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"The historic struggle between Rome and Carthage represents a classic strategic rivalry. A strategic rivalry is essentially a pattern of perception and behavior in which the participants see each other not just as threats capable of inflicting harm but as inveterate adversaries vying to displace each other.[1] The rivalry between Rome and Carthage played out over 118 years and three wars, the last of which left the Phoenician city-state in ruins.[2] Influential Roman politicians such as Marcus Porcius Cato (Cato the Elder) saw the struggle as a zero-sum game, while the Carthaginians mistakenly believed the rivalry had ended and they could co-exist with their Mediterranean counterparts.[3] That error proved tragic for Carthage. Currently, the United States and its partners face several inveterate foes, strategic rivals, and the West's leaders require a strategy for dealing with them. This article describes how a grand strategy of Outpacing—gaining and keeping a commanding lead over one's rivals—can help the Western powers confront their strategic rivals and avoid the Carthaginian error.
Strategic rivalry is a particular species of strategic competition in the same way nuclear arms are a specific species of weaponry: both involve extreme outcomes. The object of strategic rivalry is not just to pursue one's interests, as in day-to-day interstate competition, but to pursue a specific interest, namely, weakening one's rival in any way possible.[4] Rivals also tend to weaponize bargaining, if it occurs at all, not only to obtain the best deal for themselves but also to ensure the agreement diminishes their rivals in some way.
While some scholars consider strategic competition and war to be distinct activities, this view is untenable, especially for strategic rivals.[5] If war is merely the continuation of policy by other means and a state's policy is to engage in strategic competition, then it follows that war can be an instrument of that policy. Recent examples of war serving such policies include Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury, the joint US-Israeli operations aimed at eliminating Iran's nuclear program and reducing its military and economic power, its capacity to compete.[6] Moreover, rivals have a broad array of conflict tools at their disposal: conventional and unconventional, regular and irregular, gray zone and hybrid, covert and clandestine, as well as economic blockades and political isolation.[7] As the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz once wrote: "war is thus an act of force (Gewalt) to compel our opponent to do our will."[8] Nothing in his definition says force must satisfy the traditional notion of war in the sense of shots being fired and blood being spilled. In any case, force and violence are interchangeable terms in English dictionaries.
Furthermore, wars among rivals should not be seen as discrete events: they are serial in nature—interconnected and recidivistic—meaning each incidence of armed conflict between rivals makes another armed conflict more likely.[9] Historical data show rivalries have caused or been responsible for 80 percent of wars globally; simply put, when rivals go to war, "they tend to go to war with each other."[10] Historical data also reveal consequential patterns in rival perceptions and behavior. For instance, rivalries develop most frequently over (a) spatial motives, the desire to acquire territory; and (b) positional motives, the desire to establish hegemony or to enhance regional or global status.[11] Ideological incompatibilities constitute a distant third motive, as ideology often becomes intertwined with the desire to acquire territory or status; motives based on ethnic differences, political dissidence, the acquisition of…"
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Armand
worries about not losing his rules stuff.
