The Care Bear Theory of Strategy

Once upon a time, three things were widely accepted:

• Conflict between political communities was a common and normal feature of political life.
• This conflict involved the purposeful use of violence, i.e, killing people or threatening to kill people.
• This conflict involved hostile intentions, fears, concerns of honor, and desires.

Today, we instead have what I roughly dub the “care bear” theory of strategy.

• Cooperation between entities with opposed aims is the default assumption and the notion of conflict or adversarial interaction is de-emphasized.
• If violence is acknowledged at all, it is regarded as something that has to be controlled, minimized, or employed in some elaborate and enlightened manner.
• Not only are hostile intentions, fears, concerns of honor, or desires ignored, the only legitimate motivation for going to war must be altruistic in nature.

Unfortunately, the problem with the Care Bear Theory of Strategy is that it cannot acknowledge something unfortunately true about war. Saying, for example, that the objective of war can only be to create a better peace imposes a normative aim that not everyone shares. For example, is Putin’s intention in Ukraine to “create a better peace?” How could we make such an attribution? At the end of the day, the Care Bear Theory of Strategy also does two things that structurally distort analysis of conflict. First, it denies and de-legitimizes the very passions and emotions that drive human conflict. This confuses a helpful explanatory device (rationalism) with a normative philosophical one (liberal rationalism). Second, it forces politicians to shoehorn self-interested policy aims (we want to remove al-Qaeda’s sanctuary) into altruistic ones (we want to rebuild Afghanistan!).

But this is secondary to the biggest problem of the Care Bear Theory of Strategy. It treats human conflict as a kind of black box, where you take a given aim and then input any kind of instrumental approach into the box. The box then returns the desired outcome. Unfortunately, though war (compared to other competitive phenomena) is rare, it must be observed that when war occurs it is because two adversaries are willing to kill to achieve their desired aims. We can speculate into infinity about whether or not war is preventable, whether the adversaries can partition the expected gains a priori, whether incomplete information or perverse incentives lead to war, yadda yadda. The problem is simply that the Care Bear Theory envisions conflict as a tragic mistake rather than the outcome of purposeful, adversarial interaction.

Certainly the “tragic mistake” frame is preferred by liberal Westerners, with World War I as its exemplar. But to others, the only thing worse than war as a tragic mistake is the inability to resist humiliation and domination by others. Hence the ridiculousness of the “Thucydides Trap” in US-China discussions. It reflects a projection of the modern West’s origin myth — the fall from grace as war spirals out of control — onto a society that instead utilizes a quite different origin story. One of humiliation and oppression by Westerners and a violent struggle for unity and power.

Is war inevitable? Nope. But if we hope to prevent it, we should not mistake our own ideological biases for valid theories and knowledge about conflict and war.