I used to carry a pocket version of Sun Tzu’s Art of War with me everywhere. I’d open it at random places when I had a spare moment, and probably read it cover to cover ten to fifteen times.
It is considered a subtle insight that you can attack the will of your opponent. This is considered high level strategy. It was the essence of Ho Chi Minh’s carefully orchestrated sermons, consisting of lies about who he was, what his intentions were, and what the fate of the Vietnamese people would actually be if he and his seized the draconian control they so desperately longed for.
We LOST the Vietnam War when it was our to win. The Vietnamese did not win it, except to the extent their off-battlefield efforts softened up the will of the American people; and that of Communists generally softened up our minds.
Be that as it may, I would like to suggest the following continuum.
At bottom is physical conflict. The worst type of conflict is fixed positional warfare, perhaps best exemplified in prolonged seiges. Sun Tzu said he had seen poor commanders do things quickly, but never good ones slowly.
Next is logistical warfare, in which you try to deny your enemy what he needs physically to fight.
Next is diplomatic warfare, in which you try to prevent your enemy from strengthening himself through alliance. The Cold War was in large measure diplomatic warfare, which had to reduce to physical warfare at times so that the diplomats had credibility. You can hardly ask someone to ally themselves with you if you never come to the rescue of any of your current allies. They get all of the bad, and none of the good.
Next is psychological warfare. This is warfare by prevention. Deterrance through strength is psychological. People don’t even want to start with you. What the Vietnamese were able to do is convince the American people that a war they had already won was in fact lost, and that they were superhuman, never quit, and that we could only expect more death and destruction in what was after all just a civil war half a world away that had nothing to do with America or American interests.
One also reads at times of prolonged campaigns of strategic movement, in which two superior generals never see quite the right time to strike. I would argue this is psychological when it is strategic.
Finally, though, I would add two more levels, which are not discussed in texts on war. This is the point of this post.
The next level is eliminating the reasons the other person would have wanted to attack you in the first place. No more powerful tool for world peace has ever been invented than free trade and free market capitalism. We need to understand that European colonialism–and every form of imperialism going back to prehistory–had as its aim getting stuff through violence. You take over a country, enslave the workers, and suddenly you don’t have to pay for things. It seems like a good deal, until you get the bill for the “police”.
In Capitalism, everyone wins. You never sell a thing if it is not in your interest. Others do not have to compel you to hand it over (obviously this has been done, but that is not Capitalism) because you WANT to. You get something back. The system fosters innovation, economic growth, and rising middle classes.
Trade, then, is an extension of military strategy, and aims not at managing conflict, but at elevating it to a non-physical, and mutually beneficial sphere.
The final level is actively seeking peace through love. I have spoken often of love as an aggression, and this is what I mean. It is one thing for someone to not hate you, another to benefit economically from you, but another entirely for them to value you for who you are, and you them.
In the lowest levels, the world is filled with sharp knives, and slicing, hacking, and death. In the highest levels, it is filled with golden clouds, singing, and trust.
We are always moving. We cannot help this, and it only makes sense to choose our motion. Since you have to do something on this Earth, why not work to improve it? That is the role I envision for my conception of Goodness. It is aggressive. It is strategic. It is real, and I for one like it.
I will append that I talk about love sometimes, but do not want to leave the impression I am always a nice person. I’m a curmudgeonly misanthrope at times; a butthead in the vernacular. I get irritable, particularly with large burocracies and robots used to answer telephones.
Thus: please understand I have many miles to go myself, but I do have a direction, and hope I can influence you in a beneficial direction as well. Read what I have to say, think it over, and reinterpret it as you see fit. If you copy me you haven’t understood me at all. You can do better. I’m a jackass too. Let’s just be jackasses together.