Sea vs. Land: The Ancient Strategic Divide Still Shaping World Order
Sarah Paine frames world history around a single structural divide: maritime powers, which can defend themselves at sea and prosper through trade, versus continental powers, which face contiguous land threats and expand by absorbing neighbors. The United States began as a continental power but transitioned—partly through Mahan's intellectual influence—into the maritime paradigm. Neither China nor Russia meets Mahan's prerequisites for a maritime power: neither has a geographic moat, reliable sea egress, a commerce-driven economy, or stable democratic institutions, yet both harbor maritime ambitions they may not fully understand.
The lecture walks through three canonical geopolitical thinkers. Mahan emphasized trade and sea power as the engine of national wealth. Mackinder identified Russia's Eurasian heartland as strategically invulnerable to sea power, insulated by mountains, deserts, and frozen seas. Spykman, writing in 1943, warned that US security depends on a maritime shield and allied continental partners—a lesson he drew from how close the Axis came to dominating Eurasia.
Continental strategy follows an internally consistent but dangerous logic: no two-front wars, no great-power neighbors, absorb failing states sequentially, establish buffer zones, and sow divisions among rivals. Paine applies this directly to Putin. The costs are starkly visible in WWII casualty data—over 25 million Soviet dead versus 295,000 American—because continental powers fight on home soil while maritime powers are insulated by oceans. Overextension and imperial implosion are the recurring failure mode for land empires across Chinese and Russian history.
The Industrial Revolution shifted the basis of power from land to commerce and industry, enabling a maritime rules-based order built on freedom of navigation, containerization, and post-WWII institutions (UN, IMF, NATO, WTO). This order is positive-sum—trade compounds wealth for all participants—while territorial land empire is negative-sum. China under Deng Xiaoping was the order's greatest beneficiary; under Xi, Paine suggests, it is retreating from that logic.
The core concern is that Putin, and arguably Xi, are actively working to hollow out international institutions, kill alliance systems, and return the world to warring spheres of influence. Paine's bottom line: the maritime order's defensive, negative-sum objectives are invisible by nature (prevented wars don't appear in headlines), making them politically hard to sustain—but the alternative, as WWII casualty counts show, is catastrophic. Diplomacy and institutions, not military overextension, are the maritime power's primary tools.
Naval War College professor Sarah Paine argues that the fundamental tension in world politics is between maritime powers organized around trade, open seas, and institutions versus continental powers organized around territorial expansion, spheres of influence, and garrison states. This divide—mapped through Mahan, Mackinder, and Spykman—explains Russia and China's behavior today, the staggering asymmetry in WWII casualties, and why the rules-based international order is worth defending.
the focus isn't primarily on the military instrument of national power, it's actually much more about economics, coalitions, institutions
The only win-win solution is to deploy diplomats and lawyers to hash out differences in international forums, because sending soldiers risks a third world war with nuclear fallout effects.
Maritime powers are the exception and continental powers are the rule, because maritime powers can defend themselves primarily at sea with their navies, whereas a continental power simply cannot.
The first distinguishing characteristic between a maritime and continental power is whether it is feasible to defend yourself at sea or not.
The United States began its life as a continental power focused on expanding to the West Coast, and tried invading Canada in 1775 and 1812.
The Monroe Doctrine is a classic continental spheres of influence stay out of my backyard moment, but at the time of declaration the United States was so weak that telling Europeans to stay out of the Americas was impossible to enforce.
Unlike a typical continental power which expands with massed armies, the United States preferred checkbook diplomacy, purchasing Louisiana from Napoleon in 1803 when he was short of cash.
When the Russians were short of cash the United States bought not only Alaska but the northern part of the West Coast.
The longest counterinsurgency in this country's history was against the native population, not the recent conflicts in the Middle East.
Alfred Thayer Mahan is by far the most famous professor ever associated with the Naval War College.
Neither China nor Russia today has the full list of Mahan's maritime prerequisites; neither has a moat, both have more neighbors than any two other countries on the planet, and many of those neighbors don't like them.
