fleet. The United States secured the Atlantic by using World War II to take advantage of British weakness, driving it from near the U.S. coast, and by the end of World War II had created a fleet of such enormous power that the British were unable to operate in the Atlantic without U.S. approval. This made the United States effectively invulnerable to invasion.
Complete domination of the world's oceans to further secure U.S. physical safety and guarantee control over the international trading systemThe fact that the United States emerged from World War II not only with the world's largest navy but also with naval bases scattered around the world changed the way the world worked. As I mentioned previously, any seagoing vessel - commercial or military, from the Persian Gulf to the South China Sea to the Caribbean - could be monitored by the United States Navy, who could choose to watch it, stop it, or sink it. From the end of World War II onward, the combined weight of all of the world's existing fleets was insignificant compared to American naval power.
This highlights the single most important geopolitical fact in the world: the United States controls all of the oceans. No other power in history has been able to do this. And that control is not only the foundation of America's security but also the foundation of its ability to shape the international system. No one goes anywhere on the seas if the United States doesn't approve. At the end of the day, maintaining its control of the world's oceans is the single most important goal for the United States geopolitically.
The prevention of any other nation from challenging U.S. global naval powerHaving achieved the unprecedented feat of dominating all of the world's oceans, the United States obviously wanted to continue to hold them. The simplest way to do this was to prevent other nations from building navies, and this could be done by making certain that no one was motvated to build navies - or had the resources to do so. One strategy, "the carrot", is to make sure that everyone has access to the sea without needing to build a navy. The other strategy, "the stick," is to tie down potential enemies in land-based confrontations so that they are forced to exhaust their military dollars on troops and tanks, with little left over for navies.
The United States emerged from the Cold War with both an ongoing interest and a fixed strategy. The ongoing interest was preventing any Eurasian power from becoming sufficiently secure to divert resources to navy building. Since there was no longer a single threat of Eurasian hegemony, the United States focused on the emergence of secondary, regional hegemons who might develop enough regional security to allow them to begin probing out to sea. The United States therefore worked to create a continually shifting series of alliances designed to tie down any potential regional hegemon.