Theodore Roosevelt, Donald Trump, and the Forgotten Lessons of Sea Power

Editor’s Introduction

History comes alive when it is told by someone who has spent a lifetime studying it.

In this episode of Fair Game, Dr. Gary Kellner is joined by his longtime friend, historian Harold E. “Pete” Stark, whose passion for military history, naval strategy, and the great turning points of world events brings a unique depth to every conversation. Stark has devoted decades to researching the decisions, personalities, and campaigns that shaped nations, always with an eye toward the lessons they still offer today.

Together, Gary and Pete explore Theodore Roosevelt’s enduring fascination with sea power, the strategic thinking of Alfred Thayer Mahan and Sir Julian Corbett, and why history remains one of the most valuable guides for understanding the challenges facing modern leaders.

Whether you are a student of history or simply curious about the forces that shape our world, this conversation reminds us that the past is never truly past. Its lessons are waiting for those willing to listen.

Theodore Roosevelt, Donald Trump, and the Forgotten Lessons of Sea Power

The President Who Went West

There are few places in America less likely to become the home of a presidential library than the tiny ranching town of Medora, North Dakota. Nestled against the rugged Badlands, surrounded by sweeping grasslands and weathered buttes sculpted by millions of years of wind and water, Medora seems a world away from the corridors of power in Washington, the Victorian elegance of Oyster Bay, or the bustling streets of New York City. Yet it is here, in this remote corner of the American West, that the Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library has been built. To those unfamiliar with Roosevelt’s life, the location appears curious. To historians, it could not be more appropriate.

The story begins not with politics but with heartbreak.

On February 14, 1884, Theodore Roosevelt experienced one of the darkest days any man who became an American president has ever endured. Within hours of one another, the two women closest to him died beneath the same roof. His beloved mother, Martha Bulloch Roosevelt, succumbed to typhoid fever after a lengthy illness. Upstairs, his twenty-two-year-old wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, died from complications of Bright’s disease only two days after giving birth to their first child, a daughter he named Alice in honor of her mother. Roosevelt was just twenty-five years old.

His diary entry that evening contained only a single sentence. Beside a large black X he wrote, “The light has gone out of my life.”

Friends feared he would never recover.

Instead, he disappeared.

Leaving his infant daughter in the care of family members, Roosevelt boarded a train and traveled nearly two thousand miles west into what was then Dakota Territory. He purchased interests in cattle ranches near the Little Missouri River and immersed himself in a life that could not have been more different from the drawing rooms and political clubs of New York. He hunted buffalo, rode long cattle drives, slept beneath open skies, tracked horse thieves through blizzards, and worked alongside hardened ranch hands who neither knew nor cared that he belonged to one of New York’s oldest families.

Those years in the Badlands changed him forever.

The West did not erase Roosevelt’s grief. It gave him something more valuable. It taught him endurance. It stripped away pretension. It exposed him to men who judged character not by family name or political connections but by whether someone would keep riding through a storm, stand his ground in danger, or shoulder his share of the work. Roosevelt later admitted that he would never have become President of the United States had it not been for what he learned in the Badlands.

It is one of history’s quiet ironies that one of America’s most intellectual presidents was shaped not only by books but also in bunkhouses.

Long before he became famous as the Rough Rider charging up Kettle Hill during the Spanish-American War, Roosevelt had become something much rarer among politicians: a genuine student of history. He believed that the past was not merely interesting—it was instructive. Great civilizations left behind patterns. Successful leaders solved problems that reappeared century after century under different names. Nations rose and fell not because of luck but because of decisions, and those decisions could be studied.

Most public figures read history for inspiration. Theodore Roosevelt read it for instruction.

That distinction would shape every stage of his remarkable career.

By the time Roosevelt entered Harvard University, his appetite for history had become almost insatiable. He read classical historians alongside military memoirs, biographies beside naval dispatches, and constitutional debates with the same enthusiasm most young men reserved for sport. Friends often remarked that Roosevelt possessed one of the most astonishing memories they had ever encountered. He could recall the movements of armies, quote speeches from Parliament, discuss Roman emperors, or debate obscure naval engagements with equal ease. His curiosity seemed limitless.

It was during these early years that another passion began to emerge—one that would ultimately reshape American foreign policy for generations. Roosevelt became fascinated by the sea.

To many Americans in the late nineteenth century, the ocean represented little more than a highway for commerce. The Civil War had ended two decades earlier. The frontier still dominated the national imagination. The United States remained largely inward-looking, separated from Europe and Asia by two vast oceans that many believed guaranteed permanent security.

