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Maritime Strategy and Cooperative Security

Abstract:

The objective of this research is to analyze the necessary conditions of cooperative security that contribute to the purposes of the states’ maritime strategy. The maritime strategy is part of the national strategy of a state, and its purpose is to create, maintain, and use maritime power to promote and protect maritime interests, which derive from the strategic political level, based on the attributes of the sea that each state analyzes and considers that they are the ones that allow it to contribute from the maritime perspective to its national objectives. The permanent dialectic between cooperation and conflict at sea, added to other actors such as transnational crime, piracy, and overexploitation of resources, makes the oceans spaces where anarchy reigns. This limits the efforts of states to protect and develop their interests at sea, where maritime traffic, the center of gravity of international trade, is particularly affected. States are then called upon to collaborate with their political, economic, informational and military efforts, if required, for good order in the oceans, under a full and comprehensive cooperative security scheme, based on the concept proposed by Richard Cohen of the “four rings of cooperative security”; which is the optimal condition where the true contribution of the efforts of the states contributing to their maritime strategy is appreciated, with prior conditions such as common maritime interests, and the willingness to protect the great common good called the ocean and the activities that take place in it.