Some twenty years ago, when we found out that the Chinese could fight, American military and diplomatic officialdom discovered Sun Tzu. This discovery came about through emergency reading of Mao Tse-tung on strategy, which in turn revealed that Mao had drawn many of his ideas (and even plagiarized) from an obscure ancient called Sun Tzu. More recently, when we found out that the North Vietnamese could fight, Sun Tzu again, so I am told, came into vogue with our military and diplomatic thinkers.

Liddell Hart speaks of this fourth century B.C. military theorist as having had a “clear vision” and “more profound insight” than Clausewitz. But our leaders' acquaintance with that vision and insight seems to have availed us little. “Know the enemy and know yourself,” said Sun Tzu — not Confucius nor John F. Kennedy — “and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.”