It is no longer the maritime or the continent, but the combination of the two that is decisive. China cites the example: Continental powers are also sailing never to return.

By Ret Admiral Cem Gürdeniz

Global Research, September 18, 2025

 

For centuries, those who commanded sea power determined the world order. Throughout history, nations that mastered the necessary technology and trained the manpower to go to sea gained access to the earth’s new riches without encountering obstacles on land. Global reach gave birth to global powers. Whether founded on an island or on a continent, once naval powers reached the oceans, they attained the peak of strength. Thus, maritime empires emerged. Their rivals were always continental empires. Although some empires managed to establish both, the one strong at sea always had the final say. While continental empires were short-lived, powers that ventured to sea and never withdrew secured lasting superiority. The geography of the planet, the course of history, and the character of nations naturally created the geopolitical environment, and scenarios emerged accordingly. Yet in each scenario, the decisive factor was the sea. Any empire that did not anchor its power in the sea eventually collapsed.

Alexander the Great was powerful on land, but he could not establish a naval empire. The Roman Empire, regarded as the longest-lasting empire in history, dominated the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast, and part of the British Isles. Yet its expansion relied mainly on land power, and it was ultimately divided. The Mongols never went to sea from the Eurasian steppes. They controlled economic power by dominating Asia’s Silk and Spice Routes but, having avoided the seas, their empire dissolved within a century. The Holy Roman Empire—whose legacy is carried into today’s EU—failed to build a maritime empire. The Ottoman Empire, influential across three continents, remained a continental power; beyond the Mediterranean, it never gained a lasting presence in other oceans. Its collapse came through invasions from the sea.

Pax Britannica

At the beginning of the 19th century, Protestant England began its rise to dominance over the seas. The maritime nation steadily transformed into a maritime empire. With its technology, manpower, production capacity, capital, and—most importantly—its chain of overseas bases, it developed a corporate strategic mind under the Admiralty. Britain could sever maritime trade routes, impose blockades, and cripple a rival’s commerce whenever and wherever it wished. At the end of the 18th century, with the invention of the steam engine and chronometer, it gained a decisive advantage at sea. At the dawn of the 19th century, by destroying the navies of France and Spain—two continental states—at Trafalgar, it ushered in the era of Pax Britannica, a century-long period of maritime supremacy. As the controlling power of the world’s oceans, Britain successfully thwarted continental rivals for generations and imposed the rules of global trade and shipping that endure to this day.

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An elaborate map of the British Empire in 1886, marked in pink, the traditional colour for imperial British dominions on maps (Public Domain)

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Trade created the infrastructure and wealth needed to sustain sea power. Just as the famous Prussian strategist Clausewitz (1780–1831) emphasized the indispensability of the “trinity” of people, government, and military in his work On War, the American naval theorist Admiral Mahan highlighted the indispensability of “national wealth, commercial power, and sea power.” In this sense, naval strength supports not only geopolitics but also geoeconomics. Today, cultural and technological ecosystems can be added to Mahan’s triad.

France, England’s rival for centuries, reached its height in the 14th century. During the reign of Louis XIV, even with a naval strategist such as Colbert, it failed to surpass England at sea. The main reason was that its military and commercial strength was eroded by costly continental wars and excessive geopolitical ambitions on land. Although France surpassed England technologically in some fields at that time, it chose to expand by land rather than by sea. As a result, it lost its colonies in the Americas and India to England. Still, Colbert promoted trade and naval development to enrich France and implemented important reforms in this area.

The Netherlands fell into a similar trap: it focused only on trade and economic wealth, without sustaining broader maritime power. It neglected the fact that a strong navy was essential for the continuity of trade and the ecosystem of economic wealth. England built a trade system that was supported and sustained by military power. This trade system was rooted in Henry VII’s wool trade, while the foundations of its strong navy were laid by Cromwell’s republic. The system they created endured until 1945, and ultimately until 1956.

