I read somewhere a few years ago, about a briefing (perhaps at the Royal Society, but maybe somehwere else) in the late 19th/early 20th century in which it was suggested that Continental Empires would take Seaborne ones due to modern developments such as trains, telegraphs. But I can't remember who it was! It was offered as a sort of counter to Mahan... at least from what I remember.
Thanks to these innovations the full expanse of land could be harnessed (for the first time, as before it could take days to send a message, and even longer trying to move things like ores, coal ect.), giving continental Empires a huge advantage as they could get resources where they needed to be quicker, more securely (no sea crossings, blockades ect.) and possibly cheaper (no middlemen, no need to invest so heavily in protecting merchant fleet ect)
Halford Mackinder wrote in "The Geographical Pivot of History" submitted to the Royal Geographical Society, that the world was divided into a central 'World-Island' (the Eurasian landmass, with a 'pivot', or heartland centred on Russia and central Asia), a peripheral 'insular crescent' (the 'seafaring peoples' ie, the US, Britain, Japan, etc) and a 'marginal crescent' (continental Europe, Indian subcontinent, South-East Asia) sandwiched between them.
He argued that whoever controlled the 'pivot' could control the world-island, and would command the vast bulk of the world's resources. Historically, the lack of effective terrestrial transportation prevented powers from maintaining control over the Heartland and thus the world-island, but as technology progressed, it would be possible for a state (like the German Empire, or Tsarist Russia) to control the world-island, and thus dominate the marginal crescent from within. Seafaring nations would no longer have the advantage of mobility, and their power would decline, while the nations of the marginal crescent would forever be stuck between the Eurasian empire controlling the pivot, and the seafaring people.
It was mostly ignored at the time, but a number of far-right Russian thinkers (in particular Dugin) have picked it up to justify a sort of Russian Manifest Destiny.