I say that they have limited goals, however, China does have a very expansionist economic policy via its Belt and Road initiative.


Do Russia Or China Have ‘Limited’ Or ‘Unlimited’ Political Goals?

Riddle me this: does a contender intent on overthrowing the international system harbor “limited” or “unlimited” political goals?

This may sound like an idle exercise in academic hairsplitting. Far from it. In fact, the answer could clarify the stakes in embattled zones like the Black Sea or the South China Sea and suggest how the United States and fellow guardians of the system—a system founded on and inextricable from freedom of the sea—ought to frame policy, strategy, and operations.


The intuitive answer is that Russia and China are pursuing limited aims around their peripheries. They snatch-and-grab bits of territory when opportunity beckons—sometimes uninhabited shoals or atolls in the case of China—or assert outsized claims to sovereignty. They do not attempt large-scale conquest. This is an unduly comforting view. Aggressors want big things even though they’re content to fulfill their goals by increments.


To get some purchase on this question let’s turn to Prussian soldier-philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, who furnishes a classic definition of limited and unlimited aims in warfare. War, he says, “can be of two kinds.” Either “the objective is to overthrow the enemy—to render him politically helpless or militarily impotent, thus forcing him to sign whatever peace we please.” That’s the unlimited variant. Smashing hostile armed forces, dictating expansive terms, ousting a hostile government—these are quintessential unlimited objectives.


Unlimited campaigns yield what Clausewitz terms “total victory.” One combatant casts down another, puts its boot on the neck of the defeated, and does what it pleases with its victory.


Or, observes the martial sage, a combatant might merely wrest away some of the foe’s “frontier-districts” in order to “annex them or use them for bargaining” when trying to put a satisfactory end to the fighting. Turf is valuable in its own right. And if the leadership has reason to believe the enemy fears a “brutal decision,” then “the seizure of a lightly held or undefended province is an advantage in itself; and should this advantage be enough to make the enemy fear for the final outcome, it can be considered as a short cut on the road to peace.” In that case occupying ground is a negotiating lever.


Campaigns for limited aims, in other words, generally stop short of crushing enemy forces wholesale and leave the enemy regime more or less intact.



Neither Russia nor China seems to entertain unlimited aims toward its neighbors.
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