Content area
Full Text
The art of peace: engaging a complex world Juliana GERan Pilon New YoRk: RoutİEdgE, 2016 PapERback, 414 pagEs, $44.95
The sheer rise in unconventional threats to national security has confirmed the need for a balance of military and other unconventional tools of statecraft to counter such threats; yet, only a few existing texts on American foreign commitments in a complex world border to accentuate this. Juliana Pilon's The Art of Peace: Engaging a Complex World, from the perspective of an erudite scholar-practitioner, fills this irenology gap. Pilon demonstrates that to win and maintain its peace doctrine in a complex world, the United States "can no longer afford to sit on the proverbial three-legged national security stool [military, diplomacy, development], where one leg [military] is a lot longer than either of the other two," virtually undermining the fourth leg [information]. Perhaps, none would have imagined back in 521bc, that several millennia later, Sun Tzu's The Art of War would become a beacon treatise for revealing the strategic deficit disorder affecting American foreign policy today, as Pilon did in The Art of Peace. Sun Tzu held that the acme of strategic leadership entailed endeavouring to suppress the enemy without firing a shot; a stratagem that America's founding fathers also comprehended and practiced with astounding victory. To accomplish this, the founders strove, as Sun Tzu counseled, to utilize all available instruments of national power in peacefare as much as in warfare. Pilon shows how US foreign policy has increasingly neglected the instruments of civilian power and become overly dependent on lethal solutions in The Art of Peace.
Deriving its title from Sun Tzu's The Art of War, Pilon's seventeenchapter book, an outcome of her dogged professional academic and field experience, is divided into four parts. The author starts by capturing the essence of developing peace pedagogy as with that of war, arguing as Sun Tzu did that, although opposites, war and peace are always dialectically complimentary. One reason the art of peace was relatively ignored in the past was that America assumed that once oppressive regimes were decimated, the people would speedily take to liberal democracy without questioning; but in the light of current complexities, the U.S. can no longer make such assumptions. "Why...