Prior to his invasion of Russia, Napoleon reportedly said: “[M]y campaign plan is a battle, and all my politics is success.” However, following a Pyrrhic victory in Borodino, Napoleon found himself without a plan or success. Not anticipating Tsar Alexander I’s refusal to surrender and General Mikhail Kutuzov’s strategic withdraw from Moscow into the vast Eurasian steppe, the Grande Armée was left exposed and exhausted. With the weight of a Russian winter coming, Napoleon submitted to a confused retreat, ultimately leading to the Little Emperor’s defeat. According to historian John Lewis Gaddis, Napoleon had transgressed Carl von Clausewitz’s maxim on strategy, whereby war must be subordinate to policy. When leaders fall in love with war, making it an end unto itself, the “culminating points of their offensives are self-defeat.”
When examining the state of U.S. President Donald Trump’s self-described “trade war” against China, one cannot help but wonder whether the White House has a coherent strategy or whether the plan has been to engage in battle in order to reach a policy. Given this confusion, it is perhaps both unsurprising and appropriate that the Trump administration has momentarily lost its taste for confrontation with China. After another round of high-level negotiations in Washington, D.C., on May 19, 2019, U.S. Secretary of Treasury Steve Mnuchin, Trump’s apparent lead negotiator, meekly announced that U.S. and China were “putting the trade war on hold.”
