Isegoria

The United States has more port potential than the rest of the world combined, Peter Zeihan explains (in The Accidental Superpower):

The coast of Africa, for example, may be sixteen thousand miles long, but in reality it has only ten locations with bays of sufficient protective capacity to justify port construction, three of which are in South Africa.

Ports also require a sufficient hinterland to support them in the first place. In this, Northern Europe faced quite a few challenges in the centuries before European dominance, as much of the coastline was marsh and mud, as is northern China’s. Brazil north of the 22nd parallel south — roughly the latitude of Rio de Janeiro — isn’t much better. South of the 22nd parallel, Brazil’s coast is all cliff, as is much of southern China’s. Australia’s coast may be accessible, but it is so arid it is almost devoid of people — as is North Africa’s coast. Russia’s coast — like most of Canada’s — is (sub) arctic. What few African locations have a friendly coast are often backed up by swamp, desert, or jungle. The entire Sub-Saharan region really only has four coastal areas capable of supporting cities of significant size (two of which are still in South Africa).

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Courtesy of those barrier islands, Texas alone has thirteen world-class deepwater ports, only half of which see significant use, and room for at least three times more. Why not expand port capacity? Because the United States has more port possibilities than it has ever needed, despite the fact that it has been the world’s largest producer, importer, and exporter of agricultural and manufactured goods for most of its history.

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The island of Cuba and the Yucatán and Florida peninsulas limit access to the Gulf of Mexico to two straits, creatively named the Yucatán and Florida Straits. These sharply limit the ability of extrahemispheric powers to play in the Gulf of Mexico.

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That means that since the Civil War the Americans have never had to worry about fortifying anything along the Gulf Coast, even when German U-boats were sinking shipping in the millions of tons off the East Coast.

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In 1871, Canada first tried to solve the Saint Lawrence’s winter ice and the Great Lakes’ waterfalls problems with a series of locks on the river and construction of the Welland Canal. By the 1890s, however, the Canadians had proposed a partnership with Washington for a more extensive, binational waterway that would link the Atlantic Ocean through the Saint Lawrence to the Great Lakes. The main selling point was that the Americans would actually benefit more than the Canadians from improving the waterways on their common border. The Canadians were indeed correct: Bringing the Great Lakes online would turn places like Duluth, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit into full-on ocean ports.

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The American government knew that the Canadians were going to build the lock system anyway, because having some sort of transport system that allowed Quebec and Ontario to interact economically was a national imperative. To do otherwise risked hardening Canada’s Anglophone-Francophone divide into something truly ugly. The Americans also knew they would be able to use the fruits of Canadian labor in an unrestricted manner regardless of whether Washington helped pay for it or not: The system would be right on the border and at least some of the canals would have to be on the American side of the line.

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In the end, the Canadians had to foot over 70 percent of the bill, pay almost all of the maintenance, and the Saint Lawrence Seaway wasn’t fully operational until 1959.

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The United States is the only country with significant populations on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, with nearly 50 million people on the Pacific and twice that on the Atlantic. So only the Americans have broad-scale access to both of the world’s great trading zones.

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The Americans have sufficient infrastructure to enable their Pacific citizens to trade with Europe when Asia is in recession, or to allow their Atlantic citizens to trade with Asia when Europe is in recession. Because they can easily switch dance partners, the Americans only suffer a recession caused by international factors when the entire world goes into recession.

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