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The United States, with a GDP six times that of Japan and, crucially, with all its major resources located and protected within its vast continental territory, could, if necessary, increase its naval output to a level Japan could not match. With Japan%u2019s energy and production resources running out in the early 1940s, Yamamoto %u2014 although aware of the material gap with the United States %u2014 nevertheless advised a surprise attack on the American fleet anchored at Pearl Harbour. The decision bore the character of a grim paradox: an act born less of self-confidence than of necessity. Japan was, in a sense, %u201ccommitting suicide by fear of death%u201d. The initial strike, executed with remarkable precision, achieved a fleeting tactical brilliance; however, it served even more decisively to awaken the very industrial giant that Yamamoto had long feared. The US mobilisation of shipbuilding and manufacturing was beyond what Japan, constrained by its structural limits, could replicate.Fraught with deep concern that day, which, according to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was %u201ca day that would live in infamy%u201d, the United States, in 1942, scrambled to build 22 aircraft carriers. In contrast, Japan was capable of building only three. Over the four years of the war in the Pacific, the United States produced more than thirteen times as much steel as Japan. Japan decisively lost the naval war at Midway; Admiral Chester Nimitz%u2019s island-hopping strategy created a vast maritime logistical network to sustain American far-flung naval projection and gradually tighten the noose around Japan. The atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, in this sense, the coup de gr%u00e2ce to an already decisive Japanese naval defeat.America%u2019s naval primacy in the Second World War did not emerge out of thin air. Since the dawn of the twentieth century, the US had possessed the industrial capacity to surpass any other state in shipbuilding. In 1907%u20131909, Theodore Roosevelt demonstrated American naval power by dispatching the so-called %u201cGreat White Fleet%u201d on a circumnavigation of the globe, calling at major foreign ports to convey a clear message: that the United States was, if not yet the foremost, then certainly among the world%u2019s preeminent naval powers.American dominance of the oceans continued unabated after the Second World War as Washington sought to contain the Soviet Union. The US fleet %u2014 larger than the rest of the world%u2019s navies combined %u2014 could project force across the rimland, i.e., the coastal zones of Eurasia, thereby consolidating American political influence over economically and resource-rich regions, notably Western Europe and the Persian Gulf. The key instrument of this %u201crimland control%u201d was the aircraft carrier, whose aviation capabilities enabled the projection of devastating force deep into the interior. Even in the recent war against Iran, 70% of US destructive power sprung from carrier aviation and sea-launched cruise missiles.It is not a stretch to argue that, for the past 100 years, the United States has been the world%u2019s sole thalassocracy. However, Chinese analysts maintain that we are living in an era of unprecedented change unseen in a century. Among Greek shipping in an era of contested thalassocracyby Vasilis Trigkas* Geopolitics & shippingAdmiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the commander of Japan%u2019s Combined Fleet, was not a strategic intellectual whose views were taken lightly in the Empire of the Rising Sun. Having studied at Harvard University and served as Japan%u2019s Naval Attach%u00e9 in Washington, Yamamoto had a clear grasp of the gap in naval capabilities between the United States and Japan. This gap was not simply reflected in the size of their respective fleets but, more importantly, in their national industrial capacity.132 NX