This book offers assessments of the maritime policies of the principal South Atlantic navies, and their implications for the regional maritime order. It is part of a project to set a new agenda for scholarship on South Atlantic maritime security issues. While Maritime Security Challenges in the South Atlantic deals with regional security issues with maritime implications, Navies and Maritime Policies in the South Atlantic discusses the maritime interests, naval capabilities, and policy agendas of Nigeria, South Africa, Argentina, United Kingdom, and Brazil.
The overall project aims to provide the first comprehensive and multi-level analysis of South Atlantic contemporary maritime security issues. First, it is a multinational effort that reflects the compromise in providing South American and African perspectives of naval and maritime issues, without neglecting Northern hemispheric counterpoint views. Second, these collaborations involve individuals with eclectic backgrounds, united by the emerging field of maritime security studies.1 Third, the project aims to launch further research agendas rather than conclude any of its several topics. This book presents different conceptual backgrounds and views over the possibilities of African navies’ engagement in naval cooperative arrangements; the character of British maritime policies for the Falkland Islands, Argentina, and South America; the national strategies to deal with the opposed claims of economic exclusive zones; and the reach and feasibility of Brazilian aspirations in the South Atlantic.
An introduction to those issues must consider the two nexuses between seapower and the South Atlantic small navies.2 First, to talk about seapower is to talk about United States seapower, and the actual or potential changes in US maritime strategy which also impact the South Atlantic. That region was one of the first to be shaped by US seapower primacy in the early twentieth century, and it has been affected by the US pivot to the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia during George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s administrations, while the ongoing retrenchment or isolationism of Trump’s (lack of) grand strategy raises doubts about the void of seapower in the region.3 A second issue is assessing the implications in the South Atlantic of the changing character of seapower in the twenty-first century, among other emergent issues, when small navies and coastguards start to perform strategic relevant roles.4
The South Atlantic: An Ocean Without Seapower?
Since the beginning of twentieth century, the hegemonic concentration of real capabilities by the United States Navy blocked any other gain or expression of seapower in the South Atlantic by regional and extra-regional states. For almost a hundred years, any naval expression of power in that ocean was a very risky business. In the last decade, there is evidence that regional and extra-regional powers are investing in sponsorship and hedge strategies to evade US seapower in the South Atlantic.
The US hegemony in the Western hemisphere has been favoured by three patterns of US foreign policy.5 First, the United States has been reactive against any insertion in the Atlantic Ocean by an extra-continental seapower. This became an American political condition after expelling Spain from the continent in 1898 and after the United Kingdom’s consent to the Moore Doctrine in 1900, led to the United States becoming the sole Atlantic seapower. Since then, the United States has reacted against German special relationships with Latin American countries and its opposition to a Soviet nuclear permanent stronghold in Cuba almost carried the world to Armageddon in 1962.
Second, the United States has interposed against the raise of any other seapower in the region. The United States’ containment policy has been proportional to the growing reach of its own seapower. On one hand, the United States’ seapower projection served regularly for interventions in Central America and Caribbean that took place early in the achievement of its maritime primacy in the continent. And this meant that armed forces and navies on constabulary guards were subordinated, mainly, to US Navy operations and bases. On the other hand, the United States’ presence and involvement in South America developed later and more slowly, only after the Second World War, though it was already expressed on several occasions during the nineteenth century, when the British Navy was still the main offshore balancer at the time.6
During the first half of the twentieth century, Argentina and Brazil were considered to have the potential for great power: large armies by universal and compulsory conscription, the acquisition of big battleships and aircraft carriers, air fighters, and even the development of nuclear projects. Nonetheless, their pursuit of real power and regional influence was downgraded slowly with US ascendancy as the global seapower during and after the Second World War. One cannot ignore the dual purpose of the United States’ military presence in Brazilian northeast region as intermediary basing for operations in North Africa and a negative incentive to South American alignment to the Axis powers. Hence, the South Atlantic was never a primary area of US seapower action and lost importance after the construction of the Suez and Panama canals. During the Cold War, the Southern Atlantic routes had secondary relevance as alternative routes for Soviet submarines, and dealing with that challenge became the main role and responsibility of the Argentinian, Brazilian, and South African navies at that time. The end of the Cold War and wider global compromises have weakened the United States’ presence in the South Atlantic since the 1990s. The constraints of the United States’ global distribution of power plus the South Atlantic countries’ uninterrupted, but heterogeneous, development are offering room for regional and extra-regional limited expressions and gains of seapower.
