TO RULE THE WAVES

The director of the Brookings Institution project on international order revives an old strategic tenet: Who rules the oceans rules the world.

Four basic facts come into play here: The world’s oceans are increasingly zones of contention, particularly between the U.S. and China; most of what we call globalism is an oceanic phenomenon, since, as Jones writes, “more than 85 percent of all global commerce is a function of sea-based trade”; the oceans are the epicenter of global communications, thanks to the undersea cables that carry data; and the oceans are the sources of a tremendous amount of mineral wealth. Small wonder they’re the object of so much attention on the part of the superpowers, sometimes forging unlikely alliances—Muslim Malaysia, for instance, with China, despite China’s aggressive anti-Muslim policies. Traveling around the world to visit such centers as Singapore’s Changi Naval Base and China’s Yanghan Port, the world’s largest container port, and boarding vessels such as the Madrid Maersk, “the world’s largest trading ship” in 2019, Jones examines the geopolitics of ocean power. Along the way, he looks into the history of standardized shipping, courtesy of the multimodal container, and delves into what are likely to be future patterns of energy use—with India, for instance, joining Japan and China in becoming dependent on oil shipped via the Straits of Hormuz, another sharply contested zone. The book is marred by small errors—Malcom, not Marshall, McLean was the innovator behind the metal container; the Arctic, not Antarctic, lies above Maine; the weather current that alternates with El Niño is not El Niña but La Niña, etc.—but the author’s points are well taken, especially when he warns that China “is fast becoming a fuller maritime power than the United States,” with implications for political relations in years to come.

Knowledgeable and wonky, largely of interest to policy planners.