Chapter 3 The strategic adjustment of the Royal Navy

In the 1880s, the Royal Navy switched its fleet from burning coal to burning oil.The British Navy was the first to recognize the strategic implications of making this change.As early as 1914, on the eve of the First World War, under the impetus of the young Secretary of the Navy Winston Churchill, the entire British naval fleet changed from burning coal to burning oil. Churchill knew that the British Empire would be able to control the oceans in the future, and that the British Empire could continue to control the world when the German navy was still rapidly catching up with the British Navy. This is the core of the British Empire model.The British Empire was an island power, a sea power.This was defined by Sir Halford Mackinder, the eminent British imperialist and the founder of geopolitics.Germany, on the contrary, was called a land power by Mackinder.

As long as it was cleverly designed to pit the continental states against each other, the British Empire was invincible.In a famous 1904 essay, "The Geographical Pivot of History," Mackinder made this point. Mackinder famously uttered a quote in 1919 after the First World War that had a huge impact on the formation of British foreign policy and later American foreign policy.This famous quote is succinct: Whoever rules Eastern Europe (Germany and Poland) controls the heartland (Russia and Ukraine); whoever rules the heartland controls the world islands (Eurasian countries including China and India); Whoever rules the islands of the world controls the world.

Among them, Mackinder very implicitly stated the prerequisite for British foreign policy-the notorious balance of power policy-that is, the Eastern European countries must be pitted against each other, such as Poland against Germany, Germany against Russia, Russia against Turkey and France , France against Germany, never to reconcile. In any case, there is only one purpose: to prevent the formation of an alliance of interests between Russia, a power in the core region, and countries on the European continent. Later, British foreign policy turned to China, and in the 18th and 19th centuries, it exported opium from Indian colonies to China on a large scale, trying to wear down the will of the Chinese elite. From 1840 to 1860, in order to control China, Britain launched the infamous Opium War, forcing China to open its ports to British goods, giving up sovereignty over Hong Kong, and preventing any potential threat to the crown jewel of the British Empire, the Indian colony .