The Accidental Superpower

by Peter Zeihan

  Local Powers

  If the United States has one of the easiest geographies to develop, Mexico has one of the most difficult. The entirety of Mexico is in essence the southern extension of the Rocky Mountains, which is a kind way of saying that America’s worst lands are strikingly similar to Mexico’s best lands. As one would expect from a terrain that is mountain-dominated, there are no navigable rivers and no large cohesive pieces of arable land like the American Southeast or the Columbia valley, much less the Midwest. Each mountain valley is a sort of fastness where a small handful of oligarchs control local economic and political life. Mexico shouldn’t be thought of as a unified state, but instead as a collage of dozens of little Mexicos where local power brokers constantly align with and against each other (and a national government seeking—often in vain—to stitch together something more cohesive). In its regional disconnectedness Mexico is a textbook case that countries with the greatest need for capital-intensive infrastructure are typically the countries with the lowest ability to generate the capital necessary to build that infrastructure. By the time the Mexicans completed their first rail line from their sole significant (preindustrial) port at Veracruz to Mexico City in 1873, the Americans already had over fifty thousand miles of operational track.

  Canada has a similar unity problem, as geography splits the country into five pieces:

  • The Canadian Rockies split British Columbia from the Prairies.

  • The Canadian Shield, a region where repeated glaciation stripped the soil and shattered the bedrock, splits the Prairies from Ontario. A single thousand-mile transport corridor snakes through the shield to link the regions.

  • That same shield keeps Ontario apart from Quebec. What infrastructure links them hugs the Saint Lawrence River.

  • The Gulf of Saint Lawrence separates Quebec from the Maritime provinces, again, linked by a single transport corridor (well, the mainland Maritimes anyway—the island Maritimes are obviously on their own). For most purposes each of these zones functions as an independent country.

  The one thing that Canada has going for it is that it does have a navigable waterway—the Saint Lawrence—but since that waterway merges with the Great Lakes, the Saint Lawrence watercourse is shared with the United States, making most Canadian waterborne commerce subject to American proclivities. That, in fact, is the theme of Canada as a whole. It is far easier for almost all of the Canadian provinces to integrate economically with the United States than with each other.

  Beyond Mexico and Canada, there are no other powers that could even theoretically march on American territory. While technically North America and South America are connected by the Panamanian isthmus, the land is so swampy that even now—five hundred years after the region’s first European exploration—there is not a single road connecting the two American continents.

  Ocean Buffers

  As hard as it is to conceive of a credible military threat to the United States arising in North America, coming up with one from beyond the continent strains the imagination. The oceans serve as fantastic buffers, sharply limiting unwanted interaction with the larger populations of Europe and East Asia. As leaders like Napoleon and Hirohito learned, attacking over water proves a bit of a logistical challenge. An amphibious assault requires military infrastructure, equipment, and training that has little use in any sort of military operation except an amphibious assault. For countries like France or Germany or Russia that are perennially concerned about the security of their land borders, simply having an amphibious assault capacity—much less attempting an assault—is a luxury that they cannot typically afford. At the height of its power Nazi Germany abandoned plans to invade Great Britain due to the difficulty of crossing the English Channel, a body of water but twenty-one miles across at its narrowest point. The shortest distance from Europe to the United States is over three thousand.

  Considering the distances involved, the outside world missed its best chance to disrupt America’s development in the War of 1812, one of only two occasions when the Americans faced an extrahemispheric invasion (the other being the Revolutionary War). The critical battle was for Fort McHenry in September 1814.

  The British had sacked and captured Washington, D.C., just three weeks before and were moving north by land and sea toward Baltimore. At the time, Baltimore was the largest city in the region and a notorious hub for the privateers who had been raiding British shipping lines. But it was also the sole meaningful land link between the northern and southern states: With the Allegheny Mountains to the west, all roads hugged the Chesapeake Bay, which in turn led to the bay’s major city and port. As importantly, the entirety of inland America was dependent upon Baltimore. The Cumberland Narrows through the Appalachians lay just to the west, and only three years earlier the government had begun construction on a road to connect the Potomac River to the Ohio valley. Instead of a months-long sail down to New Orleans, then up the Mississippi to the Ohio, this new National Road would allow Baltimore to serve as an immediate outlet for Pittsburgh and lands beyond.

  If the British could hold Baltimore, the war’s other theaters would be rendered moot and the young America would be split into North, South, and interior. Luckily for the Americans, Major George Armistead’s heroic defense of Fort McHenry convinced British commanders that the post could not be taken with available forces. While time has eroded the details from the American mind, all Americans instantly recognize the description of the battle and its outcome as recorded by an American who watched the battle from the deck of a British vessel where he was being held prisoner: Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”

  The Americans got not just a catchy tune out of the event, but also a lesson in strategic vulnerability and sea approaches. The British attempt on Baltimore—indeed, the entire war effort—would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean.

