How Trump and Putin Destroy the Power They Claim to Restore | Sarah Paine

Overview

In this episode of The Global Gambit, historian and grand-strategy scholar Sarah Paine explains the difference between continental and maritime security paradigms. Her central argument is that continental powers tend to measure wealth and security through territory, military expansion, and control of neighboring land, while maritime powers emphasize trade, institutions, alliances, and rules that enable compounding wealth.

Paine argues that geography influences strategic behavior but does not determine it. Countries can choose whether to turn geographic conditions into an expansionist, zero-sum strategy or into a cooperative, commercially oriented system.

Relevant source moment: [04:36]–[05:58]

Main argument: Two competing ways to organize security and power

Paine uses “continental,” “land,” “maritime,” and “naval” power as related terms, while distinguishing those physical characteristics from a broader national-security paradigm. A continental paradigm assumes that neighboring states are potential threats, so security requires military strength, territorial depth, and often outward expansion. A maritime paradigm treats secure trade, legal rules, alliances, and access to sea-based networks as the foundations of national power.

The underlying economic distinction is between negative-sum conflict and positive-sum exchange. War destroys wealth, whereas trade, insurance, credit, banking, and mutually accepted legal rules allow countries to specialize and accumulate wealth over time. Paine’s practical test for strategy is therefore whether other participants also benefit enough to support and sustain it.

Relevant source moment: [06:31]–[08:46] Geography remains relevant because land borders, coastlines, oceans, and transport networks shape a country’s vulnerabilities and opportunities. However, nuclear weapons, satellites, cyber systems, and undersea cables do not eliminate geography; they add new layers to the same strategic environment. Oceans remain major channels for trade, communications, and military deployment.

Evidence and historical examples

Britain is Paine’s clearest example of a maritime security system. Its island geography provided a defensive moat, while the Royal Navy protected trade and prevented invasion. The Dutch Republic and the work of Hugo Grotius are presented as important contributors to the maritime order, particularly through the idea of freedom of the seas and rules governing international commerce.

Russia represents the contrasting continental pattern in Paine’s account. She describes Russian history as repeated expansion from neighboring territories outward, with land and control of surrounding space treated as measures of power. She contrasts this with Switzerland, another landlocked European country that, in her view, has largely protected itself, followed international rules, and prospered without pursuing territorial expansion.

Relevant source moment: [16:20]–[17:06] Paine also presents the United States as historically mixed rather than naturally or permanently maritime. She points to westward expansion, wars against Native Americans and Mexico, the Louisiana Purchase, the acquisition of Alaska, and the Monroe Doctrine as examples of an earlier continental or sphere-of-influence orientation. She then argues that the United States increasingly adopted a maritime, institution-building strategy in the twentieth century.

The historical framework extends back to classical Greece. Paine identifies Thucydides’ account of Athens and Sparta as an early study of the asymmetry between a maritime power and a continental power. She also invokes Alfred Thayer Mahan, Roman law, British strategy, and the post-World War I generation’s emphasis on institutions as parts of a long, multinational development of the rules-based order.

Relevant source moment: [11:45]–[12:14] Relevant source moment: [22:10]–[25:48]

Distinctive insights

A central non-consensus claim is that territory is not necessarily the modern “currency of power.” Paine uses Singapore as an example of a small state whose influence comes from industry, commerce, and trade rather than territorial size. In her framework, a country can possess extensive land and natural resources yet remain comparatively poor if it mismanages institutions and repeatedly destroys wealth through conflict. Another useful distinction is between geography and political choice.

Paine compares Russia and Switzerland to show that two continental locations can produce very different security strategies. Geography creates constraints, but political institutions, historical experience, and national beliefs determine whether a state responds by closing itself off, expanding outward, trading, or joining rule-based arrangements. Paine also argues that alliances are not merely military conveniences.

They are part of a broader security paradigm in which states accept rules and create relationships that make cooperation more predictable. A country that abandons this system may gain short-term freedom of action while weakening the alliance network and commercial order that support its long-term power. Relevant source moment: [15:38]–[16:13]

Predictions and conditions

Paine predicts that states relying on territorial aggression and coercion will destroy wealth, weaken their relationships, and create counter-coalitions. She applies this reasoning to Russia’s war against Ukraine and to what she describes as current United States policy, arguing that both approaches damage the countries pursuing them as well as their opponents.

Her broader forecast is that the rules-based order is vulnerable but not necessarily finished. China, in her view, faces a strategic choice: continue benefiting from the existing system, move against Taiwan, or use perceived American failures to gain influence in international institutions and attract states seeking a counterweight to the United States.

Relevant source moment: [26:44]–[27:11] These forecasts would be weakened if territorial expansion consistently produced durable prosperity, if military coercion strengthened rather than fractured alliances, or if states could gain greater long-term power by rejecting trade and institutional cooperation. The discussion does not provide systematic measurements for these claims, so the forecasts function primarily as historical-strategic judgments.

Practical implications

For policymakers, the episode’s explicit lesson is to favor strategies that create shared benefits for allies and trading partners. Protecting legal predictability, international commerce, financial trust, and maritime communications can produce more durable power than attempting to dominate territory directly.

The discussion also implies that governments should evaluate security policy by its effects on alliances and national wealth, not only by immediate military gains. Paine specifically emphasizes fixing domestic legal institutions, reducing corruption, and developing natural resources through functioning laws rather than using external expansion to compensate for internal weakness.

For analysts, the framework offers a diagnostic question: is a state treating territory as the main source of security, or is it using trade, institutions, and networks to multiply its capabilities? The answer can help explain why states with fewer resources may outperform larger countries.

Relevant source moment: [14:12]–[14:44]