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The writer is a Junior Research Fellow at MCE, Pakistan Navy War College. Reach her at amnahashmee@gmail.com
If you know yourself and know your enemy, you will not fear the results of 100 battles.
It is the most quoted military maxim in recorded history. It is also, without exception, the most ignored one.
We keep fighting the hundred battles.
Consider Iran. The US has been grossly misinterpreting that nation for almost 47 years. All the sanctions, all the assassinations, all the ultimatums have been based upon the same false premise, that Iran is a Western rational actor, that pressure yields results, that a country will yield when its economy is bleeding. It doesn’t. It thinks in decades and not election cycles. It takes the punishment in proxies, Hezbollah, the Houthis, militias in four countries, and never offers a clean target to retaliate. Sun Tzu called it formlessness. You cannot fight something that you cannot define.
The maximum pressure doctrine by Trump is based on the assumption that the enemy will flinch. Sun Tzu knew better: a cornered enemy does not surrender. It fights to the last drop of blood. The existing nuclear brinkmanship with Tehran is not pressure at work, it is pressure that is breeding the very desperation it is said to be forestalling.
Then there is Gaza. Israel was familiar with Hamas tactically: its tunnels, its weapons, its command structure, but not with its strategic thinking on October 7th: that the attack was created as much to provoke a reaction as to cause one, making Israeli military superiority a liability in the international arena. In its turn, Hamas did not fully count on the magnitude of the destruction that was to come. Two parties, each of which was sure it knew the other. Both turned out wrong. Sun Tzu would have recognised this; they were battling the foe they had imagined, not the one they had in front of them.
Ukraine offers the same lesson from a different angle. Putin misunderstood the will of Ukraine to fight; he wanted a government to run away and a nation to surrender. The West misunderstood the readiness of Putin to bleed his economy, his soldiers, his position in the world, instead of letting it go down the drain. A 72-hour war has lasted thousands of days and more. Each side had come to know all except the one thing that was important; what the other was really composed of.
Enter now Donald Trump, a man who literally wrote The Art of the Deal, and has name-checked Sun Tzu in interviews. And yet tariffs were launched at the same time on both friends and foes, red lines were drawn and red lines were erased, NATO was torn, and Beijing was observing with a great patience and more than usual interest. This was the best practical advice that Sun Tzu gave, not to fight a war on multiple fronts at a time. Do not strain your strength on all. Choose. Concentrate. Win.
The American stance today manages to antagonise Europe, pressure Iran, confront China, arm Ukraine, and alienate the Global South simultaneously. That is no strategy. Feels like noise dressed in the language of strength.
The irony is that Sun Tzu’s book is free and short. It has also been translated into every major language on earth. Every general has read it. Every strategist cites it. And yet the key lesson: understand who you are actually dealing with, remains the rarest commodity in geopolitics.
We are not stupid. We lack comprehension. We do not lack information about our enemies. We are not willing to take them as they are, as opposed to how we want them to be, so that our own narratives hold.
Sun Tzu did not promise victory to the strongest army. He promised it to the one that truly saw.
We are still learning to open our eyes.
