Part II: The Betrayal of Strategic Thought
The great military theoreticians whose works have shaped strategic thinking across centuries would find themselves bewildered by the warfare we witness today. Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, Machiavelli, Jomini, and Liddell Hart—each approached war from different perspectives and with different emphases, but each understood that war must serve rational purpose and be bounded by strategic wisdom. The Trump-Netanyahu war in Iran, Gaza and Lebanon violates every principle they articulated.
Sun Tzu: The Inversion of Wisdom
The ancient Chinese strategist’s “The Art of War” remains the most influential military treatise ever written, prized for its emphasis on strategy over brute force, on winning without fighting as the supreme achievement, and on the importance of understanding both oneself and one’s enemy. Sun Tzu’s core principles are systematically violated in contemporary warfare.
Principle: The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Contemporary practice: War is pursued as an end in itself, with no apparent interest in subduing the enemy through means other than total destruction. The possibility of negotiated settlement, of political accommodation, of addressing legitimate grievances—these are dismissed as weakness or treason. War becomes not the last resort but the first and only resort.
Principle: Know your enemy and know yourself.
Contemporary practice: The enemy is not understood but caricatured, reduced to demonological abstractions that bear no relation to reality. The self is not critically examined but celebrated as inherently righteous. This mutual ignorance ensures that strategy is replaced by fantasy and that military operations are guided by illusion rather than intelligence.
Principle: All warfare is based on deception.
Contemporary practice: Deception is employed not against the enemy but against one’s own population and the international community. The justifications for war shift and mutate, the facts on the ground are obscured, and the true purposes of military action are hidden behind layers of propaganda and misinformation. When deception becomes self-deception, strategy becomes impossible.
Principle: To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.
Contemporary practice: Victories are measured in body counts and destruction, not in achieved political objectives. Each “victory” creates more enemies than it eliminates, ensuring that war becomes permanent and that peace recedes endlessly into the future. The accumulation of tactical successes produces strategic failure.
Carl von Clausewitz: War Without Politics
The Prussian theorist’s magnum opus, On War, remains the most sophisticated analysis of war’s nature and character. Clausewitz’s famous dictum—that war is the continuation of politics by other means—established the fundamental relationship between violence and political purpose that has guided strategic thought for two centuries.
The contemporary warfare we examine has severed this relationship. The political purpose that should guide and limit military action has become ambiguous, shifting, and ultimately irrelevant. When asked to articulate the political objective that justifies the immense destruction, leaders offer platitudes rather than purposes: “destroying Hamas,” “restoring deterrence,” “ensuring security.” These are not political objectives but military tasks; they describe means rather than ends. The true political purpose—whatever it might be—remains unstated, perhaps even unexamined.
Clausewitz also introduced the crucial distinction between “limited war” and “absolute war.” Absolute war, in his framework, is a theoretical abstraction—war freed from all constraints and pursued to its logical extreme. In reality, war is always limited by political purpose, by available means, by the resistance of the enemy, and by the friction that inevitably accompanies military operations. The warfare we witness today I Iran has abandoned these limitations. It approaches absolute war not as a theoretical concept but as operational reality: destruction pursued for its own sake, violence unconstrained by political calculation, war as pure force rather than as instrument.
The “fog of war” that Clausewitz identified—the uncertainty that surrounds all military operations—has been weaponized rather than acknowledged. Uncertainty is not a regrettable feature of war to be managed; it is a deliberate strategy to be exploited. The directional ambiguity that characterizes this conflict serves to confuse opponents, divide international opinion, and shield decision-makers from accountability. But it also ensures that no coherent strategy can emerge and that military operations lurch from one improvisation to another without clear purpose or endpoint.
Niccolò Machiavelli: Prudence Abandoned
Machiavelli’s reputation as a teacher of evil obscures his actual contribution to strategic thought: a hardheaded analysis of political and military reality that emphasizes prudence, adaptability, and the relationship between means and ends. Even in The Prince, where he appears most cynical, Machiavelli insists that cruelty must be “well used”—swift, decisive, justified by necessity, and followed by reconciliation.
The warfare we witness today in Iran violates every Machiavellian principle of prudent cruelty. The violence is not swift but protracted, dragging on for months and years without resolution. It is not decisive but incremental, killing thousands without achieving strategic clarity. It is not followed by reconciliation but by renewed vengeance, ensuring that each cycle of violence breeds the next. This is cruelty badly used—cruelty that serves no political purpose, that alienates rather than subdues, that creates enemies faster than it eliminates them.
Machiavelli also emphasized the importance of maintaining the support of the people, both one’s own and the conquered population. Contemporary warfare seems designed to achieve the opposite: alienating the conquered population through collective punishment and humiliating occupation, while dividing one’s own population through the moral compromises required to support unlimited violence. The result is strategic exhaustion rather than strategic victory.
Antoine-Henri Jomini: The Logic of War Abandoned
Jomini, the great systematizer of Napoleonic warfare, sought to identify the principles that underlie military success. His emphasis on lines of operation, concentration of force, and the importance of strategic positions shaped military education for generations.
The warfare we witness today in Iran appears to have abandoned any coherent operational logic. Lines of operation are confused and overlapping; force is dispersed rather than concentrated; strategic positions are destroyed rather than secured. The destruction of infrastructure, the killing of civilians, the kiling of leaders, the demolition of homes—these actions do not contribute to any intelligible operational objective. They represent not strategy but its absence.
Jomini also emphasized the importance of securing the support of the population in occupied territory—a principle that the experience of counterinsurgency warfare has only reinforced. Contemporary practice seems designed to achieve the opposite: to ensure that every member of the occupied population becomes a permanent enemy, that resistance is not defeated but created, and that occupation becomes permanent warfare rather than temporary necessity. The occupation of Palestine serves a living example of default.
B.H. Liddell Hart: The Indirect Approach Inverted
The British strategist’s concept of the “indirect approach” emphasized the importance of avoiding the enemy’s strength, of achieving surprise, and of disrupting the enemy’s psychological and logistical balance rather than destroying his forces in direct confrontation.
Contemporary warfare represents the direct approach elevated to dogma: head-on confrontation with enemy forces, attrition warfare that exchanges lives for hegemony or for territory, destruction rather than disruption as the primary objective. The indirect approach—which might involve addressing the political grievances that fuel resistance, isolating the enemy diplomatically, or finding alternatives to direct military confrontation—is dismissed as weakness or appeasement.
Liddell Hart also emphasized the importance of the “objective”—the political purpose that military action serves. In contemporary warfare, the objective has become so diffuse and ambiguous that it provides no guidance for military operations. Is the objective to destroy Hamas? To kill its leadership? to kill the president of Iran?, To end rocket fire? To free hostages? To restore deterrence? To change the political landscape of the region? to contain Russia and China or confront them, Each of these objectives suggests different operational approaches; the failure to choose among them ensures that none is achieved.
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