I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
The whole point of the maritime order is one country doesn't own it.
If one country owned it, no one would join it, right?
It is an aggregation of what we're all willing to put up with.
What's the common denominator on rules that we can all more or less follow?
That's the international order.
All of us in the foreign policy world have talked a lot about great power competition over the last decade.
But no one can entirely agree on the contours of today's competition.
Whether it's a battle of autocracies and democracies, or revisionists and status quo powers,
or whether, as the realists would argue, it's just states doing what states do.
Sally Payne, a longtime professor of strategy and policy at the U.S.
Naval War College, sees something else going on.
To her,
the great power competition we talk about today is just the latest example of the centuries-old tension between maritime and continental powers.
For maritime powers, like for most of its history in the United States,
money and trade serve as the basis of influence, and that leads them to promote rules and order.
Continental powers, like Russia most clearly and China in most but not always,
focus their security objectives on territory, which they seek to defend and control and expand.
From this divide rises two very different visions of global order.
It also, Payne argues, in a new essay in Foreign Affairs,