Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto—Commander-in-Chief of the Imperial Japanese Combined Fleet from 1939 to 1943—was not a strategic intellectual whose views were taken lightly in the Empire of the Rising Sun. Having studied at Harvard University and served as Japan’s naval attaché in Washington D.C., Yamamoto possessed a clear grasp of the capability gap between the United States and Japan. This gap was not simply reflected in the size of their respective fleets, but more importantly in their national industrial capacity.
The United States—with a GDP that was six times larger than that of Japan, and crucially with all major resources located and protected within its vast continental territory—could surge its naval production in ways Japan could not match. With energy and production inputs running out in Japan in the early 1940s, Yamamoto, though fully conscious of this irreconcilable material gap, nevertheless advised a surprise attack against the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor. The decision bore the character of a grim paradox: an act born less of confidence than of necessity. Japan had, in a sense, “committed suicide for fear of dying.” The initial blow, executed with remarkable precision, achieved a fleeting tactical brilliance, yet served more consequentially to awaken the very industrial giant Yamamoto had long feared—unleashing a mobilization of American naval shipbuilding that Japan, bound by its structural limitations, could neither replicate nor withstand.
Awakened by the day that would live in infamy, the United States surged ahead in 1942, building 22 aircraft carriers to Japan’s 3 aircraft carriers. Over four years of war in the Pacific, the United States produced more than thirteen times Japan’s steel output. Japan decisively lost the naval war at Midway and Guadalcanal, as Admiral Chester Nimitz’s island-hopping strategy forged a vast yet efficient maritime logistical network, sustaining American naval projection across vast distances while gradually tightening the noose around Japan. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the coup de grâce to an already decisive Japanese naval defeat.
America’s unrivalled naval primacy in World War II did not emerge out of thin air. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, the United States had possessed the industrial capacity to surpass any rival in shipbuilding. Between 1907 to 1909, Theodore Roosevelt demonstrated this power by dispatching the so-called “Great White Fleet” on a circumnavigation of the globe. The Fleet called at the ports of major powers to convey a clear message: the United States was, if not yet the foremost, then certainly among the world’s preeminent naval powers.
American dominance of the oceans became indisputable after World War II, as Washington moved to contain the Soviet Union. The U.S. fleet—larger than the rest of the world’s navies combined—faced no meaningful challenge in commanding the high seas. It was political scientist Samuel Huntington who first proposed a new strategic role for the U.S. Navy. In a seminal 1954 article “National Policy and the Transoceanic Navy” in the U.S. Naval Institute’s magazine Proceedings, Huntington argued that the Navy’s purpose was “not to acquire command of the sea but rather to utilize its already established command of the sea to achieve supremacy on the land”—and more specifically, to apply naval power to “that decisive strip of littoral encircling the Eurasian continent.”
Control of this littoral Eurasian zone—known in geopolitical terminology as the rimland—consolidated American political influence over economically and resource-rich regions, notably Western Europe and the Persian Gulf. The principal instrument of this rimland control was the aircraft carrier, whose aviation capabilities allowed for the projection of devastating force deep inland. Even today, as the United States conducts operations against Iran, more than 70 percent of its destructive power springs from carrier aviation and sea-launched cruise missiles.
It is not a stretch to argue that, for the past century, the United States has been the world’s sole thalassocracy: a maritime empire unrivalled on the high seas, in full control of maritime chokepoints, and capable of projecting catastrophic force across the rimland at will—from Vietnam and Cambodia to Latin America, from Serbia to Iraq in 1991 and 2003, and now to Iran.
Chinese analysts, however, maintain that we are living in an era of unprecedented change unseen in a century. Among the most consequential of these shifts is the possibility that we may be approaching the twilight of American uncontested thalassocracy. China has achieved something equally unprecedented: in 2 of the 3 constituent elements of sea power—actual capacity and surging capacity—it has moved ahead of the United States. China’s navy is now larger by hull count, and, more importantly, its capacity to surge naval production surpasses that of the United States by 2 orders of magnitude. China today produces more steel, the basic input of shipbuilding, than the rest of the world combined.
