In Spykman's words, U.S. leaders fixed their strategic gaze on "America's Mediterranean" to the south. They set ambitious goals, such as preserving Latin American republics' independence while keeping stronger imperial powers at bay. And expediency determined the implements they used to attain those goals. Having an external benefactor like the Royal Navy appeared providential during the founding decades, when the United States was subduing a continent and pursuing internal improvements. By the 1880s, however, the Industrial Revolution had delivered such material abundance that Washington could take charge of North America's environs. The United States started accumulating strategic mass, manifest in a strong navy. Victory over Spain in 1898 furnished strategic mobility in the form of an island base network to support naval operations in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico.
Policy energy, strategic mass, strategic maneuver -- these were the struts supporting America's first foreign-policy pivot. But if Pivot 1.0 swiveled U.S. attention to the Caribbean, it also ushered in Pivot 1.5. Adm. George Dewey's Asiatic Squadron crushed the Spanish fleet at Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War, handing the United States an offshore outpost in the Far East. Washington scooped up islands such as Hawaii and Guam -- islands suitable for naval stations -- in the aftermath of war. America had established a bridgehead off the China coast, complete with island stepping-stones to reach it. It just needed a Central American canal to expedite access from the North American east coast to the Pacific Ocean, and thence to the riches of Asia.
America's Pacific strategy remained in limbo until the Panama Canal opened in late 1914, completing the arc of Pivot 2.0. In an arresting turn of a phrase, Spykman vouchsafed that the transoceanic waterway in effect lifted the United States and turned it 90 degrees southward on its axis -- rotating the republic's strategic gaze wholesale toward the isthmus and the broad Pacific. In reality the canal split U.S. foreign policy. The republic's leaders surveyed events not just along the traditional eastward vector toward Western Europe, but also along a new westward vector pointing toward Asia.
With the opening of the canal, the strategic-maneuver component of the Pacific pivot thus fell into place alongside strategic mass. As the United States continued its ascent to great power, consequently, the longstanding pattern -- in which the Old World was the arbiter of events in the New -- reversed itself. Having won grudging European acquiescence in the Monroe Doctrine, the United States cast eyes on the western and eastern rimlands of Eurasia. Statesmen like Theodore Roosevelt had long considered it dangerous to allow a single great power or hostile coalition to wrest away control of Western Europe, East Asia, or both -- gaining sufficient military resources and a geographic platform from which to menace the Americas. Hardscrabble logic like TR's summoned the United States to Eurasia for two world wars and a Cold War.
The logic of Pivot 2.0 persisted through the Cold War, although the nature of East-West strategic competition drew U.S. strategists' attention further into the Eurasian heartland occupied by the Soviet Union than during the days when Imperial Germany and the Axis were on the march. Samuel P. Huntington, the great political scientist, contended that U.S. maritime strategy entered a "transoceanic" phase following World War II, fixing American attentions on events deep within Eurasia while empowering U.S. forces to act from forward bases scattered around the rimlands. Call Huntington's transoceanic strategy Pivot 2.5 if you like. But it was another variation on the same theme.
The difference between the Cold War and the world wars, then, was in emphasis more than substance. The Cold War threw the contest between land and sea power into stark relief. Moscow operated mainly within the bounds of Eurasia, projecting power outward from the heartland along railways, roads, and other land lines of communication. Seagoing Western forces ranged around the circumference, transmitting power inward from the sea. But despite the change of adversary, from the rimland alliances of the world wars to a central Eurasian power, Washington's determination to prevent a hegemon from ruling the eastern and western rimlands endured.
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