How America Beat Queen Victoria’s Britain without FightingAmerica pushed Britain out of the Western Hemisphere, more or less, by the turn of the twentieth century. It did so by making itself the strongest contender in the New World, harnessing its burgeoning industrial might to build a navy able to command the waters Washington cared about most.
by James Holmes
September 8, 2018Westerners make much of China’s obsession with “winning without fighting.†As though any sane statesman, Eastern or Western, relishes losing or longs to take up arms with all the dangers, hardships and perverse turnabouts of fortune that come with combat. Winning without fighting is what we call “diplomacy,†and it is a mode of interaction that spans all countries, civilizations and times.
Now, Chinese Communist diplomacy does display distinctive characteristics. For one, it’s a 24/7/365 enterprise. Beijing wages “ three warfares †in peacetime, shaping opinion constantly through legal media, and psychological means. For another, there’s a warlike edge to Chinese diplomacy seldom encountered among the pinstriped set. It is about winning, and it aims to deliver gains normally achieved on the battlefield without so many hazards.
This single-mindedness doubtless stems from Chinese strategic traditions—in part. After all, it was China’s own iconic general Sun Tzu who taught that the commander or sovereign who wins without fighting has reached the zenith of strategic artistry. Master Sun’s maxim is engraved on China’s way of diplomacy.
Ancestral traditions don’t tell the whole story, though. Chinese communists are communists as well as Chinese. Marxism-Leninism must also mold Beijing’s strategic outlook. Chinese Communist Party founding father Mao Zedong helped set the tone. Mao riffed on Clausewitz’s famous dictum, proclaiming that “politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed.†His foreign minister Zhou Enlai concurred that “all diplomacy is a continuation of war by other means.†Communist potentates erased the line separating diplomacy from war. These are simply different means to the same ends.
But even ideology and history cannot explain the winning-without-fighting ethos in full. It must arise in part from the nature of strategic competition among nations. An aspiring great power like China must strike a single-minded attitude to overtake an established hegemon like the United States and emplace itself atop the global order. It fears the hegemon will strike first to cut its ascent short—and thus prefers to win without the perils of war. China has that way of thinking in common with past aspirants to regional or world supremacy.
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https://nationalinterest.org/feature/how-america-beat-queen-victoria%E2%80%99s-britain-without-fighting-30797