Across every category of commercial vessel, from bulk carriers and tankers to LNG ships and container ships, China outproduces the United States by a ratio of more than 200 to 1. Chinese shipyards in 2025 captured over 60 percent of the global shipbuilding order book. While commercial output does not translate directly into naval production, the economies of scale embedded in China’s shipyards, combined with its emulation of the U.S. model of civil-military fusion, allow China to redirect commercial production toward the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) naval build-up with considerable effect.
In this narrower but decisive dimension of industrial mobilization, China today invites comparison with the United States of 1942—a power whose strength lay not only in the fleet it possessed, but in the vastly greater fleet it could build. The United States, by contrast, risks occupying in this specific respect a position that recalls, albeit imperfectly, that of Japan in 1942: technologically sophisticated and operationally formidable, yet constrained by a more limited productive capacity to regenerate maritime power at scale. The analogy should not be overstretched. Unlike Japan, the United States retains abundant natural resources, significant advantages in naval technology, and most importantly a global alliance network with substantial shipbuilding capabilities. The emerging asymmetry is therefore not one of comprehensive inferiority, but of differential industrial depth—an imbalance between the two leading naval powers that may prove decisive over time if left unaddressed.
It is only in the third element of sea power—naval logistics, and in particular the network of overseas bases—that China continues to lag significantly behind the United States. Here the American position remains dominant, with more than 50 major naval bases and hundreds of supporting installations across the globe. China, by contrast, possesses a far more limited footprint: allegedly one naval base in Cambodia and a dual-use port in Djibouti. Naval bases remain indispensable to sustained global power projection, as fleets depend upon reliable systems of resupply and maintenance. Without them, China’s naval power remains constrained, confined broadly to its first island chain. Even the widely speculated to be nuclear-powered aircraft carriers China is currently developing—the Type 004, under construction at Dalian—would be unable to operate continuously on a global basis without an accessible basing and supply network.
The key strategic question for China is when its leadership will decide to develop a supporting logistical network of naval bases across the world, so as to extend the reach of its already formidable navy beyond the littoral waters of the first island chain. For now, Chinese naval doctrine remains focused on the Taiwan question—ensuring that any secessionist attempt will be decisively prevented by overwhelming firepower nearshore. Within the first island chain, China’s anti-access and attritional advantages make any U.S. intervention extraordinarily costly and uncertain. Strategic ambiguity over U.S. commitments regarding changes to the Taiwanese status quo, combined with the potential for nuclear escalation should the United States face conventional defeat in this theatre, supports deterrence and encourages prudent strategizing on both sides.
Yet another question arises: given China’s unrivalled conventional advantages near its maritime periphery, especially within the first island chain, why is China building such a massive naval force? A part of this expansion includes the buildup of its aircraft carrier fleet from 3 vessels today to 9 by the mid-2030s—according to disclosed U.S. Department of Defense estimates. Likewise, China is on track to field a 435-ship fleet by 2030, while the U.S. Navy will struggle to reach 300 ships.
It seems that China’s drive toward global naval power projection is driven less by prestige than by calculation. China must increasingly secure its overseas economic interests at a time when the United States appears intent on rolling back China’s global access. This is visible in Washington’s invocation of a revived “Donroe” Doctrine in Venezuela, its effort to reshape Gulf energy dynamics through the effective dismantling of Iran as a functioning state, and its pressure on key arteries of maritime connectivity—as the recent case of Panama illustrates.
However, China’s present strategic aims lie less in the construction of overseas naval bases than in the accumulation of strategic reserves—whether in oil or in energy storage—designed to mitigate the effects of geopolitical supply shocks. At the same time, China continues to invest heavily in land-based connectivity across Eurasia, linking its energy- and food-hungry economy to Russia’s abundant resources. But China’s economic interests extend well beyond the continental landmass and remain exposed to forms of maritime coercion and interdiction in which the United States retains considerable leverage. It is precisely the capacity of a thalassocrat to deny trade and “embarrass the finances of a country,” as the founding father of naval power theory Alfred Mahan put it, that renders maritime dominance so strategically consequential.
