Rapid Communications in Conflict and Security Series. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2016. xvii, 304 pp. (Figures.) US$29.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-60497-920-6.
This book offers an unconventional approach to an age-old question: how to formulate and execute strategies in pursuit of security and in defense against threats. Traditional ways of thinking about strategies are more about how statesmen and military planners can best mobilize and apply resources at their disposal to achieve a particular objective. Left underappreciated and much less answered is how effective strategies with combined effects are needed and can be developed in confronting and defeating today’s complex threats.
The author argues that an effective strategy must take account of the diverse understanding of security and develop a comparative approach to addressing the fundamental questions of confrontation and cooperation, threats, and effectiveness. Specifically, each of these questions requires a strategy with a spectrum of instruments of power that can be applied to deliver combined effects both psychologically and physically. In essence, that author suggests that carefully designed strategies with appropriately chosen tools can have the combined effects to “prevent or cause certain behaviors and attitudes” (11) and “influence will and capability” (11).
Security culture features prominently in this innovative approach to understanding why strategies succeed or fail, and how national interests, objectives, and tools are perceived, defined, and selected. The rationale for developing an analytical framework derives from the author’s dissatisfaction with the American exceptionalism and US military culture of technology-determinist, one-dimensional, lineal, and single-effect approach to problem-solving and warfighting. The failure to appreciate and grasp the complexity of many of the security challenges that policymakers and military strategists face therefore has serious consequences.
To illustrate his points, the author selects China, Korea, and Japan as his case studies. Each case contains one chapter that summarizes and reviews the dominant security culture, followed by another chapter focusing on a particular set of crises or challenges to demonstrate how security culture affects threat perceptions, informs the selection of strategies, and influences their execution for combined effects.
The Chinese security culture draws from its historical legacy and cultural superiority, its sense of centrality in the East Asian international system, and as reflected in the tributary system, and a fixation on territorial integrity predominantly informed through its “hundred years of humiliation” at the hands of foreign powers. The use of force has not always been considered the strategy of first choice; instead, defeating the enemy without fighting demonstrates supremacy in military leadership. A combination of deterrence, coercion, and compellence on the one hand, and persuasion, inducement, and assurance on the other ensures the maximum effects in affecting the enemy’s will and behaviour. The strategies used by both Beijing and Taipei in cross-Strait relations—characterized as the unsettled sovereignty—reveals how the two governments use a combination of confrontation, assurance, and even cooperation to achieve their respective objectives: eventual unification for China and de facto independence or at the minimum, status quo for Taiwan.
The Korean security culture has been informed by a history of subjugation to great power dominance and therefore a strong will to maintain independence and ensure survival in often inhospitable security environments. At times, pragmatism necessitates appeasing one great power in order to fend against another. The ability to properly manage major power relationships has been a critical element in ensuring the Korean nation’s maintenance of either the semblance of or real independence. This is how Korea has dealt with its more powerful and often aggressive neighbours—China, Japan, and Russia. North Korea’s combination of the juche principle, military-first policy, and the pursuit of a nuclear weapons program over the past two decades is a clear demonstration of how Korean security culture informs a strategy of confrontation and cooperation to ensure regime survival, bargaining for economic benefits, and deterrence of any threats to the DPRK with the retention and development of nuclear weapons.
Japanese security culture reveals the ambivalence of a past record of militarism and aggressiveness and post-war pacifism, a combination of isolation and engagement with the outside world, reflected in a strategy
of reactiveness even though at times this actually translated into very proactive, and indeed aggressive, behaviors. The chapter on the Sino-Japanese dispute over the Senkaku/Diaoyu islets reveals how Tokyo applies a combination of diplomatic, economic, and defensive measures to protect its sovereignty claims, driven primarily by its energy security concerns. While refraining from turning the dispute into a military confrontation with China, Japan nonetheless seeks to engage US commitments through the US-Japan security pact.
Through these case studies, the author seeks to demonstrate the critical role security culture can play in the selection of strategies whose synergetic application may result in combined effects on intended objectives. This is certainly refreshing as it draws our attention to important elements heretofore either understudied or largely ignored. It challenges traditional thinking on strategy and provides a unique way of thinking and applying it given the multitude of challenges today.
While the book makes an important contribution to the literature on strategy, the reader needs to be reminded that culture is not destiny. In fact, left unspoken, but implicit throughout the book, is the fact that hard power remains the bedrock and critical ingredient of any strategy, in addition to its application to deliver the optimal combined effects. For instance, it is not clear whether North Korea’s ability to achieve its goals has largely been due to its skilful application of strategy, or is in fact the result of discordance and the competing interests of its interlocutors, providing Pyongyang the opportunity to undermine the latter’s objective of persuading North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons program. This book is intended for an audience with the knowledge, expertise, and attention to navigate the labyrinth of strategic concepts and military terms. In other words, the book’s strength could well prevent it from reaching a larger readership.
Jingdong Yuan
The University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
pp. 541-543