However, surveillance missions such as the Impeccable's send a message that the United States sees China as a likely enemy.

Such messages, if repeated often enough, can establish a dynamic that is difficult to reverse. It took almost half a century for just such a dynamic to bring war between the United States and Japan -- I think the first U.S. Navy "Plan Orange" for war with Japan dated to 1907 -- but eventually it did the trick.

The way the U.S. government and the political culture in Washington work, it would take courage for someone in the Office of the Secretary of Defense or the State Department or the White House to tell the U.S. Navy to swallow the tactical disadvantages and avoid missions we know will antagonize China.

But that is what sound strategy requires. Anything else elevates tactics over strategy, an elementary blunder that almost always brings unfortunate results.

The same critique applies to the Chinese. Tactically, it is understandable that the Chinese navy wants to give its submarines every possible advantage. Protecting its boomers is important strategically as well as tactically. While China has more submarines than the United States, its fleet is far inferior qualitatively, in personnel as well as hardware. In any naval confrontation with the United States, China is very much the underdog. She needs every advantage she can get.

But the wise and prudent strategy of China's leaders, ever since the end of the disastrous reign of Chairman Mao Zedong, has been to avoid military conflicts while building up China's economy. The Chinese leadership has understood that economic power must precede military power if the latter is not to be shallow and brittle.

China needs at least 20 to 30 more years of peace and rising prosperity before she dare think about war. From this perspective, the harassment of Impeccable was putting tactics ahead of strategy, the same error the United States made by sending the ship on her mission. No less than the United States, China must avoid establishing a dynamic of conflict between the two powers.

Here again, we come to the central requirement dictated by the rise of fourth-generation war. States should avoid conflicts with other states because the winner will most likely be the non-state forces of the fourth generation. Rather, states should seek an alliance of all states against non-state elements.

The fact that this most basic of all strategic requirements is understood neither in Washington by the leaders of the United States nor in Beijing by the leaders of China may not surprise us, but it should trouble everyone who dares hope the 21st century will not see the end of the state system and its replacement by a world of bottomless chaos.

(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)

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