-Edited & Reviewed by Declan Browne & Samuel Lee
Sun Tzu’s paradox that ‘preserving the enemy's state is best,’ initially seems far removed from US military strategy often characterised as domineering and interventionist. However, analysis of US campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan show that preservation of the enemy state was a key strategic objective of US strategy that Clausewitz could not explain. Using Echevarria’s characterisation of American strategic culture in parallel with Coker’s application of Sun Tzu to US wars in the Middle East, this essay finds that Sun provides valuable insight into how contemporary American strategists perceive risk. This has led American warfare to exhibit characteristics that align with his philosophies on paradoxes in war and an aversion to escalation.
Addressing China as a second great power, the influence of Sun Tzu over Chinese military strategy is investigated through ideology found within the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) essays on strategy. To broaden their utility, the ideological PLA documents are further contextualised through analysis of Chinese strategy in the South China Sea (SCS). Putting theoretical and realpolitik elements side-by-side, one finds that China’s expansive and formless territorial strategy represents a seemingly perfect application of Sun’s work as a theory on total control (Yuen,2008). Ultimately, this essay concludes that Sun Tzu’s insights hold immense value due to how his writing on paradoxes and control accurately maps onto the contemporary military strategy of the US and China.
Defining modern US risk perception as rooted in resource and security concerns, this essay finds that Sun Tzu’s paradoxical strategies for war provide better insights than traditional Western theory on why the US has sought to preserve enemy states and pulled out of conflict despite having the material capacity to trigger and win Clausewitzian total war (Strachan, 2007). To create clear parameters on the conflicts relevant to this essay, we define the ‘contemporary’ as any conflict after the Cold War era (1991-2024+).
The Middle East (ME) has become the geographical focus of US wars in the 21st century but despite the US’s unparalleled material power, Washington has not deployed its military arsenal to permanently disarm enemies or decimate their ability to resist. Considering that US objectives in Iraq and Syria were to depose existing leadership, Clausewitzian theory would support the use of maximum material force to achieve political ends that implied dismantling an enemy state (Allen, 2015). However, Yom can be used to find a nuanced explanation for why US objectives of regime change were not synonymous with Clausewitzian dismantling of the enemy state. Yom argues that, since the 2000s, the US began a gradual disengagement from the region because it no longer identified the ME as a source of ‘credible security threats’ to the US or its economic interests. Regional US intervention became increasingly risk averse once threats to national security; Al-Qaeda and its sponsor Saddam Hussein, and the US economy; oil insecurity, were eliminated. A US desire to disengage from a region following a long period of war can be understood through the simple Sun Tzu conclusion that 'no country has benefited from protracted warfare (Coker, 2003).
Critical theories place emphasis on the mutually destructive nature of war and Sun’s work derives the same conclusion from the Taoist understanding of harmony as the natural state of order. War is a disturbance to harmony and, thus, both sides will suffer greatly from the lack of harmony during war (Ibid). Sun’s inherent aversion to war is not universally applicable to US military strategy but it could explain the limitations the US places on itself when waging war. Likening a Taoist harmony to optimal conditions for a democratic US state, wherein the government enjoys electoral support for its foreign and domestic policies, the decline of approval ratings in correlation with the length of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars disrupted ‘US harmony.’ Echevarria explains that the US strategic culture exhibits casualty aversion in ‘wars of choice’ because the public cannot accept US casualties in conflicts that are not seen to directly threaten the home population’s safety. Considering that Afghanistan and Iraq, post Saddam Hussein, fall under the classification of wars of choice, casualty aversion can be used to further frame what the state of harmony may look like for American military strategists. As the wars in the Middle East dragged on with little success eliminating militarised enemy groups, the deaths of US troops increasingly damaged the credentials of Washington. Establishing that the Iraq and Afghanistan wars disrupted the electorate-government harmony essential to a functioning democracy, Sun’s criticism of protracted warfare becomes a lens through which to understand contemporary US military strategy.
Placed in the context of Yom’s work on US risk perception, Sun Tzu’s paradox of preserving the enemy state being the best strategy helps one understand the US strategy of allowing the Iraqi government to rearm and withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The potential for third parties to escalate a state of war once a power vacuum was formed was a concern of Sun Tzu explored by Coker in relevance to US strategy in Iraq. In this case, Sun Tzu employed a paradox of preserving the existing enemy to avoid being faced with a new and unknown replacement (Allen, 2015). US support for rearmament of the Iraqi government (2008) allowed Iraqi state forces to suppress a plethora of armed opposition. At its core, US actions to balance internal Iraqi power dynamics display a consciousness in US strategy to avoid conflict escalation by preserving Iraqi leadership. Likewise in Afghanistan, preservation of the Taliban state, following US withdrawal, cemented Afghanistan’s isolation and weakness as a nation state. Financially deprived from a decade of US programmes targeting terrorist money laundering chains, materially impoverished from waging a war of attrition and isolated following the War on Terror’s destruction of hundreds of global terrorist cells, the US could be sure that the Taliban would not be able to launch a successful attack on US soil (Cooker, 2003). Furthermore, the burden of trying to function as a cohesive governing body, after existing for decades as tribal guerilla fighters would only further play on the paradox that a preserved Taliban state is an inherently weak and fractured one. With US objectives of neutralising the Taliban’s threat to national security achieved, Sun Tzu’s theories on paradox placed alongside Yom’s characterisation of US threat perception help one understand contemporary military strategy in the Middle East.
