Chapter 3, Section II: The Trojan Horse and the Myth of Perimeter Defense
- john raymond
- Jul 7
- 3 min read
We begin, appropriately, with a lie—with a deception.
The fall of Troy is not just a tale of war—it is a parable about perception. The Greeks had laid siege to Troy for a decade and failed to breach its walls. Their strength had met strength and found only deadlock.
But the war ended not with conquest, but with a gift: the infamous horse, left seemingly as a gesture of surrender. Inside were hidden soldiers, and within a single night, what could not be done with armies was accomplished through subterfuge.
Troy fell not because it was weak, but because it was blind. The lie was the attack.
This foundational story of Western literature is often read as a trick. But it was more than that. It was an asymmetric solution to a symmetric problem. The Greeks could not outfight Troy, so they out-thought it. And in doing so, they showed the future how wars would be won—not always by siege engines or sword, but by narrative control, psychological manipulation, and the exploitation of cultural assumptions.
The Trojan Horse is not unique. But it is iconic because of what it tells us: strong defenses don’t matter if you open the gates yourself. America, too, opened its gates. And not once, but twice. First under George W. Bush, when conventional thinking led to asymmetric self-harm. Then under Donald Trump, when a Trojan Horse candidate—unvetted, unstable, unqualified—was ushered into the highest office, not despite his flaws, but because of them.
Trojan Logic in American Decline
Trump didn’t sneak into Washington. He was paraded in. Like the horse. A spectacle. A symbol. He was embraced by those who thought they were winning a culture war, but in doing so, they surrendered the Republic to a man who owed his rise to a foreign autocrat and whose strategy matched that of the enemy: confuse, disrupt, destabilize.
He is not alone. Every autocratic regime in history has relied on misdirection more than might. And Trump, like the horse, was not empty. He carried with him the means of national compromise: propaganda, legal sabotage, loyalist networks, and the dismantling of civil cohesion.
His court appointments—packaged as victories for “conservatism”—have functioned as embedded operators within the system. They don’t need orders from Moscow to fulfill their function; their ideology is sufficient sabotage. They reinterpret liberty. They hamstring accountability. They shield Trump from consequence. This is asymmetric warfare of the highest order: preloading the system with agents of internal entropy.
Perimeter Thinking as Strategic Delusion
We misunderstood the threat, again. Not because we lacked intelligence, but because we lacked imagination. Like Troy, we believed our walls would hold. We believed our institutions were strong. But strength without vigilance is just a monument waiting to crumble. The horse didn’t defeat Troy. Its welcome did.
We mistook norms for safeguards. We mistook flags and ballots for inviolable protections.
But asymmetric warfare doesn’t knock at the front door—it finds the cracks in your foundation. The idea that Trump is too dumb to be dangerous is a symptom of this blindness. So too is the assumption that America cannot fall from within. Every empire falls from within. That’s how it happens. That’s how it has always happened.
The Weapon and the Welcome
The challenge today isn’t just the weapon. It’s the blindness that allows the weapon in.
Trump’s rise wasn’t just a national failure of politics—it was a civilizational failure of perception. He was the gift we seemed to give ourselves, while our enemies watched and smiled.
Like the Greeks before Troy, they didn’t need to scale the walls. We opened the gates for them—and called it democracy.
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