The Art of Peace

Engaging a Complex World

Juliana Geran Pilon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781412864237
• eBook ISBN: 9781351485708
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Sun Tzu, author of 'The Art of War', believed that the acme of leadership consists in figuring out how to subdue the enemy with the least amount of fighting a fact that America's Founders also understood, and practiced with astonishing success. For it to work, however, a people must possess both the ability and the willingness to use all available instruments of power in peace as much as in war. US foreign policy has increasingly neglected the instruments of civilian power and become overly dependent on lethal solutions to conflict. The steep rise in unconventional conflict has increased the need for diplomatic and other non-hard power tools of statecraft. The United States can no longer afford to sit on the proverbial three-legged national security stool ("military, diplomacy, development"), where one leg is a lot longer than either of the other two, almost forgetting altogether the fourth leg information, especially strategic communication and public diplomacy. The United States isn't so much becoming militarized as DE civilianized. According to Sun Tzu, self-knowledge is as important as knowledge of one's enemy: "if you know neither yourself nor the enemy, you will succumb in every battle." Alarmingly, the United States is deficient on both counts. And though we can stand to lose a few battles, the stakes of losing the war itself in this age of nuclear proliferation are too high to contemplate.

1
Opposites Detract

‘In pace, ut sapiens, aptarit idonea bello.’ In peace, as a wise man, he should make suitable preparation for war.

—Horace, Satires Book ii, 30 BC

Ambiguity is not, today, [caused by] a lack of data, but a deluge of data.

—Paul Gibbons, The Science of Successful Organization, 2014

We want peace, but we study war.

—Irving Louis Horowitz, The Idea of War and Peace, 1957

Who would have imagined, back in 521 BC, that several millennia later, The Art of War would become an international runaway bestseller? Eventually rediscovered on every continent, it is breezily cited, if not necessarily read from cover to cover, even in the nation least inclined to revere anything older than itself—modern-day America. This improbably popular slim volume has been translated into just about every language, its aphorisms appealing to political scientists and military officers as much as to salesmen and entrepreneurs, self-help gurus, and ordinary unsuspecting folks who like its aphorisms without being quite sure why. Perhaps the most celebrated how-to manual of all time, Sun Tzu’s military guidebook continues to be a publisher’s dream. The seemingly self-evident aphorisms resonate, taunting the reader with the feeling—accurate, as it happens—that there is more, much more, behind their bumper-sticker wisdom. Writes Colin Gray: “This short work is far more subtle than it appears to be in its presentation-like form. While concentrating in the main on generalship, it does have much of value to say about political statecraft.”¹

For that reason and more, the little book’s relevance is only growing, notwithstanding the great distance from us in both time and space. Born during the so-called Spring and Autumn Period (around 771–476 BC) in Chinese history, Sun Tzu had been witness to massive changes in technology and geopolitics. In the early days of that period, pitched battles were uncommon; “deterrence and diplomacy, rather than warfare, were often the preferred means to fulfill a ruler’s goals.”² But that was soon to change. Wars migrated south, where rivers were plentiful, leading to new types of terrain that now required water transport and fleets. Far more complex joint operations included infantry, chariots, and fleets; war became more protracted and increasingly violent, necessitating radically new approaches to both war and peace. Conscription was introduced, and armies became much larger. Military rituals that characterized earlier, milder confrontations, were giving way to a deception-based approach. Unsurprisingly, as the stakes rose and the danger of massive bloodshed increased exponentially, so did the importance of outwitting the adversary. Though far less apocalyptic in scope than today’s weapons of mass annihilation, even in Sun Tzu’s time, “war had become a dangerous business; the recourse when other means had failed.”³

But Sun Tzu recoiled against overreliance on sheer hardware and army size. Should violence be unavoidable, even the most lethal weapons cannot deliver specific desired outcomes in the absence of astute, targeted, well-thought-out plans. Though primarily a military manual, his Art of War underscores the importance of strategic communication, political influence, intelligence and information operations, not to mention cultural acumen—in brief, the spectrum of assets, both physical and psychological, required to defend the nation’s interests and values. The nonlethal tools, moreover, are deemed indispensable at all times: before as much as during the course of military engagement, and certainly in the aftermath.

