To Know McCain, Read Mahan

"War, once declared, must be waged offensively, aggressively," wrote the sage of American navalists, Alfred Mahan, in his seminal 1890 book, "The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, 1660-1783." "The enemy must not be fended off, but smitten down."

Mahan is important today because our chief architect of Mahanian policy now forms an exploratory committee to begin his campaign for the presidency in 2008. John McCain, son and grandson of admirals, Annapolis graduate, aviator, and war hero, who is notorious for hectoring the Bush administration on policy issues as wide-ranging as federal judgeships, torture protocols, and pork-barrel spending, is in fact the clearest living expression of Mahanism on planet Earth. He not only inherits Mahan's core philosophy of American imperial power through naval supremacy and global commerce, but also inherits the duly famous combat legacy of his Mahanian grandfather, Vice Admiral John S. "Slew" McCain, who commanded the fast carriers that defeated the Japanese Imperial navy — steaming to the rescue at Leyte Gulf — and who invented through experiment the naval air tactics that have guaranteed American foreign policy since World War II.

Mr. McCain brings to the campaign many gifts, such as curt candor and a savvy tolerance of new ideas, but his overwhelming strength is that he thinks, plans, and acts according to Mahan. In this, Mr. McCain is in a potent line of presidential actors, starting with William McKinley and his Mahanian Spanish War, continuing to the Mahanian champion Teddy Roosevelt and his globalizing Great White Fleet, and including Franklin Roosevelt, who studied Mahan while still at Groton, and the Cold Warriors Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Jack Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and the two Bush presidents, both of whom asserted Mahanism by protecting American energy resources in the Persian Gulf.

If the Republicans choose Mr. McCain for 2008, and if Mr. McCain survives the crusading candidacy of Hillary Clinton, he will take the oath of office in 2009 with the salty ghosts of all the triumphant Mahanians of every ocean on the reviewing stand.

Who was this still-little-known Mahan? U.S. Navy Captain Alfred Mahan, son of an engineering professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, was a modest, bookish lecturer in gunnery at Annapolis and later in naval history and strategy at the Naval War College at Newport, R.I., when he published the scholarly "Influence of Sea Power." To that date, his critical experience as a naval officer was at the beginning of his career, at age 27 in 1867, when he circumnavigated the globe aboard the steamship USS Iroquois, including ports of call at Japan and China. His book was an immediate phenomenon. The undiscovered Teddy Roosevelt, then a 32-year-old city politician, wrote Mahan in a burst of prescience, "I am greatly in error if it does not become a naval classic." Also, no less than the young Kaiser Wilhelm II, a decade before he launched the naval arms race that invited the Great War, wrote that he was "devouring" the book and was "trying to learn it by heart." The Japanese lord and Harvard graduate, Baron Kaneko Kentaro, moved quickly to have the book translated into Japanese. It was soon adopted by the Japanese Imperial naval and army staff war colleges.

Mahan retired from the Navy in 1897, in time for President McKinley and the young assistant secretary of the Navy and later accidental president, Teddy Roosevelt, to adopt him as their war thinker. Mahan not only advocated the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands and Philippine archipelago as forward bases of operations for the Navy, but also conceived the fundamentals of what would become War Plan Orange, a projected contest between the American fleet and the Japanese Imperial fleet for domination of the Pacific Ocean. In sum, more than five decades before Pearl Harbor, more than 11 decades before the rise of Chinese naval power, and of Persian naval power, Mahan saw completely that there would be "a rapid closing together of vastly different civilizations," and that the profound challenge of the 20th century would be "whether the Eastern or Western civilization is to dominate the Earth and control the future."

Mr. McCain is Alfred Mahan's child. Mr. McCain will go forward as a candidate speaking of a more perfect union, of domestic tranquility, even of the soft power of diplomacy and consensus. However, underneath the smile of the man from Arizona is the confidence of the big stick of the war fleet and with it the power of the White House to advance and sustain American liberty.

Mr. Batchelor is host of "The John Batchelor Show," now on hiatus.