Roosevelt saw something entirely different.

As he immersed himself in British naval history, the Napoleonic Wars, the War of 1812, and the long struggle between maritime empires, he became convinced that oceans did not isolate nations. They connected them. Commerce, diplomacy, migration, warfare, and ideas all traveled across water. Whoever controlled those waters exercised influence far beyond the reach of any army.

This was not simply an academic interest. It became the lens through which Roosevelt viewed history itself.

At just twenty-three years of age, he published The Naval War of 1812. Few first books by young historians have enjoyed such lasting influence. More than 140 years later, professional naval historians continue to cite Roosevelt’s work, not because every conclusion remains beyond debate, but because the scholarship was astonishing for someone so young. Roosevelt had combed through American and British sources, compared original ship logs, evaluated eyewitness accounts, calculated the comparative firepower of opposing vessels, and attempted to reconstruct naval engagements with remarkable precision.

What fascinated Roosevelt was not simply who won individual battles. He wanted to know why they won.

He studied training, leadership, ship construction, logistics, discipline, geography, supply chains, morale, weather, intelligence gathering, and political decision-making. Again and again, he found himself reaching the same conclusion. Battles rarely determined history by themselves. More often, history rewarded nations that had prepared long before the shooting began.

It was a lesson that would stay with him for the rest of his life.

The Prophet of Sea Power

Every great leader has teachers whose names gradually disappear from public memory. Theodore Roosevelt had many influences—Abraham Lincoln, the Roman historian Tacitus, the frontier, the Civil War veterans he admired—but no single thinker shaped his understanding of world affairs more profoundly than a quiet, scholarly naval officer named Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Today, Mahan’s name is known primarily inside military academies and war colleges. During his own lifetime, however, he became one of the most influential strategic thinkers in the world. Kings read him. Emperors quoted him. Admirals reorganized fleets because of him. Politicians altered national policy after studying his ideas. It is no exaggeration to say that one American naval historian helped reshape the foreign policies of nearly every great power at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Mahan was born in 1840 at West Point, where his father taught military engineering. Although surrounded by Army officers, young Alfred chose the sea instead. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1859, served throughout the Civil War, and spent decades observing something that increasingly troubled him. America possessed one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, yet its Navy had steadily declined after the Civil War. Congress, eager to enjoy what many believed would be a permanent peace, allowed ships to age, shipyards to deteriorate, and naval innovation to stagnate. While Britain launched modern steel warships and France experimented with new armored fleets, much of the American Navy still consisted of aging wooden vessels whose glory belonged to another generation.

To Mahan, this was not merely shortsighted.

It was dangerous.

In 1890 he published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a book that would become one of the most consequential works of military history ever written. Its central argument was deceptively simple. Nations become great not merely because they possess large armies or abundant natural resources, but because they control the movement of commerce across the seas. Trade creates wealth. Wealth builds industry. Industry supports fleets. Fleets protect trade. The cycle becomes self-reinforcing. Lose command of the sea, and eventually a nation’s prosperity, influence, and security begin to erode.

Mahan challenged readers to think beyond battles. He asked them to look instead at the structure that sustained civilizations: merchant shipping, overseas coaling stations, strategic ports, protected sea lanes, industrial production, and governments willing to invest in long-term national strength rather than short-term political popularity. Naval power, he argued, was not simply about sinking enemy ships. It was about guaranteeing the uninterrupted flow of commerce upon which modern civilization depended.

His ideas spread with astonishing speed.

In London, British statesmen read Mahan almost with relief, believing he had finally explained why Britain, an island nation with relatively modest land forces, had nevertheless built the largest empire in human history. The famous declaration that “the sun never sets on the British Empire” was not merely poetry. It reflected a practical reality. British merchant vessels carried goods to every inhabited continent. Royal Navy warships protected those routes, suppressed piracy, deterred rivals, and ensured that British commerce reached markets thousands of miles away. The Empire’s greatest weapon was not always its army. More often, it was the simple assurance that British ships could sail almost anywhere on earth.

Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany became equally captivated by Mahan’s arguments. Determined to transform his nation into a global empire, he instructed his naval planners to study the American’s work carefully. Under Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, Germany embarked upon one of history’s largest naval construction programs, producing the mighty High Seas Fleet that would eventually challenge Britain’s dominance. Historians still debate whether Mahan intended to encourage such competition, but there is little doubt that his ideas contributed to the naval arms race that heightened tensions before the First World War.

