To Rule the Waves: How Control of the World’s Oceans Shapes the Fate of the Superpowers

Product Description

From a brilliant Brookings Institution writer, a vivid, timely, and insightful examination 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 dominance. 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 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 40-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 by it show that the struggle for power on the seas is a critical issue today.

Now, in bright, closely observed prose,
To Rule the Waves author Bruce Jones conducts us on a fascinating voyage through the great modern ports and naval bases of this era—from the vast container ports of Shanghai and Hong Kong to the vital naval base of the American 7th 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?

Review

“Jones has managed to write an important book about foreign policy without delivering an impenetrable tome. He handles his reporting deftly, keeping the reader engaged as he roams from a Cold War-era submarine base beneath a Norwegian mountain, recently reactivated in anticipation of conflicts in the Arctic, to the bridge of a missile-equipped command vessel in the Pacific. And he deftly diagrams the connections between economic policy and national security.” 
—Wall Street Journal

“An excellent primer on the role of seaborne commerce in creating our global economy.”
 —
New York Journal of Books

“[A] penetrating historical and political study.” 
—Nature

“Bruce Jones has written a timely and important reminder that, with all due respect to sophisticated 21st century cyber weapons, good old-fashioned naval power, enhanced with these new technologies, remains crucial to our collective future.
To Rule the Waves makes an utterly convincing case that, in a globalized world, navies are essential sources of both opportunity and risk for all of us. And the accessible style and fascinating stories in it makes this one of the (all-too) rare works that foreign policy wonks can share with people who never read these kinds of books.” 
—Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group

“[
To Rule the Waves] revives an old strategic tenet: Who rules the oceans rules the world. Traveling around the world, Jones examines the geopolitics of ocean power. Along the way, he looks into the history of standardized shipping, courtesy of the multimodal container, and delves into what are likely to be future patterns of energy use. The author’s points are well taken . . . knowledgeable.” 
—Kirkus Reviews

“This is nothing short of a masterwork of illumination. What is truly driving our world beneath the surface? Jones has rendered with brilliant clarity a breathtaking body of knowledge on the deep currents shaping the century ahead—strategic, environmental, and violent. This is
Sapiens for the seas; there is true knowledge on every page.”
—Evan Osnos, winner of the National Book Award and author of The Age of