Lately, the West Philippine Sea has been the staging ground for too many war exercises, and geopolitical experts are now raising their voices about initiating peace games instead.
Similar to their more unsettling counterparts, peace games are also simulations, but instead of preparing for conflict, they build efforts to prevent war and strengthen amity.
The US Institute of Peace (USIP), a think tank based in Washington, D.C., postulated that such exercises are simulations of primarily diplomatic engagement. Using military and economic tools, they seek to explore and improve statecraft to advance peace and reduce the risk of conflict.
The movement has its roots in the perception of many experts on global conflict that Washington “seems to be awash in war games, especially China-related ones.”
“Despite the dangers posed by a great power conflict, there are shockingly few peace games happening,” it noted.
Based on the descriptions of the peace mongers, the simulations are valuable for studying how adversarial relations can be improved and to test the efficacy of diplomatic strategies.
War games, in contrast, focus on the conduct of war, but peace exercises are grounded in reality.
USIP described the revolutionary concept as “Peace games are not propelled by flights of fantasy nor driven by wishful thinking. They are serious simulations grounded in real-world problems and focused on the difficult challenge of seeking alternatives to hostilities and wars, as well as grappling with how to address seemingly intractable and heated disputes via peaceful means.”
The goal is to change the default perspective of preparing for war to opening several avenues for peace.
According to USIP, the movement's authors possess decades of policy and analytic experience in the US national security community and view simulations as a valuable tool for exploring major global security challenges and gleaning fresh insights into how to address them.
Cited as a perfect staging ground for the peace games is the China conflict.
It indicated that a war between China and Japan or China and the Philippines would almost certainly draw in the United States since Washington is a treaty ally of Tokyo and Manila. It could conceivably become a brutal, intense, and extended conflict waged across vast swathes of the Western Pacific and beyond.
“The irony of this looming specter of war is that no country intentionally seeks war,” the US group pointed out.
USIP said peace simulations involving China highlight the “propensity of both China and the United States to swiftly assume malevolent intentions behind any proposal or action of the other.”
USIP said scenarios were presented with real-world features that resulted in deep suspicion and distrust among those involved who were experienced and knowledgeable security experts.
“The issue is almost certainly going to be more acute under real-world conditions involving less seasoned practitioners. Indeed, research suggests this type of misperception is quite common in international relations,” the group said.
The peace simulations also indicated that China tends to pay close attention to strategic messaging compared to the United States and most other countries that do not.
In multiple games, China took time to formulate and articulate a coherent public narrative. In contrast, the United States focused on the details of a particular scenario and specifics of how best to respond.
“Chinese narrative exists without a public counter-narrative,” results of the games indicated.
If war games constitute an essential arrow in a warrior’s quiver, peace games should also be considered an essential instrument in a peacemakers’ toolkit from the USIP’s viewpoint.
The imperative of the peace games is that nations exhaust all possible options for peace once a conflict arises while throwing war into the trash bin of history.
