Speak about attempting revisionist history, Professor Nicholas A. Lambert follows the money—or at least the economics—behind Alfred Thayer Mahan:
This book immodestly argues that the conventional wisdom about [Alfred Thayer] Mahan’s beliefs is not only wrong, but that neglect of its finest thinker has had a deleterious effect on the U.S. Navy, whose persistent misreading of Mahan has handicapped itw own strategic thinking to the present time. For decades, Mahan and his concept of sea power have been misunderstood by naval writers, and this misunderstanding has contributed materially to the impoverishment of thinking about naval policy of the United States. In effect, the Navy has projected its own crude conception of what navies are for onto Mahan, whose ideas were far more sophisticated than most then or since. Yet if we actually read all his words, his usefulness to current strategists might equal and perhaps even surpass the eminence that Professor Rosinski saw as long gone, even before the apogee of the Navy during World War II. That is to say, the recovery of what Mahan really thought and argued has the potential to improve U.S. naval policy formulation in the present, offering the prospect of enhancing the role of sea power in support of peace and world security in a new era.
Lambert, p. xiv
Lambert’s main argument boils down to a simple sentence: “Far from defining sea power in terms of combat, Mahan defined it in terms of economics” (Lambert, xiv). Essentially, Lambert sees the role of the Navy as one of balancing, “combat, the realm of the military spirit…at the heart of what navies did” with, “commerce and politics, the realm of the civilian spirit” which “must also remain at the heart of what navies did” (Lambert, xvii).
If there is a connection to wargame design, perhaps it is found in the Epilogue “Magister Resurget?”. If one was to model strategic decision making in sea warfare, one might have “discerned that in sea warfare strategic decision making was seldom governed by military considerations but more often by political goals, driven mostly by economic-commercial factors” (Lambert, p. 337). This brings to my mind thoughts about sea lanes in Stephen Newberg’s Seapower & the State (Simulations Canada, 1982) or the need to deliver convoys to Europe in Stuart Tonge’s Blue Water Navy (Compass Games, 2020).
Recommended.
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Rocky Mountain Navy Gamer 
Surely since the post WW2 global order, the US Navy has been doing this – patrolling commerce routes and heading off threats with FONOPS in order to uphold the globalised system that has benefitted the US (and the west and arguably everyone else).
Mahan was writing in an era when the Royal Navy did a similar job for the Empire. I’m not well read enough to understand whether this is a new appreciation.
Yes, the Navy has been doing this but not doing a good job explaining to the public as such. Since the end of the Cold War and the rise of China everyone dooms to think the Navy only really exists to fight in the Pacific. Lambert argues that the Navy needs to “advertise” itself better by going back to the “real” roots of Mahan.
I suspect policing is underappreciated and success means the status quo persists. I imagine a new crisis resulting in higher oil or commodity prices would sharpen attention. The duties of Empire are numerous.