China’s dependence on sea-based imports for critical resources is considerable. The batteries underpinning its energy transition alone require lithium, cobalt, and nickel—commodities for which China relies on imports. Cognizant of this vulnerability, China aims to remain the world’s dominant refiner. By ensuring that the world depends on China for processed copper and lithium, Beijing hopes to create a form of mutually assured economic destruction through asymmetric interdependence: if the United States cuts off China’s raw ore, the United States loses its own supply of refined materials that are essential for a functioning economy. Washington has begun to respond, encouraging the development of near- and friend-shored refining networks that would, over time, dilute China’s leverage.
China’s physical storage strategy cannot fully neutralize offshore dependence, nor can China accept complete reliance on Russia. It follows that some measure of maritime reach may, in time, prove necessary to complement China’s strategy of stockpiling and overland connectivity. The result is less a departure from existing policy than its extension: a belt-and-braces approach in which redundancy across land, sea, and storage becomes the essence of resilience.
As the United States and China enter what may be described as a new Cold War—one in which neither side can decisively defeat the other through direct kinetic conflict, owing to the constraints of nuclear deterrence and mutual assured destruction—the navy assumes renewed centrality as an instrument of political power. It possesses both inductive and coercive qualities. By protecting sea lanes and partners, a naval power can offer reassurance and rewards, thereby attracting partners and consolidating influence; in its more coercive guise of gunboat diplomacy, naval presence can extract concessions or even directly interdict trade flows to adversaries.
The United States has historically demonstrated considerable skill in both dimensions. China—mindful of its own experience as a victim of gunboat diplomacy during the century of humiliation—has been reluctant to embrace the coercive variant. Among senior Chinese intellectuals, the notion that the Chinese navy will act in coercive ways globally is rejected outright as colonial behavior that China will never emulate. The towering figure of Chinese reform, Deng Xiaoping, following Mao’s directions declared in a UN speech in 1974 that if China were ever to “change her colors, subjecting others to bullying and exploitation, then the people of the world should expose it, oppose it, and work together with the Chinese people to overthrow it.”
Deng was prudent to offer that counsel. Whether China will continue to resist the coercive use of naval power remains to be seen. Yet it may find it increasingly necessary to cultivate global naval reach as a means of deterrence and inducement alike. The strategic logic points toward discouraging American efforts to revise the economic status quo in regions where China has invested heavily, while encouraging sustained bilateral engagement from states along the rimland.
It is in this latter dimension—inducement and attraction—that the economic foundations of thalassocratic power assume particular significance. Surplus capital, typically accumulated through maritime commerce, permits sustained investment in infrastructure that enhances connectivity and, in turn, economic welfare, nurturing mutually beneficial interdependence among states. Over the past 20 years, China has emerged as a leading investor in maritime and transport infrastructure both domestically and across the world.
The port of Piraeus in Greece offers a particularly instructive example, having been transformed from a relatively underutilized facility into one of the European Union’s principal commercial hubs through investment from the Chinese shipping giant COSCO. China’s President Xi Jinping—in a March 2026 Qiushi article titled “Promoting High Quality Development of the Marine Economy”—reiterated China’s long-standing ambition to become a maritime power. He emphasized that the pathway toward this goal relies heavily on the high-quality development of the marine economy, technology, and infrastructure.
Now, the Sino-American maritime competition enters the geoeconomic domain. Major powers—secure in their retaliatory nuclear capacities—increasingly engage in a protracted twilight struggle to shape structural control over critical infrastructure and resources. Commercial ports may not serve directly as logistical hubs for the PLA Navy, yet Washington is increasingly concerned about China’s expanding network of “smart” ports. By accumulating maritime data on a global scale, these facilities offer significant commercial value. However, they also generate critical logistical intelligence. U.S. officials worry these capabilities could be used to monitor American naval operations and compromise broader maritime security.
