One of the themes that runs through this book is that, every now and again, something is said about China that resonates with an audience and gains popularity through repetition. It crystallizes an emerging but often ill-defined viewpoint or sentiment to become the sort of ‘theme of the time’ discussed in Chapter 1. Joshua Ramo's identification of a ‘Beijing Consensus’ is an excellent example. First proposed in an op ed in the Financial Times in May 2004 (Ramo, 2004a) and subsequently elaborated in an expanded format for the Foreign Policy Centre in London (Ramo, 2004b), it captured a general feeling, refined it, gave it a hook, and fed it back to a largely receptive audience. Those who looked in detail at what Ramo described as the fundamental elements of the Beijing Consensus were largely unconvinced that it was an accurate reflection of how China's political economy actually worked (Kennedy, 2010). The model as described by Ramo looked more like the aspirations that China's leaders were espousing for what a future model might look like, rather than an accurate reflection of the nature of the political economy at the time. But in some respects, the actual content of the Beijing Consensus was irrelevant. The Beijing Consensus, and the notion of a ‘China Model’ that succeeded it, both summed up the growing feeling that China might have something that others could learn from to provide an alternative to neoliberal development prescriptions. Moreover, it spoke to more than one audience. Those who had been hoping for an alternative to neoliberalism welcomed it, while supporters of liberal projects – and not just neoliberal ones – were concerned by it. It even started a debate within China itself over whether there really was a replicable model or not.

A revived China threat

Another example is the emergence of the argument that China deliberately deploys a form of ‘debt-trap diplomacy’. After Sri Lanka ceded control and ownership of Hambantota Port to China in 2017 after being unable to pay back loans, Brahma Chellaney (2017) argued that this was the result of a deliberate Chinese state strategy. China, he argued, had deliberately made loans so easy to get, and on cheaper terms than those offered by more traditional funders, that a number of developing countries had been lured into overextending themselves.

Chapter 4 analyzes the ideas of Thomas Schelling, especially his bargaining model of war and his concept of strategic coercion. His "America" was also that of Brodie and Osgood. This chapter examines the limitations of both bargaining, which presupposed a shared process of arriving at tacit and explicit agreements, and coercion which assumed consent was a binary – yes, no – process. Both implied US commanders might need to exercise restraint in war just as they were gaining the upper hand, an idea most would have found ridiculous. Schelling’s model of war’s nature was also that of a coiled spring, though he introduced greater uncertainty into the model because tacit agreements can be broken without warning, or might never have existed in the first place.

War’s Logic provides a fresh perspective into twentieth-century American strategic thought. More to the point, it offers unique insights into how several of America’s prominent strategic theorists conceived of armed conflict. The title stands for a general way of thinking about war. It refers to the reasoning that underlies a theorist’s critical concepts, core principles, and basic assumptions regarding the nature and character of war. As Carl von Clausewitz observed, war’s logic is invariably political in nature. Similarly, readers of this book will note the American way of thinking about war was frequently political in nature. While War’s Logic covers ground similar to that of Russell Weigley’s classic, The American Way of War, it differs from his work in three important respects.

Chapter 2 analyzes the ideas of the airpower theorist William (Billy) Mitchell. It describes his life and his "America," which in the words of period novelist, F. Scott Fitzgerald, was "careless and confused." Mitchell, like his America, pursued his goals aggressively regardless of the consequences. This chapter also discusses how Jominian first principles – concentration, offensive action, and decision by battle – figured in Mitchell’s thinking. It ends by explaining how Mitchell’s model of war’s nature was essentially the same as Mahan’s, the traditional model.

Since at least the early 1990s, China's rise has been identified as ‘a defining element in post-Cold War international politics’ (Shambaugh, 1996, 180), and questions have been asked about what China's leaders might do to try to change the world once they had the power to do so. We are a now at a point when we no longer just need to use the future tense. To be sure, we can still speculate about the future. But we now also have real-world examples to analyse and evaluate. Identifying a defining moment when China made some sort of transition to global power status with the ability to push for change is not an exact science. The identification of China as a global power began to become relatively common in the mid-2000s, but really became a wellestablished ‘common sense’ position in the years following the global financial crisis. China might not have been seen as the predominant global power in all issue areas, but by as early as 2012, surveys showed that China was already popularly thought of as the world's leading economic power among respondents in North America and Europe (Pew Research Center, 2013). And all of this was just as Xi Jinping was taking power, and before he had begun to signal a new direction for China, with both the desire and ability to take a new global role.

