Every generation declares the previous era of warfare obsolete. Today’s strategic vocabulary is saturated with references to cyber warfare, artificial intelligence, anti-satellite weapons, hypersonic glide vehicles and electromagnetic spectrum dominance. Satellites guide precision strikes across continents. Algorithms optimise targeting in milliseconds. Autonomous drones patrol contested littorals. It has become fashionable, even intellectually seductive, to argue that geography has been transcended.Yet history resists such proclamations.Despite the multiplication of domains of warfare, the structural logic that governs the rise and decline of great powers has not fundamentally changed. Oceans, not cyberspace alone, not orbital space alone, remain the decisive arena in which global hierarchy is ultimately determined.More than a century ago, Alfred Thayer Mahan argued that the nation which commands the sea commands commerce, and the nation which commands commerce commands strategic destiny. His thesis was never........

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