SMALL WARS JOURNAL
smallwarsjournal.com
Peaceful Rise through Unrestricted Warfare:
Grand Strategy with Chinese Characteristics
Tony Corn
Fighting power is but one of the instruments of grand strategy – which should take
account of and apply the power of financial pressure, of diplomatic pressure, of
commercial pressure, and not least of ethical pressure, to weaken the opponents’ will…
Unlike strategy, the realm of grand strategy is for the most part terra incognita – still
awaiting exploration, and understanding.
--B.H. Liddell Hart, Strategy (1954)
As countless observers have pointed out, the American-Chinese rivalry in the early 21
st
century
bears more than a passing resemblance to the Anglo-German antagonism that led to World War
I. In these conditions, it is not surprising if a consensus has emerged, among International
Relations (IR) academics, around the proposition that the U.S.-China relation is bound to be the
most important bilateral relation in the coming decades.
Yet, the degree of certainty regarding the salience of this bilateral relation is only matched by the
degree of uncertainty surrounding its dynamics and its eventual outcome. When it comes to
answering the question “Is a conflict inevitable?,” all three IR schools (realism, liberalism,
constructivism) hedge their bets by offering both a pessimistic and an optimistic variant – a tacit
admission that, on the most burning issue of the day, the predictive value of IR theory is close to
nil. (1)
For the outside observer, the most disconcerting aspect of this academic debate is that optimists
and pessimists alike share the same unexamined notions of conflict and war, as if “conflict” was
a self-explanatory concept, “war” was a trans-historical category. In particular, both proponents
and critics of Power Transition Theory (PTT) – the most popular theory about China in academe
today - keep arguing about the factors conducive to the initiation, timing, severity, and
consequences of “major wars” without giving much thought to either the singularity of Chinese
strategic culture or, a fortiori, to three global developments of the past fifty years: the waning of
“major wars,” the declining “fungibility” of military force as such and, last but not least, the
transformation of “war” itself. (2)
In the military world, by contrast, the defining feature of the present era is precisely the
impossibility of coming up with “a coherent concept of war to animate and focus our military
efforts” (LTG David Barno, Ret.). Since 9/11, the strategic debate in America has been marked