Third, the United States never had a traditional strategic interest in Africa, and during the Cold War it was clear that in the South Atlantic division of influence, Africa was the focus of mainly European interest. That changed with the creation of the US Africa Command in 2007, with responsibility for all African countries, except Egypt, and headquarters in Stuttgart. It was created and especially motivated to counter terrorism and to provide humanitarian assistance, but it also engaged in supporting a more secure environment in the Gulf of Guinea. Although US forces have an advanced HQ in Djibouti, the demands of force employment everywhere else and the regional sensibilities have led the United States to adopt palliative and spin control measures in West Africa.7
Hence, the South Atlantic is not relevant to United States and global geo-economics and geopolitics with one big exception: it holds the greatest potential of seabed mineral and energy reserves in the world. The ‘deep-water offshore boom’ was started by Brazil, expanded to Angola and Nigeria, and may embrace Uruguay, Argentina, Guyana, Namibia, and the Falkland Islands among other South Atlantic countries. As evidence, the region ranked globally at first position with 109 oil and gas floating platforms (the North Atlantic had 90, the Pacific 76, and the Indian Ocean only 2) in 2010, and it became the first area of investment in offshore hydrocarbons after 2011.8 Consequently, this new Atlantic energy ‘Eldorado’ already presses traditional and emerging powers—especially from Europe and China—to implement new maritime security policies to guarantee safe passage of oil and gas and protect the related increasing market that they involve. The United Kingdom’s 2014 Maritime Security Strategy affirms: ‘many coastal States do not have the capacity to govern their maritime zones effectively’, but mentions only the oil producing countries of West Africa as main concern areas. The G-7 Declaration of 15 April 2015 is comprehensive and states the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Operations Ocean Shield and Active Endeavour and the European Union Naval Force Operation Atalanta as operational models for the provision of security in the Gulf of Guinea.
In the case of China, Africa provides 33% of its oil imports, and Angola and Nigeria alone represent more than half of that. Accordingly, the ‘Angola model’—the Chinese trade of vast investment in African infrastructure for oil export credits—has created new sorts of interdependencies and their evolution to military cooperation is already on the table.9
If the South Atlantic lacks the core components of seapower—sustainable fleet projection and regional bases—alternative forms of extra-regional presence and power projection proliferate. Europe and China have replicated in West and South Africa the US strategy of sponsorship and naval cooperation ties have started to spread across the South Atlantic.
Simon Reich and Peter Dombrowski define sponsorship strategy as ‘the provision of material and moral resources in support of policies largely advocated and initiated by other actors, whether states, global or regional institutions, or nonstate actors’.10 In its formal modality, it involves multilateral cooperative security and humanitarian campaigns sanctioned by international law and/or regional organizations. It also may operate through formal defence cooperation agreements aiming at security sector reform and capacity building. In its informal modality, it involves a sort of buck-passing or delegation strategies to local proxy groups, allies, and partners with some level of support and transference of means to deal with limited and regionalized rivalries and threats. Recently, the United States has conducted a sponsorship strategy in Libya and Syria, though that practice dates from the Cold War, and in the maritime domain the United States is concentrated in the Indian Ocean and Caribbean Sea. In the first case, it sponsors the East Africa and Southwest Indian Ocean Initiative through the Combined Joint Task Force Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), which relies on multinational contribution such as the International Contact Group on Somalia (ICG) and the EU’s NAVFOR Atalanta Operation.11 In the second case, in fact, it is ...