A Lesson of War

There is a good piece in the Wall Street Journal Opinion section today, quoting University of Pennsylvania professor Arthur Waldron.  It is interesting because the root of the story is not quite what the quote seems to convey.  The quote is:  “Compromise” is a scarce concept in Chinese theories of conflict. Rather the phrase they use is ni si wo huo—“you die, I live.” That is not “win-win.” . . .

It is what I have been saying about China for many years now.  They pretend to be cooperating with the rest of the world, but their main course of action is to look out for their own interests, very diverse and complicated as they are.  The South China Sea comes to mind.  They have managed to militarize the area without admitting to it, change the mind of their protagonist the Philippines, and lay claim to territory that any number of other countries claim as their own.  They live;  those other claims die.  Just in case the little dictator in the Philippines has not noticed, his interests are their interests as long as he does what they want - no more or less.

As to the United States, those lessons will be lost after the next election and we will reengage, almost as if the whole thing just started on January 20th with the swearing in of a new administration.  This is supposed to be why we have career government employees - to span the comings and goings of politicians and still do the job.  As we have been finding out, too many of those people are becoming politically aligned, and more than just the rising number of political appointees allowed to any new administration.  That class used to be our continuity of government, but it is largely gone now.  We should think more about making some agencies like the Department of Justice exempt from appointing anyone who might not place the administration of justice above politics.  Republicans and Democrats both decry the situation we have, but neither of them wants any part of changing it.

The lesson of war is that political systems like ours are not well suited to defeating the Chinese who are centrally managed and ruthlessly consistent in their application of their world view.