Pax Americana

USA with its growing population, industrial and technological power, trade strength rooted in Protestant ethics, its consolidation of national integrity after civil war, and, above all, its ocean-centered geography began to inherit the maritime imperial heritage of UK. At the dawn of the 20th century, however, the United States began to take over. The transfer of hegemony between these two closely related states started around 1890 and was completed by 1956. Remarkably, this transition occurred without direct conflict. The United States transformed its maritime empire into a form of maritime hegemony, which came to be known as Pax Americana.

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1898 political cartoon: “Ten Thousand Miles From Tip to Tip” meaning the extension of U.S. domination (symbolized by a bald eagle) from Puerto Rico to the Philippines. (Public Domain)

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In the 20th century, U.S. hegemony was enforced in two principal ways. First, Washington sought to neutralize existing or potential rivals by encirclement, division, and regime change. Second, it maintained overwhelming firepower ready for deterrence and intervention, projecting power through a global network of naval bases located near key maritime chokepoints or within allied territories. Inheriting Britain’s maritime supremacy in the mid-20th century, the United States preserved and expanded this system, ultimately prevailing in the Cold War.

While the sea-centered world order operated under the protection of the American “global policeman,” opponents were destroyed by military force, political pressure, or economic coercion. In effect, a mafia-like order ruled the seas. Under the rhetoric of a rules-based world order, the United States promoted an economic system centered on the dollar, democracy, liberal capitalism, the IMF, and the World Bank, while ensuring open trade routes. At the same time, maritime powers exploited the wealth generated from the seas to weaken continental states through economic warfare, embargoes, blockades, or by corrupting their leaders. During the Cold War, the United States applied these methods extensively.

The Backbone of the Global Order: Oceans and Seas

Today, the influence of the seas on both human life and geopolitical developments continues to grow. Humanity inhabits a planet that is three-quarters covered by water. Half of the world’s population lives along coastlines, while two-thirds of global production takes place in coastal regions. Ninety percent of global trade—the lifeblood of the world economy—moves by sea. A significant share of energy is extracted from beneath the seabed or transported by maritime routes. Almost all global communications rely on undersea cables. In short, the world order remains fundamentally sea centered. While this order has benefited humanity, it has also allowed the United States, as previous hegemons once did, to wield its naval power as the instrument of war and destruction for capitalism in its imperialist stage.

Declining U.S. Naval Power and Rising China

After the Cold War, the United States downsized its navy, neglected its merchant fleet, and let its shipyard capacity erode. Today, with only 291 ships, the U.S. Navy is experiencing one of the weakest periods in its history. Its shipbuilding industry has also fallen far behind its closest and most significant rival, China, as its infrastructure has entered a state of serious decline. Wrong strategic choices—especially after September 11, 2001—further accelerated this downturn. By prioritizing Israeli geopolitics and shifting toward a continental paradigm, Washington undermined its maritime hegemony and left space for continental powers to rise. It locked itself into a cycle of endless wars against weaker adversaries. It weakened its own globalization project through protectionism, sanctions, and trade wars.

China, by contrast, has undergone a maritime revolution. Since the 1990s, it has shed the reflexes of a classical continental state and embraced Admiral Mahan’s triad of economic size, trade networks, and naval power. The transformation has been unparalleled in speed and scale. Today, China possesses the world’s largest shipbuilding industry, a navy of more than 750 warships, a merchant fleet of some 8,500 vessels, and nearly 1,200 shipyards. Every minute, around 1,600 containers are in motion worldwide—almost half are loaded or unloaded at Chinese ports. Nearly 50 percent of all ships built globally are produced in China.

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Frigate “Weifang” (China) (CC BY 4.0)

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By comparison, the United States has been shrinking its shipbuilding base. The Jones Act of 1920 protects U.S. shipyards, but there are fewer to protect. According to the U.S. Secretary of the Navy, “China can build in one year the ship that the United States takes seven years to produce.” At the start of the Cold War, the U.S. had 11 naval shipyards; today, it has none. Only about seven civilian shipyards remain, compared to China’s hundreds. In wartime, the U.S. could potentially mobilize about 154 civilian yards for warship production, whereas China could mobilize over 1,200. Compounding the issue, the U.S. faces a shortage of qualified sailors, marines, and skilled shipyard workers. Experts estimate that it would take American shipyards 30 years to catch up with China’s output.