His approach is deeply pragmatic. Though hard weapons can annihilate the enemy, only a wise strategy, shrewdly executed, against a well-understood enemy, can define victory, and eventually secure it. Military measures could be compared to surgery: they are ideal if what is needed is excising a tumor. That said, a preferable course is preventing the tumor’s growth in the first place; by the time surgery must be performed, the disease is usually advanced. Not to mention that after surgery, there is convalescence and additional therapy—measures that in a foreign-policy context may be called, for lack of a better word, soft weapons.

But they are soft only by contrast with the lethal hard-ware that blows things up or otherwise destroys, sometimes indiscriminately, often causing unwelcome collateral damage. In no way does Sun Tzu imply that “soft” weapons are somehow second-best; on the contrary, the violent variety has many drawbacks. For example, even when they reach their intended targets, hard weapons tend to boomerang in unexpectedly catastrophic ways. These include killing and maiming innocent civilians who are either caught in the crossfires or deliberately planted by cynical enemies, and destroying the property of innocent people, thereby unhelpfully alienating them. Thus tactical success may be undermined by greater, strategic failure. In many ways, so-called soft weapons are actually much harder: more difficult to wield, their success less immediately obvious. Also, their effectiveness is invariably less tangible than blowing up a city or fortress. Least obvious is what soft weapons achieve by preventing something from happening; and nonevents make non-headlines. Yet it is usually soft, rather than hard, instruments of power that ultimately end conflicts, that win the peace after either having prevailed in, or succeeded in deterring, battlefield engagements.

What matters to Sun Tzu is the human personality, which he takes seriously as central to understanding conflict—an emphasis nearly absent in today’s techno-centric conversation. He believed that nothing surpasses the need to understand both one’s enemy and oneself, assessing realistically and without illusions the full dimensions of a volatile situation. Indeed, there are no shortcuts: the whole conflict environment—physical and human, the entire spectrum of relevant factors—had to be grasped astutely and realistically. No starry-eyed idealist, Sun Tzu took it as a given that life is perpetual strife, that winning battles is ephemeral, and that war and peace are not so much opposites as steps along the hard road of survival. His best-known mantra—that the acme of a general’s skill, and the highest goal of a true strategist, is to win without firing a shot—has resonated through the millennia. It is as true today as ever.

There are no quick and decisive solutions to conflict when the world is always teetering on the verge of war when not right in the middle of it. The notion of a “solution” is itself misleading: all we can hope to accomplish is mitigate the ever-present dangers that lurk into the background in a dauntingly complicated environment. To go Donald Rumsfeld one better, besides the known unknowns and the unknown unknowns, there are, dauntingly, the unknowable unknowns. And if that weren’t bad enough, the entire conflict environment—including the knowns, the unknowns, and the unknowable—is constantly changing. Sun Tzu had understood that taking the challenge head-on means fully embracing its complexity, always mindful of opportunities to prevail in a fluid setting.

His pithy aphorisms, however, cannot alone reveal fully his underlying, fascinating worldview that differs from our own in ways that are very much worth exploring. Imprecise translations, due in part to linguistic ambiguities, and insufficient understanding of ancient Chinese philosophy generally, have prevented a deeper appreciation by Western readers of his sophisticated work. We thus owe a debt of gratitude to the groundbreaking new book by Professor Derek M. D. Yuen, Deciphering Sun Tzu: How to Read the Art of War, written under the tutelage of the brilliant Colin Gray at Reading University, where Yuen received his doctorate. Chinese-born, Yuen also benefited from consultation with fellow Chinese scholars at Hong Kong University, where he teaches. For the first time in two and a half millennia, Yuen’s careful study offers English-speaking audiences the opportunity to explore more fully the insights of the world’s most astute strategist. Not a moment too soon.

But, the American reader may well ask, isn’t Sun Tzu approach likely to be too Chinese? The short answer is: actually, no. Yuen agrees with scholars Michael Handel, Laurence Freedman, and many others that good strategy is not determined by either culture or geography: considerable differences in tactics notwithstanding, there isn’t a “Western” or an “Eastern” art of strategy. So while Chinese strategic thinking follows patterns different from those commonly accepted in the West, the wise course would be to blend the two approaches.

In the first place, both system of thought may be described as dialectical, in the sense that both make use of concepts that are opposites in meaning. Dialectics (from dia, “through,” and legein, “speak”), refers to a conversation or dialogue, usually meant to arrive at some conclusion that reconciles two opposing perspectives, with one proposition followed by another challenging it. The most common way of interpreting dialectics in the Western world is the Aristotelian, based on classical logic, whose most fundamental principle is the law of noncontradiction. In its simplest form, that law states that A and not-A cancel each other out—or, put differently, their juxtaposition always yields a necessarily false statement or contradiction.⁴ Accordingly, A and not-A cannot both be true; a possible resolution might state that A is true except when (fill in the blank), in which case it is not-A. For example: “All swans are white except when the color gene mutates, and then some swans turn out a different color. So not (quite) all swans are white.”

