A History of Strategy by Martin van Creveld Page A

by a humanitarian approach and have as their aim the restoration of
dao
.
    These underlying philosophical differences cause Clausewitz to recommend the use of maximum force, the Chinese of minimum force. In turn, the Chinese emphasis on minimum force leads to a greater emphasis on trickery of every sort than Clausewitz, with his realistic assessment of such factors as uncertainty and friction, regards as practicable. Had the two sides met, then Sun Tzu and Co. would undoubtedly have accused Clausewitz of overemphasizing brute strength, which in turn means encouraging stupidity and barbarism. Clausewitz on his part would have replied that the kind of super-sophisticated warfare advocated by them was intellectually attractive but, alas, often unrealistic and sometimes dangerous as excessive maneuvering provided the enemy with opportunities to “cut off one’s head.” None of this is to deny that, in practice, Western warfare often made use of stratagems whereas Chinese warfare could be quite as bloody and brutal as its Western counterpart. Indeed it could be more so, given that necessity has no limits and that questions regarding the law of war
a la
Bonet would have made the sages put on a contemptuous smile.
    These considerations explain why Clausewitz and the Chinese were able to transcend their own time and place. Still, inevitably, their reputations had their ups and downs. Outside China itself, where Sun Tzu and Confucius served as the basis for the state-run examination system, the Chinese writings were particularly popular during the eighteenth century craze for
chinoiserie
as well as after the Chinese Revolution in 1949. There are currently at least
five
different English translations of Sun Tzu on the market. As for Clausewitz, after being greatly venerated during the nineteenth century he was often regarded as “too philosophical” during the first half of the twentieth. His nadir probably came during the early years of the nuclear era when he was relegated to the sidelines, only to make an impressive comeback after 1973, when a new English translation appeared and the Arab-Israeli war encouraged people to think about large scale conventional warfare.
    More ups and downs are to be expected. One recent historian even speaks of the “Grand Old Tradition of Clausewitz-Bashing.” Yet is it likely that, when all the rest are forgotten, Sun Tzu and Clausewitz will still be read and studied by those who seek to achieve a serious theoretical understanding of war. Considering that even the “modern” Clausewitz is now almost two hundred years old, this constitutes high praise indeed.

5. The Nineteenth Century
    An aspect of Clausewitz’s thought not yet discussed in these pages, and which distinguishes it from virtually all his predecessors, is the way he approached history. As we saw, the Chinese classics were written between 400 and 200 BC. The background was a semi-mythological past regarded as superior to the present. With the exception of Vegetius, who resembles the Chinese in this respect, in the extant treatises written by ancient military theorists a sense of historical change is almost entirely lacking. The same is true of the Byzantine and medieval texts. Severely practical, the former are really little more than handbooks. They are interested solely in the present, and exclude any hint concerning the possibility that the past has been, or the future could be, different. The latter are usually aware of the glorious if idolatrous past. But somehow they manage to combine this awareness with a complete disregard for the immense differences that separated their own times from those of, say, Vegetius.
    The position of “modern” Western authors from Machiavelli on is more complicated. Regarding themselves as emerging from centuries of barbarism, the men of the fifteenth century were acutely aware of their own inferiority
vis à vis
the ancient world in every field, the military one included. Accordingly, for