James Holmes
Theodore Roosevelt was an avowed Mahanian. He was also a closet Maoist! Or at least, his convictions about strategies for lesser competitors ran parallel to those made popular by Mao Zedong during the Chinese Civil War and Second Sino-Japanese War, as transposed to marine warfare by the Great Helmsman’s saltwater-minded successors.
Nor, as it turns out, should this synchronicity come as any surprise. Both Roosevelt and Mao coveted conventional triumphs on oceanic battlegrounds. The chief difference: spared decades of internal strife and foreign invasion, Roosevelt’s America had trodden farther along its pathway to industrial and military might than had Mao’s war-ravaged China.
http://www.nationalinterest.org/feature/great-red-fleet-how-china-was-inspired-by-teddy-roosevelt-22968