  The Americans took note of which territories were used and reshaped their foreign and military policies to ensure that those lands—and any like them—could never be used for such purposes again.

  • After the War of 1812, the British were obsessed with reformulating Europe in the aftermath of Napoleon’s fall. American diplomatic, economic, and military pressure succeeded in hiving Canada off from Britain and transitioning it to neutrality.

  • In the latter half of the 1800s, the United States both purchased Alaska (1867) and annexed the Hawaiian Islands (1898). This did more than push back potential Asian hostiles twenty-six hundred miles. Beyond Hawaii the next meaningful speck of land is the 2.4-square-mile atoll of Midway, another thirteen hundred miles from either Hawaii or Alaska. The Americans militarily snagged Midway in 1903.

  • In the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Americans seized direct control of Puerto Rico and de facto control of Cuba. This prevented any hostile power from potentially severing American access from the greater Mississippi basin to the outside world via the Florida and Yucatán Straits.

  • The Americans usurped British control of the western Atlantic outright with the Lend-Lease program in the early part of World War II. By terms of the agreement the United Kingdom gave the United States rent-free control for ninety-nine years of nearly all of the serviceable British ports in the Western Hemisphere.

  By the beginning of their participation in World War II, the Americans had already secured all of the potential approaches that could be used for an assault on North America.

  Of course, approaches can go both ways. While the United States is largely immune to extrahemispheric invasion, there are any number of potential routes that the Americans could—and during World War II did—use to invade Europe and Asia. By the end of the war the Americans had not only extensively used launching points such as Iceland, Sicily, and Great Britain, but the postwar NATO alliance brought islands like Zealand, the Azores, Cyprus, and the Faroes into the American defense network.

  Asia’s sea approaches are even more favorable to the Americans. Off the East Asian coast ar
e not simply a series of archipelagoes, but a series of well-established, populous nations: Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. All, like the United Kingdom, are full-on powers in their own right. What do they have in common? A fear that another regional power might one day be powerful enough to end them. In the past this has made them hostile to Japan (and friendly to the United States), and in the present this has made them hostile to China (and friendly to the United States). As of 2014 all—including Japan—are allies.

  The net effect is that the United States now has a multilayered defense of the homeland before one even considers its alliance structure, its maritime prowess, or the general inability of Eurasian powers to assault it.

  Which brings us to the final point about why the United States is nearly immune to rivals.

  There is no one who is capable of trying.

  A Lack of Eurasian Powers

  Pulling off an invasion of North America would require three particularly onerous prerequisites. First and most obvious, it takes a huge population to duke it out with a country of over 300 million on its home territory. The only entities with the population that could even theoretically attempt such a task are China, India, the combined European Union, and Russia.

  Second, there is (a lot) more to launching an extrahemispheric amphibious assault than a (whole) lot of troops. Also required is the industrial might and technological command required to construct the ships and sail halfway around the world into a region in which the defender would be able to bring land-based defenses—most notably aircraft—to bear. Currently, the world’s second and third most powerful navies just happen to be the only two naval powers that the Americans have clashed with: Japan and the United Kingdom. Both are now allies. Beyond those two countries, there are none that have even moderate levels of military sealift capacity.

  Third and finally, any would-be invader must have the strategic freedom to build an invasion fleet in the first place. For any country with land borders, an army to patrol and protect the state is an absolute necessity—but a navy is an expensive luxury, or at best a fringe armed services branch. It’s the army that carries out the day-to-day mission of defending the frontier, while the navy’s superior movement capacity makes it primarily an expeditionary arm. Expeditionary arms are handy when you have secure borders, and largely pointless when you do not. (What good is a small task force that can reach around the globe if a foe can simply roll across your frontier with his tanks?) It is this simple point—more than any others—that has sharply limited the number of significant naval powers in world history. Even at the height of their power, the Soviets never had free forces sufficient to contemplate an invasion of England, much less North America. Again, this limits the list to two American allies: Japan and the United Kingdom.

  Pulling off an invasion that is continental in scope and extracontinental in reach requires a special constellation of factors and forces, and even with them in place it is just as hard as it sounds. In fact, it has only ever been done successfully once in human history, and it wasn’t done against the Americans—it was done by the Americans.

  Deepwater Navigation and the United States

  In addition to the inestimable advantages discussed above, no geography on the planet is better suited than America’s for the technologies of deepwater navigation, which in turn has made it the greatest maritime power the world has ever seen.

  What made Britain the absolute master of the seas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was pretty straightforward. An island was always going to be a better generator of sailors, captains, ships, and fleets than a mainland state. Resources didn’t need to be dedicated to an army, so they were available to instead flow into a navy. And the same acumen that allowed for a powerful merchant marine (you can’t trade by land when you’re on an island) could also contribute to a robust military fleet.

