Everyone goes to f***ing General Quarters when Russia sends a spy ship to the East Coast or China shows up to RIMPAC uninvited, but yet I feel like smart people genuinely struggle to understand how naval presence works.

If you had a DDG with probably 30 TLAMs on board tooling around, well within striking distance of your naval base in Crimea, might that cause you some anxiety? Might that get inside your head a bit? Might that upset your strategic calculus a bit?

When Russia buzzed Donald Cook in the Baltic, they got a lot of attention for that. But sitting in the middle of the Baltic, Moscow is in Tomahawk range. That's how naval presence works.

And you may say, "Pshhh subsonic cruise missile, S-400 could handle it." Maybe, maybe not. Probably some number would get intercepted. But I doubt that makes you feel great about it.

There is a good deal of intangible about it. That's absolutely true. But it's also not difficult to see the problems it poses someone like a Putin or Xi who has to consider more than just what the outcome of this scenario would be in a computer simulation.

When you think about this as politics, and not pew-pew, things like naval presence become more important.

If you ran a war game of Imperial Germany vs Belgium in 1912, Germany would win every time. But they should have paid more attention to the geo-strategic implications.