Introduction
This article proposes a reading of the emerging international order that begins from the oceans. With the progressive diminishing of the United States’ role as the pivot of the post-Cold War unipolar system, a complex reconfiguration is under way — one in constant motion and difficult to decipher. Analysing it through oceanic space, adopting a view of the ocean planet rather than the land planet, can offer a useful framework for reading this transition.
1. Why the Ocean?
The history of world order has always been written, in part, at sea. From the Roman mare nostrum to British dominance over the Atlantic routes, and on to the American carrier groups that have patrolled the oceans for eighty years, maritime dominance is the infrastructure on which terrestrial political arrangements have rested.
In today’s globalised world this centrality has not diminished: ninety per cent of international trade travels by sea, as does almost all of the oil and liquefied natural gas that fuels industrial economies, while the projection of military power is achieved through fleets, naval bases and rapid deployment routes. At a historical moment in which supply chains have become geopolitical vulnerabilities, and military force has once again become currency in international relations, looking to the oceans represents a methodological choice as useful as it is necessary.
The Two Dominant Poles
The American-Atlantic Pole
The United States is carrying out a gradual strategic reorientation toward the western hemisphere and toward the oceans that bound it, the Atlantic in particular. Faced with the rising costs of global primacy and with China’s growth as a competing power, American strategy is to consolidate control over the territory essential to its national interests and progressively to reduce peripheral commitments.
In the Atlantic, Washington maintains a structural dominance through NATO, the transatlantic economic relationship and its network of bases and naval infrastructure — so much so that the Atlantic is, in practice, a protected interior sea for American power. This recent withdrawal toward the hemisphere nevertheless produces tensions on the very front it seeks to consolidate. The relationship with Europe, historically the pillar of the Atlantic order, is being transformed: Washington is no longer willing to sustain unlimited costs for European security, and this loosening opens spaces that others are already occupying. The erosion of French influence in the Sahel, Turkey’s growing assertiveness in the Mediterranean and Chinese commercial penetration of southern European ports are all signs of a pressure accumulating at the margins of an area indispensable to Washington’s security. Equally indispensable are the alignment of Canada and Mexico within the hemisphere, control of the Panama Canal, the geopolitical position of Cuba and the political trajectory of Venezuela.
by I Bautista via Pexels
2.2 The Chinese-Pacific Pole
China’s strategic logic in the western Pacific pole is a matter of sequence. The first step is the resolution of the Taiwan question, treated here as a probable medium-term outcome rather than as a remote contingency. Taiwan represents the critical gap in the Chinese defensive perimeter: control of the island would give Beijing the access to the open ocean that is today denied it, and would complete the arc of influence over the South China Sea, already in the process of being absorbed into the Chinese sphere. Once that front were consolidated, the confrontation would shift toward the vast oceanic expanse further east, where Chinese reach is growing and the American presence, though still substantial, appears ever less able to maintain the level of control it exercised in the past.
The Chinese path in that direction nonetheless meets significant obstacles. Japan is the country that would find itself most directly and most rapidly threatened by the seizure of Taiwan, and it possesses both the latent capacity and the existential incentive to oppose Chinese expansion into the Pacific. South Korea finds itself in an analogous position, rendered still more complex by its geopolitical location. China’s strategic horizon, however, is a long one: 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic, is the date by which Beijing intends to complete reunification with Taiwan. This long-term horizon allows Beijing to proceed by degrees, consolidating the positions it has acquired and managing external resistance, while every signal of American withdrawal or weakening — in Europe as in Asia — lowers the political cost of each further step.
3. The Multipolar Peripheries
Around the two dominant poles extend regions where neither Washington nor Beijing intends to exercise a hegemonic presence sufficient to stabilise them. It is precisely this absence of great-power gravity that makes these areas the most turbulent in the present system: without a recognised arbiter, regional powers advance their own ambitions, clash over maritime boundaries, trade routes and seabed resources, and generate a continuous friction that no multilateral institution is today able to contain effectively.
3.1 The Indian Ocean
Moving west from the Pacific, the Indian Ocean is the first of these peripheries. Geography defines its importance: it carries the greater part of the world’s oil, liquefied natural gas and containerised goods, and India occupies its geometric centre, with a coastline facing all the principal transit routes. India claims this space as its natural sphere of influence, invests in naval modernisation and builds bilateral security relationships with the island states of the region — but its position is not uncontested.