China does not yet possess a global network of overseas bases like the United States. However, it holds investment stakes or financial control in more than 100 ports across dozens of countries on five continents and manages nearly half of the world’s container traffic. Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), China is simultaneously laying terrestrial lines across Eurasia and opening to the oceans in a way that is “irreversible.” Backed by its technological revolution, industrial might, and expanding navy, China has become the new seafaring power of the emerging global order. Its transformation has overturned traditional paradigms of continental versus maritime power.

Continental Powers Become Maritime

Continental powers such as China, Russia, and India are now going to sea with different instruments—and staying there, never to return. This signals the end of the unipolar sea centric Atlantic order and the certainty of a multipolar era.

As history has shown since the era of the Athenian city-states, great-power competition in the international system has largely stemmed from the geopolitical divide between continental powers and maritime, trade-oriented powers. This thesis has consistently proven correct: the expansion of capitalism and the expansion of sea power have always been inseparable. Venice, the Netherlands, England, the United States, and now China all represent this paradigm, combining naval power with capital power.

For continental powers, the principal source of strength was always land. Viewing their neighbors as threats or targets for conquest, they built vast armies and drained their wealth through endless wars. Napoleonic France and Nazi Germany stand as the two best examples. By contrast, naval powers prioritized wealth and trade—that is, securing sea routes. They viewed the oceans as a “common space” and sought to establish order there. Britain’s naval supremacy allowed it to defeat Napoleon, and later, the United States rose to global leadership after World War II with the same logic.

Today, the trajectories of the United States and China as global naval powers bear striking similarities. Just as the United States became the world’s largest economy in 1890, China surpassed the United States in foreign trade in 2010—ending 120 years of American leadership in production. (Today, China holds a 30 percent share of global manufacturing, compared to America’s 17 percent.) As the United States grew, it first secured its southern flank (Mexico) and northern flank (Alaska and Canada) to consolidate its geopolitical integrity, before extending into the Pacific (Hawaii and the Philippines) and Central and South America (the Caribbean). Likewise, China is seeking first to expand in its near seas—the Taiwan Strait, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea—because it understands that the seabed is far more valuable than the land.

China is simultaneously expanding its navy and widening the scope of its operations. Contrary to Mahan’s prediction that continental states could not sustain maritime power, China is investing heavily not only in its navy but also in its merchant fleet and shipbuilding industry—pillars of sea power that the United States largely abandoned in the end of 20th century. Aware of its vulnerability at the Strait of Malacca, China has advanced far in asserting control over the South China Sea. Its momentum toward “maritimization” is unprecedented in history.

With its navy and advanced weapons, China is now strong enough to challenge the combined naval power of the West inside the first and second island chains during wartime. Its hypersonic and ballistic missiles—developed with Russian technology—pose a direct threat to U.S. carrier strike groups, making the American Seventh Fleet increasingly vulnerable. Meanwhile, Russia’s opening of Arctic Sea routes under its control in 2021 has transformed Mackinder’s “Heartland” from a purely continental concept into a maritime one. The melting of the polar ice is reshaping Russia’s, and indirectly China’s, maritime geopolitics.

The Continent Challenges the Sea with New Instruments

For the past 500 years, the North Atlantic has been the geopolitical and geoeconomic center of the world. Anglo-Saxon and later Anglo-American dominance of the North Atlantic in the 19th and 20th centuries enabled Britain and the United States—both maritime powers—to coordinate their efforts and manage the two world wars. During both the world wars and the Cold War, uninterrupted access from the U.S. East Coast to Britain and Western European ports became the foundation of U.S. and later NATO control over Europe.

