One of the most enduring questions in international relations theory concerns not what power is, but how it ought to be wielded. A broad intellectual lineage stretching from Clausewitz to Morgenthau, from Sun Tzu to Mearsheimer, converges upon a single foundational axiom: military power, in the final analysis, retains its highest strategic value so long as it remains unused. Power is akin to a sword; it deters while sheathed, yet the moment it is drawn, it subjects both itself and its bearer to trial. The question of American aircraft carriers constitutes precisely the most dramatic test of this axiom in the contemporary world order.
The Concept of Potential Power and the Doctrine of Sea Dominance
The doctrine of sea dominance formulated by Alfred Thayer Mahan in the late nineteenth century has constituted the backbone of American strategic thought. According to Mahan, whoever controls the oceans controls world trade; and whoever controls world trade determines the course of global politics. The most concrete manifestation of this doctrine in the twentieth century was, without question, the aircraft carrier. From the Second World War onward, the American Navy constructed an unrivaled power projection capacity across the world's oceans with eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers — each, in essence, a floating air base.
A critical point must be noted here: the strategic value of these aircraft carriers derived, in large measure, from their continued existence as a "potential threat." Throughout the Cold War, American aircraft carriers patrolled from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, from the Indian Ocean to the North Atlantic. Yet their primary function was not to enter into actual combat, but to deter rival actors through their mere presence. The deployment of a single American carrier strike group to any given region constituted, in and of itself, a diplomatic message: "We are here, and our intervention capacity is intact." The efficacy of this message stemmed, paradoxically, from the fact that said capacity had never been fully tested.
In the literature of international relations, this phenomenon is conceptualized as the "deterrence paradox." Deterrence functions if and only if the threat remains credible yet simultaneously unenforced. The moment a threat is put into execution, it either succeeds in entirely neutralizing the adversary — which is seldom achievable — or it fails, thereby eroding the very foundation of deterrence itself. The latter possibility inflicts damage upon the perceived legitimacy and capacity of the power in question that is exceedingly difficult to repair.
The Weapon-Dollar Coalition: The Invisible Architecture of Hegemony
To properly comprehend the strategic function of aircraft carriers, one must look beyond the purely military dimension of American hegemony. With the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 and the severance of the dollar's gold convertibility, the United States acquired an unprecedented global economic privilege. From that date forward, the "petrodollar" system — which ensured that global energy trade, particularly petroleum transactions, was conducted exclusively in U.S. dollars — evolved into a mechanism that financed America's structural budget deficits, channeled global savings into American treasury bonds, and bestowed upon Washington an unmatched economic leverage.
The sustainability of this system, however, rested upon more than financial rules or diplomatic consensus. Within the framework conceptualized as the "Weapon-Dollar coalition," the ultimate guarantor of the dollar's status as the global reserve currency was American military power. The acceptance by oil-producing states — particularly the Gulf monarchies — of conducting energy trade in dollars in exchange for a security umbrella formed the very foundation of this coalition. American aircraft carriers, therefore, served not merely as military platforms but simultaneously as the floating guarantors of the dollar's global incontestability and of the international financial order.
Viewed from this perspective, the strategic value of aircraft carriers' "non-use" becomes far more lucidly apparent. So long as these vessels patrolled the seas as a potential threat, they simultaneously preserved both military deterrence and the petrodollar cycle. The moment power was put to active use, it was not merely military deterrence that came under risk, but the entirety of the economic hegemony erected upon that deterrence.
The China Factor and American Strategic Reassessment
The principal dynamic that has fundamentally transformed the global balance of power in the first quarter of the twenty-first century has been the rise of the People's Republic of China. China has ascended to the status of an actor that seriously threatens American hegemony not only in terms of economic magnitude but also in military modernization, technological innovation, and regional influence projection. The artificial island constructions in the South China Sea, anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategies, and breakthroughs in hypersonic missile technology have, in particular, laid the groundwork for questioning American naval supremacy.
It is at this juncture that a fracture occurred within American strategic thought. For decades, aircraft carriers had been regarded as instruments of "sustainable hegemony." Yet when this sustainability came into question in the face of China's growing capacity, American decision-makers — particularly within the framework of the Trump doctrine — began posing a different question: "Shall we continue to bear the cost of sailing so expensive a navy across the world's oceans, or has the time come to collect the returns on this investment?"