While a few have gone to the next step and endowed China with superpower status, there is no need to see China in this way or as closely catching the US (though many do) for it to be thought of as a global power. And being a global power is certainly not the same thing as being the single global power or the predominant one. Nor does it mean that China's rise is over. It could continue to rise even further either as a result of what it does, or as relative power capabilities shift as others decline. Or it might suffer a decline or even a crash as a result of indigenous or endogenous shocks, or a reconfiguration of global power structures and alliances.

The primary aim of Chapter 1 was to understand how different ways of studying China lead to different conclusions and predictions. It would be rather disingenuous, though, to pretend that it was a totally neutral analysis, and this chapter starts from the assumption that a full and sophisticated understanding of China's rise ‘requires us to capture some of the key complex and simultaneous interactions between the global and domestic levels in the study of China's external relations’ (Foot, 2013: 1). In short, the argument here is that studying the domestic can tell us things that question a number of the assumptions of those studies that focus more on the international/global level.

This rather simple statement immediately generates two important responses. The first is that it is indeed rather simple. Students of Chinese domestic politics will certainly find it an unremarkable and underwhelming re-statement of the very obvious. However, the reason that it needs to be made is that what is obvious to one scholarly community is frequently absent in scholarship that emerges from other intellectual endeavours. As Hameiri and Lee (2015) have argued, much IR scholarship on China still starts from the assumption of a single Chinese national interest and sees Chinese action as the result of state control to attain state goals. Furthermore, as suggested in Chapter 1, the neglect of domestic diversity in generating transnational activity seems to be more pronounced in the study of China than it is with the study of other states. Here the nature of the Chinese political system makes it easier to assume a conformity of interest than, for example, in liberal democracies where ideational and policy competition is much easier to observe, and frequently leads to changes in ruling parties and policies.

The second is the use of the word ‘bounded’ to qualify both plurality and diversity. The aim of this chapter is to show that there is more to what Chinese want and do inside and outside China's borders than just the goals of the central leadership in Beijing.

Chapter 7 analyzes the ideas of Joseph Caldwell Wylie especially his theory of strategy as control. It describes his life as well as his practitioner perspective, which served to inform his theory of strategy and his idea that war is a discontinutation of policy as much as it is a continuation of it. This chapter also discusses his contribution to the traditional model of war’s nature, which he helped to enlarge.

Emphasizing the need to focus on how we study China might sound like an invitation to walk down an already well-trodden path. After all, IR debates on China's rise (and there are many of them) have devoted considerable time and space to discussions of the relative merits of realist assertions that China simply cannot rise peacefully (Mearscheimer, 2006; Allison, 2017), and liberal expectations that this rise can indeed be accommodated by the existing liberal global order (Ikenberry, 2008). Of course, dig a little deeper and it's not hard to find exceptions, as a range of different theoretical positions have been deployed to try and analyse and understand China, and predict what China's rise means for the future of the world. Nevertheless, if you step back and take a panoramic view of the writings on China's rise as a whole, then the continued dominance of these two major theoretical contenders is rather conspicuous.

There are good reasons for this. These two theoretical positions are not only the most often used in IR scholarship, but have also been the most influential in terms of debating policy options (particularly in the US). Even so, many have found their dominance rather unsatisfying. So unsatisfying, in fact, that some have questioned their efficacy for understanding China at all. Rather than truly being universal international theories, so the argument goes, they are instead culturally and historically specific with realism in particular – but not just realism – built on a study of a European history that has nothing to do with China's or Asia's experiences (Hui, 2004). As they are ‘inductively derived from the European experience of the past four centuries, during which Europe was the locus and generator of war, innovation, and wealth’ (Kang, 2003: 57), why should we expect them to have explanatory power when applied to a very different part of the world with very different experiences of statehood and conflict? Even IR theories that have been developed in opposition to the mainstream tend to do so by building on European history and overwhelmingly were developed by Western theorists (Acharya and Buzan, 2007).