By establishing a direct maritime link between the “island” of America and the Western European peninsula—home to old colonial traditions—and securing it under NATO, created in 1949, the geopolitical environment of what we call the “Western world” was consolidated. This system, which merged the United States with Western Europe, then the center of world trade and production, enabled the spread of the Washington Consensus.

Behind the rhetoric of democracy, human rights, counterterrorism, and a so-called “rules-based international order,” the dollar, the World Bank, the IMF, American multinationals, military-industrial giants, think tanks, Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and Hollywood became the true rulers of the global system. Supported by the U.S. Navy, Air Force, Marines, aircraft carriers, and a chain of overseas bases, this structure made the United States the sole hegemon during the 30 years of globalization following the fall of the Berlin Wall. With control over oceans and sea routes fully secured, U.S. dominance seemed absolute.

Yet, the benefits of this victory were consumed quickly. Driven by insatiable ambition—the same flaw that had doomed every previous hegemon—unrestrained American power created chaos and uncontrollable wars. At the same time, Washington failed to rebuild its navy, which had shrunk dramatically after the Cold War. Then, the unexpected occurred: what the United States feared most became reality. The two greatest powers of Asia, Russia and China, formed an alliance. The golden rule of U.S. dominance—that Eurasia remained divided across its northern and eastern shores—was broken.

Two decades after the Cold War, Russia and China consolidated control over the northern and eastern flanks of the Eurasian “island,” and both moved decisively to sea from its rimlands. In the fall of 2025, India joined this partnership. Thus, in the 21st century, the center of gravity shifted decisively to the Asia-Pacific basin. Asia emerged as a new hub of global power—Russia providing energy resources and military strength, China contributing economic, technological, and demographic weight.

Today, the densest freight flows, port activity, and shipping routes are concentrated in the Asia-Pacific. At the same time, Eurasian consolidation has advanced through the Belt and Road Initiative: railways, highways, air corridors, ports, fiber-optic cables, 5G, and digital data flows have all become instruments of continental power. The continent’s greatest weakness, however, remained energy dependence. Not only China’s massive urbanizing population, but also its expanding artificial intelligence ecosystems, demanded ever greater electricity supplies. China’s share of global electricity generation rose from 10 percent in 2000 to 33 percent today. By deepening its partnership with Russia, China secured its energy future through both the Belt and Road and the Northern Sea Route across the Arctic.

The Paradigm Is Changing

From the early 19th century until today, naval powers consistently defeated continental powers—in the Napoleonic Wars, the Crimean War, both world wars, and the Cold War. By projecting firepower from sea to land, supported by economic and manpower resources, they confined continental rivals and starved them of energy. The essence of war was once “iron and blood”: iron as firepower and energy, blood as soldiers fighting in the mud. States able to transfer force across seas from distant lands generally succeeded, if they could not be stopped at sea (with Gallipoli 1915 as a major exception).

In today’s wars, however, iron and blood alone are no longer enough. The boundaries between land and sea power are increasingly blurred. Unlike 80 years ago, the seas and oceans are no longer separate domains from the continent—except for the underwater realm. Merchant ships, warships, aircraft, and drones can now be constantly monitored by satellites and radars; the ability to move independently and secretly has largely vanished. Strategic and tactical situational awareness, integrated by advances in satellites, cyber systems, communications, and C6ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat Systems, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), has transformed the entire surface and airspace of the earth into a single surveillance and influence sphere.

At the same time, perception management, information warfare, cyber warfare, and cognitive warfare have become at least as critical as traditional battles fought by ships, aircraft, and tanks. Mahan once argued that naval forces controlling sea routes were more decisive than land forces. Today, however, continental powers also have the capacity to control sea routes. The Yemeni Houthis, for example, despite lacking a navy, have since November 2023 mounted highly effective Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) operations in the Red Sea using UAVs, drones, and missile technologies. Asymmetric warfare is reshaping naval combat: a $2,000 kamikaze drone can disable an $8 billion destroyer simply by striking its fire-control radar.

