Chapter 3, VII. Summary: What History Teaches About Trump, Bush, and the War We’re In Now
- john raymond
- Jul 7
- 2 min read
Asymmetric warfare is not a modern invention. It is the oldest strategic logic in the world. From the siege of Troy to the desert campaigns of early Islam, from Mongol terror to Byzantine diplomacy, the weak have always had one primary tool: cunning. That same cunning now defines the enemies of the West—and worse, it increasingly defines the behavior of those within it.
This chapter has traced those ancient threads not to marvel at history, but to understand the present. Trump is not an exception to American politics. He is its culmination under asymmetric pressure.
The tactics he employs—disinformation, disruption, distrust—are not novel. They are simply older strategies, deployed now with modern tools. Social media replaces scrolls. Memes replace whispers. But the effect is the same: the coordination of the strong is broken by the confusion of the many.
Trump is not the first demagogue, nor the first traitor to serve a foreign power. But his unique danger lies in his selfishness. He does not need to believe in Putin’s cause. He needs only to see benefit in serving it.
Like the agents of ancient sabotage, his motivations matter less than his consequences. In asymmetric war, betrayal is not always deliberate—but it is always useful.
George W. Bush, too, stands not outside history, but inside its blind spots. By invading Iraq, he ignored every principle of asymmetric defense. He fought a visible enemy to pretend to avenge an invisible one.
He wielded conventional might against a movement defined by fluidity. And in doing so, he created the conditions for asymmetric war to flourish. The insurgency that followed was not unpredictable—it was inevitable.
Worse, the public that emerged from that war was not empowered by the experience but degraded by it. The lies that justified the war became tools that justified anything. Torture. Surveillance. More lies.
Today, the West stumbles not because it is weaker, but because it has forgotten. Forgotten the playbook. Forgotten the terrain. Forgotten that war, at its core, is not about who has the best weapons, but who understands the game being played.
Asymmetric war is not a kind of war. It is the kind of war that weak actors always use—and that strong actors often fail to prepare for.
We now live in the long shadow of that forgetting.
Putin does not beat the West with tanks. He beats it with traitors, trolls, and time. Trump was not a nuclear bomb dropped on the American system. He was a logic bomb, set to detonate trust, coherence, and memory. And it is working.
The lesson, then, is not merely historical. It is diagnostic.
If we do not understand the asymmetric shape of war, we cannot defend ourselves. If we cannot see that betrayal can come wrapped in familiar flags and spoken in familiar tongues, we will lose our way of life.
Trump is not merely a problem to be solved. He is a symptom of a deeper vulnerability—one that was diagnosed thousands of years ago, and exploited ever since.
To fight back, we must first remember what kind of war we are in.
It is total—and it is asymmetric.
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