Alfred Thayer Mahan was historian and was considered the most influential American author of the nineteenth century.
His views were based in the 17th-century conflicts between the Dutch Republic, England, France and Spain, and the nineteenth-century naval wars between France and Great Britain.
He believed that the power of a nation was associated with the sea.
He said that: Naval strategy has for its end to found, support, and increase, as well in peace as in war, the sea power of a country.
