Do European Navies Traditionally Perform Well?

The USN's ability to thus far repel the Iranian antiship ballistic missile attack should not conceal the fact that virtually no other European navy could do so to the same degree.

Consider the French Charles de Gaulle. A normal CdG group includes at least one Horizon-class…

— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) September 10, 2026

The post above raises interesting historical questions. Note its conclusion: "To those steeped in the tradition of European maritime superiority these [that European navies would not fare well against Iranian drone attacks] are surprising results." I've been asking mysef for a while whether "the tradition of European maritime superiority" is overrated. This brings us to A T Mahan:

In 1890, Captain Alfred Thayer Mahan, a lecturer in naval history and the president of the United States Naval War College, published The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783, a revolutionary analysis of the importance of naval power as a factor in the rise of the British Empire. Two years later, he completed a supplementary volume, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793–1812.

Mahan argued that British control of the seas, combined with a corresponding decline in the naval strength of its major European rivals, paved the way for Great Britain’s emergence as the world’s dominant military, political, and economic power. Mahan and some leading American politicians believed that these lessons could be applied to U.S. foreign policy, particularly in the quest to expand U.S. markets overseas.

If the UK was "the world’s dominant military, political, and economic power", why did it fight itself to exhaustion in the Great War? The one Mahan-style decisive naval engagement of that war, the Battle of Jutland, was essentially a draw, with both sides determining that any such future engagement would result in one side, as Winston Churchill put it, "losing the war in an afternoon". But wasn't this precisely Mahan's point? In effect, Churchill acknowledged that the UK wasn't realistically capable of forcing a Mahan-style decisive victory. So much for the might of the British Empire.

As a long-ago English major, I would point out tbat the American expatriate Henry James had observed the exhaustion of UK society by 1900:

"Mrs. Medwin" is a short story by Henry James, first published in Punch in 1900. The story slyly satirizes fashionable society in fin-de-siècle England. The central characters are an American brother and sister who both entertain and live off this society, which has grown bland and bored and almost exhausted.

Admiral David Beatty, who famously remarked at the Battle of Jutland, "There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today", was definitely part of that bland, bored, almost exhausted society.

But let's move to World War II. Winston Churchill's experience in the Great War seems to have shaped his strategy for the next one: from the start, his aim was to hold out only long enough to get the US into the war. The loss of the HMS Hood -- which had precisely the same thing wrong with it as the British dreadnaughts lost at Jutland -- was a tactical loss for the UK but a potential propaganda disaster if it convinced the US public that the UK couldn't continue the war; this was the reason for Churchill's urgency in sinking the Bismarck.

In fact, the only Mahan-style decisive victory for the Royal Navy in World War II was the Battle of Cape Matapan, where rhe UK defeated the Italian navy in the Mediterranean; the British had radar, the Italians didn't. Much more important was the Mahan-style defeat of the Royal Navy off Malaya on December 10, 1941:

Part of a British naval squadron known as Force Z, the Royal Navy battleship HMS Prince of Wales and battlecruiser HMS Repulse were sunk by land-based bombers and torpedo bombers of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

. . . The objective of Force Z, which consisted of one battleship, one battlecruiser and four destroyers, was to intercept the Japanese invasion fleet in the South China Sea north of Malaya. The task force sailed without air support. Although the British had a close encounter with Japanese heavy surface units, the force failed to find and destroy the main convoy. On their return to Singapore they were attacked in open waters and sunk by long-range torpedo bombers.

. . . The sinking of the two ships severely weakened the British Eastern Fleet in Singapore. . . . Singapore itself fell to the Japanese on 15 February, leading to the largest surrender in British history.

According to Wikipedia,

The deployment of the ships was a decision made by Winston Churchill. He was firmly warned against it by the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound, and later by his friend, Field Marshal Jan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa, who prophesied the fate of the capital ships, when he addressed the crew of HMS Repulse just before she left Durban for Singapore.

. . . The earlier grounding of the carrier HMS Indomitable left the capital ships without naval air cover. [Admiral Sir Tom] Phillips[, who had ingratiated himself with Churchill,] had long held the opinion that aircraft were no threat to surface ships, and so he took Force Z, consisting of HMS Prince of Wales, HMS Repulse, and four destroyers. . . to intercept the Japanese without air cover.

The best thing that can be said about Churchill is that he recognized the war was unwinnable without the US coming in, but the end effect of that was that the US Navy had eclipsed the Royal Navy and all other combatant navies by the end of the war. The only Mahan-style engagements after the Royal Navy's loss at Malaya were US vs Japanese.

It's intriguing that the post embedded above suggests that currently, only the Japanese navy, and possibly South Korea, could do an equivalent job to the US Navy in opposing Iranian drones. But since 1940 -- and maybe since 1916 -- the Royal Navy, as well as the French, German, and Italian navies, haven't potentially done as well against the US Navy as the Japanese.