Peaceful War

Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a Pacific New World Order is a book written by Patrick Mendis. It provides an analysis of the unfolding drama between the clashing forces of the Chinese dream and the American Dream. The foreword to the book is written by Jack Goldstone, the Virginia and John Hazel Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University.

In 2012, Professor Mendis coined the new term "Pacific Dream" to describe possible outcomes resulting from the interface between the Sino-American policies and initiatives of US President Barack Obama and Chinese Communist Party general secretary Xi Jinping that resonate with the American Dream and the Chinese dream. In April 2013, US Secretary of State John Kerry officially unveiled President Obama's vision of the "Pacific Dream" to deliver mutual benefits among all stakeholders in the region.

The themes of Mendis' book are seemingly drawn from ideas expressed during his extensive study and lecture tours in 2012 and 2013 at prestigious universities and institutions in China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and elsewhere in Asia and America. These include the lectures at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing and the Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou. His other related publications appeared in the Yale Journal of International Affairs, the Columbia University's Journal of International Affairs, the Minnesota Post, as well as the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong.

The book contains a comparative analysis of the distinctive and different philosophies between the People's Republic of China's millennia-old Confucian civilization and the young republic of the United States and its founding vision. The author explains that "America and China are two republics—the 'Old and Young.' China is an old and evolved civilization while America is new and created by enlightened men" (in 1776); however, "their approaches are different" in domestic governance and international affairs.

In a book review of the author's previous book, Commercial Providence, the United States' hidden and esoteric traditions as embedded in the symbolism and architectural design of Washington, DC, and the secret destiny of the American empire were revealed. In his Peaceful War, Mendis also uncovered a number of previously unknown similarities, especially in the esoteric traditions of architectural designs of the Forbidden City surrounded by Tienanmen Square in the historic center of Beijing and the square-shaped original Federal City that encloses the Federal Triangle in Washington, DC. The author furthermore contrasts American foreign policy traditions derived from Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton and China's adaptation of them. Such examples include Beijing's revision of America's Manifest Destiny in its policies within the Indian Ocean and its reworking of the Monroe Doctrine in the Pacific Ocean, the South China Sea, and the East China Sea.

Within his new book, Mendis explains that similar to the experience of the United States in having its foreign policy traditions spread over the Pacific Ocean and into Hawaii and the Philippines, the post Deng Xiaoping’s China has practically been using "Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends" and borrowed the founding idea inspired by the American Dream as a model for China's peaceful rise in the Indo-Pacific region. The so-called Chinese dream, as reinvented by Xi Jinping, seems to continue Deng's Hamiltonian experiment of the economic liberalization into the twenty-first century.

With a possible "fiscal cliff" in America and a "social cliff" in China, the author revisits the history of Sino-American relations to explore the prospects for a return to the long-forgotten Beijing-Washington love affair launched in the trade-for-peace era before the First Opium War in the nineteenth century.^{[citation needed]} During his two-month book and lecture tour in the late 2013 in China, Dr. Mendis told a Beijing news reporter 傅立钢 of the China Trade News that "economic and trade cooperation between China and the US" must now be carried out within "a legal framework" as global commerce has become the "mainstream."

The author envisions that President Obama's Asia pivot strategy and the new Silk Road plan of Xi Jinping will eventually create a "Pacific Dream" and a New World Order of peace and prosperity for all. The key question raised in the book is: "Will China ultimately evolve into a democratic nation by rewriting the American Dream in Chinese characters, and how might this transpire?" As a strategic partner in the Pacific tasked with accommodating China's peaceful rise, President Obama's Secretary of State Kerry outlined America's vision of the "Pacific Dream" for mutual benefit and a more peaceful world as he reiterated former Secretary Hillary Clinton's previous announcement on President Obama's Asia pivot strategy and the Trans-Pacific Partnership.