Not Muskets, but Ministries: The Return of America's Oldest Strategic Challenge
How George Washington understood governance as power, and why it matters again
Americans are accustomed to thinking about strategic competition in material terms: armies, fleets, missiles, industrial capacity. When threats are framed this way, they feel legible and familiar. Power can be counted, compared, and deterred. Yet the most consequential form of competition confronting the United States today does not primarily operate through firepower or force posture. It operates through governance itself.
This is a return to form.
The United States was born confronting an imperial system that exercised power less through battlefield dominance than through administration, law, economic control, and legitimacy. The strategic challenge of the twenty-first century is not fundamentally different in kind. What has changed are the tools. The logic remains intact.
To understand this moment clearly requires recovering a form of strategic memory Americans once possessed instinctively and have since allowed to atrophy.
George Washington and the War Beneath the War
George Washington did not win the American Revolution by defeating the British Empire on its preferred terms. He understood, earlier and more clearly than most of his contemporaries, that the contest was not simply about armies meeting on fields. It was about endurance, legitimacy, and the survival of a political project under pressure.
Washington worried constantly about collapse from within. His correspondence reveals an acute awareness that armies dissolve when governance fails: when supply systems break down, when civilian confidence erodes, when authority fragments. He feared administrative weakness more than tactical loss. The British could win battles. What they could not easily defeat was a population that no longer accepted imperial governance as legitimate.
This was a practical insight, forged through experience. British power in North America rested on law, taxation, commercial regulation, and institutional authority. Military force existed to enforce compliance when necessary, but it was governance that normalized control. Customs regimes, courts, appointed officials, trade restrictions, and narratives of imperial legitimacy shaped colonial life far more consistently than redcoats on patrol.
Washington grasped that this was the true battlefield. Victory depended on denying the empire its ability to govern—to collect, regulate, adjudicate, and compel obedience as a matter of routine. The revolution succeeded not because Britain lacked military capacity, but because imperial governance could no longer function effectively in the colonies.
The American Revolution as a Rebellion Against Imperial Governance
The American Revolution is often remembered as a war for independence. It was also something more precise: a rebellion against an imperial governance system that constrained political autonomy through administrative means.
Parliamentary taxation without representation functioned as a mechanism for extracting compliance through distant authority. Customs enforcement and commercial regulation were not neutral policies; they reordered economic life in service of imperial priorities. Legal structures increasingly subordinated local norms to metropolitan control. These mechanisms worked quietly, persistently, and lawfully. That was their strength.
Resistance emerged when governance no longer felt legitimate, when rules ceased to reflect consent and instead functioned as instruments of domination. This is why pamphlets, petitions, committees, and parallel institutions mattered as much as militias. The revolution unfolded simultaneously in political, administrative, economic, and narrative space.
Military conflict punctuated the struggle, but governance defined it.
The Founding as Defensive Architecture
The constitutional system that followed independence was a strategic response to lived experience under imperial administration.
Separation of powers reflected a deep suspicion of concentrated authority. Federalism diffused coercive capacity across levels of governance. Civilian control of the military guarded against institutional capture. Even inefficiency, at times, was a feature rather than a flaw, where friction served as a safeguard against administrative overreach.
These were defensive measures against a form of power the Founders understood intimately: governance exercised without accountability, normalized through procedure, and justified by necessity.
The early American republic was built to resist not only military conquest, but administrative domination.
Governance as Power
Governance is often treated as background infrastructure, something that exists to support “real” power. In practice, governance is one of the most effective instruments of power available to states.
Rules shape behavior. Institutions constrain choices. Administrative processes define what is permissible, profitable, or punishable. Over time, governance systems can normalize dependence, reduce resistance, and make coercion unnecessary. When successful, power appears benign, inevitable, even invisible. Governance determines not only what is possible, but what appears permissible, and therefore, what most actors never question at all.
This form of power is slow. It is cumulative. It rarely triggers crisis response. And once embedded, it is difficult to dislodge without significant disruption.
Empires have always understood this.
China and the Revival of Imperial Logic
China’s approach to strategic competition reflects a sophisticated appreciation for governance as a tool of power. Legal frameworks, regulatory standards, bureaucratic integration, economic leverage, and narrative control are not ancillary to its strategy; they are central to it.
Rather than seeking decisive confrontation, the Chinese Communist Party emphasizes shaping the systems within which decisions are made. Dependencies are cultivated. Norms are influenced. Administrative reach is extended. Legitimacy is constructed and contested. The objective is not necessarily to defeat adversaries in battle, but to condition environments so that resistance becomes costly, constrained, or unthinkable.
Consider Belt and Road’s operational mechanics. Partner nations adopt Chinese technical standards for railways, telecommunications, and port infrastructure. Local officials attend training programs in China, absorbing administrative methods and policy frameworks. Legal agreements embed dispute resolution in Chinese courts under Chinese commercial law. Financial dependencies create ongoing consultation requirements. Over time, these mechanisms do more than facilitate trade—they harmonize governance systems, making Chinese preferences the path of least resistance for routine decisions.
What appears novel is not the logic, but the technology. Digital systems accelerate reach. Data enables precision. Bureaucracy scales. The underlying approach—governing first, coercing second—would be immediately recognizable to imperial administrators of earlier centuries.
This is governance competition operating below the threshold of war, yet capable of producing durable strategic effects.
Washington’s insight about imperial power applies directly to contemporary strategic competition. Where Britain governed the colonies through law and routine administration, China embeds influence through standards, institutions, and administrative integration.
The Quiet Return of Irregular Conflict
The most consequential contests of power rarely announce themselves as wars. They unfold through rules rather than raids, through compliance rather than conquest. They shape behavior long before violence becomes necessary, if it ever does.
This is why traditional indicators of strength often mislead. Military superiority remains essential, but it does not automatically translate into strategic advantage when competition is waged through institutions, norms, and administrative systems. Force deters escalation, but governance determines outcomes.
Washington understood this intuitively. He knew that survival depended on maintaining legitimacy, coherence, and institutional resilience under pressure. He feared that republics, once secure, would forget how power actually works and become vulnerable to precisely the forms of domination they were designed to resist.
Remembering the War That Created the Republic
The strategic challenge confronting the United States today is familiar in structure, if not in appearance. The instruments have changed. The logic endures.
The United States was born resisting an empire that governed through administration, law, and legitimacy as much as through force. That experience shaped its institutions, its strategic culture, and its early understanding of power. Over time, prosperity and distance dulled that memory.
The question is not whether this form of competition has returned.
It has.
The question is whether Americans still recognize it, and whether they remember why their republic was built the way it was. Xinanigans exists to recover that strategic memory, to analyze governance as battlespace, and to provide the analytical frameworks necessary for recognizing—and responding to—imperial logic in contemporary form.
[Author’s Note: This essay sits outside the regular Xinanigans publishing cadence. It is not a weekly analysis, a China update, or a policy brief. It is a foundational piece, an explanation of how this project understands power, conflict, and strategic competition at their most basic level.
The argument is simple: the United States is once again confronting a form of power it has faced before: not battlefield dominance, but imperial governance. The mechanisms have changed. The logic has not.
This essay traces that logic back to America’s origins and to George Washington’s understanding of the kind of warfare republics rarely recognize until it is too late. Everything that follows in Xinanigans rests on this strategic frame.
For readers who want to move from foundations to application, A Field Guide to the Real US–China Strategic Competition applies this framework directly to contemporary competition, and serves as a guide to the rest of Xinanigans.]