Description
To analyze and predict the strategic motives behind international conflicts is one of the key points to realize the combination of academic theory and policy practice in international studies in the current stage and the foreseeable future. Also, it is one of the most considerable and challenging research paths to grasp military security issues from the perspective of international relations. Its fundamental difficulty lies in the ceaselessly changing uncertainty in strategic evaluation, which occurs at any time and place. From a broader perspective, the research on uncertainty is as well an eternal but seemingly forever imminent core issue for international researchers, politicians, and strategic guiders, notably in the current world’s unprecedented changes rarely seen in a century. Due to the complex background and frequent transformation of contemporary international conflicts, the causes of characteristics, the working mechanism, and the coping strategies of uncertainty in strategic motivation evaluation have different forms. However, they also have a common cognitive analysis framework and system effect laws in the contemporary era, and this is exactly the core topic of this paper. This kind of uncertainty has different theoretical concepts and interpretations due to diverse school notions. At the policy level, it is generally deemed as the absence of information function because the participants or those concerned in international conflicts fail to access and study information adequately. Through historical research, practical investigation, and theoretical deduction, as well as combined with the characteristics of contemporary international conflicts and the evolution trend in the future, this paper holds that the root of uncertainty lies in the inevitable complexity of the organic system formed by the interaction and mixed fermentation of power, strength, interest, intention, determination, and environmental cognition among the parties of strategic conflicts. Moreover, it points out through analysis that for such uncertainty, the reality of objective conditions predetermines its dispersive form and scale, the inherited transformation of subjective cognition directly influences its complexity and breakthrough points, the characteristic superposition of conflict effect greatly intensifies its salient possibility and aftermaths, and the complex interaction between them profoundly affects its stability and opportunity for qualitative change. Afterward, this paper applies the case method, the quantitative method, and the interpretation method to further analyze the correlation mechanism between the failure and uncertainty of strategic motivation evaluation, and explore the theoretical framework to depict uncertainty. Besides, it attempts to make a theoretical statement on the boundary of uncertainty when strategic motivation evaluation is guaranteed to achieve success with high probability. By doing so, it aims to form a more definite theoretical description regarding the uncertainty of strategic motivation evaluation in international studies than before, that is, to transform parts of uncertainty into certain ones. Eventually, by using the strategic evaluation methods in the Western academic community such as Convergent Scenario Development, Ripple Effect Analysis, Divergent Scenario Development, Strategic Relevance Check, Decision Significance Comparison, and Expectation Impact Analysis, as well as introducing the thoughts on international relations, strategic judgment, and crisis management in China’s military strategic thinking, this paper tries to propose some feasible paths to break through the uncertainty in strategic motivation evaluation against the different stages of the strategic motivation evaluation process, such as evaluation preparation, evaluation implementation, and evaluation termination. Meanwhile, it offers concise theoretical suggestions for strengthening the prediction of international conflicts and the prevention of potential international conflicts.
