To Rule the Waves, Bruce Jones
To Rule the Waves, Bruce Jones
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To Rule the Waves
How Control of the World's Oceans Determines the Fate of the Superpowers

Author: Bruce Jones

Narrator: Jacques Roy

Unabridged: 12 hr 15 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/14/2021


Synopsis

From a brilliant Brookings Institution expert, an “important” (The Wall Street Journal) and “penetrating historical and political study” (Nature) of the critical role that oceans play in the daily struggle for global power, in the bestselling tradition of Robert Kaplan’s The Revenge of Geography.

For centuries, oceans were the chessboard on which empires battled for supremacy. But in the nuclear age, air power and missile systems dominated our worries about security, and for the United States, the economy was largely driven by domestic production, with trucking and railways that crisscrossed the continent serving as the primary modes of commercial transit.

All that has changed, as nine-tenths of global commerce and the bulk of energy trade is today linked to sea-based flows. A brightly painted forty-foot steel shipping container loaded in Asia with twenty tons of goods may arrive literally anywhere else in the world; how that really happens and who actually profits from it show that the struggle for power on the seas is a critical issue today.

Now, in vivid, closely observed prose, Bruce D. Jones conducts us on a fascinating voyage through the great modern ports and naval bases—from the vast container ports of Hong Kong and Shanghai to the vital naval base of the American Seventh Fleet in Hawaii to the sophisticated security arrangements in the Port of New York. Along the way, the book illustrates how global commerce works, that we are amidst a global naval arms race, and why the oceans are so crucial to America’s standing going forward.

As Jones reveals, the three great geopolitical struggles of our time—for military power, for economic dominance, and over our changing climate—are playing out atop, within, and below the world’s oceans. The essential question, he shows, is this: who will rule the waves and set the terms of the world to come?

About Bruce Jones

Bruce D. Jones directs the Project on International Order and Strategy of the Foreign Policy at the Brookings Institution, where for four years he was also vice president for foreign policy. He has lived and worked in Asia, Africa, and Europe, including serving with UN operations in Kosovo and the Middle East. He has documented the changing dynamics of world power in several previous books about international affairs. He has been a senior advisor to the World Bank and has lectured or been a nonresident fellow at Princeton, Stanford, Yale, and New York University.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Jeff

(Mostly) Solid Examination Of History And Current Events. This is a fairly well documented - nearly 100 pages of its 400 are bibliography, *in addition to* at least a few paragraphs of footnotes at the end of every chapter - examination of both the history and current events of why both commercial a......more

Goodreads review by Nils

Deftly weaves together the story of the economic logics that have led to global maritime integration (via the personal stories of Denmark’s Maersk and Hong Kong’s CH Tung) against the political logics which turn those same connections into geopolitical tensions and vulnerabilities, centered on the o......more

Goodreads review by Brendan

This book is neither what I expected it to be nor can I quite describe what it is. I expected it to be a history-based discussion of how naval and commercial sea power contributed to the success or failure of states and empires and an analysis of strategies to "rule the waves." And there is some dis......more

Great book especially in conjunction with the book The Strategy of Denial Together these books lay out China's ongoing strategy to isolate and weaken the U.S. to a second rate power to China. This strategy is already well under way and is already one that the U.S. can't stop alone short of nuclear wa......more