The Art of War

Aspiring conquerors, invaders and entrepreneurs, take note!
For most of the '90s, you couldn't walk into a bookstore without seeing a hardcover edition of Sun Tzu's classic treatise on military strategy on the counter, waiting to be purchased as a Christmas stocking stuffer by an enterprising businessman or — more likely — to be studied by the businessman himself. And why not? In the dot-com era, sagacities like "Although everyone can see the outward aspects, none understands the ways in which I have created victory" imbued the art-of-the-deal with a mystique thoroughly disproportional to the banality of the results. Illusion is Sun Tzu's favorite strategy: pretending your armies are massive, your weapons more powerful, your forces inexorable, and by doing so, intimidate your enemy. Before diplomats invented the frustrating semiotics of “sending signals,” Sun Tzu was writing history with northern lights.

For all that, though, The Art of War is required reading in most military colleges, which means we must take it seriously — even if, in the post 9-11 age, no country fights the kind of battles Sun Tzu described with such precision (let's find anything but a historic use for advice like “Cross salt marshes speedily. Do not linger in them.”). But don't say a word to the kings, prime ministers and presidents who sought to burnish their profiles in courage; it's easy to imagine Richard Nixon looking in the mirror and reciting, “Subtle and insubstantial, the expert leaves no trace; divinely mysterious, he is inaudible” as he ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia. Chances are he and Henry Kissinger, the Prince Metternich of Foggy Bottom, missed one of Sun's most straightforward remarks: “For there has never been a protracted war from which a country has benefited.”