Hence, the United States has moved to exclude Chinese data platforms—such as LOGINK and Nuctech’s cargo screening equipment—from its ports and it has encouraged its allies to do likewise. In March 2026, U.S. Ambassador to Greece Kimberly Guilfoyle visited Piraeus to celebrate the delivery of new American-made cargo screening systems and to underscore Washington’s determination to displace Chinese-linked security technologies from strategically sensitive ports. The United States has also barred the use of port ship-to-shore cranes produced by China’s state-owned Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industries—despite their prior dominance in the U.S. market—in favor of more costly alternatives from allied suppliers. In an era defined by geoeconomics, considerations of security increasingly prevail over those of cost.
Concerns over security have also extended into shipbuilding. The Section 301 USTR investigation, initiated under the Biden administration—and concluded under the Trump administration—identified extensive Chinese state support for its shipbuilding sector. U.S. officials have argued that major commercial Chinese shipyards operate on a dual-use basis, such that foreign contracts may indirectly augment China’s PLA naval capacity. In response, Washington imposed port fees on vessels constructed in Chinese shipyards—irrespective of ownership.
Although these measures were subsequently paused following the Trump–Xi meeting in Busan in late 2025, the episode is better understood as a temporary geoeconomic truce—one shaped, in part, by China’s leverage in rare earths. In truth, the adage of “high walls, small yards” that former U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan proclaimed as the compass of American geoeconomic strategy has steadily given way to a posture of ever higher walls and ever larger yards. The geoeconomic competition between the United States and China is intensifying not only at the micro level of chips, but at the macro level of ships and heavy industry.
More broadly, U.S. policy has begun to emphasize the consolidation of shipbuilding capacity within its allied network. The approval of Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel—alongside the entry of Korea’s Hanwha Ocean into the Philadelphia Shipyard—points to a strategy of industrial recombination across friendly states. Hanwha’s parallel engagement with Greek shipyards, which is supported by the U.S. Development Finance Corporation, further underscores this trend. Moreover, American investments are being directed into Finnish shipyards for the construction of new icebreakers. Competition with Russia and China is rapidly expanding into the Arctic. In this Arctic environment, the opening of northern sea routes is acquiring major strategic and commercial significance.
In response to this intra-allied consolidation, China merged its two largest shipbuilding companies—CSSC and CSIC—in a massive $16 billion deal in 2025. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies (“China Dominates the Shipbuilding Industry”), CSSC alone built more commercial vessels by tonnage in 2024 than the entire U.S. shipbuilding industry has produced since the end of World War II.
This scale of maritime competition between China and the United States has no similarities to the competition between the Soviet Union and the United States during the Cold War. At that point, the United States retained absolute naval pre-eminence. It extended protection over rimland states, while the strength of its commercial maritime ecosystem exercised a quiet but powerful attraction upon those same rimland states—reinforcing, rather than complicating, the prevailing order. In the decades ahead, competition for influence along the rimland is likely to intensify, and the geostrategic environment for rimland states will become considerably more complex.
It is among these rimland states that the consequences of this shifting maritime order will be felt most acutely—none more so than those whose geography, history, and economy are inseparable from the sea. Consider the case of Greece, the quintessential rimland state, situated at the maritime crossroads of three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. The Greek Nobel laureate in literature Odysseas Elytis once observed that if you deconstruct Greece, in the end an olive tree, a grapevine, and a boat will remain—and that with as much, one may reconstruct her. Greece is a peninsula surrounded by the sea, and this geographical condition has shaped not only its civilizational character—open, cosmopolitan, and possessed of unmatched aesthetic sensibility—but also its geopolitical instincts.
In every major conflict of the modern era, Greece aligned with the thalassocratic coalition: with the Entente in World War I, with Great Britain in World War II, and with the Anglo-American order through NATO during the Cold War. This strategic certainty—the reflexive alignment of a rimland state with the dominant thalassocrat—may, however, be approaching its limits. As China rises to challenge American command of the seas, the foundations of this long-standing pattern may gradually erode.