Russia has a lamentable internal transportation grid, whereas China's has been improving.
Neither China nor Russia has reliable egress by sea; they tend to get blockaded and closed down in wartime. Russia has reliable egress up north, but no one lives there.
Russia has never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector.
Neither China nor Russia has stable government institutions; the litmus test for that is transparent regular elections, and dictatorship for life does not remotely qualify.
China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions, but it is not clear they actually understand what goes into a full maritime paradigm.
Occupying the heartland provides the possibility for defense in depth, strategic retreat, and self-sufficiency. The heartland is not insulated by the sea, it's insulated from the sea.
A maritime power like Britain wanting to influence the heartland must do it on the periphery—in Mackinder's day through colonies in strategic locations, in our own day through allies with bases in those locations.
Nicholas Spykman completed his very important work in 1943, the year he died; he was a naturalized American citizen from the Netherlands, then under Nazi occupation.
Spykman felt the Nazis had come really close to dominating Eurasia in 1941.
Spykman argued that US security was a function of sea power, and that invulnerability to attack at home is a function of a maritime shield.
Spykman argued that victory in World War II would depend on alliances and allies, specifically a continental ally who can provide a base from which land power can be exercised.
Sunzi's Art of War makes no references to maritime warfare at all and only tangential references to riverine warfare, because he is writing about the world of continental empires in existence long before maritime paradigms emerged.
China is dependent on food imports today because too much of its real estate is vertical to grow things on.
The Han wound up with all the prime arable real estate in China by laying waste to the competing Zunghar and Tibetan empires; the Zunghars were wiped out by the Qing Dynasty.
In the continental world, the binary choice is either become Han or be killed; genocide is what happens to the losers in continental warfare, and apparently in our own day the Uyghurs are slated for genocide.
When China claims its historical lands, it either chooses the Mongol Yuan Dynasty or the Manchu Qing Dynasty—both periods when the Han were subjugated people.
China has been raising armies denominated in hundreds of thousands of people for thousands of years; the West does not do this on a regular basis until the Napoleonic Wars.
Mackinder was concerned about Russia building railways giving it internal lines of communication that would work really well in wartime, whereas Britain was stuck with exterior lines of communication by sea on the periphery.
Russia's security threats circa 1900 included, from west to east: Britain, Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, China, and Japan.
Russians have suffered catastrophic defeats to the Mongols, the Swedes, initially to Napoleon, and the Germans in World War I, but each time the central position allowed them to rise again.
In a continental power, the army's mission number one is to keep the ruling party in power—for example, the People's Liberation Army's goal number one is to keep the Communist Party in power—not expeditionary warfare as in the maritime world.
Axis military deaths in World War II included 3.2 million dead German soldiers.
8 and 1/2 million dead Russian soldiers, nearly a million dead Poles, 1.3 million dead Chinese, and 340,000 dead Frenchmen
Britain with 326,000 deaths, United States 295,000. By some statistics, they suffered fewer deaths than Italy or France
over 7 million dead Germans, over 25 and 1/2 dead Russians, almost 7 million dead Poles, 11 million dead Chinese, nearly a million dead Frenchmen
That's Ukraine's problem. Whereas if you're a maritime power observing someone else being invaded cuz in theory it's pretty tough to invade you by sea, it's a major point of strategy as to whether you're going to intervene at all
for Stalin, it means he dominates Eastern Europe or Russia does for the duration of the Cold War, but understand that that kind of territorial domination comes at a huge price
This is Vladimir Putin's game.
there's been a tendency over the course of China's and Russia's long histories to overextend and this helps account for the implosions of various empires and dynasties
the absorption by Russia of a considerable portion of the Chinese Empire is only a question of time, unless the Chinese get their act together
Putin also looks at the world this way, apparently.
if a continental power botches strategy, its known world can vanish forever. And this is what happened to Imperial China, Imperial Russia, and many venerable civilizations.
it is a member of the Dutch Republic, Hugo Grotius, who's the founding father of international law
in 1996, China signed the UN ratified the UN Convention on the Law of the Seas, UNCLOS. And except China says that freedom of navigation does not extend within 200 nautical miles of their coastline. Except under UNCLOS, the number is 12 nautical miles.
