ABSTRACT
Over twenty five hundred years ago, the Chinese scholar Sun Tzu, in The Art of War, proposed a codification of the general strategic character of armed conflict and, in the process, offered practical advice for securing military victory. His advice is credited, for example, with having greatly influenced Mao Zedong’s approach to conflict and the subtle tactics of revolution and the ways in which North Vietnam and the Viet Cong thwarted America’s military advantages. The formulation of general strategic principles-whether applied to war, parlor games such as Go, or politics-has long fascinated scholars. And regardless of context, the study of strategic principles is of interest because it grapples with fundamental facts of human existence-first, people’s fates are interdependent; second, this interdependence is characterized generally by conflicting goals; and, finally, as a consequence of the first two facts, conflicts such as war are not accidental but are the purposeful extension of a state’s or an individual’s motives and actions and must be studied in a rational way.
