Neither. Like it or not -- a policeman.
Anarchy is not as people falsely perceived to be nothing but destruction and chaos. Anarchy really mean no hierarchy and best or worst of all, no leadership of any kind. If people in this state of relationship want to live in peace, that peace completely depends on the cooperation of all parties involved. We know that is not possible. Never have been. Not even in small scale. In any community of any size in any continent in any era, there have always been an authority figure, at least a nominally moral one, then a cadre of enforcers of whatever this moral authority declared to be beneficial for this community. The larger the community, the more complex the authority structure becomes.
Naive people want international affairs to be anarchic in relationship, meaning not even an organization like the UN should exist. The first world war proved that such a state of international affairs is not possible. The League of Nations failed to gel and came the second world war. The UN failed like the League of Nations and the world continues to see an average of 40 conflicts, ranging from 'armed conflicts' to full scale 'wars', every year since the end of WW II.
Like it or not, someone had to take up the truncheon and start beating heads.
Throughout history, navies have always been the instruments, not of choice, but of necessities for national defense, power projection from one's border, protection of overseas national interests, and of waging wars. Even with the advent of air power, the navy continues to be that most prominent of a nation's military power.
World War II devastated the historical powerful navies such as that of Great Britain and the Europeans. In Asia, the Imperial Japanese Navy was the only significant naval power that rose and fell. All other navies in Asia never got beyond coastal patrol stage. At the end of WW II, the US Navy fielded slightly over 6,000 ships composed of every class and types above and below surface. Never in naval history have a navy been so overwhelmingly powerful. Then came US air power and never in history have any military been so seemingly omnipotent.
The US kept the global peace. No matter how uneasy it was from the Cold War to today, it was a peace. Lee Kwan Yew of Singapore, in his memoir 'From Third World to First', revealed that it was the Vietnam War that enabled the rest of the weaker Asian countries to basically 'got their shit' together to show the Soviet Union and China that Asia would not fall under their controls so without a fight. China even went so far as to engage in racism in trying to put as much of Asia under communism. Lee Kwan Yew confronted Deng Xiaoping and told Deng that China must stop radio broadcasts to overseas Chinese urging them to remember their blood ties to China and to rebel against the host countries. Lee and the leaders of the other Asian countries wondered where was the UN in this ?
What we called 'World War II' is actually 'World War I' for Asia. China, from that 'century of humiliation' of the Europeans then of the loss of Manchuria to Imperial Japan, is determined to be the hegemony of Asia and she will do it not by economic but of military might. It is happening as we debate in this little corner of the Internet.
Peaceful anarchy is possible only if people lives far away from each other and do not rely on each other for survival and prosperity. But that is not the world we live in. The greater the economic interdependence of peoples and their respective countries, the greater the odds of armed conflicts to occur and the greater the odds of those small wars to escalate into larger ones.