Another form of Western logic is so-called Hegelian dialectics, after the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), who applied the concepts of “thesis” and “antithesis” beyond discourse to the material world. To oversimplify a bit (the only alternative to long years of study, preferably in the original German), Hegel’s view is as follows: nature and history could be imagined as a sequence of ideas, such that an event, which may be described as a “thesis,” confronts another event that may be called an “antithesis,” which in turn “negates”—or opposes—the thesis. (A true metaphysical idealist, Hegel tended to conflate reality and the language used to describe it.) And as thesis and antithesis occur in the world simultaneously, they lead to conflict whose resolution entails the annihilation of both. The previous example of “most swans are white” is therefore not as useful an illustration of synthesis as, say, an oxygen molecule colliding with two molecules of hydrogen to yield an entirely new substance—water.

The Marxist application of Hegelian dialectics to history considers the opposing classes that coexist at any historical stage (e.g., feudalism) as a thesis opposing an antithesis, whose inevitably clashing synthesis ushers in an entirely new historical stage—for example, capitalism— which then repeats the process, with the proletariat and bourgeoisie becoming the next thesis and antithesis. The eventual culmination of all history, when it ends with an epic secular finale, is the classless society of humans liberated from property and therefore from all greed—which is viewed as the root of all evil/war/inequality/etc., QED.

What Aristotelian and Hegelian logic do share is the assumption that contraries cannot coexist: whether in a conversation or in the real world (which is at least mirrored in, even if not coextensive with, language), contradiction must be eliminated. Yuen calls this methodological approach “aggressive”—an apt description, as the Marxist application vividly illustrates. In contrast, Chinese yin-yang logic is predicated on the world being “at once interconnected, interpenetrating, and interdependent in an uninterrupted manner, [as] the polarity of the situation essentially rests in [the yin-yang continuum].”⁵ According to this mindset, opposites are not destroyed but persist. By analogy, when autumn follows summer, although leaves die, something lives on, which reappears in the spring: or, to put it differently, every slice of reality consists of opposites. (Think negative and positive charges coexisting inside a molecule; simultaneous attraction and repulsion to a unique object, within the same breast; new cells emerging as dead cells are eliminated.) This type of dialectic, which Yuen calls “holistic,” helps explain why “Chinese strategic thought is not military-centered, or at least it is far less military-centered than its Western counterpart.”⁶ Reality, in Chinese strategic thought, one might say, is intrinsically Janus-faced. Thus hard and soft aspects must be addressed simultaneously, difficult as that sounds—and is.

Another way of distinguishing between Western and Chinese thinking patterns is by describing the former as causal-linear and the latter as cyclical-evolutionary. The scientific, linear method generally relies on seeking causal relationships that are repeatable, quantifiable, and simplified. The holistic approach, on the other hand, is irredeemably complex, taking all the related factors as contributing to the evolution of motion and reality, such that one state may precede another without necessarily being assumed to have literally, let alone solely, caused the latter. The evolutionary mindset presupposes the coexistence of apparent contraries without expecting a resolution (at least not any time soon) and without fear of paradox. On the face of it, imagining someone being both friend and foe, or a menacing outburst of anger being accompanied by soothing psychological relief, is not difficult. But holistic dialectic represents a muc...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• About the Authors
• Introduction: Peace and Strategy
• I. Sun Tzu’s Acme of Skill
• 1 Opposites Detract
• 2 The Art of Information
• 3 Shaking the Invisible Hand
• 4 Leadership
• II. The Founders’ Art of Peace
• 5 Sovereignty and Self-Government
• 6 Influencing
• 7 Diplomacy and Commerce
• 8 A Brave New World
• III. Strategic Deficit Disorder
• 9 American Self-Ignorance
• 10 Intelligence Deficit
• 11 Soft Power for Softies
• 12 One-Hand Clapping
• 13 Communication-Challenged
• IV. Rebalancing to Win the Peace
• 14 Strategic Dialogue
• 15 Development Engagement
• 16 Peace-Building Reboot
• 17 Exceptionalism as
• Conclusion: Medicine for a Sick World
• Bibliography
• Index