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"When word of a crisis breaks out in Washington, it's no accident that the first question that comes to everyone's lips is: 'Where's the nearest carrier?'" —President Bill Clinton, aboard the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71)
Let us speak today of friends and enemies, of power and how to project it.
America's prosperity and security have always sailed upon the oceans. During and since World War II, we have required dominance of the seas and the skies. Now, to stay prosperous and secure, we must dominate the seas, the skies, and space.
It's complicated, isn't it? So it's a good thing we have friends.
We didn't always, and we learned valuable — that is to say, costly — lessons early on in our history.
Britain and France warred on and off (mostly on) for 60 years, before, during, and long after our Revolutionary War. As a young nation of a few million farmers and merchants mostly huddled along the Atlantic coast, the U.S. in our first 50 years or so wished for little more than to be left alone by Europe's warring parties.
If wishes were horses, we'd have ridden them right up Europe's... you know.
The various wars Britain and France waged against one another from 1756-1815 are best understood as one long struggle and one we fought in three times. It all began with the Seven Years' War, when George Washington was just a promising 21-year-old officer in Virginia's colonial militia.
Nobody called it a World War, but it was the first war to span the globe — including Colonial America. That we called it "The French and Indian War" displayed a provincialism we eventually, stubbornly, learned to outgrow.
The debts Britain ran up during the Seven Years' War led to colonial taxes that helped light the fuse for our Revolutionary War. That time, France came in on our side.
When Britain and Republican France resumed fighting in the 1790s, President John Adams resolved to keep us out of it. But France kept seizing our merchant ships, dragging Adams reluctantly (and with a big assist from the British Royal Navy) into the Quasi-War against the French navy.
We finally got fully involved in the Napoleonic Wars in 1812, but on the other side. British-Canadian forces captured Washington, D.C., and burned down the White House.
That France went from a monarchy to a republic to a nationalist dictatorship (and finally back to a monarchy, once the dust had settled) was beside the point. Britain's eternal interests couldn't allow for a single, hostile power to dominate the Continent, regardless of the title its ruler held.
Whether a Bourbon king, an emperor named Napoleon, a German Kaiser, or a Russian communist party chief, Britain either took the lead in thwarting their ambitions or stood by our side during the Cold War while we did.
Again, it's nice to have friends.
Like Britain, our allies and enemies sometimes change, but our interests — free passage on the seas, and now in air and space — remain eternal.
Foreign troops haven’t set foot on continental American soil since 1814 — and that’s no accident.
I understand Washington's warning against entangling alliances, but two things ought to stand out to any student of history. The first is that even the most determined doves, starting with Adams, have proven unable to keep the peace. The second is that having allies has meant fighting our wars over there instead of over here.
It's called power projection, and for 80 years, the U.S. has proven the grand master at it, despite serious challenges across the Iron Curtain, in Korea, Vietnam, the Middle East, and now from China.
And Another Thing: Folks with an isolationist bent might point out that we went more than a century — from 1814 to 1917 — without getting involved in Europe's wars, and ask, why can't we still? The thing is, Europe went that century with just one major war, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. It was a relatively short affair and fought entirely on land between only France and the German alliance. But almost as soon as Europe decided to fight another globe-spanning war on the seas in 1914, we were doing our best Al Pacino: "Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!"
The Cold War version of NATO — you know, the version of the alliance that was mostly functional — depended on large European armies, particularly the West German Bundeswehr, to do most of the fighting. In case of war, the U.S. Navy's job was to keep the sealanes open and deliver the reinforcements and supplies that would be enough (it was hoped) to tip the scales.
Right now, you can see something similar happening in the Middle East, where U.S. forces remain on standby just in case, while Israel does all the heavy lifting. Israel's fight is important to us, not just because it's a tiny freedom-loving country sitting in a sea of despotism, and not just because Iran is a terrorist state in pursuit of nuclear weapons.
The current phase of the decades-old Israel-Iran War — aka Operating Rising Lion — looks on the surface like a regional affair, or maybe just two old rivals who "have to fight it out," as President Donald Trump put it earlier this week.
Iran is a part of a nascent anti-Western alliance, sometimes called "the axis of resistance" or even "the axis of upheaval."
I'm fond of the acronym, CRINK: China. Russia. Iran. North Korea.
China is the patient powerhouse, constantly probing for weakness with measures just short of war, and creating weakness in its rivals whenever possible.
Russia is the bitter loser, a revanchist semi-power that doesn't know when to quit. Vladimir Putin is no Hitler, but post-Cold War Russia is a close analog of Germany in the 1920s and '30s. Sorry, but it's the truth.
North Korea and Iran are useful street thugs for the upstart alliance, but it looks increasingly like Israel is about to knock the I right out of CRINK.
