Chapter 3: Asymmetry Is the Oldest Strategy
- john raymond
- Jul 7
- 2 min read
Section I: Opening Provocation: The Strong Lose Because They See Only Strength
Empires do not fall in spite of their strength. They fall because of it. Because in the arrogance of strength lies the blindness to anything else. Conventional thinkers equate war with strength—tanks, planes, borders, bombs. But the oldest and most effective strategies in history were forged not in firepower, but in guile.
Consider the mythic arc of human conflict. For thousands of years, the weak have survived—and often triumphed—not by meeting power with power, but by wielding subversion, deception, surprise, and sabotage. From the shadowy agents of the Persian court to the strategic mysticism of Sun Tzu, from the terror logistics of the Mongol horde to the cold-blooded betrayals of Byzantine statecraft, asymmetric warfare has always been the domain of the cunning.
It is only the strong who forget this. And when they forget, they lose.
This is not a lesson for ancient kings alone. It is a warning to every modern democracy. America, the global hegemon of the postwar order, has proven singularly blind to the asymmetric lessons of its enemies. On 9/11, a decentralized network of terrorists weaponized America’s own aviation infrastructure against it.
The response? A conventional military invasion of a country that had nothing to do with the attack. Under President Bush, America fell back on strength—deploying tanks against ghosts, soldiers against mirages. It was a failure not of force, but of strategic imagination. It was the blindness of strength.
And then came Trump. Not a general, not a planner, not a tactician. But a wrecking ball. The product of a foreign operation and a domestic breakdown. And like the Greeks before Troy, the Kremlin understood how to bypass fortresses. They didn’t need to storm the walls of America. They just needed to get someone to open the gates. Not by coercion, but by spectacle. Not by war, but by politics. Trump was the trojan horse, and he was rolled through the gates to cheers and chants.
But here’s the deeper truth: Trump did not need to be Putin’s ideologue. He only needed to be selfish. Bush failed because he mistook dominance for security. Trump succeeded—in serving the enemy—because he replaces personal gain for national strategy. In both cases, asymmetric warfare found an open wound and made it deeper.
This chapter will move through ancient and early modern history, surfacing not just patterns of asymmetric tactics but the psychological truths that make them effective. We will follow the through-line from Troy to the Kremlin. And by the end, we will understand how asymmetric warfare is not the future of conflict—it is its origin. What is new is not the method, but the failure to see it.
And no one will fail more completely, or more dangerously, than the people who see strength as a mirror instead of a mask.
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