Trump is spending tomorrow’s security today

[BERLIN] The great theorists of war agreed that squandering one’s military power is the cardinal strategic sin. Sun Tzu, writing some 2,500 years ago, warned that an army that improvidently wastes its resources will collapse before the conflict is won. The people who sustain that army will be ruined along with it.

Likewise, Carl von Clausewitz insisted that a state’s fighting forces, its territory and its alliances should not all be expended at once, because the capacity to continue the struggle across time must be preserved.

Niccolo Machiavelli even counselled princes against forms of generosity that exhaust one’s resources, warning that a ruler who spends his military means on a single display of power without securing his position in the long run invites disaster.