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March 2 - June 21, 2025
When you look for an ally, you have a need, an interest you want met. This is a practical, strategic matter upon which your success depends. If you allow emotions and appearances to infect the kinds of alliances you form, you are in danger. The art of forming alliances depends on your ability to separate friendship from need.
Alliances infected with emotions, or with ties of loyalty and friendship, are nothing but trouble. Being strategic with your alliances will also keep you from the bad entanglements that are the undoing of so many.
To play the Alliance Game right, today as in ancient China, you must be realistic to the core, thinking far ahead and keeping the situation as fluid as possible. The ally of today may be the enemy of tomorrow. Sentiment has no place in the picture. If you are weak but clever, you can slowly leapfrog into a position of strength by bouncing from one alliance to another.
Crawford would also court cameramen and photographers, who would then work overtime to light her well and make her look good. She might do the same with a producer who controlled a screenplay with a role in it she coveted. Crawford would often make alliances with up-and-coming young talent who valued a relationship with the star.
The key to playing the game is to recognize who can best advance your interests at that moment. This need not be the most obviously powerful person on the scene, the person who seems to be able to do most for you; alliances that meet specific needs or answer particular deficiencies are often more useful. (Grand alliances between two great powers are generally the least effective.)
Slowly, from being a poor kid from Texas with no connections, Johnson raised himself to the top, through his network of convenient alliances.
One of the best stratagems in the Alliance Game is to begin by seeming to help another person in some cause or fight, only for the purpose of furthering your own interests in the end. It is easy to find such people: they have a glaring need, a temporary weakness that you can help them to overcome.
when Austria was at its weakest and Metternich had to cozy up to the French, he kept his country free of lasting entanglements. Without bonding Austria to France by any legal alliance, for example, he tied Napoleon to him emotionally by arranging for the emperor to marry into the Austrian royal family. Keeping all of the great powers—England, France, Russia—at arm’s length, he made everything revolve around Austria, even though Austria itself was no longer a great military power.
When Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico in 1519, he faced hundreds of thousands of Aztecs with 500 men. Knowing that many smaller Mexican tribes resented the powerful Aztec Empire, he slowly worked to peel them away from their alliances with the Aztecs. By filling a tribal leader’s ears with horrible stories about the Aztec emperor’s plans, for example, he might bait the man into arresting the Aztec envoys on their next visit. That of course would infuriate the emperor, and now the tribe would be isolated and in danger—and would appeal to Cortés for protection. On and on Cortés went with this
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In facing an enemy that is composed of allies, no matter how large or formidable, do not be afraid. As Napoleon said, “Give me allies to fight.” In war, allies generally have problems of command and control. The worst kind of leadership is divided leadership; compelled to debate and agree before they act, allied generals usually move like snails.
Beware of sentimental alliances where the consciousness of good deeds is the only compensation for noble sacrifices. —Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898)
People’s personalities often form around weaknesses, character flaws, uncontrollable emotions. People who feel needy, or who have a superiority complex, or are afraid of chaos, or desperately want order, will develop a personality—a social mask—to cover up their flaws and make it possible for them to present a confident, pleasant, responsible exterior to the world.
For a samurai, losing a duel could mean death or public humiliation. Swordsmen sought out any advantage—physical dexterity, a superior sword, the perfect technique—to avoid that fate. But the greatest samurais, the Bokudens and Musashis, sought their advantage in being able to subtly push the opponent off his game, messing with his mind.
Understand: what will yield the greatest effects in the game of one-upmanship is a subtle disturbance in your opponents’ mood and mind-set. Be too direct—make an insulting comment, an obvious threat—and you wake them to the danger you represent, stir their competitive juices, bring out the best in them. Instead you want to bring out the worst.
Silence.—The way of replying to a polemical attack the most unpleasant for both parties is to get annoyed and stay silent: for the attacker usually interprets the silence as a sign of contempt. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, 1844–1900
A Hollywood actress has to be thick-skinned, and Joan Crawford was the quintessence of the Hollywood actress: she had a huge capacity to absorb and deal with insults and disrespect. Whenever she could, though, she plotted to get the last laugh on her various nemeses, leaving them humiliated.
