The unsettling premise at the core of Liu Cixin’s 2008 novel, The Dark Forest, is that deterrence is more than a theory of international politics; it is part of a universal law governing the behavior of all societies. Western planners, policymakers, and other security thinkers concerned about potential future conflicts (or cooperation) with the People’s Republic of China should recognize the importance of this conception. A Chinese worldview that looks at national security, foreign policy, and international relations in this way has staggering implications for the future of geopolitics. Indeed, nearly 20 years after its first publication, the book stands out as one of the most provocative, albeit fictional, explorations of deterrence heretofore written. Yet, despite its significance, there is a tendency for other commentators to recommend the full Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy, while Liu’s The Three-Body Problem appears alone more frequently on strategic and military reading lists than either The Dark Forest itself, or Death’s End, its sequel.

However, I argue that if Western security thinkers are to read any one of the three books, they should read The Dark Forest. In addition to its radical perspective on deterrence, the book endures today for the insight it provides into the future of Chinese space power theory, its native portrayal of Chinese culture, and its potential influence on the strategic socialization of China’s future leaders. Where fiction generally has value for leader development, and science fiction promotes creativity, futures thinking, and political awareness, The Dark Forest offers insights into Chinese culture and the future of Chinese thought that other works cannot match. In an effort to show that the novel should be required reading for Western strategic thinkers, especially those concerned with long-term competition and conflict with China, this essay, rather than being a book review, contextualizes these literary themes and implications by situating them in a discussion of Chinese strategy and culture.

The Law of Deterrence

The idea of “dark forest deterrence” is just one example of Chinese reasoning on the broader topic of deterrence, but Liu’s is one that raises the concept and related ideas (like mutually assured destruction) from mere theoretical principles to a universal law. Popularized by Liu’s novel, the “dark forest” is a metaphor used by some real life astrophysicists to explain the Fermi paradox, or the idea that the universe should be teeming with life despite the fact that the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence has never found evidence supporting this contention. It refers to a social Darwinian conception of a competitive forest biome wherein weaker species are preyed upon by larger predators. As prey animals might learn stealth to avoid detection in a dark forest, weak civilizations in the dark forest of the cosmos must therefore maintain stealth to prevent destruction at the hands of a more powerful actor. What happens in the Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest is that the Earth fails to adhere to this principle.

The Trisolarans, a more advanced civilization, discover Earth after a disgruntled Chinese researcher makes first contact. While Trisolaris is an insignificant power in terms of galactic politics, humans are little more than bugs by comparison. Following the Thucydidean dictum that “the strong do what they can” while “the weak suffer what they must,” Trisolaris launches an invasion fleet intent on conquering the Earth. In other words, Liu’s conception of the universe is one where the cosmos stands in for the Hobbesian state of nature. As a result, The Dark Forest conceptualizes realist security dilemmas, zero-sum games, and mutually assured destruction not as elements of a realist theory of international politics, but as a universal law of sociopolitical interaction that governs all societies, be they planets or nation-states. Dark forest deterrence, one asymmetric component of this law, then emerges from the Hobbesian order as the only viable strategy available to minor states confronting a great power.

The idea is rooted in four notions of cosmic sociology. First, suggests the novel, all life forms, and especially intelligent life forms always expand. Second, resources in the universe are finite. Third, chains of suspicion (read security dilemmas) prevent societies from establishing trust with one another. And finally, technological explosions can allow one civilization to leapfrog another, regardless of any of the latter’s previous relative advantages. Taken together, this means intelligent civilizations will always come into conflict. If a nation-state is to capture the resources........

© E-International