From a brilliant Brookings Institution expert, an "important" (The
Wall Street Journal) and "penetrating historical and political study"
(Nature) of the critical role that oceans play in the daily struggle
for global power, in the bestselling tradition of Robert Kaplan's The
Revenge of Geography.
For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for
supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems
dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the
economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and
railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of
commercial transit.
All that has changed, as nine-tenths of global commerce and the bulk of
energy trade is today linked to sea-based flows. A brightly painted
forty-foot steel shipping container loaded in Asia with twenty tons of
goods may arrive literally anywhere else in the world; how that really
happens and who actually profits from it show that the struggle for
power on the seas is a critical issue today.
Now, in vivid, closely observed prose, Bruce Jones conducts us on a
fascinating voyage through the great modern ports and naval bases--from
the vast container ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai to the vital naval
base of the American Seventh Fleet in Hawaii to the sophisticated
security arrangements in the Port of New York. Along the way, the book
illustrates how global commerce works, that we are amidst a global naval
arms race, and why the oceans are so crucial to America's standing going
forward.
As Jones reveals, the three great geopolitical struggles of our
time--for military power, for economic dominance, and over our changing
climate--are playing out atop, within, and below the world's oceans. The
essential question, he shows, is this: who will rule the waves and set
the terms of the world to come?
