Alfred Thayer Mahan identified six prerequisites for maritime power: first, a moat (insulation from attack); second, a dense internal transportation grid for peacetime commerce; third, reliable egress by sea for wartime naval deployment; fourth, dense coastal population to run the commerce-driven economy; fifth, a commerce-driven economy itself; and sixth, stable government institutions with transparent executive transfer and rule of law.

In the continental security model, power is a function of land, neighbors are dangerous even if small (instability spreads across borders), and the primary mission of an army is to keep the ruling regime in power—making the army function as a praetorian guard—with the second mission being preventing defections from the empire, and border defense only third.

Continental powers suffer vastly higher casualty rates in war because most fighting occurs on home territory, particularly if they lose, exposing civilian populations to no sanctuary from combat; comparing World War II statistics, maritime powers (Britain, United States) suffered far fewer military and especially civilian deaths than continental powers (France, Italy), with the difference growing sharply when civilian deaths are included.

The rules for success in the continental security paradigm include: first, avoid two-front wars with multiple neighbors; second, avoid great-power neighbors because today's friends become tomorrow's foes; third, take on neighbors sequentially, setting them to fail, destabilizing rising threats, and absorbing buffer zones when opportunity arrives; fourth, alternatively, sow mutual resentments among neighbors with disinformation so they weaken each other while you play the jackal, stealing the kill.

If continental powers botch their strategy, their known world can vanish forever, as happened to Imperial Russia, Imperial China, and many Eurasian civilizations; the continental world operates without insurance policies—there is no institutional mechanism for reset—making overextension particularly dangerous.

The Silk Road and control of trade routes: The Silk Road connected East and West trade for millennia; whoever controlled the Western terminus collected tolls; the Muslim Conquest settled this; later the Ottomans controlled the Western terminus; Spain and Portugal bypassed this by seeking an ocean route to Asia, bumped into the New World, and found gold/silver, diverting them to heavy metals instead of luxury goods.

Chinese claim to territories through Yuan and Qing dynasties is self-contradictory: the Han ethnic majority claims 'historic lands' by invoking Yuan (Mongol) and Qing (Manchu) dynasties when, ironically, Han people were subjugated under those foreign-ruled empires—meaning China's territorial nationalism is based on claiming lands acquired when Han were ruled as conquered subjects.

In the first Cold War, the West maintained prosperity while compounding communist poverty: Japan, South Korea, and Western allies parried the Soviet nuclear threat without using nuclear weapons, maintained economic growth, and as the maritime order compounded economic growth, communists lived in compounded poverty of their own making—a sustainable long-term strategy.

US Cold War strategy consisted of five elements extracted from the period's history: (1) extensive military buildup with allies; (2) broad strategic communications campaigns (Radio Free Europe, Voice of America, etc.) to get accurate news to subject populations; (3) alliance building for friends and alliance-busting for enemies; (4) amplifying overextension of enemies (Russia's inefficiency at occupying others indefinitely, abusive behavior); (5) leveraging geographic advantage without lifting a finger (narrow seas naturally contain Russia and China).