>Everyone prospered from more efficient shipping but there was a cost paid by the one nation that did not need maritime security because it had two large oceans

>Everyone prospered from more efficient shipping but there was a cost paid by the one nation that did not need maritime security because it had two large oceans protecting it from would-be aggressors, was a net exporter of food and fuel. Big error there: the US is a net exporter of fuel now but it sure wasn't for most of the Cold War. How does someone writing in a magazine or blog for the shipping industry not know that? Petroleum and petroleum products make up more than half of the world's tonnage of ocean-going shipping and have since the start of the Cold War! Also, if you share a continent with a potential invader (like for example Ukraine does) then you should invest mainly in your army. It is exactly when you are secure in your own continent (or island) like the US is (and Britain before it was) that it starts to make sense to invest heavily in a Navy, to address the residual military threat. All countries with populations next to an ocean would benefit from a good navy, but only rich countries with no pressing need for a good army can afford the luxury of a navy strong enough to repel any other country's navy. All the other countries of the world with coastal populations just have to put up with the risk of an attack from one of the world's dominant navies. And if the US didn't have a good navy, it would be vulnerable to the countries that did, regardless of where in the world that countries was located. Contrary to the sentence I quoted, an ocean is no barrier to a sufficiently well-funded navy. The only protection from a blue-water navy is a better navy. Well, that might be starting to change now (in the future, the best protection might be hypersonic missiles with advanced guidance and sensory systems plus a constellation of satellites to surveil the oceans plus an array of listening stations in the ocean) but it has been true for centuries and is probably still true. Peter Zeihan has a point (namely, the US has less of an incentive to use its dominant navy to protect the world's shipping than it did during the Cold War) but the OP has not successfully reproduced Zeihan's argument. (Also, the US continues to have an incentive to continue to maintain a dominant navy, briefly because even if you are already the most militarily secure nation on Earth, it still makes sense to buy more security if you can do so at a reasonable cost, and for the US, a good navy is probably a reasonable cost.)