Britain's the only power in Europe that doesn't need to maintain a large standing army because if Britain could maintain a competent navy, no army's going to reach British shores cuz they're going to be drowned at sea.
The Industrial Revolution upends empires of both types. And it's going to usher in a maritime rules-based global order.
Power is a function of land back in the day. Why? Because land is where you get the commodities
Once wealth is a function of commerce, industry, and trade, it isn't land anymore, and this upends the world.
Who's rich, who's poor, who's powerful, who's not, it's often the degree to which the country is industrialized.
The Suez Canal wrecked the camel trade on the Silk Road because once the canal is built, it is so much cheaper to send things by ship than to walk it over Eurasia with draft animals.
Before the 1967 war, almost 90% of ships were 50,000 deadweight tons or less, and could all make it through the Suez Canal.
By 1972, almost 30% of the number of ships were huge ships that never had existed before and cannot make it through the Suez Canal.
Sending oil from the Persian Gulf to Rotterdam in a small ship through the canal might cost a little over $13 per ton, whereas sending it in a big ship the long way around Africa costs roughly a third of that price.
Malcolm McLean reduced the loading cost from nearly $6 a ton to less than 20 cents by putting truck bodies minus chassis on ships as containers.
The International Organization for Standardization standardized container sizes to fit one if by truck, two if by railway cars, and thousands if by sea.
Until 1960, the average tanker size was 20,000 deadweight tons; today the smallest ultra-large crude tankers are a quarter of a million deadweight tons.
The longest train can take maybe 600 containers on a good day, whereas the largest container ships can take over 21,000 containers with cargoes valued at over $1 billion.
For China, the seas are going to be open to it only in peacetime; in wartime it is surrounded by shallow seas and islands that become kill zones through which merchant traffic cannot pass.
The end of the last Cold War caused world trade to take off, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty.
The maritime order focuses on freedom of navigation, free trade, and international laws and institutions that facilitate trade in order to minimize transaction costs and maximize wealth.
The greatest generation—conscripts of World War I who survived and later sent their children to fight World War II—concluded that the solution to great depressions and world wars was institution building on a global scale, and built the UN, IMF, NATO, predecessor institutions of the WTO, and the EU.
Most of the hot fighting during the Cold War occurred on Mackinder's Inner Marginal Crescent, where the maritime and continental worlds collide.
Sanctions are like economic chemotherapy, preventing one or two percent growth per annum even with leaky sanctions, and the difference over several generations is the difference between North and South Korea.
China has benefited more than any other country from rejoining the family of nations in the maritime world under Deng Xiaoping.
Alliances can bestow a collective maritime position and power package to countries that join in, even if those countries are not maritime by geography alone.
Putin and Kim Jong-un want to upend the maritime order, hollow out international institutions, kill off the alliance system, and return the world to warring spheres of influence.
these are things that the United States needs to think about very carefully before it intervenes all over the place and over extends
there are no enduring alliances in this world because the neighbors figure it out. The hegemonic power is just a long-term problem. And there's also no council on when to quit. Like how much territory do you take before you choke on it?
China's Belt and Road Initiative is not continuous end-to-end and is not all the same gauge, requiring repeated loading and unloading, making it logistically inefficient.
Continental and maritime powers tried to organize the world in very different ways and these have real implications in our own day.
Geopolitics is the influence of geography on politics and grand strategy is grand in the number of instruments of national power that it integrates.
Mahan argued that power in the world is not so much a function of continental expansion and consolidation, but really about all the wealth you can accrue from trade.
