"For Our Enemies, We Have Shotguns": Explaining China's New Assertiveness

The following article - coauthored with Andrew Small - originally appeared in War on the Rocks on July 20, 2020. An excerpt is included below and the full text can be accessed here. 

China’s ambassador to Sweden, Gui Congyou, has a colorful turn of phrase to describe his country’s approach to foreign policy: “We treat our friends with fine wine, but for our enemies we have shotguns.” The “enemies” he has attacked in the last two years encompass a bewilderingly expansive range of media and political targets, one of the contributory factors behind China’s rapidly deteriorating reputation in Sweden, alongside the Chinese government’s unwillingness to release a Swedish bookseller that it kidnapped. His belligerent behavior has been the subject of some bemusement in Stockholm: Why would Beijing choose so comprehensively to alienate a country that should, given its free-trading tradition, leading technology sector, and unusually successful investment ties with China, be one of its closest European partners?

In recent months, it has seemed like much of the world has been subjected to the same treatment, eliciting similar questions about why Beijing should engage in such self-defeating behavior. By any measure, China’s recent foreign policy has displayed an astonishing level of assertiveness. That Beijing has shed its prior inhibitions in the midst of a devastating global health and economic crisis for which the Chinese leadership itself bears culpability, and a still-fragile economic situation in China itself makes it all the more remarkable.

For those who have observed this pattern of behavior, the reasons remain confounding. Four possible explanations suggest themselves, based on whether Beijing perceives this as a new era in its foreign policy or a temporary phase, and whether its actions are motivated by a sense of strength or vulnerability. Analyzing whether its new foreign policy reflects temporary opportunism, hubris, crisis management, or deeper insecurity is helpful in discerning whether Beijing will ultimately look to wind back its aggressive posture or if there is greater escalation to come. Yet in practice, the most effective policy responses will look very similar, regardless of China’s intentions. 

Read the full article.

Warfare in the Early Caliphate: Revisiting A.I. Akram's "The Sword of Allah"

The following article originally appeared on the War on the Rocks blog on September 11, 2014. An excerpt is reproduced below and the full text can be accessed here.

Over the past two decades, the West has paid an incredible amount of attention to Islamist violence, from grand theories of civilizational decline to a surfeit of more contemporary sociological and political studies. After a lull following the drawdown of U.S. and Western forces from Iraq and Afghanistan, the Arab Spring and the rise of new groups – notably the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria – have led to renewed interest in various subjects related to Islamist violence.

And yet, for all the analysis, the origins of Islamic warfare remain remarkably under-examined. Major Western histories of political Islam do cover such events as the Battle of Tours, the Crusades, and even the Sunni-Shi’a schism and the Battle of Karbala (680 CE). But they often gloss over much of the earlier period. In fact, reliable accounts in English of the early years of Islam’s rapid growth – the three decades during which the faith spread from a single town, Medina, to the rest of the Arabian Peninsula, the Levant, Egypt, Libya, Persia, Mesopotamia, and Central Asia – are few.

For those seeking a better understanding of Islamist warfare, this is unfortunate. The leaders and fighters of the Islamic State are unlikely to be swayed by historiographical arguments. But a glimpse into the military successes of the early caliphate suggests several differences between competing notions of Islam and warfare that have taken root across the Muslim world and in the West.

This is what makes Major General A.I. Akram’s book The Sword of Allah such a valuable resource for its overarching military history of the very early Islamic period (circa 613-642 CE). In the late 1960s, Akram, a retired Pakistani military officer, was disappointed with the “void” in Islamic military history in the curriculum of the Staff College at Quetta, and took it upon himself to write a history of early Islamic military successes. He chose as his vehicle the person of Khalid bin al-Waleed (known as “the Sword of Allah”) because he was perhaps the most outstanding general among the first generation of Mohammed’s followers.

Akram’s book is available in only a handful of U.S. university libraries and it has not been reviewed in a U.S. publication since the 1980s. But it has been used in military academies in his native Pakistan and by other armed forces in the Islamic world. To some degree, its scarcity is not unwarranted, for Akram was certainly no professional historian. He was unabashed about presenting a viewpoint that was sympathetic and even generous to his Islamic protagonists. And by his own admission in the introduction, he ignored many early Western sources, particularly Byzantine historians writing in Greek, a language he did not read.

Nonetheless, Akram rendered two incredibly valuable services. Firstly, he mined the early Arabic literature from the seventh to the tenth centuries, evaluated these texts critically when there were discrepancies, and rendered an accessible and engaging narrative. Secondly, he actually took the trouble to travel to most of the major battle sites – Uhud, Aleppo, Yarmouk, Busra, Kazima – logging 4000 miles by road in a matter of weeks in 1968 and 1969, from Kuwait and Syria, to Lebanon, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. He used his first-hand knowledge of the geography of the battlegrounds to critically examine some of the early accounts. As with most ancient and medieval historical texts, many of the early Muslim chronicles were written at some temporal and geographical distance from the events they described, and were thus inaccurate, misleading, or contradictory, particularly on matters of geography.