As a preeminent Chinese military strategist, it is assumed that Sun Tzu must hold the key to decoding contemporary Chinese military strategy. Despite decades of erasure of classical Chinese philosophy by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Thomas and Ghiselli both corroborate the importance of Sun Tzu to contemporary Chinese military strategy as they assess how his teachings underpin the theoretical foundations of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) generals who authored essential reading material for military cadre. Ghiselli and Thomas spotlight the academic study of Sun Tzu within the PLA and wider CCP to prove that Chinese military strategists seek to gain wisdom directly from historical texts. However, it is their specificity on how Sun Tzu informs the employment of deception and the hard limitations of international organisations that allows one to conclude that Chinese military strategy fully embodies Sun Tzu’s formlessness as a means of maintaining initiative over developing conflicts.
Indicative of Sun Tzu’s value in helping one understand Chinese strategy is The Science of Military Strategy’s prioritisation of deception as an essential tactic to guide the opponent into unfavourable actions without direct confrontation (Thomas, 2007). Peng and Yao, prominent editors of The Science of Military Strategy, allude to the importance of deception when noting that strategy should…
‘Defend the state by orthodox methods and […] use force by unorthodox methods’
…(Ibid).
Deception is an essential facet of Sun Tzu’s work because it is ingrained in his process for how to maximise control or ‘knowledge’ over the unpredictable elements of war (Yuen, 2008). Unlike Clausewitz, Sun does not support the trinitarian view that chance is a totally independent variable in war. Sun theorises that knowledge and its manipulation allow an actor to perfect their strategy by dictating the realities perceived by their enemy and resultantly accurately predict how their enemy may act (Allen, 2015). In contrast, Clausewitz accepted unpredictability as an unalterable risk to successful strategy, proposing that only confidence could overcome the psychological fear that chance created in strategists (Strachan, 2007). In this way, deception premised on the control of knowledge becomes a key element of Chinese military strategy that can be explained through insights unique to Sun Tzu.
Building on themes of maximising control over chance elements of war, Ghiselli implies a wider Chinese adherence to formlessness when stating that Chinese strategy is suspicious of international treaties and organisations. Sun Tzu’s theory of formlessness as the optimal strategy for a state is well placed to explain this aspect of CCP strategy. Formlessness is defined by a state's ability to respond to its external environment with maximum strategic flexibility (Yuen, 2008). International organisations and treaties inherently employ binding conditions as a means of maintaining accountability and adherence, making them antithetical to formlessness. Therefore, Chinese rejection of United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) rulings, despite being subject to it, is explicable through Sun Tzu. Applying Ghiselli and Yuen to Chinese military strategy in the SCS, it could be argued that formlessness is the strategy underpinning the diversity of tactics used by China to expand territorially. Formlessness is crucial because it subverts predictability, ensuring that the enemy cannot form a strong basis for knowledge if they are unable to see patterns in your strategy (Yuen, 2008). In the SCS, China has exhibited unpredictability by using a specific tactic to probe for the red line of other states and switching tactics when faced with minimal pushback. This is most evident in patterns of Sino-Philippine conflict. Following the 2016 ruling, submitted by the Philippines, against Chinese claims in the SCS, China ceased island building and the nine-dash line temporarily disappeared from state media. However, once the Philippines failed to use the ruling to support material claims, China adopted new aggressive tactics: coast guard patrols, damaging vessels, arresting of Philippine fisherman, orchestrating collisions and using primitive weapons (AMTI, 2024). Nonetheless, after President Marcos proclaimed that the death of a Philippine national would signal war for the two states, Beijing organised a diplomatic meeting premised on advancing peace in the SCS (Hille et al, 2024). China’s pivot to peace-making further roots CCP strategy in Sun’s philosophy by assuming pre-emptive control of a conflict by ‘attacking the …[Philippine]… plans’ to escalate and ‘subjugating …[them]… without fighting’ (Yuen, 2008). The unpredictable employment of aggression and peaceful diplomacy by China in the SCS only further proves how Sun Tzu’s insights can support one’s understanding of contemporary military strategy. Moreover, Marcos’ admission that only the death of a national would warrant war highlights that China achieved the ultimate success for Sun: total control over the conditions of war and perfect knowledge on how to avoid it. Yuen’s assertion that Sun’s Art of War is essentially a theory of control strengthens Sun’s credentials as the key to understanding Chinese military strategy that has managed to avoid all wars in the contemporary era yet achieved all desired territorial conquest. For Sun, the winning of a war begins before the war occurs and Chinese expansion in the SCS can be understood through this.
In conclusion, Sun Tzu’s insights offer a compelling lens for understanding the military strategies of both the US and China in contemporary conflicts. American strategies seeking to preserve the enemy states align with Sun’s aversion to prolonged conflict. Through this lens, we can interpret US withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan as strategic choices that prioritised stability over exhaustive military dominance, aligning with Sun’s notions on the mutually debilitating effects of war. Similarly, Sun’s concept of formlessness is highly applicable to China's expansion in the South China Sea, where unpredictability, deception, and avoidance of formalised constraints reflect a preference for maximum strategic flexibility. Ultimately, Sun Tzu's philosophies on control, paradox, and the avoidance of escalation provide valuable insights insufficiently explained by western theorists into how both powers manage risk and seek strategic advantage.
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