(5) HAVE OTHERS DO THE FIGHTING FOR YOU

 

It’s simple – sit back while others do the fighting for you.

This essentially comes in two versions. There’s the adversarial version, in which you sit back while your adversaries or rivals destroy or exhaust themselves fighting each other, although that’s often as much a matter of good luck as good strategy. One reason for the Islamic conquest of the Sassanid Persian empire and (much of) the eastern Roman empire is that they were exhausted from decades (or centuries) slugging it out against each other like glazed-eyed punch-drunk boxers.

Alternatively, there’s the allied version, which is much the same except you sit back while your allies bear the brunt of the fighting, although typically you’ll have to finance or supply them or at least do some cheerleading.

 

USA! USA! USA!

 

Again, one has to admit that, through good luck or good strategy, this is kind of how the United States has won its bigger wars. Perhaps its biggest war, at least in terms of the disparity with its adversary, was the American Revolution, so it was just as well France fought it for them – not just France but Spain and the Netherlands as well, in what was essentially a world war against Britain.

The sequel War of 1812 was somewhat similar, as the United States was mostly a distraction from Britain’s main concern with, in the words of H. L. Mencken, “an enterprising Corsican gentleman, Bonaparte by name”.

The world wars were even more of the same. The United States entered the First World War at the tail end of it, when every other combatant was exhausted by years of fighting, with far fewer casualties as a result. In the Second World War, it came in about halfway, but it was the Soviet Union that did most of the fighting against Germany, as well as most of the dying – about 27 MILLION dead as opposed to about 420,000 dead for the United States. So yeah, it was more like saving Private Ivan.

The biggest exception to the rule was the war it fought against itself, the American Civil War, which is why it involved the most casualties of any American war.

Again, like most things, there’s a catch. The adversarial version needs good judgment – in correctly judging that your adversaries will destroy each other, rather than one defeating the other and becoming stronger or more dangerous to you as a result. The allied version on the other hand has a problem all its own – namely that your uppity allies, having done the fighting, might think that they should do the winning as well.

Once again, the United States has excelled at putting an end to this crap. France went broke from its spending in the American Revolution and had a revolution of its own, while Spain had similar problems (and lost its American colonies). The Napoleonic wars took center stage in the War of 1812. Virtually everyone was exhausted, broke and owed money to the United States or swallowed up by revolution or civil war at the end of the First World War.

The biggest exception was the Second World War, with the Soviet Union claiming its spoils of victory. It just took a bit longer – and the United States winning the Cold War by making money – for them to be exhausted and broke as well.