Book Review: “Finding Virtue In Strategic Denial And Deception: The Intelligence Pathway to Conserving State Power” by Reva Bhalla

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This book is deceptively slim but undeniably piercing as an analysis of perception management. Perception management is meant to influence your adversary to give you an advantage otherwise unobtainable. Strategic denial and deception is part and parcel of perception management which is statecraft. Let me draw on history to illustrate this statecraft.

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In the Brest-Litovsk treaty of March 3rd, 1918 Vladimir Lenin signed away a quarter of Russia’s population and industry in addition to nine-tenths of its coal mines so as to end the war with Germany. (Talk about Unequal Treaty!)

How could Lenin get away with it? By denial. He denied that he had betrayed Mother Russia. Somehow he convinced his fellow Bolsheviks that Germany, following Russia, would be ripe for communist revolution. Whatever he had lost to an Imperial Germany he promised to recover from a Communist Germany: Workers were supposed to own and share everything while respecting no borders. 

Of course, it was the victorious Allied Powers’ politicians, not the defeated German Empire’s workers, who finally abrogated the Brest-Litovsk treaty in the wake of the Armistice of November 11th, 1918. 

Facts might be stubborn things, but they had not been stubborn enough to stop Lenin and Leninists from weaponizing denial through their CHEKA, a Soviet agency of terror, during and beyond the Russian Civil War.

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Lenin’s denial paid in the Russian Civil War (1918-21); so did Mao Zedong’s deception in the Korean War (1950-3).

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For Chinese emperors, and Mao was one, Korea was always an indispensable tributary state rather than just a neighboring nation-state in the Westphalian sense. Wonder why the emperors of Tang, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties fought costly wars to keep Korea as a tributary state if not a downright vassal state? 

As for Mao, his military thought on defense was offensive in nature, befitting someone with a traditional Chinese chess (wei qi) mentality. From open sources we know that Mao had reiterated on a number of occasions that military deterrence should never be passive. To defend was to attack, at a time of his choosing. His Korean War and subsequent border wars with India on the Himalayas (1962) and with Russia on the Ussuri/Wusuli River (1969) made his point.

America didn’t quite get it when Mao played his game of deception with a seemingly overwhelming force assembled on the mainland side of the Taiwan Strait around the time the Korean Peninsula blew up. 

President Truman realized belatedly that Mao’s move on Taiwan was a red herring. Mao actually meant to fight General MacArthur head on in Korea, which came to a standstill at the 38th parallel north. 

Taiwan could wait. Korea could not. Truman and MacArthur got Mao’s priority wrong. They failed to grasp Mao’s fear of Stalin joining a victorious MacArthur in taking China’s northeastern territory. No one knew better than Mao that Stalin was a natural born land-grabber. Without the Northeast, Beijing would invite invasion instantly. So the Korean War was a must-win for Mao. A standstill was a win.

After the Korean War no one would or could seriously bet on China’s integration into the Westphalian world anytime soon. This in turn contributed significantly to China’s seclusion. In seclusion Mao continued to wreak more and more havoc, at a human cost much higher than that of the Korean War. 

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Let’s face it. Strategic denial and deception is a tool of statecraft. To find virtue in a tool, as the author suggests, doesn’t make much sense to me. I would rather find virtue in the tool user. 

Winston Churchill once said, “…in wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” 

If one has to lie through his teeth to get a prisoner of conscience out of China, then it is virtuous to be a remorseless liar.

I rest my case.

——Lingyang Jiang