Halfway around the world, Japanese naval officers reached the same conclusion. Japan, fresh from the reforms of the Meiji Restoration, understood that survival required more than modernization on land. It required command of surrounding waters. Japanese officers translated Mahan’s books, taught them in naval academies, and employed many of his principles to defeat China in 1895 and Russia a decade later. The victories astonished Europe, but they did not astonish anyone who understood the intellectual foundations upon which the Japanese Navy had been built.

Among Mahan’s most attentive students, however, was Theodore Roosevelt.

The two men first became acquainted while Roosevelt served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President William McKinley. Although vastly different in temperament—Mahan reserved and methodical, Roosevelt exuberant and overflowing with energy—they recognized in one another a shared fascination with history. Their friendship quickly evolved into something deeper. Mahan became both mentor and intellectual sounding board. He recommended books, challenged Roosevelt’s assumptions, and reinforced the younger man’s conviction that America stood at the threshold of a new era.

Roosevelt did not blindly follow Mahan. He expanded upon him. Where Mahan supplied theory, Roosevelt envisioned policy and practice. The United States, he believed, could no longer think of itself as a continental republic protected by the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Steamships had shrunk the world. Telegraph cables carried information across oceans in minutes rather than weeks. International trade connected American factories with Asian markets and European banks. The nation could not remain prosperous if it ignored events beyond its shores.

In Roosevelt’s mind, the oceans had ceased to be moats for America. They had become even greater highways connecting the U.S. to the world.

It was a revolutionary way of thinking for an America that still saw itself largely through the lens of the frontier. While many politicians looked westward toward the remaining open lands, Roosevelt looked outward toward the sea. He understood that the next century would not be decided by wagon trains crossing the Great Plains but by industrial powers competing for influence across the world’s oceans.

History, he believed, had already rendered its verdict.

The nations that mastered the seas shaped the future. Those that neglected them eventually watched someone else do so.

From Theory to Steel: Building an American Navy

Ideas, no matter how brilliant, accomplish little until someone is willing to act upon them.

By the last decades of the nineteenth century, the United States stood at an uncomfortable crossroads. It had become one of the world’s great industrial powers. American factories produced steel, machinery, locomotives, textiles, and agricultural equipment in astonishing quantities. Railroads stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Immigration fueled explosive population and economic growth. American merchants increasingly sought customers in Asia, Latin America, and Europe.

Yet the nation’s navy remained embarrassingly obsolete.

Following the Civil War, Congress allowed the Navy to languish. Across Europe, naval technology was advancing at breathtaking speed. Steam had replaced sail. Steel replaced wood. Heavy armor protected modern battleships. Heavy rifled naval guns could strike accurately at distances unimaginable a generation earlier. Self-propelled torpedoes introduced entirely new forms of naval warfare. Nations that failed to modernize would soon discover that courage alone could not overcome technological inferiority.

An old naval saying observed that every new war begins by exposing the mistakes made during the previous peace.

America was approaching that moment.

Beginning in the early 1880s, Congress reluctantly authorized construction of what became known as the “New Steel Navy.” The first ships—the cruisers Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, and the dispatch vessel Dolphin—were modest by European standards, but they represented something far more significant than their size. They signaled that the United States had finally accepted an unavoidable reality: a modern industrial nation required a modern navy.

Progress, however, came slowly.

Congressional debates over naval appropriations became fierce political battles. Many lawmakers still viewed the oceans as America’s natural defense. Why spend millions building fleets, they argued, when the Atlantic and Pacific already insulated the nation from Europe’s endless wars? Others feared that a large navy would tempt the United States into imperial adventures incompatible with the principles of the Republic.

It was a reasonable debate.

The Founders themselves had warned against entangling alliances and unnecessary foreign conflicts. George Washington’s Farewell Address cautioned future generations against becoming embroiled in European rivalries. Thomas Jefferson envisioned a republic of independent farmers rather than a global maritime power.

Yet the America of 1890 was no longer the America of 1790.

Factories replaced farms. International markets replaced local commerce. Steamships crossed oceans in days instead of months. Telegraph cables carried financial information around the world almost instantaneously.

The oceans that had once protected America increasingly connected it to every major crisis on earth. Few people grasped that transformation more clearly than Theodore Roosevelt.

Serving as Assistant Secretary of the Navy under President William McKinley, Roosevelt approached the department with characteristic energy. Although technically second in command, he often behaved as if he were already Secretary. He visited shipyards, studied construction schedules, challenged procurement delays, immersed himself in readiness reports, and maintained constant correspondence with naval officers throughout the fleet.

