ABSTRACT
Power abhors a vacuum. Between 1898 and 1905 the United States and Japan found it prudent to ll vacuums, the rst occasioned by a revolt against the colonial regime of Spain in the Caribbean, the second by the failing hold of China’s Qing dynasty on Korea and Manchuria. In each case, competition among established powers for overseas colonies and bases raised concerns about access to foreign resources, markets, and trade routes sufcient to preoccupy governments with establishing, by force of arms, spheres of inuence on water and land adjacent to home territory-for the United States, in the Caribbean basin, Cuba, and Panama; for Japan, in the Yellow Sea, Sea of Japan, Korea, and Manchuria. Both the resulting Spanish-American and Russo-Japanese Wars represent pivotal conicts between declining and emerging powers at the dawn of the twentieth century. Both involved the application of maritime strategy, dened loosely in a classic work of the time as “the principles which govern a war in which the sea is a substantial factor”1 in landing troops, supplying their extensive land operations, and maintaining incontestable dominance on the seas providing access to the theatre of conict.
