...go back in time and consider one of the oddest disjunctures in world history. In the very first decades of the 15th century, the great Chinese admiral Cheng Ho led a series of amazing maritime expeditions to the outer world, through the Straits of Malacca, into the Indian Ocean, across even to the eastern shores of Africa. Nothing at that time compared with China's surface navy.

Yet, within another decade, the overseas ventures had been scrapped by high officials in Beijing, anxious not to divert resources away from meeting the Manchu landward threat in the north and about how a seaward-bound open-market society might undermine their authority...

...While China's great fleets were being dismantled by imperial order, Western Europe was beginning to move into "new" worlds, full of ancient peoples and cultures in the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Any place vulnerable to Western naval and military power was at risk. Above all, as the American naval captain A. T. Mahan taught us over a century ago in his classic book, "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History" (1890), the West valued navies as the key to global influence...

...the Chinese naval build-up is only in its early stages, like, say, the U.S. Navy was in the 1890s. Just last month the Congressional Research Service, a body not known for hyperbole or dramatic statement, issued a remarkable 95-page report entitled "China Naval Modernization: Implications for U.S. Navy Capabilities." The details are extensive, and look impressive. Perhaps the most important facts are tucked into the first footnote: "By 2010, China's submarine force will be nearly double the size of the U.S. submarine feet The entire Chinese naval fleet is projected to surpass the size of the U.S. fleet by 2015."...

...let us return to the European scene. Here the trend seems to be in the opposite direction, with naval budgets being held down and (given the inexorable rise in the cost of weapons systems and personnel) actual fleet sizes being reduced. The most publicized case here is the news that the Royal Navy may be planning to "mothball" many of its fleet of destroyers and frigates (which, being only 25 in number, is now less than half of Japan's total).

Angry Conservative members of Parliament are demanding a debate on the fact that defense expenditures represent a smaller percentage of GDP than at any time since the 1930s - and we all know what that implies. Those critics appear even more outraged that the French Navy now possesses more major surface combatants than Britain for the first time in 250 years...