by James Holmes
Westerners 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 Enlaiconcurred 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.
Aspirants such as fin de siècle America. The United States ushered Victorian 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. And it took advantage of new threats gathering in Europe. Threats to Britain in particular. In 1898 Imperial Germany set out to construct a High Seas Fleet capable of vying with the Royal Navy in the North Sea. Big-gun German steamships posed a direct menace to the British Isles, prompting London to summon home Royal Navy squadrons from the Americas and the Far East to meet that menace. German battleships siphoned British attention and energy from imperial pursuits—and made things easier for challengers to British rule of the waves in the Americas and Asia.
Germany’s seaward turn thus constituted America’s opportunity. It’s worth noting that the United States won the bloodless Anglo-American struggle—not just without taking up arms, but without overtaking the British Empire by most indices of national strength. It didn’t need to. American policymakers and strategists were content to command the approaches to the Central American isthmus, where an interoceanic canal would be dug. Engineering efforts had achieved only fitful progress since midcentury. In 1902, however, American diplomats concluded a treaty empowering Washington to dig and fortify a canal. That riveted attention on the isthmus and adjoining seas.
The artificial waterway would need protection. Accordingly, U.S. maritime thinkers fashioned a strategy designed to make the U.S. Navy supreme in the Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico, where the sea lanes connecting the Atlantic Ocean with the canal—and thence with the Pacific Ocean and Asia—would pass. This was “ America’s Mediterranean ,” and it would soon take rank alongside the Mediterranean Sea among the world’s great nautical thoroughfares. Managing events in this middle sea transfixed sea-power strategist extraordinaire Alfred Thayer Mahan, along with likeminded naval enthusiasts such as Theodore Roosevelt, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, and William Howard Taft.
Southern waters constituted the focal zone for U.S. maritime strategy, but defending them didn’t demand an open-ended, ship-for-ship arms race against Britain or any other European rival. Mahan hewed out a yardstick for measuring whether the U.S. Navy was up to the task of managing affairs in the Caribbean and Gulf. Namely, was the American navy stronger than the fraction of a hostile navy that some European government was likely to commit to action there? If properly sized and configured,maintained Mahan , the U.S. Navy could take to the sea and “fight, with reasonable chances of success, the largest force likely to be brought against” it. The fleet sufficed if it met that modest standard.
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