by Nomad
"If you don't know who to trust anymore, this might be the thing that's making you feel that way. If you feel exhausted by the news, this could be why. And if you're sick of it all and you just want to stop caring, then we really need to talk."
The Art of Deception
Supreme warfare is achieved by overcoming one's enemy without fighting. That's a fundamental precept from the Chinese military general Sun Tzu's "The Art of War.All warfare, writes Tzu, is based on deception. And the most successful type of warfare is that where the enemy does not recognize the battlefield and the type of weapons used. The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.
Therefore the skillful leader subdues the enemy's troops without any fighting; he captures their cities without laying siege to them; he overthrows their kingdom without lengthy operations in the field.
Writing some 500 years before Christ, Tzu describes a strategy that achieves victory without the firing of artillery or the launching of missiles, carried out so clandestinely, that no defensive response is triggered.
This method of war-making has been put to the test by the Kremlin in a campaign that is decades in the making. Even as the Soviet Union crumbled, the long-term strategy to undermine the US and other Western democracies (and to tear apart the bonds between them.) continued. And it was no coincidence that it would be led by a former KGB officer who, using the same tactics on his own people, managed to seize power.
As Russia's ultimate goal is well within sight, we in the West are only now waking up to this serious threat. The Cold War hasn't been revived. For the Russians, it never ended. The "evil empire," after being seen as the apparent loser of that competition in the early 90s, is today very close to winning.