Opinion | Do military leaders hold the keys to peace for China and the US?
- Tensions between the two powers have been rising, but the heads of the Pentagon and PLA are keen to ensure the conflict does not become militarised
- While both countries speak the language of righteousness and law, they are both sleepwalking towards an all-out confrontation
“War is nothing but a duel on an extensive scale … nothing more than the continuation of politics by other means,” the early-19th century Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once observed.
“For political aims are the end and war is the means, and the means can never be conceived without the end.” The ultimate aim of war, he wrote, was to “compel [an] opponent to fulfil our will”.
For the past decade, the United States and China have been duelling for supremacy on Asia’s high seas, brazenly dangling the threat of war in pursuit of ambitious political objectives.
More recently, in an unlikely turn of events, it has been the men in uniform, rather than the statesmen in suits and ties, who have become the greatest advocates for cautious vigilance and strategic moderation.
As strongmen populists dominate global politics, the key to preserving peace in Asia lies, quite paradoxically in the hands of sober and calculating military men. After all, it’s the generals, who are intimately familiar with the horrors of unmitigated military escalation between great powers.