Mahan's prerequisites for a maritime security paradigm: a moat preventing border invasion, a dense internal transportation grid, reliable egress by sea, a dense coastal population, and stable government institutions that fund a navy and enable commerce.
Halford Mackinder argued in his 1904 article that Russia occupies the best geopolitical location—the pivot area or heartland—which is the citadel of land power, insulated by mountains, deserts, frozen seas, and inaccessible rivers, making it impervious to sea power.
In a continental power, the army serves three purposes in order: protect the ruling machine, garrison the empire and prevent defections, and then border defense—away games are a rare event.
the deaths for the land powers are measured in millions, whereas the maritime powers, it's hundreds of thousands, because you're not insulated by the oceans, so the fighting tends to be on home territory
Rule number one, no two-front wars. Secondly, no great power neighbors. So what do you do? You take on your neighbors sequentially, right one at a time. You set them up to fail, you destabilize the rising, you ingest the failing, and you set up buffer zones in between
you sow their mutual resentments, you get them to fight each other, you deluge them with fake news so that Russia can play the role of the jackal state, which is once the neighbors have sufficiently weakened themselves and weaken each other that Russia can move on in and steal a kill made by others
the seas are a commons that you want to share. The whole point is you want to get goods going from port to port. And in our own highly networked age, think about it, the seas are the original network that potentially connected everyone to everything.
a navy could provide Britain with a prevent defeat strategy but a navy's insufficient for a deliver victory strategy. It's not going to eliminate these continental problems.
The continental world is about positive objectives—visible, territorial gains—while the maritime world is about negative objectives—preventing bad things from happening—which are invisible because the thing prevented never happened.
rule number one is you keep the home economy growing. Secondly, don't let the elephant forage. Rule number three, you want to rent an elephant. Rule number four, Britain needs to find a theater that is peripheral to that main theater, where access by sea is much more efficient than access by land. Rule number five, Do not take on the enemy main force directly. Rule number six, if you're going to fight on the main front, only do it after you have really bled that elephant so that it's been greatly weakened and you only do it with lots of friends
Continental powers face contiguous threats. So they have to focus on national security and often they want to insulate themselves from neighbors and they want exclusive zones. Maritime powers think this is crazy land because they've got the relative security of the moat, no one's going to invade them. So they're going to focus on national prosperity and trade is the path to prosperity
two mutually exclusive world orders: One of them is we're going to divide the world up into very large spheres of influence, each a world unto itself. And the other one is no no no no no, we're going to operate under universal rules and the seas are going to be open to everyone.
Continental powers historically leverage interior lines of communication to garrison their empire and form contiguous alliance systems, while maritime powers use exterior sea lines to access the entire globe and form global alliance systems.
Land empire is negative sum—fighting over territory damages goods and destroys wealth—whereas the maritime trading order is positive sum, with compounded growth through win-win trade.
“Despite occupying the the safest position of any nation in the world, we Americans have been involved in two devastating World Wars in the space of a quarter of a century. And in the second one, i.e. the ongoing one, we are were one point at in serious danger of defeat. The expectations of US statesmen regarding the outcome of their actions were consistently wrong. And their thinking about national security generally failed to provide successful answers.”
“The history of Russia is a history of a country in process of colonizing itself. Her area in of colonization grows in tandem with her national territory, at times shrinking, at times expanding, age-old movement. Therefore, the periods in our history are the stages which our people have gone through in the occupation and development of the land acquired by them.”
“In Europe, we are hangers-on and slaves, whereas we shall go to Asia as masters. In Europe, we are Asiatics. We're in Asia, we too are Europeans. Our civilizing mission in Asia will bribe our spirit and drive us further.”
“the problem for Russia is to obtain as large a share as possible of the outlived oriental states”
“Russia historically, geographically has the undisputed right to the lion's share of the expected prey”
“every nation is free to travel to every other nation and trade with it”
“By natural law, the following are common to everyone: the air, flowing water, the sea, and in consequence, the seashore.”
“Sanctions are like economic chemotherapy.”
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