Why foreign policy strikes must land hard

AMERICAN poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson has this bit of advice for the proverbial political leader planning to confront a rival: "When you strike at a king, you must kill him."

Put it in simpler terms, if one is striking at an opponent, one should make sure that the fatal blow is struck, thus ending the confrontation.

Niccolò Machiavelli, the infamous Italian political philosopher, wrote 300 years earlier in his classic, The Prince: "Never do an enemy a small injury," because "the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one does not stand in fear of revenge".