Continental Powers and Naval Development: Strategy Coherence, Threat Diffusion, and Success at Sea

Forthcoming in Routledge’s Cass Series: Naval Policy and History

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

Crucial to the discussion of whether China will surpass or challenge US domination of the international system 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 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 (or absence) influences the state of relations between great powers.

I discuss the book’s themes on Maritime Security Challenges; an article derived from the book is published by the US Naval Institute.

An abridged version of the France case study appears in Paul Kennedy and Evan Wilson’s edited Navies in Multipolar Worlds: From the Age of Sail to the Present. I also discuss the France case on the Center for International Maritime Security’s Sea Control podcast.