You must never forget that the unification of Germany is more important than the development of the European Union, that the fall of the Soviet Union is more important than the unification of Germany, and that the rise of India and China is more important than the fall of the Soviet Union.
Asia’s International Order and China Of all conceptions of world order in Asia, China operated the longest lasting, the most clearly defined, and the one furthest from Westphalian ideas. China has also taken the most complex journey, from ancient civilization through classical empire, to Communist revolution, to modern great-power status – a course which will have a profound impact on mankind.
The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.
Since no grand resolution was available, the Gong memorial established a priority among the dangers, in effect based on the principle of defeating the near barbarians with the assistance of the far barbarians. It was a classical Chinese strategy that would be revisited roughly a hundred years later by Mao.
Whenever peace – conceived as the avoidance of war – has been the primary objective of a power or a group of powers, the international system has been at the mercy of the most ruthless member of the international community. Whenever the international order has acknowledged that certain principles could not be compromised even for the sake of peace, stability based on an equilibrium of forces was at least conceivable.
Presidential campaigns are on the verge of turning into media contests between master operators of the Internet. What once had been substantive debates about the content of governance will reduce candidates to being spokesmen for a marketing effort pursued by methods whose intrusiveness would have been considered only a generation ago the stuff of science fiction. The.
At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, ‘... what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?’ he replied: ‘what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be’.
Any system of world order, to be sustainable, must be accepted as just – not only by leaders, but also by citizens. It must reflect two truths: order without freedom, even if sustained by momentary exaltation, eventually creates its own counterpoise; yet freedom cannot be secured or sustained without a framework of order to keep the peace. Order and freedom, sometimes described as opposite poles on the spectrum of experience, should instead be understood as interdependent.
If the Emperor strayed from the path of virtue, All Under Heaven would fall into chaos. Even natural catastrophes might signify that disharmony had beset the universe. The existing dynasty would be seen to have lost the “Mandate of Heaven” by which it possessed the right to govern: rebellions would break out, and a new dynasty would restore the Great Harmony of the universe.19.
Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, told Ambassador Robert Murphy, a Dulles emissary, that, if Great Britain did not confront Nasser now, “Britain would become another Netherlands.
Hence the task of a strategist is less to analyze a particular situation than to determine its relationship to the context in which it occurs. No particular constellation is ever static; any pattern is temporary and in essence evolving. The strategist must capture the direction of that evolution and make it serve his ends. Sun Tzu uses the word “shi” for that quality, a concept with no direct Western counterpart.
It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.
In our period, new technology has been developed, but remains in need of a guiding philosophy.
What is new about the emerging world order is that, for the first time, the United States can neither withdraw from the world nor dominate it.
Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans. But in our time, one of AI’s challenges is that the skills and resources required to create it are not inevitably paired with the philosophical perspective to understand its broader implications.
Moreover, events often move too quickly to allow for precise calculation; leaders have to make judgments based on intuitions and hypotheses that cannot be proven at the time of decision. Management of risk is as critical to the leader as analytical skill.
The penalty for excessive ambition – what the Greeks called hubris – is exhaustion, while the price for resting on one’s laurels is progressive insignificance and eventual decay.
Statesmen are not called upon only to settle easy questions. These often settle themselves. It is where the balance quivers, and the proportions are veiled in mist, that the opportunity for world-saving decisions presents itself.
The scientist thus learns truth experimentally or mathematically; the strategist reasons at least partly by analogy with the past – first establishing which events are comparable and which prior conclusions remain relevant.
The irony is that even as digitization is making an increasing amount of information available, it is diminishing the space required for deep, concentrated thought.