  Americans enjoy this same advantage, but increased by an order of magnitude. The United States isn’t technically an island, but the inability of Canada or Mexico to threaten it by land makes it an island functionally. As an island-continent it simply has a greater quantitative ability to leverage deepwater technologies than anything the British on their mid-sized island could manage.

  Then there is the absolutely dominating factor of how large and perfectly positioned America’s waterways are. America’s rivers transform cities deep in the interior such as Pittsburgh, St. Paul, Sioux City, and Tulsa into ocean ports. Having more internal waterways than everyone else combined has certainly got to make the United States the premier maritime power, right?

  Correct. But the continental scope of the United States and its omnipresent waterways are only the beginning of why the United States is the ultimate home for deepwater navigation.

  Ports

  The United States has more port potential than the rest of the world combined.

  Ports require a friendly coastline. Most ocean coastline is not suited to serving as ports. Tidal differences require the construction of expensive infrastructure—jetties have to be extended into deep water so that ships can dock safely regardless of the tidal cycle. Storms are an even bigger problem: Damage from winds—or worse yet, from hurricane-spawned storm surges—can wreck a territory miles inland. That’s why most ports are located on bays, where the ocean can only punch in from one direction.4 While bays are hardly rare, they are certainly not omnipresent and oftentimes very lengthy coastlines have but a few. The coast of Africa, for example, may be sixteen thousand miles long, but in reality it has only ten locations with bays of sufficient protective capacity to justify port construction, three of which are in South Africa.

  Ports also require a sufficient hinterland to support them in the first place. In this, Northern Europe faced quite a few challenges in the centuries before European dominance, as much of the coastline was marsh and mud, as is northern China’s. Brazil north of the 22nd parallel south—roughly the latitude of Rio de Janeiro—isn’t much better. South of the 22nd parallel, Brazil’s coast is all cliff, as is much of southern China’s. Australia’s coast may be accessible, but it is so arid it is almost devoid of people—as is North Africa’s coast. Russia’s coast—like most of Canada’s—is (sub) arctic. What few African locations have a friendly coast are often backed up by swamp, desert, or jungle. The entire Sub-Saharan region really only has four coastal areas capable of supporting cities of significant size (two of which are still in South Africa).

  The contrast to the United States could not be starker. When it comes to having ample coastal frontage, hinterlands for cities, and deep passages for shipping, Puget Sound, San Francisco Bay, and Chesapeake Bay are bar none the world’s three largest and best natural harbors. Chesapeake Bay alone boasts longer stretches of prime port property than the entire continental coast of Asia from Vladivostok to Lahore. Additional areas such as New York Harbor and Mobile Bay are “merely” world-class.

  And then there are America’s barrier islands. They block the strongest of storm surges and mitigate tidal variations. Regular breaks in the barrier island chains allow for easy access to the open ocean, while the near omnipresence of the islands provides the Gulf and East Coasts with port opportunities that can best be described as egregious. Courtesy of those barrier islands, Texas alone has thirteen world-class deepwater ports, only half of which see significant use, and room for at least three times more. Why not expand port capacity? Because the United States has more port possibilities than it has ever needed, despite the fact that it has been the world’s largest producer, importer, and exporter of agricultural and manufactured goods for most of its history.

  Nearby Waterways

  Beyond its superfluity of port potential, the United States actually has control of more waterways than even its river system would suggest.

  The island of Cuba and the Yucatán and Florida peninsulas limit access to the Gulf of Mexico to two straits, creatively named the Yucatán and Florida Straits. These sharply limit the ability of extra
hemispheric powers to play in the Gulf of Mexico.

  Within the Gulf there is no contest. Of the score of active ports of note, only one, Veracruz, is not American. Mexico’s lack of naval acumen allowed the Americans to capture Veracruz not once but twice in order to force its will on Mexico City. The inability of Mexico to challenge the United States by land, and the absolute ability of the United States to dominate Mexico by water, makes the Gulf of Mexico a de facto American lake. That means that since the Civil War the Americans have never had to worry about fortifying anything along the Gulf Coast, even when German U-boats were sinking shipping in the millions of tons off the East Coast.

  To the north there is Canada’s only waterway—the Saint Lawrence River—which too is in effect an American waterway.

  In 1871, Canada first tried to solve the Saint Lawrence’s winter ice and the Great Lakes’ waterfalls problems5 with a series of locks on the river and construction of the Welland Canal. By the 1890s, however, the Canadians had proposed a partnership with Washington for a more extensive, binational waterway that would link the Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes. The main selling point was that the Americans would actually benefit more than the Canadians from improving the waterways on their common border. The Canadians were indeed correct: Bringing the Great Lakes online would turn places like Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit into full-on ocean ports.