This question appears, at first glance, to be a rational cost-benefit analysis. The construction cost of a single Gerald R. Ford-class aircraft carrier is approximately $13 billion; annual operating costs, including escort vessels and air wing, run into the billions. For the American taxpayer, these figures engender a concrete expectation of returns. Trump's "let us reap the fruit" approach is precisely the political expression of this expectation.
This approach, however, rests upon a strategic illusion. For the "fruit" of aircraft carriers is their non-use. Their continued existence as potential power, their contribution to the stability of the global order, their guarantee of the security of maritime trade routes — all of these are strategic gains achieved precisely because these vessels are "not used." These gains are, by their very nature, invisible; much like the value of an insurance policy, which goes unappreciated so long as no damage occurs.
The Iran Theater: The Litmus Test Effect
The case that most strikingly demonstrated the collapse of the potential power doctrine arose in the context of the Israel-Iran confrontation. The United States, in coordination with Israel, deployed aircraft carriers and fifth-generation fighter jets such as the F-35 in military operations against Iran. This maneuver signified the conversion of a force maintained for decades as a potential threat into a kinetic element — that is, an actual instrument of war.
The results were, from a strategic standpoint, profoundly instructive.
The financial dimension of the operation, designated Operation Epic Fury, laid bare the cost of converting potential power into kinetic power in striking fashion. According to CSIS analyses, the bill for the first 100 hours of the operation alone amounted to $3.7 billion, with average daily expenditure reaching $890 million. This colossal consumption of resources caused America's most critical munitions stockpiles — Patriot and THAAD interceptors, Tomahawk cruise missiles — to erode to dangerously low levels; Pentagon command was compelled to warn the political leadership that this kinetic display of force would render the United States defenseless on a global scale. The reality that those who said "let us reap the fruit" failed to account for was that fruit, once plucked, is consumed — whereas potential power, much like the tree itself, continues to bear fruit season after season so long as it stands.
Yet the truly devastating consequence was not the financial cost but the asymmetric vulnerabilities that manifested in the field. Iran's relatively low-cost hypersonic and ballistic missiles posed a formidable threat to the world's most expensive and most sophisticated combat platforms. The potential of a missile costing a few million dollars to inflict serious damage upon — or even neutralize — an aircraft carrier worth billions materialized as the most striking example of asymmetric warfare. This compelled the American Navy to keep its aircraft carriers outside the range of Iranian missiles, refraining from bringing them anywhere near the Strait of Hormuz.
What occurred here was the validation of one of the most fundamental predictions of strategic theory: power is tested the moment it is employed; and the moment it is tested, its vulnerabilities are exposed. Aircraft carriers, so long as they remained a potential threat, had created the perception of being "unsinkable." This perception formed the very foundation of deterrence. Yet when the vulnerability of these platforms to hypersonic missiles became visible in an actual combat environment, the myth of "unsinkability" collapsed, and with it, the deterrence capacity itself eroded.
Examined from a juridical perspective, the situation assumes an even more intriguing character. Within the framework of international maritime law, the freedom of navigation of aircraft carriers on the high seas is guaranteed by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). However, an aircraft carrier's participation in active combat operations against a state fundamentally alters the legal status of that vessel. An aircraft carrier navigating as potential power is a maritime platform under the protection of international law; an aircraft carrier conducting operations as kinetic power is a legitimate military target. This legal distinction constitutes the normative foundation of the strategic distinction.
Furthermore, the threat posed by Iran's missile capacity to aircraft carriers has brought back to the agenda the critical importance of the Strait of Hormuz for international maritime trade. Control over this narrow waterway, through which approximately one-fifth of global petroleum trade passes, is no longer subject to the will of the American Navy. This development warrants profound analysis not only from a military standpoint but also from the perspectives of energy geopolitics and global trade law.
V. The F-35 Debacle and Technological Hubris
A similar situation obtains with respect to the F-35 Lightning II program. The total cost of the F-35 program, heralded as the most expensive weapons system in history, exceeds $1.7 trillion. This aircraft was marketed as a "game changer" and presented as the indisputable instrument of air superiority. Yet it became apparent during the Iran operations that the F-35's stealth capacity does not confer absolute superiority against advanced defense systems.
This situation points to a broader strategic problem: technological hubris. The American defense industry has been constructed for decades upon the assumption that technological superiority alone would guarantee strategic superiority. The paradigm of asymmetric warfare, however, has fundamentally shaken this assumption. The correlation between the size of a state's defense budget and its strategic effectiveness has ceased to be linear. As the Iranian case demonstrates, missile technologies developed with a comparatively modest defense budget can neutralize astronomically expensive platforms.