Some regarded him as overenthusiastic. Others considered him exhausting. History would suggest that he was simply ahead of his time.

Roosevelt believed that military preparedness could never be improvised after war began. Ships required years to design and construct. Crews needed countless hours of training before they could fight effectively. Officers had to learn not merely navigation but logistics, communications, engineering, gunnery, diplomacy, and command. The true measure of military readiness lay not in how quickly a nation could declare war but in how thoroughly it had prepared during peace.

History, he believed, repeatedly demonstrated the same truth. Preparation was unexciting. Failure was spectacular.

The Spanish-American War: A Naval Victory Remembered as a Cavalry Charge

When the battleship USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898, killing 266 American sailors, public outrage swept across the nation. Although historians continue to debate the precise cause of the explosion, newspapers immediately blamed Spain. Calls for intervention intensified. Within weeks, the United States found itself at war.

Popular memory remembers the Spanish-American War through a single dramatic image: Theodore Roosevelt charging uphill with the Rough Riders at San Juan Heights outside Santiago de Cuba.

It is one of the most recognizable scenes in American history. It is also deeply incomplete.

Pete Stark makes an important observation during his conversation with Kellner. Roosevelt’s famous charge, courageous though it undoubtedly was, could never have occurred without sea power.

That statement deserves careful examination.

Long before American troops landed in Cuba, the Navy had already begun determining the outcome of the war.

On May 1, 1898, Commodore George Dewey sailed into Manila Bay in the Philippines and destroyed the Spanish Pacific Squadron in a battle lasting only a few hours. American casualties were astonishingly light. Spain effectively lost control of its Pacific possessions in a single morning. Dewey’s victory instantly transformed him into a national hero, but its larger significance extended far beyond the Philippines. It demonstrated that the United States possessed a professional navy capable of operating successfully thousands of miles from its own coastline.

Meanwhile, in the Caribbean, Admiral William T. Sampson and Commodore Winfield Scott Schley established a blockade around Santiago Harbor, trapping Admiral Pascual Cervera’s Spanish fleet inside.

The blockade became the decisive strategic fact of the campaign.

Spanish forces in Cuba could receive neither meaningful reinforcements nor reliable supplies. Their fleet remained bottled up while American commanders patiently tightened the noose.

Only then did Roosevelt and the Rough Riders enter history.

When American troops landed near Daiquirí and Siboney, they did so because the Navy had secured the sea. Supplies, horses, ammunition, artillery, food, and thousands of soldiers crossed the Caribbean under naval protection. Every rifle fired on San Juan Hill had first arrived aboard an American transport escorted by American warships.

Even the battle itself was influenced by naval power. Offshore, American ships bombarded Spanish positions while maintaining complete control of surrounding waters. Days later, when Cervera finally attempted to escape Santiago Harbor on July 3, 1898, the waiting American fleet annihilated his squadron in a matter of hours.

Spain’s Caribbean fleet ceased to exist. With it vanished Spain’s ability to defend Cuba.

Roosevelt’s courage deserves every measure of admiration history has given it.

But history also demands honesty.

The charge up San Juan Heights became possible because command of the sea became the platform for American victory. It was precisely the lesson Alfred Thayer Mahan had spent decades teaching.

Roosevelt never forgot it.

Neither should we.

The President Who Thought in Oceans

When William McKinley was assassinated on September 14, 1901, Theodore Roosevelt became the youngest president in American history. At forty-two years old, he entered the White House with an advantage few presidents have ever possessed. He did not need to discover a philosophy of foreign policy after assuming office. He had spent nearly twenty years developing one.

Most presidents inherit events. Roosevelt inherited an opportunity.

The United States had emerged victorious from the Spanish-American War with new responsibilities stretching from the Caribbean to the Pacific. Cuba stood under American occupation. Puerto Rico and Guam had become American territories. The Philippines, acquired from Spain, suddenly placed the United States squarely in the politics of East Asia. Hawaii had been annexed only three years earlier. America was no longer merely a continental republic. Ithad become a Pacific power.

Roosevelt understood that this transformation demanded an entirely new way of thinking.

A nation with interests in two oceans could not defend itself with two separate navies.

At the time, moving a battleship from New York to San Francisco required a voyage of nearly fourteen thousand miles around Cape Horn at the southern tip of South America. Depending upon weather, repairs, and sea conditions, the journey could take two months or longer. Should war suddenly erupt in the Pacific, the Atlantic Fleet would arrive long after the decisive battles had already been fought.

To Roosevelt, this was not merely inconvenient. It was strategically unacceptable.

