The Art of Peace: Engaging in a Complex World.

AuthorBlau, Thomas
PositionBook review

The Art of Peace: Engaging in a Complex World

Juliana Geran Pilon

New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 2016, 383 pp.

Juliana Geran Pilon's The Art of Peace asks a question of first-rate importance: Why does our country do so badly peacefully protecting its interests? We outspend and outfight our enemies, winning battles--but not the peace. Now, the new challenges such as accelerating nuclear proliferation, Russian hybrid warfare, cyberwar, Chinese aggrandizement, political terrorism, and criminal networks require disenthralling ourselves from the intellectual and emotional pathology Pilon calls "Strategic Deficit Syndrome"--that is, a lack of grand strategy, a failure to synchronize all the elements of statecraft, not just the military, and to study ourselves and the world. This is not a fringe view. She quotes no less an establishment figure than Ambassador Robert D. Blackwill, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, on the so-called National Security Strategy as a "wish list disassociated" from both the world and U.S. objectives. And that is our problem.

Her interest is in minimizing the resort to violence everywhere by understanding war and peace in the manner of the Chinese sage Sun Tzu, as elements of life. Each contains the seeds of the other. We will do better to manage them, rather than to pursue total "solutions" that end in disaster, like President Woodrow Wilson and the war to end all wars. She calls for a comprehensive approach to war and peace that has an enhanced role for civilian talents and agencies, at least so that the military may focus on its own areas of expertise. Perhaps most of all, she finds in Sun Tzu a logic both humane and effective: the acme of military skill is to subdue the enemy without firing a shot. Get inside the enemy's head to disrupt his plans, rather than seek cataclysmic battle. Use peacetime to pursue national objectives and thereby make war less likely.

She ranges easily between military theory, international relations, our recent wars, the role of the Constitution, the strategic thought of the American Founders, public opinion, and relations between voters and their leaders. She has studied the relevant government literature, such as reports and strategy statements, carefully--no small job, since many of them are pretty low on signal and pretty high on noise. She delivers her message fluently, with an occasional flash of humor--and exasperation--driven by her ultimate focus on the real world...

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