China was waging a proxy war against Israel, but now China’s proxies—Iran and Hamas—are losing. This means China is losing. https://t.co/dvWaM22iCy
— Gordon G. Chang (@GordonGChang) June 19, 2025
Why is little Israel China's concern?
China not only buys an estimated 90% of Iran's oil exports, but it also gets them at a discount due to Western sanctions. Sanctions mean Tehran can't be too picky about whom they sell to, allowing Beijing to dictate prices. Iran also supplies the missiles and terrorists that keep the world on edge — perfect for an alliance aimed at upheaval.
Despite all our serious differences, the Arab world — particularly its rich uncle, Saudi Arabia — is largely tied to the U.S.-led West. We get steady oil, they get security. CRINK means to undermine that.
That alone might make it worthwhile for Trump to order U.S. warplanes to join in the fray, particularly against Iran's hardened Fordow Fuel Enrichment Plant (FFEP), but I remain wary of direct U.S. involvement. Reportedly, so does Trump.
Israel is proof that the U.S. alliance system still works and still has teeth. Other countries, notably Japan and Poland, show similar strengths. Taiwan is a bit of an unknown — not so great, since the island is the lynchpin for defense of the Western Pacific — but appears finally to be taking its defense more seriously.
Our traditional postwar friends in Europe look increasingly like lost causes. I'm looking at you, Britain, France, and Germany.
Japan is a perfect example of just this — and the incorrect notions stuck in the heads of too many Americans.
"Why do we pay all that money to protect Japan?" is a perfectly fair question, provided someone isn't aware of all the facts.
Strong alliances keep the peace. We aren't in Japan to protect its interests; we're there to protect ours. Our trade, our wealth, and our security have been tied to the Pacific Ocean for at least 150 years. And as the global economy moves increasingly from West to East, those ties only increase.
Establishing and maintaining the peace in the Pacific is a vital national interest, and our position in Japan — hard-won against fanatical resistance in a war that Japan started — protects that vital interest.
So does Japan, for that matter. Anyone who believes Japan's military isn't potent must still live in 1950. Japan's air, sea, and land forces are all top-notch and quite serious. If they're perhaps smaller than we'd prefer, that's because of limitations placed in the constitution that we forced on them during the occupation. That's changing, though — unlike certain NATO members I could mention, Japan is serious about increasing the size and lethality of its armed forces.
I could say the same about our other friends in the Pacific Theater: South Korea and Taiwan.
And I could sum up the reason in one word: China.
What about the rest of CRINK? It isn't much of an alliance, really. It's long been said that China doesn't have friends — it either has trade partners or vassals. Russia looks increasingly like a vassal. Iran, too. North Korea plays Moscow and Beijing against one another — the Kims have always been wily — to avoid vassalization, but the end might soon come for that game.
Still, CRINK isn't without its uses for China. While Russia and Iran's wars in Eastern Europe and the Middle East keep the West preoccupied, China builds up and husbands the air and naval forces required for the Big Show sometime later.
But imagine Beijing's frustration with Israel.
While Israel disassembles Iran's military, nuclear program, and terror apparatus from the air, the U.S. is in a position to strangle the regime from the sea. China, despite all its impressive efforts at building a world-class navy, as yet cannot project power as far as Iran — while we do it with seeming ease from half a world away.
Look at a map of the world. Look at where Iran is in relation to China. Look at where the U.S. is. Yet China CAN do little to help Iran — perhaps nothing.
What's the mood in Beijing these last few days? Frustration? Humiliation? C'est la vie?
So pity poor China — but only for the moment, because seen again from Xi's eyes, the view isn't entirely bad.
Your navy and air forces are coming along nicely, while America's military procurement process remains broken in essential ways. Your navy isn't yet a match for the Americans, but you're closing the gap. Your nuclear forces just eclipsed the combined arsenals of Britain and France, who aren't even real players anymore, even with nukes. You have serious demographic issues, sure, but AI and automation are the new tools of war and generators of economic growth, not mere manpower.
China's ambition is to avoid another "century of humiliation," like the one it endured between the Opium Wars that began in 1839 and the establishment of the Communist "people's republic" in 1949. For Beijing, that means dominating Eurasia and the Pacific at least as far as Midway. Hawaii would be better. San Diego, better still.
It doesn't necessarily mean to conquer anyone militarily — economic dominance will do.
But I do believe that it means to kick us out of the Western Pacific by any means necessary, and that war between today's two great powers is probably more likely than not.
Should Beijing decide on war, we'll have something it does not: friends.
The greatest method of power projection might not be the aircraft carrier strike group, after all. As I watch events unfold in the Middle East — at the things we can do but do not have to do — I realize that perhaps the greatest power projector is a friend.
Last Thursday: Corruption, Contagion, and the Smart Guys in Suits