Almost immediately, his attention focused upon a dream that had occupied statesmen for centuries: cutting a canal across the narrow Isthmus of Panama.

The Canal That Changed the Map

The idea of joining the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans was far older than the United States itself. As early as the sixteenth century, Spanish explorers recognized that Central America offered the shortest passage between the two great oceans. Again and again, engineers proposed routes. Again and again, technology, disease, and politics defeated them.

The most ambitious early effort came from the French.

Fresh from the triumph of constructing the Suez Canal, Ferdinand de Lesseps believed he could repeat his success in Panama. Instead, his project collapsed into one of the greatest engineering disasters of the nineteenth century. Tropical rains triggered massive landslides. Yellow fever and malaria swept through the workforce. More than twenty thousand laborers died. Investors lost fortunes. France suffered both financial ruin and national humiliation.

Most governments concluded that Panama was impossible. Roosevelt reached the opposite conclusion. If the canal could be built, he believed, it would transform not merely American defense but global commerce itself.

History rarely grants great achievements without controversy.

Panama, then a province of Colombia, became the center of one of Roosevelt’s most debated decisions. After Colombia rejected the Hay-Herrán Treaty, which would have allowed the United States to construct the canal, separatists in Panama declared independence in November 1903. American naval vessels prevented Colombian troops from suppressing the uprising. Within days, the United States recognized the new Republic of Panama. Shortly afterward, the Hay-Bunau-Varilla Treaty granted America the right to build and administer the canal.

Critics immediately accused Roosevelt of orchestrating the revolution. Roosevelt never entirely discouraged the accusation. Years later, with characteristic bluntness, he remarked, “I took Panama.”

Historians continue debating the fairness of that statement.

Some argue Roosevelt acted decisively in the face of Colombian obstruction. Others contend he exceeded both diplomatic and moral boundaries. The controversy has never entirely disappeared. What remains beyond dispute is the canal’s significance.

Under the direction of Chief Engineer John Stevens and later Colonel George Washington Goethals, American engineers accomplished what many experts had declared impossible. Just as important, Army physician Colonel William Crawford Gorgas attacked yellow fever and malaria by implementing mosquito-control measures based upon the pioneering medical discoveries of Dr. Walter Reed and Cuban physician Dr. Carlos Finlay. For perhaps the first time in history, modern medicine became as essential to an engineering project as concrete and steel.

When the Panama Canal officially opened in August 1914, the world changed.

A voyage between New York and San Francisco had been shortened by nearly eight thousand miles. The Atlantic and Pacific Fleets could reinforce one another in weeks rather than months. Commercial shipping entered a new era.

The canal was not completed while Roosevelt was in office, but no single project better expressed his understanding of sea power. The canal was not merely a shortcut. It was strategy carved into the geography of the Western Hemisphere.

The Great White Fleet

If the Panama Canal represented Roosevelt’s strategic vision in concrete, the Great White Fleet represented it in steel.

On December 16, 1907, sixteen gleaming American battleships steamed slowly out of Hampton Roads, Virginia, beginning one of the most ambitious peacetime naval voyages ever undertaken.

Their hulls were painted brilliant white. Their trim gleamed gold. Thousands of sailors stood at attention along polished decks while crowds gathered along the shoreline to witness a spectacle unlike anything America had ever attempted.

Many observers assumed Roosevelt was staging political theater. He certainly appreciated symbolism. But symbolism was only the surface.

The voyage posed practical questions no nation could answer from behind a desk. Could American battleships operate together across thousands of miles? Could they refuel efficiently in distant ports? Could damaged vessels be repaired overseas? Could supply ships keep pace? Could officers command such a large formation over an extended period? Could American diplomacy secure the cooperation necessary for such an expedition?

These were not ceremonial questions. They were strategic ones.

Over the next fourteen months, the fleet traveled more than forty-three thousand nautical miles, visiting six continents and approximately twenty ports before returning triumphantly to Hampton Roads on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1909.

The world watched carefully.

Britain observed. So did Germany and Russia. Most importantly, Japan observed and learned.

Relations between the United States and Japan had grown increasingly uneasy after Japan’s astonishing victory over Russia. Immigration disputes on America’s West Coast had further strained diplomatic relations. Some feared that conflict between the two Pacific powers might eventually become unavoidable.

Roosevelt hoped to prevent that outcome.

The Great White Fleet carried a simple but unmistakable message. The United States sought friendship. But friendship would rest upon strength.