In this new era, both firepower and platforms have changed, reconnaissance and surveillance limits have disappeared, and even powers denied direct access to the sea can project force from inland positions. Cyber and space weapons, submarines, and long-range hypersonic systems prevent any state from exercising total maritime control. In Asia, China and Russia have forged a durable maritime partnership, integrating land and sea strategies. Under these conditions, the concept of “absolute maritime control” has lost validity. Hypersonic missiles, ballistic “carrier-killer” weapons, unmanned aerial and naval vehicles, submarines, and cyber/space weapons extend continental power far out to sea. Reliance on satellites, GPS/Beidou systems, fragile fiber-optic seabed cables, and vulnerable cyber networks has further undermined the certainty of C6ISR dominance by any power.

Consequently, the idea of “total control of sea routes” is no longer as precise or decisive as it was in Mahan’s era. The decisive factor today is the continent’s ability to project power across land, sea, cyber, and space simultaneously. This has eroded Atlantic hegemony. The China–Russia alliance is the most concrete expression of this shift. Land-based networks such as the Belt and Road Initiative, the Arctic Northern Sea Route, hypersonic arsenals, powerful submarine fleets, growing space and cyber capacities, rapid shifts toward war economies, and the mobilization of public opinion have all weakened the West’s naval superiority.

The battlefield of the 21st century is fundamentally different. The continent is no longer isolated. A new partnership now permanently links land and sea, reaches the oceans through hypersonic strike systems, and challenges naval superiority in cyber and space dimensions. China’s land networks with Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, and Iran provide alternatives for wartime logistics in the event of maritime disruption. At the 25th SCO Summit in September 2025, India joined this integrative process. Most importantly, the Power of Siberia 2 agreement between Russia and China—creating a new oil and gas pipeline—promises revolutionary changes in the struggle between land and sea.

In short, Asia is forging a synthesis of Mahan and Mackinder under Chinese and Russian leadership. Mahan’s famous triad—national wealth, commercial power, and naval power—now translates into economic scale, expansive supply chains, and military strength, with technology as the critical multiplier. Today, China applies this triad far more effectively than the United States, in both geopolitical and geoeconomic terms. Asia has entered a period in which it will never again submit to Mahan’s maritime determinism. Its greatest advantage lies in the fact that both Russia and China are security states, able to suppress religious and ethnic unrest and prevent “color revolutions.” Otherwise, it would be far more difficult for them to withstand the disruptive tactics of U.S. neoconservatives and financial oligarchs, often operating with Israeli influence and the leverage of unlimited dollar printing, who can find collaborators in almost any country.

Result

Today, the revolutionary convergence of land and sea demonstrates that the era of unilateral Atlantic domination is drawing to a close. Although the United States maintains hundreds of bases in more than 80 countries, its lack of a sufficiently large navy to protect them—and of a national merchant fleet to sustain them—constitutes a profound weakness. Even after expanding NATO with Sweden and Finland, the Western bloc has only limited capacity in the Arctic Ocean for access denial (A2) or area denial (AD), let alone maritime control.

Despite U.S. military expenditures exceeding $1 trillion annually, its inability to secure lasting maritime control against the Houthis in the Red Sea presents a striking paradox. Meanwhile, at home, polarization deepens. Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, American society has been increasingly numbed by television, social media, the sports industry, and entertainment culture—echoes of Rome’s arena spectacles. Income inequality widens, the middle class erodes, and institutional trust declines. Much like the “Military Anarchy” period in Rome 2,000 years ago, debt crises, political polarization, and institutional decay are converging to produce systemic instability.

Rome lost its technological edge once Germanic tribes mastered its military techniques. Today, the United States is vulnerable to hypersonic weapons not only from China and Russia but also from regional actors like Yemen and Iran. Just as Rome sustained itself through tribute and grain from the provinces, U.S. power has long rested on dollar hegemony and the petrodollar system. Yet initiatives such as BRICS, the SCO, and the Belt and Road—combined with Trump’s protectionist tariffs—are undermining that foundation.

