Seablindness. Seth Cropsey
makers believed was possible. As Roberta Wohlstetter observes:
For every signal that came into the information net in 1941 there were usually several plausible alternative explanations, and it is not surprising that our observers and analysts were inclined to select the explanations that fitted the popular hypotheses. They sometimes set down new contradictory evidence side by side with existing hypotheses, and they also sometimes held two contradictory beliefs at the same time. . . . Apparently human beings have a stubborn attachment to old beliefs and an equally stubborn resistance to new material that will upset them.4
The 9/11 Commission reached similar conclusions. Established by Congress and the president, the bipartisan commission found that the attacks of September 11, 2001, revealed failures in imagination, policy, capabilities, and management. The commission report listed “imagination” first.
The 9/11 Commission report noted that, following the crash of TWA flight 800 in 1996, which the FBI concluded was not the result of a crime, President Bill Clinton had established a commission headed by Vice President Al Gore. The Gore Commission was scrupulously exhaustive in its concentration on the dangers of bringing explosives aboard civilian aircraft, as had been planned—but foiled—in the so-called Manila plot of 1995, in which Islamists planned to place bombs aboard eleven passenger aircraft and destroy them as they flew from Asia to the United States. The Gore Commission identified a lack of rigor in searching passengers before they boarded. It did not mention the possibility of using aircraft themselves as weapons.
Other oversights complement that of the Gore Commission. In August 1999, the Federal Aviation Administration’s Civil Aviation Security intelligence office worried that al-Qaeda might try to hijack a plane. One of its scenarios was a suicide hijacking operation. The scenario was dismissed within the FAA because, as the 9/11 Commission recorded, “it does not offer an opportunity for dialogue to achieve the key goal of obtaining [i.e., releasing Omar Abdel-] Rahman and other key captive extremists.”5 “A suicide hijacking,” said FAA analysts, “is assessed to be an option of last resort.”6
In short, scholarly and official inquiries into the two largest and most lethal attacks against the U.S. military and the American homeland in the past three-quarters of a century identify a failure of imagination as critical in the unpreparedness that preceded disaster. Imagination is as essential in thinking about the consequences of sharply reduced or strategically distracted seapower as it is in considering future threats.
STRATEGIC CHANGE
The threats the United States faces have changed radically in a little over one generation. In 1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned his position as president of the Soviet Union. He was succeeded by Boris Yeltsin, president of the newly formed independent state of Russia. U.S. policy makers bent their efforts to ensure that the United States would never again face a peer competitor that could cripple the nation in minutes and destroy it within hours.
Embers of the Soviet Union ignited in the Balkans, and Russia faced a constitutional crisis that was resolved by force. Terrorism grew. A short war was fought at the northern end of the Persian Gulf. China started its rise and began to invest heavily in arms. But great power competition seemed to have ended as the Soviet Union was replaced by a weak state, whose natural resources were more valuable than the finished products manufactured from them.
A single generation later, all has changed. The United States today faces a heretofore unfamiliar strategic challenge: the possibility of three linked hegemonies that span the Eurasian land mass. Russia is on the ramparts in Ukraine, Georgia, and the Middle East. Its Baltic State ambitions are no secret. NATO’s failure to respond in a real crisis means the end of the alliance and a maturing Russian hegemony that stretches from Central Asia to the Atlantic. China actively seeks to become Asia’s hegemon, while its unruly satellite North Korea has become a nuclear power. Iran’s rulers, armed with missiles of increasing range, added financial resources, and the likelihood of nuclear weapons, have their eye on dominating the strategic space between Moscow’s influence and Beijing’s.
A single hegemony on the Eurasian land mass threatens U.S. markets, our ability to keep conflict at a distance, regional stability, and democracy. At a minimum, the three hegemonies would overturn the current liberal international order. If the United States does not take effective action to prevent this, its run as a preeminent global power will end. Proximity to the oceans and seas offers the United States the opportunity to leverage its still-dominant seapower as the key to countering or, if necessary, opposing the three would-be hegemons.
Since Woodrow Wilson, the goal of American foreign policy has been to prevent regional hegemony. Two decades after Wilson, President Franklin D. Roosevelt led the United States in another global conflict, against Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. Both Europe and Asia were—and remain—critical to our hopes for greater prosperity, security, and an increasingly democratic world. The United States and its allies destroyed both totalitarian hegemons. Finally, the United States contained the Soviet Union for almost half a century, blunting its threat to Europe, and confronting its expanding influence in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.
Emerging from this century of nearly continuous global conflict, the United States was the unquestioned global power. No state could challenge it economically, politically, or militarily. The United States destroyed the Iraqi military twice in slightly over a decade, and put a stop to ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.
New threats have ended this brief period of America’s benevolent international leadership. Three competitors are at odds with the American-led international system. The sum of their ambitions is to undermine U.S. global power.
A resurgent Russia aims to reclaim its previous glory and capitalize on the current U.S. administration’s idea that America can make itself great again with a minimum of cooperation from others.
The European refugee crisis and potential destabilization in the European Union challenge the American alliance system in Europe—the cornerstone of American security policy since the end of World War II. America’s remaining allies show little resolve. Meager European defense budgets make matters worse. They offer ammunition to demagogic politicians who seek to exploit the undercurrent of American isolationism.
In Asia, a rising China focuses on cultivating and marshaling its economic resources to develop its military power. China’s island-building campaign aims to extend its territorial claims into international waters and directly confronts the international order. As Admiral Harry Harris, commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific, told Congress in early 2017, “China has fundamentally altered the physical and political landscape in the South China Sea.”7 Beijing combines its land reclamation campaign with high-tempo presence operations conducted by the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) and coast guard in contested areas of the South and East China Seas. The Chinese are also accelerating their ability to project naval power and control the seas by constructing troop transports, large surface combatants, and a second aircraft carrier.
This situation bears a resemblance to the world America faced before World War II, when Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan initially overwhelmed the European powers that had refused to rearm following World War I.
But the semblance is passing. America faces not two aspiring hegemons, but three. The Middle East is the critical link between Europe and Asia. Its oil-rich states supply a large amount of the world’s energy resources and facilitate exchange between the two hemispheres. With the Red Sea, Persian Gulf, and Arabian Sea in the south, the Mediterranean to the west, and the Caspian and Black Seas to the north, the Middle East is more like an island than a contiguous land mass.
On this island, Iran attempts to assert its dominance. Russia aids Iran with weapons transfers and its support of Iranian proxy Bashar al-Assad in Syria. Relieved of sanctions, the Islamic Republic has begun to receive massive financial inflows and has actively directed some of its profits toward obtaining dual-use military technology such as jet engines. Iranian Special Forces, known as the Quds Force, conduct paramilitary operations in Iraq and Syria, expanding Tehran’s influence over its neighbors.
Although America’s adversaries have worked with one another in the past, the current degree of cooperation between China,