The Use of Force as Strategic Failure
What classical Chinese thought teaches about reading a conflict that leaves no battlefield
11 pages · PDF · 29 June 2026 · Licensed single-user copy, watermarked to the buyer
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About this report
The West tends to measure power on the battlefield. War is the moment of truth, the clash that reveals who is stronger and consecrates that supremacy; and so, where there is no open war, we are inclined to read stability, or at most a rivalry that has not yet reached its breaking point.
It is a long-standing habit of mind, rooted in the European strategic tradition and in its greatest classic, Clausewitz, for whom the destruction of the enemy’s forces is the end toward which all military action tends. Yet there exists a strategic tradition — the classical Chinese one — that reverses this criterion entirely.
Key questions this report answers
- How does the report contrast the Clausewitzian focus on destroying enemy forces with the classical Chinese view that reverses this criterion?
- Why does the Western habit of reading stability where there is no open war misjudge the exercise of power?
- How does the classical Chinese strategic tradition treat the use of force as a strategic failure rather than a moment of truth?
- What are the practical implications of this reframing for interpreting rivalry that has not reached open conflict?
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