Naval diplomacy rests on qualitative human relationships as well as ships, weapons, and deployments that can be counted. Incidents that nearly became crises are visible enough to study. Successful presence may prevent a dispute from arising, leaving no event to count or prove. This makes it easy to catalog failures and much harder to identify conflicts quietly avoided through good relations. Historical judgment and close reading are therefore necessary alongside numerical data.
Notable Point · 55:06-58:35
Why naval diplomacy resists simple metrics
Diplomatic success is hard to quantify because its most important result may be a crisis that never becomes visible enough to count.