The Treaty Mirage

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A British graphic in 1939 showing battleships front and centerAs late as 1939, it was still possible for a citizen of Great Britain to take a global voyage and take pride in the readily apparent trappings of Britain’s global power. Boarding a steamer in Bombay, he might take a long voyage past a variety of critical global chokepoints and bases - crossing the Indian Ocean to Aden, sailing up the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, stopping over at Malta in the Mediterranean before passing through Gibraltar, and then reaching home in Southampton - and along the way he would have seen nothing except British bases, British ships, and British power. This was a centuries old system of geopolitical power projection, preserved very carefully to give the impression of a stable and predictable world. The essence of this system was very simple: this was a Eurocentric (and I use the word without the pejorative connotation) world system in which sea power was the medium of global influence, and the main way to measure that influence was in battleships and the bases that allowed them to operate at vast distances. In other worlds, the scenes that awaited our passenger were largely unchanged from the 18th Century. Sailing ships of the line had of course given way to the steel of the big-gun battleships, but the axis of global power was still a network of British naval bases occupied by British capital ships. The world’s other sea powers had the capacity to project force regionally (Japan in East Asia, Italy and France in the Mediterranean, and so forth) but only Britain was everywhere, all at …