Seapower, geostrategic relations, and islandness: The World War II Destroyers for Bases deal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Destroyers for Bases deal was signed on March 27, 1941, and transferred fifty aging US destroyers to Great Britain in exchange for 99-year leases of bases on the British controlled islands of Newfoundland, Bermuda, Trinidad, Jamaica, Antigua, St. Lucia, the Bahamas, and one in British Guiana. The deal highlights how US strategic planners came to see the value of the islands because of their relationality. Three forms of relationality are discussed: the land/sea dialectic; spatial connectivity; and the changing geopolitical balance of power. Relationality is a factor in four strategic calculations: other islands; other continents; other oceans; and the conjuncture of long-term historical processes of hegemonic decline and rise. The relationality of the islands is understood through the lens of seapower as both input (the military bases) and output (the projection of force). Media representations of the deal are discussed to illustrate how islandness was implicit in the narration of the islands as being of strategic benefit to the US. The conclusions drawn emphasize the need to see strategic and military actors as agents who are aware of and construct island relationality; and the need for islands to be included as one of the inputs of seapower.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".