The Hegemonic Transition
All of these developments have reignited the "hegemonic transition" debate within international relations theory. Robert Gilpin's theory of hegemonic war, Paul Kennedy's "imperial overstretch" thesis, and Giovanni Arrighi's analysis of systemic cycles of accumulation all point in the same direction: hegemonic powers accelerate their own decline by overusing their military capacities — particularly by deploying them in ways that weaken their economic foundations.
The United States, as the guarantor of the global order it has constructed since the Second World War, owes the sustainability of that order in large measure to the "potential" character of its military power. During the Cold War, the NATO umbrella, nuclear deterrence, and conventional power projection — all of these functioned on the basis of the principle of "non-use." The doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) represents the purest expression of this principle: nuclear weapons deter precisely because they cannot be used.
In the twenty-first century, however, American decision-makers have exhibited a tendency to deviate from this ancient strategic wisdom. The invasion of Iraq (2003) was the first great manifestation of this deviation; potential power was employed to change a regime, but the chaos and instability that ensued proclaimed the limits of American power to the entire world. The twenty-year war in Afghanistan was the second; two trillion dollars in expenditure and thousands of casualties culminated in the Taliban's return to power. The Iran theater now constitutes the most striking example of this deviation in the dimension of naval power. Each case plainly demonstrates the strategic cost of converting potential power into kinetic power.
At this juncture, Thucydides's Trap must also be addressed. As Graham Allison has conceptualized, the probability of conflict between a rising power (China) and the incumbent hegemon (the United States) is historically high. Yet there exists a variable unaccounted for in Allison's model: the hegemon's premature and unnecessary expenditure of its own power. The United States, by expending the deterrence capital it ought to have preserved for a potential strategic competition with China against an actor such as Iran — one that occupies a relatively subordinate position in the hierarchy of strategic priorities — has weakened its hand in the real great game. Expressed in chess terminology, this resembles the sacrifice of one's queen in a qualifying round before the final match of a grand tournament.
He Who Draws the Sword Loses
Is the world today on the threshold of a hegemonic transition? It is not yet possible to give a definitive answer to this question. What can be stated, however, is this: the United States, committing a historical error, has converted the military capacity it ought to have maintained as potential power into a kinetic instrument, and in the process has considerably depleted its deterrence capital.
Perhaps the heaviest toll of this kinetic adventure has been exacted not on the battlefield itself but upon the global geo-economic plane. Iran's establishment of a toll mechanism for tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz, and its declaration that these transit fees would be collected exclusively in Chinese Yuan, constitutes the de facto announcement of the collapse of the petrodollar system analyzed at the outset of this essay. The axiom that "global energy trade is conducted in dollars" — an axiom shielded for decades under the shadow of aircraft carriers — has lost its purchase in a conjuncture where those very carriers are fleeing Iranian missile range and waiting a thousand miles offshore. China's regional integrations, long constructed through its Belt and Road Initiative, and its alternative payment infrastructures to SWIFT, have in this crisis transformed into a de facto global financial alternative. The squandering of American military power in the kinetic arena has, ironically, created the very strategic vacuum China needed to establish its own economic hegemony.
The compulsion to keep aircraft carriers outside Iranian missile range is not merely a tactical retreat but an indicator of a strategic paradigm shift. The certification of the vulnerability of these platforms — held to be "untouchable" in the eyes of world opinion — is fundamentally transforming the global perception of American power. When this transformation is assessed alongside China's claims in the South China Sea, Russia's maneuvers in the Black Sea, and the growing confidence of regional actors, it furnishes strong presumptions that the transition to a multipolar world order is accelerating.
Turkey, it should be noted, is situated in one of the geographies where this transformation is felt most acutely. Across a broad arc stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf, from the Black Sea to the Red Sea, the erosion of American naval power is directly affecting regional power balances. Turkey's efforts to develop its own naval capacity — such as the TCG Anadolu multipurpose amphibious assault ship project — should be read in this context not merely as national defense investments but as strategic responses to the shifting global maritime power map.
An ancient Chinese proverb states: "The warrior who draws his sword least is the one most feared." The United States has drawn its sword. And history has seldom shown mercy to those who draw too soon.
The matter is this: power is not a fruit tree; fruit plucked from the branch is consumed. Power is, rather, more akin to a shadow — it appears large from afar, and shrinks as one draws near. American aircraft carriers once cast an immense shadow. Now the world has begun to see the true dimensions behind that shadow. And what has once been seen can never be unseen.