The pace of such change will depend, above all, on Beijing’s political decision to develop a network of naval bases beyond the first island chain—an evolution that will not be immediate and may unfold over a decade or two. Yet once realized, it would mark a fundamental shift in the geopolitical and geoeconomic environment within which rimland states such as Greece—and much of Europe—have long operated.
This emerging era of contested sea power is further complicated by disruptive technological change. Advances in sensing, the proliferation of anti-ship missiles, and the growing accessibility of unmanned surface and undersea systems have lowered the threshold at which even relatively weak states can disrupt global commerce and challenge more powerful navies. These technologies, as former senior American diplomat and military official Karl Eikenberry has espoused, “might be combined in ways to make aircraft carriers and large surface vessels the seagoing armored knights charging into a line of maritime crossbows.” The 2025 U.S. campaign against the Houthis—who, without possessing a navy of their own, were able to contest access to the Red Sea for a sustained period against the all-powerful U.S. Navy—offers a striking illustration of the impact of these new technologies.
Likewise, Ukraine, despite lacking a conventional fleet, has imposed meaningful constraints on Russian naval operations in the Black Sea. In such conditions, even smaller and economically constrained states may acquire disproportionate strategic relevance, at times acting as proxies for larger maritime powers in an emerging great-power rivalry. The competition for influence along the rimland has only just begun, and its future course is likely to be shaped as much by technological diffusion as by the traditional measures of naval strength and the United States’ efforts to attrit Chinese maritime power projection.
Such a transformation will directly impact Greece’s formidable shipping sector—a vital artery of the global economy. The Greek maritime fleet operates globally but depends upon a stable maritime order. When a thalassocracy faces no peer competitor, the choice for shipowners is relatively straightforward: their vessels operate under the security umbrella of the dominant naval power. In an era of contested seas, however, that clarity fades.
Although it will take time for China to develop the requisite logistical architecture—not least a network of overseas naval facilities—capable of projecting naval power at scale, geoeconomic Sino-American antagonism is already well underway. From the Section 301 investigations, which seek to impose costs on Chinese-built vessels irrespective of ownership, to efforts aimed at curbing Chinese involvement in key port infrastructures—from Piraeus to Panama and Chancay in Peru—the evidence suggests that an emergent condition of competitive thalassocracy is already underway. More immediately, the prospect that commercial fleets may, in times of crisis or blockade, be drawn into auxiliary logistical roles signals that long-standing liberal assumptions about the neutrality of commerce are beginning to erode.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the geoeconomic domain, where competition is no longer incipient but gathering momentum, with senior American officials remarking that “ships are the new chips.” Greek shipowners have invested more than $50 billion in Chinese shipyards since 2000, bringing the sector under growing strategic scrutiny. It is, in this sense, a proxy for the wider European maritime sector—one that controls over 30 percent of global shipping and retains considerable techno-industrial weight. The European Union’s recent Industrial Maritime and Port Strategy—aimed at restoring competitiveness—reflects an awareness of this shifting landscape; yet it has not escaped notice in Beijing, where it is viewed less as an endogenous adjustment than as a U.S.-induced effort to exclude China from Europe’s maritime ecosystem.
In this nascent era of contested thalassocracy, Europe’s maritime powers must preserve strategic autonomy without sacrificing commercial openness and resist becoming instruments of another power’s maritime-industrial design. Beyond the level of the state, the European maritime and shipping community must cultivate its own geoeconomic and geopolitical intelligence—building the foresight necessary to remain ahead of the strategic curve, and to balance efficiency with resilience.
Above all, the European shipping community must do what it has long done best: demonstrate to all major powers that the free flow of maritime commerce advances the welfare of all and, in no small measure, renders life more peaceful. That end, however, will remain elusive unless China and the United States succeed in channeling their rivalry into a form of managed competition—one oriented toward domestic socio-economic excellence rather than mutual attrition—and refrain from reducing rimland states to mere pawns on a geoeconomic chessboard.
