By Kerry Brown
Clausewitz’s writings on the sentimental dimensions of war help explain China’s recent moves in the South China Sea.
The nature of warfare has changed radically since the time almost two centuries ago when Carl von Clausewitz wrote On War, his great treatise on the subject. For him, the great exemplars of tactical genius were Napoleon and von Bulow; the horrors of absolute, mechanical war lay in the future. Even so, there is one great insight in von Clausewitz’s work which has resonance across the ages and transcends culture. “We are apt to regard the combat in theory as an abstract trial of strength, without any participation of the feelings,” he writes, “and that is one of the thousand errors which theorists commit.” Clausewitz acknowledges that “the heart and sentiments of a nation” are an enormous factor in the product of its political and military strength. Of all the noble feelings that fill in the human heart in the exciting tumult of battle, he writes, “none, we must admit, are so powerful and constant as the soul’s thirst for honor and renown.” War as a battle of feeling and moral sentiment rather than brute strength is his great message. And it helps us today when we look at different kinds of conflict across the world.
Anyone looking dispassionately at China’s pushback with Vietnam in the last month without Clausewitz’s insight might profess puzzlement. It seems illogical. Firstly, China has serious domestic security issues at the moment, with a number of very nasty attacks related to Xinjiang over the last few months. Secondly, China has a number of ongoing territorial spats, with those involving Japan and the Philippines being the most severe. Thirdly, relations even with the DPRK look bad, with rumors that the Chinese have been exerting pressure on the capricious young leader of their northeastern neighbor not to go ahead with another nuclear test. With all this negative activity happening inside and outside, why do more to alienate regional neighbours, and the international community, by encroaching symbolically onto contested territory and raising the hackles of a famously bellicose neighbor to such an extent that Chinese investments in Vietnam are attacked and people have to be repatriated? Far from promoting China’s self-interest, isn’t this damaging them?
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