Roosevelt often summarized his philosophy with a phrase that has become inseparable from his presidency: “Speak softly and carry a big stick.”

The saying is frequently misunderstood. It was never an argument for bullying. It was an argument that diplomacy succeeds best when backed by credibility. Promises mean more when allies believe them. Warnings carry greater weight when adversaries know they can be enforced.

The Great White Fleet embodied that principle.

It was diplomacy under steam.

When Sea Power Preserves Peace

Military strength has always presented civilized nations with a profound paradox.

The same fleet that can wage war can also prevent it. The same army capable of conquest can deter aggression. The same nation powerful enough to dominate others may instead choose to restrain conflict before it spreads.

History offers surprisingly few leaders who understood that paradox as well as Theodore Roosevelt.

It is one of the reasons Roosevelt remains difficult to categorize. He is often remembered through caricature—the exuberant Rough Rider, the hunter posing beside trophies, the energetic reformer charging through politics with seemingly inexhaustible enthusiasm. Yet beneath the outsized personality stood an extraordinarily disciplined strategic mind. Roosevelt admired military strength, but he admired it because he believed strength created opportunities for diplomacy that weakness never could.

The first great test of that philosophy arrived only a few years into his presidency.

The War Nobody Expected Japan to Win

On the night of February 8, 1904, Japanese torpedo boats slipped quietly toward the Russian naval base at Port Arthur in Manchuria. Without a formal declaration of war, they launched a surprise attack against the Russian Pacific Fleet. Several battleships were crippled before many Russian sailors even understood what was happening.

The world was stunned.

European observers generally regarded Imperial Russia as one of the great military powers of the age. Japan, despite decades of remarkable modernization following the Meiji Restoration, remained underestimated by many Western governments. Few believed an Asian nation could successfully challenge a European empire in modern industrial warfare.

Those assumptions evaporated quickly.

Japanese armies consistently outmaneuvered Russian forces on land. At sea, Admiral Tōgō Heihachirō displayed tactical brilliance that immediately drew comparisons to Britain’s Lord Nelson. But the decisive moment came more than a year later.

Determined to reverse its fortunes, Russia dispatched its powerful Baltic Fleet on one of the longest naval voyages in history. More than forty warships steamed nearly eighteen thousand miles around Europe, across Africa, through the Indian Ocean, and toward East Asia. The journey lasted seven exhausting months. Crews suffered from fatigue, poor maintenance, inadequate training, and declining morale. Coal shortages complicated operations. Diplomatic incidents erupted along the way, including the infamous Dogger Bank affair, in which nervous Russian sailors mistakenly fired upon British fishing vessels, nearly provoking a war with Great Britain before the fleet had even reached Asia.

By the time the Russians approached the Tsushima Strait in May 1905, they were physically exhausted.

Waiting for them was Admiral Tōgō.

Using superior speed, disciplined gunnery, and masterful maneuvering, the Japanese fleet annihilated the Russians in what many naval historians regard as one of history’s most decisive sea battles. Of Russia’s thirty-eight major warships entering the engagement, the overwhelming majority were sunk, captured, or forced to surrender. The Russian Baltic Fleet effectively ceased to exist in less than two days.

For naval historians, Tsushima marked the end of one era and the beginning of another. For the rest of the world, it announced something even more startling.

Power was shifting.

For the first time in the modern age, an Asian nation had defeated one of Europe’s great empires in a major war. Military academies across Europe immediately began studying every aspect of the campaign. Governments reconsidered assumptions they had held for generations. Colonial powers quietly recognized that the balance of international politics was changing before their eyes.

Roosevelt watched these events with unusual clarity. He admired Japan’s remarkable achievements. He also understood their potential consequences.

If the war continued indefinitely, the instability would threaten not merely Russia and Japan but the commercial arteries of the entire Pacific.

Once again, sea power and commerce proved inseparable.

The Peace of Portsmouth

Here Theodore Roosevelt demonstrated perhaps the greatest statesmanship of his presidency.

Neither Russia nor Japan trusted the other. Neither wished to appear weak before the international community. Yet both had reached the limits of what continued warfare could realistically achieve.

Roosevelt quietly began corresponding with officials in both governments. Rather than publicly inserting himself into the conflict, he worked patiently through diplomatic channels, encouraging each side to consider negotiations before military exhaustion forced even harsher terms.

Eventually both governments agreed.

Delegations gathered in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during the summer of 1905. The negotiations were extraordinarily delicate.

Japan had won nearly every major military engagement but faced severe financial strain. Russia had suffered repeated military disasters yet refused to accept complete humiliation. Both governments faced intense political pressure at home. Every concession risked appearing as weakness.