In short, U.S. hegemony is approaching its inevitable end. In this process, Washington’s alignment with Israel—its military, political, and economic support for Tel Aviv’s acts of genocide—ensures that America cannot recover its former position in the global order.

Türkiye Lessons

While scenarios of Israel’s attack on our homeland were being discussed in Türkiye, the Greek Cypriot press claimed that Israel delivered the Barak MX air defense system to the Greek Cypriot Administration of Southern Cyprus (GCASC). It’s all dust. This news are aimed at psychological operations. However, let us remind two scenarios that are realistic. In the Syrian Pit, where we fell with our own feet, Israel and the USA found cheap blood. The YPG/PYD will be encouraged to clash with the Turkish army on behalf of Israel and the United States.

A similar scenario applies to Cyprus. The Greek Cypriot Administration has now completely turned into a proxy for the USA and Israel. It should be expected that they will provoke Türkiye with military conflicts in Syria and Cyprus to wear it down with wars they cannot win, but to accelerate the economic collapse. However, the road is finished. Türkiye will resist regardless of the conditions. No hegemon can now control the oceans alone or exploit the continents without limits. In this new era, Türkiye’s task should be to define its geographical power not with the wishes of the US/EU hegemony, but with the rising reality of Asia. This process is not easy. Protecting, safeguarding and progressing our interests in the Turkish Straits, the TRNC and the Blue Homeland with our ever-growing naval power will inevitably push the maritime hegemony to a definitive showdown with Türkiye. NATO membership will not work in this showdown. Israel, the US and the EU will probably try to weaken the already fragile Turkish economy and isolate Türkiye through the armed conflict processes they will start in Syria and Cyprus. When that day comes, Türkiye can only provide resistance with Asian powers. It cannot go anywhere by making concessions to NATO and the EU and becoming a partner in their geopolitical prescriptions.

It should not be forgotten that neither the geoeconomic position of this peninsula, where three continents meet, which we won thanks to the Independence War and the Treaty of Lausanne, nor the Bosphorus dominance gained by the Montreux Convention, nor the Gulf of Iskenderun, which we took under our full control with the Hatay Wedge, nor the TRNC, which we broke the geopolitical siege from the south with the Cyprus Peace Operation, are not in our hands by chance. These are what we have won in the fight against those who try to push us from the sea to the continent and are historical obligations that we must protect forever.

Today, the Blue Homeland doctrine expresses the vision of these achievements embodied in the eyes of the people. To achieve this vision, Türkiye must expand its shipyards, nationalize its merchant fleet, keep its naval forces at a deterrent level, and advance its maritime geopolitics in the cyber and space dimensions. Otherwise, he will not be able to determine his own destiny in the Red Sea, Mediterranean and Black Sea of tomorrow, and will be the extra in the play written by others. It should not be forgotten that nations with peninsular geography that cannot go to sea and cannot hold on to the sea are pushed out of history. The lesson for Türkiye is clear. We will draw our own route and take our place as a fully independent and maritime Republic in the new equation of Asia, not the Atlantic. We are in the age of maritime civilization. While the West’s monopoly of the last 500 years is dissolving, the Asian wave is rising. Türkiye will either fortify its Blue Homeland with maritime power and draw its own route, or it will remain as a coastline on the map of others. The choice is clear. With the energy we derive from our history and geographical power, with the sea power deepening in the cyber-space layer, we will be a nation that “goes to sea and does not return”. Otherwise, thinking means being pushed out of history.

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This article was originally published on Mavi Vatan.

Ret Admiral Cem Gürdeniz, Writer, Geopolitical Expert, Theorist and creator of the Turkish Bluehomeland (Mavi Vatan) doctrine. He served as the Chief of Strategy Department and then the head of Plans and Policy Division in Turkish Naval Forces Headquarters. As his combat duties, he has served as the commander of Amphibious Ships Group and Mine Fleet between 2007 and 2009. He retired in 2012. He established Hamit Naci Blue Homeland Foundation in 2021. He has published numerous books on geopolitics, maritime strategy, maritime history and maritime culture. He is also a honorary member of ATASAM.

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