In 1900, the American naval historian and strategist Alfred Thayer Mahan (1840-1914) wrote a series of articles that were later collected into a book titled The Problem of Asia. In Mahan’s time, the problem of Asia was the growing power of Russia and the unstable “debatable and debated ground” which stretched from the islands offshore of East Asia to the Middle East—roughly between 30degrees and 40 degrees north latitude.This broader central Asian belt today includes the South China Sea, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, all of China, much of India, Pakistan, the Bay of Bengal, Afghanistan, the Arabian Sea, the Persian Gulf, Iran, the oil-rich Caspian Sea basin, the Red Sea, the eastern Mediterranean Sea, the Levant, and modern-day Turkey. It roughly tracks the Asian geography of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Today, China, not Russia, is the problem of Asia.

In Mahan’s time, the geopolitical struggle over this Asian region (the “great game”) was waged by Great Britain and Russia. Today, the geopolitical struggle over this region is waged by the United States and China. And this new great game will determine the global balance of power into the foreseeable future. 

China launched the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013, using economic leverage to further its geopolitical ambitions. Those ambitions include the unfinished business of the Communist Revolution of 1949, i.e., gaining control of Taiwan, which the U.S. prevented by inserting the 7^th Fleet between China and Taiwan at the beginning of the Korean War in the summer of 1950. China’s goals entail nothing less than what they see as full redemption from the “century of humiliation” (1839–1949) through the attainment of super power status by 2049. President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream,” described by Michael Pillsbury in The Hundred-Year Marathon as “a resurgent China that would reclaim its rightful place atop the global hierarchy,” could soon be a reality.

In Mahan’s time, Russia competed with Western powers to gain influence in a decrepit Chinese empire. Today, China has joined with Russia in a “strategic partnership” that threatens to disturb the geopolitical pluralism of Eurasia. Mahan understood that effective political control over key segments of Eurasia would threaten Britain’s global preeminence. The resources of Eurasia could transform its dominant land power into the world’s dominant sea power. This was also the assessment of Mahan’s British counterpart, Sir Halford John Mackinder (1861-1947), who famously argued that the key to geopolitical dominance would ultimately be control over the interior of Eurasia, stretching from Eastern Europe to China. Today’s great game includes land power, sea power, air power, space power, cyber power, and artificial intelligence (AI) power. 

The geography of the contest has greatly expanded. In Mahan’s time, the conflict was limited to central Asia. Today, China’s Belt and Road Initiative reaches into Europe, Africa, and in parts of the Western Hemisphere, including the Panama Canal. The Arctic Ocean is also up for grabs, which is one reason why President Trump wants Greenland and talks of Canada as the 51^st state. The great geopolitical thinker Robert Kaplan has noted that the melting Arctic Ocean has for the first time made Mackinder’s concept of the Eurasian-African “World-Island” a geographical and geopolitical reality.  

In 1900, Mahan wrote that the geopolitical conditions in the central Asian belt “render[ed] the problem of Asia . . . at once perplexing and imminent.” Mahan noted that Britain and Russia had “zones of power” in Asia and would seek to acquire “new positions” to expand their respective power. Mahan urged U.S. leaders to maintain our naval predominance in the Western Hemisphere, control the Central American isthmus to construct a strategic canal, and establish an effective naval force in the western Pacific. He also urged the formation of alliances with smaller Asian powers, including Japan, to counterbalance Russia. 

Today, the need for more naval power in the western Pacific is obvious given China’s growth in naval power and its huge lead in shipbuilding capacity. As in 1900, U.S. control of an isthmian canal is imperative to our ability to transfer warships from the Caribbean to Asia. And today the need for allies in the region is as great or greater than it was in 1900. 

It turns out that the group of conservative “Asia-firsters” of the 1940s and 1950s were way ahead of their time. Men like Sen. Robert Taft, former President Herbert Hoover, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, Ambassador William Bullitt, publisher Henry Luce, Alfred Kohlberg, Ambassador Joseph Grew, Sen. William Knowland, and others, feared that Communist China would one day pose a greater threat to the United States than the Soviet Union did. They supported the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek in China’s civil war, and blamed the Truman administration for “losing” China by ending assistance to our World War II ally. Gen. MacArthur presciently noted that “The decision to withhold previously pledged support [to Chiang’s regime] was one of the greatest mistakes ever made in our history . . . Its consequences will be felt for centuries, and its ultimate disastrous effects on the fortunes of the free world are still to be unfolded.” MacArthur believed that America’s long-term destiny was as a Pacific and Asiatic power. 

President Trump’s moves to consolidate American hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and his real “pivot” to the Indo-Pacific are Mahanian. So, too, are Trump’s trade deals and tariff negotiations, which are designed to reinvigorate our military-industrial base. Science and technology have made the “new” problem of Asia more dangerous today than in Mahan’s time. And it’s not going away any time soon. The old great game lasted for more than half a century. The new one may last even longer.