Roosevelt never dictated terms. Instead, he did something far more difficult. He kept both sides talking.

After weeks of painstaking negotiations, the Treaty of Portsmouth was signed on September 5, 1905. Russia recognized Japan’s paramount interests in Korea, transferred its leasehold rights in southern Manchuria, and ceded the southern half of Sakhalin Island. Neither nation obtained everything it desired. That was precisely why the agreement endured.

Compromise rarely satisfies everyone.

The following year, Theodore Roosevelt became the first American ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It remains one of history’s most revealing ironies.

The president most closely associated with military preparedness received the world’s highest honor for preventing war.

Power and Legitimacy

Pete Stark makes a subtle but enormously important observation during his conversation with Dr. Kellner.

Why was it the United States that mediated? Why not Great Britain? Why not France? Why not Germany? Britain remained the world’s greatest naval power. France possessed centuries of diplomatic experience. Germany had become Europe’s rising industrial giant.

Yet it was the United States that both Russia and Japan accepted as an honest broker.

Part of the answer lies in Roosevelt himself. But another part lies in America’s growing credibility.

The Great White Fleet had not yet completed its voyage, but the world already recognized that the United States possessed something increasingly valuable: economic strength, industrial capacity, expanding naval power, and relative freedom from the imperial rivalries that complicated European diplomacy.

Roosevelt understood an enduring principle of international affairs.

Nations listen differently to countries capable of acting. Diplomacy carries greater weight when backed by credibility. This did not mean military force solved every problem. Quite the opposite. Military strength gave diplomacy a chance to succeed.

That distinction is frequently lost in modern political debate.

Roosevelt never confused possessing power with using it indiscriminately. He believed the highest purpose of strength was often to make its use unnecessary.

Sir Julian Corbett and the Discipline of Strategy

As the conversation drew toward its conclusion, Pete Stark introduced another name that deserves to be far better known than it is today.

If Alfred Thayer Mahan explained why sea power mattered, Sir Julian Corbett explained how it should be used.

Born in 1854, Corbett was neither an admiral nor a career naval officer. He was a lawyer, historian, and strategist whose extraordinary ability to connect military operations with political objectives earned him the respect of Britain’s Admiralty. His lectures influenced generations of Royal Navy officers, and his book Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, published in 1911, remains required reading in military academies around the world.

Unlike many military historians, Corbett had little interest in glorifying spectacular battles. He wanted readers to understand campaigns.

Battles are moments. Campaigns are systems. Ships had to be built. Crews had to be trained. Coal had to reach distant ports. Supply lines had to remain open. Merchants had to continue trading. Governments had to define realistic political objectives before a single sailor left port.

Victory, Corbett insisted, was never measured solely by the number of enemy ships resting on the ocean floor. Victory was measured by whether military action achieved the political purpose for which it had been undertaken.

That distinction may sound obvious.

History repeatedly demonstrates that it is anything but.

Lord Nelson Was Not a Gambler

Dr. Kellner illustrates Corbett’s thinking through one of the greatest commanders in naval history—Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson.

Popular imagination often reduces Nelson to legend.

The one-armed, one-eyed admiral standing defiantly aboard HMS Victory at Trafalgar has become almost mythological. Paintings portray him as fearless. Films celebrate his daring. The temptation is to imagine Nelson as a brilliant improviser who simply trusted instinct and courage.

Corbett paints a much broader picture of Nelson as campaign strategist and leader.

During the Trafalgar campaign which Corbett so wonderfully chronicles in his book The Campaign of Trafalgar, he discusses in detail Nelson’s actions following the French fleet escaping the British blockade and leaving the Mediterranean in 1805 for the West Indies. Nelson then made the apparently astonishing decision to use the British Mediterranean fleet of which he was commander-in-chief to pursue the French across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. At first glance, it appears reckless. He was leaving his assigned station with the bulk of his fleet. Communications were slow, as were some of Nelson’s ships. The distance was enormous. If the French doubled back unexpectedly, Britain itself might be exposed.

But that is not what happened.

Before Nelson ever ordered his fleet westward, he began to manage the risks.

He dispatched detailed instructions to the Admiralty explaining his reasoning. He informed Vice-Admiral Sir John Orde and other commanders responsible for blockading the Atlantic approaches to Spain of his intentions. He considered the protection of merchant convoys. He evaluated the likelihood of French movements, calculated how quickly his own fleet could respond, and established contingency plans should events unfold differently than expected.

