Isegoria

By the beginning of their participation in World War II, Peter Zeihan explains (in The Accidental Superpower), the Americans had already secured all of the potential approaches that could be used for an assault on North America:

Considering the distances involved, the outside world missed its best chance to disrupt America’s development in the War of 1812, one of only two occasions when the Americans faced an extrahemispheric invasion (the other being the Revolutionary War). The critical battle was for Fort McHenry in September 1814.

The British had sacked and captured Washington, D.C., just three weeks before and were moving north by land and sea toward Baltimore. At the time, Baltimore was the largest city in the region and a notorious hub for the privateers who had been raiding British shipping lines. But it was also the sole meaningful land link between the northern and southern states: With the Allegheny Mountains to the west, all roads hugged the Chesapeake Bay, which in turn led to the bay’s major city and port. As importantly, the entirety of inland America was dependent upon Baltimore. The Cumberland Narrows through the Appalachians lay just to the west, and only three years earlier the government had begun construction on a road to connect the Potomac River to the Ohio valley. Instead of a months-long sail down to New Orleans, then up the Mississippi to the Ohio, this new National Road would allow Baltimore to serve as an immediate outlet for Pittsburgh and lands beyond.

If the British could hold Baltimore, the war’s other theaters would be rendered moot and the young America would be split into North, South, and interior. Luckily for the Americans, Major George Armistead’s heroic defense of Fort McHenry convinced British commanders that the post could not be taken with available forces. While time has eroded the details from the American mind, all Americans instantly recognize the description of the battle and its outcome as recorded by an American who watched the battle from the deck of a British vessel where he was being held prisoner: Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”

[…]

The British attempt on Baltimore — indeed, the entire war effort — would have been impossible without launching grounds in Canada and the Caribbean. The Americans took note of which territories were used and reshaped their foreign and military policies to ensure that those lands — and any like them — could never be used for such purposes again.

[…]

American diplomatic, economic, and military pressure succeeded in hiving Canada off from Britain and transitioning it to neutrality.

In the latter half of the 1800s, the United States both purchased Alaska (1867) and annexed the Hawaiian Islands (1898). This did more than push back potential Asian hostiles twenty-six hundred miles. Beyond Hawaii the next meaningful speck of land is the 2.4-square-mile atoll of Midway, another thirteen hundred miles from either Hawaii or Alaska. The Americans militarily snagged Midway in 1903.

In the Spanish-American War of 1898, the Americans seized direct control of Puerto Rico and de facto control of Cuba. This prevented any hostile power from potentially severing American access from the greater Mississippi basin to the outside world via the Florida and Yucatán Straits.

The Americans usurped British control of the western Atlantic outright with the Lend-Lease program in the early part of World War II. By terms of the agreement the United Kingdom gave the United States rent-free control for ninety-nine years of nearly all of the serviceable British ports in the Western Hemisphere.

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