The United Arab Emirates is building a maritime presence of its own in the western ocean through port investments and security agreements that extend its reach well beyond the Persian Gulf, while Pakistan adds a regional dimension to a competition running from the Himalayas to the Arabian Sea. The result is a space in which several ambitions overlap without any one of them managing to impose itself definitively, feeding a rivalry that has so far found no consolidated point of equilibrium.
3.2 The Mediterranean
The Mediterranean is also among the multipolar peripheries. Turkey is today its most dynamic actor: it advances extended exclusive economic zone claims in the Aegean and the eastern Mediterranean, in direct conflict with Greece, Cyprus, Egypt and France, sustained by a rapidly modernising navy and by a demonstrated willingness to project military force beyond its own borders. This is a project of regional reorientation without recent precedent in the area, one that redraws balances consolidated in the post-war period.
The Mediterranean is also the western terminal of the trade routes that run from Asia, through the Suez Canal, to European markets, which makes it strategically relevant well beyond regional confines. The Libyan conflict, in which Turkey, the Emirates, Russia and Egypt are all implicated with divergent interests, is in part a competition for control of this corridor, while the gas fields of the eastern Mediterranean and the submarine communications cables add further grounds for friction in a region that knows no moments of structural quiet.
3.3 The Arctic
The Arctic is the ocean pole changing most rapidly, under the direct pressure of climatic warming. The reduction of summer sea ice is opening the Northern Sea Route as a viable alternative to the Suez corridor, with shorter transit times between Asia and Europe and avoiding the principal chokepoints, while the Arctic seabed contains an estimated thirteen per cent of undiscovered oil reserves and thirty per cent of the world’s natural gas. It is these characteristics that make the Arctic a periphery sui generis: structurally distant from the heart of the competition between the two superpowers, yet relevant enough to attract the attention of both.
Russia advances the most extensive territorial claim, but its capacity to develop it is today limited by the economic and technological consequences of the invasion of Ukraine. The United States, which for decades neglected its own Arctic front, is reassessing it with growing attention: the renewed interest in Greenland reflects an awareness that the region faces simultaneously onto the Atlantic and the Pacific, touching both spheres of American interest and therefore assuming a strategic value that goes beyond the northern dimension alone. China, having proclaimed itself a “near-Arctic state”, signals through investment in icebreakers and a scientific presence its intention to take part in the governance of the region, irrespective of the preferences of the eight formal members of the Arctic Council.
4. The Central and Western Pacific
Between the two dominant poles extends the central Pacific, the liquid frontier where neither American nor Chinese primacy is yet consolidated, and where the interaction between the two powers will determine whether the emerging order is characterised by managed competition or by open confrontation. The region contains American allies and bases, Chinese investments, the exclusive economic zones of numerous island states, and areas used for the overlapping military exercises of both great powers.
After the seizure of Taiwan — a scenario this article considers probable, as argued above — China would consolidate its control over the South China Sea and would then have to define how far to push its projection eastward, knowing that beyond Japan and South Korea one enters progressively into the American sphere of influence. The boundary between the two spheres is not formally defined; it extends across thousands of kilometres of open ocean, in which the influence of both powers fades without either being able as yet to impose its preferences. If this indeterminacy remains managed, the system holds in a state of coexistence. If one of the two powers attempts to redefine that gradient unilaterally in its own favour, the transition under way becomes a direct confrontation.
5. Conclusion
This article has proposed reading the transition of the international order through the oceans, starting from the idea that maritime spaces are not simple connectors between the areas of interest of the great powers, but places where power is projected, contested and redistributed. The oceanic perspective does not replace traditional analyses of international relations; it integrates them with a spatial dimension that those analyses tend to neglect, and which in this phase of transition appears particularly useful for reading dynamics that are otherwise difficult to decipher.
The picture that emerges suggests that, once consolidated, the two dominant poles will tend toward a relative internal stability: the states that fall within their orbit will progressively be called upon to accept the gravity of their reference superpower, with ever narrower margins of autonomy. It is in the multipolar peripheries — the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean, the Arctic — that we should instead expect the greatest conflict: in the absence of a consolidated hegemonic presence, regional powers take the opportunity to advance their own projects of expansion and to assert their influence. Finally, it is in the central Pacific that it will be decided whether the two superpowers manage to maintain a tense but managed coexistence, or whether the accumulated pressure spills over into a direct confrontation that would redraw the entire system. For as long as that question remains unanswered, that band of ocean will remain the most opaque and the most decisive zone of the emerging order.