Nothing about the operation was impulsive. It was meticulously planned. Nelson accepted risk. He did not ignore it.

That, Dr. Kellner reminds us, is the difference between courage and recklessness.

The greatest military commanders rarely gamble.

They calculate first, and then act.

The Economics of Empire

One of the most fascinating moments in Gary and Pete’s discussion arrives almost casually.

Pete asks a deceptively simple question.

During the American Revolution, what mattered more economically to Great Britain—the thirteen American colonies or the sugar islands of the Caribbean?

For many readers, the answer comes as a surprise.

Economically, Jamaica, Barbados, Antigua, and Britain’s other Caribbean possessions generated staggering wealth. Sugar was often called “white gold.” Produced through the brutal institution of slavery, refined sugar fueled European economies and filled British coffers. By the late eighteenth century, some economists estimated that the Caribbean colonies produced greater revenue for Britain than all thirteen mainland colonies combined.

That fact changes how we understand British strategy.

The Royal Navy was not merely protecting imperial pride. It was protecting Britain’s economic lifeblood.

Merchant convoys carrying sugar, rum, coffee, cotton, and manufactured goods represented national wealth in motion. Lose those shipping lanes, and Britain risked bankruptcy regardless of how many battles it won on land.

The lesson extends far beyond the eighteenth century.

Today, roughly 90 percent of global trade by volume still travels by sea. Oil from the Persian Gulf. Grain from North America. Manufactured goods from Asia. Rare earth minerals, automobiles, pharmaceuticals, electronics—virtually every modern economy depends upon uninterrupted maritime commerce. The containers stacked aboard today’s cargo vessels are the descendants of the sugar fleets Nelson protected more than two centuries ago.

Technology has changed.

The principle has not.

History’s Most Difficult Question

It is here that Kellner gently turns the discussion toward the present.

Not toward personalities. Toward principles.

One of the recurring criticisms of modern military interventions—whether in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, or more recent confrontations in the Middle East—is that governments often fail to define precisely what political outcomes military force is intended to achieve.

Are we seeking deterrence? Regime change? Counterterrorism? Protection of allies? Freedom of navigation? Nuclear non-proliferation? Humanitarian intervention?

Can all of those objectives realistically be pursued at the same time?

Corbett would insist that these questions be answered before military operations begin. Stark makes exactly that point.

Risk management cannot occur if political objectives remain unclear Military planners may execute their missions brilliantly. Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines may perform with extraordinary courage. But if civilian leaders have not clearly defined success, military excellence alone cannot produce strategic victory.

History offers sobering examples.

President Lyndon Johnson confronted this dilemma in Vietnam, where overwhelming military superiority could not compensate for unclear political objectives and shifting strategic assumptions.

President George W. Bush faced similar challenges after the rapid collapse of Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq. Winning the initial campaign proved dramatically easier than defining and securing the political conditions that would follow.

More recently, debates surrounding Iran, Ukraine, the South China Sea, and the Red Sea continue to remind policymakers that military capability and strategic clarity are not synonymous.

Technology evolves.

Human nature, disturbingly, not so much.

The Long View

The conversation between Dr. Gary Kellner and Pete Stark began with the dedication of a presidential library in the North Dakota Badlands.

It ended with a timeless question; What separates statesmen from politicians?

The answer, Theodore Roosevelt believed, was history. Not history as nostalgia. Not history as political ammunition.

History as disciplined thinking.

Roosevelt understood that civilizations rise gradually and decline just as gradually. Commercial power, diplomatic credibility, military readiness, industrial capacity, education, and national character reinforce one another over decades. They cannot be improvised during moments of crisis.

That is why he studied Mahan. That is why Mahan studied Britain. That is why Corbett studied Nelson. And that is why serious leaders continue studying all of them today.

Theodore Roosevelt once observed that

“The more you know about the past, the better prepared you are for the future.”

More than a century later, those words feel remarkably contemporary.

Our ships are larger. Our weapons are unimaginably more destructive. Information moves at the speed of light instead of the speed of sail.

Yet the fundamental questions remain exactly the same.

How should free nations protect the commerce upon which prosperity depends? How should military strength support diplomacy rather than replace it? How does a great power project confidence without arrogance, determination without recklessness, and leadership without domination?

Those questions confronted Nelson. They confronted Mahan. They confronted Theodore Roosevelt. They confront every president.

History cannot answer those questions for us. But it does something almost as valuable.

It reminds us that we are not the first generation to ask them—and that the wisest leaders have always begun by listening to those who came before.