Watch Navy 250: Sea Power and Freedom

On Sunday, October 5^th, Real America’s Voice and Steve Bannon’s War Room presented a special program celebrating the 250^th anniversary of the U.S. Navy. The program, titled Navy 250: Sea Power and Freedom, covered live events at and near the Norfolk, Va. Naval Base, including live fire exercises, navy seal demonstrations, carrier warplane launches and landings, and an address by President Trump aboard the aircraft carrier USS Harry S. Truman. The program also included discussions on sea power and geopolitics by Strategic Intelligence editor James Rickards, retired navy captain and co-author of Embracing Communist China: America’s Greatest Strategic Failure James Fanell, Sunday Guardian columnist Cleo Paskal, retired Admiral Edward “Sonny” Masso, and other experts. Bannon, who served as a naval officer in the 7^th Fleet and at the Pentagon, hosted the program and contributed his own expertise on naval warfare and history.

Cleo Paskal observed that the “pivot” of global politics has shifted from Eurasia to the Pacific, while Captain Fanell expressed concern that our lax shipbuilding capacity relative to China is a dangerous trend that if not reversed could lead to China’s replacing the United States as the world’s greatest sea power. Rickards and Bannon noted the important contributions to U.S. naval power and strategic security of Admiral Hyman Rickover, the father of the nuclear navy, and Andrew Marshall, who for decades oversaw the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment which focused on long-term strategic threats and goals.

Bannon believes that Trump’s “America First” vision for U.S. naval and naval-air power in the 21^st century is to reclaim “hemispheric security” and to prevent the PLA Navy from dominating the Pacific. The Pacific Ocean, Bannon believes, is the strategic “heartland” of the 21^st century. Mackinder once wrote that whoever controls Eurasia or the World Island commands the world. Bannon and Paskal would revise Mackinder’s dictum, with a Mahanian twist, to: Whoever controls the Pacific commands the destinies of the world. China, they believe, is seeking to control the Pacific Ocean, and breaking through the first and second island chains (which includes Taiwan) is the initial steps toward achieving that goal.

Although the experts on the program briefly mentioned the Ukraine War and the conflict in the Middle East, they believe that Trump is rightly attempting to end those conflicts so that the United States can focus on the twin and complementary objectives of hemispheric security and maintaining control of the Pacific. Unmatched sea power is essential to both objectives. Our freedom and way of life depend on it.

Francis P. Sempa writes on military and foreign policy.