You will often find yourself nursing the desire to revenge yourself on those who have mistreated you. The temptation is to be direct, to say something honest and mean, to let people know how you feel— but words are ineffective here. A verbal spat lowers you to the other person’s level and often leaves you with a bad feeling. The sweeter revenge is an action that gives you the last laugh, leaving your victims with a sense of vague but corrosive inferiority. Provoke them into exposing a hidden, unpleasant side to their character, steal their moment of glory—but make this the battle’s last
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Churchill had admired his courage and resolution at that difficult moment, but de Gaulle was a strange fellow. At the age of fifty, he had a somewhat undistinguished military record and could hardly be considered an important political figure. But he always acted as if he were at the center of things. And here he was now, presenting himself as the man who could help rescue France, although many other Frenchmen could be considered more suitable for the role.
Those BBC broadcasts that had started out so innocently were now listened to avidly by millions of Frenchmen. Through Moulin, de Gaulle had gained almost complete control of the French Resistance; a break with de Gaulle would put the Allies’ relationship with the Resistance in jeopardy.
Had de Gaulle announced his intentions, he would have been seen as a dangerous mix of delusion and ambition. And had he grabbed for power too quickly, he would have shown those intentions. Instead, supremely patient and with an eye on his goal, he took one small bite at a time. The first bite—always the most important—was to gain himself public exposure with first one BBC broadcast, then, through clever maneuvering, an ongoing series.
When Churchill and Roosevelt realized how far he had insinuated himself into the Resistance, and into the minds of the British and American publics as France’s destined postwar leader, it was too late to stop him. His preeminence was a fait accompli.
If your bites are too big, you will take on more than you are ready for and find yourself overwhelmed by problems; if you bite too fast, other people will see what you are up to. Let the passage of time masterfully disguise your intentions and give you the appearance of someone of modest ambition. By the time your rivals wake up to what you have consumed, they risk being consumed themselves if they stand in your way.
Ambition can creep as well as soar. —Edmund Burke (1729–1797)
The key to the fait accompli strategy is to act fast and without discussion. If you reveal your intentions before taking action, you will open yourself to a slew of criticisms, analyses, and questions: “How dare you think of taking that bite! Be happy with what you have!” It is part of people’s conservatism to prefer endless discussion to action.
The problem that many of us face is that we have great dreams and ambitions. Caught up in the emotions of our dreams and the vastness of our desires, we find it very difficult to focus on the small, tedious steps usually necessary to attain them. We tend to think in terms of giant leaps toward our goals. But in the social world as in nature, anything of size and stability grows slowly. The piecemeal strategy is the perfect antidote to our natural impatience: it focuses us on something small and immediate, a first bite, then how and where a second bite can get us closer to our ultimate
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Profound. To attain my goal of becoming a rock guitarist I should use this strategy.
A very patient man, Hitchcock let his power plays unfold over time, so that producer, writer, and stars understood the completeness of his domination only when the film was finished.
In fact, it would be the height of wisdom to make your bite a little larger upon occasion and then giving back some of what you have taken. People see only your generosity and your limited actions, not the steadily increasing empire you are amassing.
According to the actress Thelma Ritter, “If Hitchcock liked what you did, he said nothing. If he didn’t, he looked like he was going to throw up.” And yet somehow, in his own indirect way, he would get his actors to do precisely what he wanted.
Hitchcock returned in the afternoon—he had found the key. Shooting began, but as the actors went to work, it was hard for them to get over the experience of that day; the movie stars’ usual cool unflappability was gone. Carroll had forgotten all her ideas about how to play the scene. And yet, despite her and Donat’s anger, the scene seemed to flow with unexpected naturalness. Now they knew what it was like to be tied together; they had felt the awkwardness, so there was no need to act it. It came from within.
Clearly Hitchcock mistrusted language and explanation, preferring action to words as a way of communicating, and this preference extended to the form and content of his films. That gave his screenwriters a particularly hard time; after all, putting the film into words was their job. In story meetings Hitchcock would discuss the ideas he was interested in—themes like people’s doubleness, their capacity for both good and evil, the fact that no one in this world is truly innocent.
Even more foolish is one who clings to words and phrases and thus tries to achieve understanding. It is like trying to strike the moon with a stick, or scratching a shoe because there is an itchy spot on the foot. It has nothing to do with the Truth. ZEN MASTER MUMON, 1183–1260
The Prince and The Discourses remained unpublished, but they circulated in manuscript among the leaders and politicians of Italy. Their audience was small, and when Machiavelli died in 1527, the former secretary to the republic seemed destined to return to the obscurity from which he came.
Published in several languages in the decades after Machiavelli’s death, The Prince slowly spread far and wide. As the centuries passed, it took on a life of its own, in fact a double life: widely condemned as amoral, yet avidly read in private by great political figures down the ages. The French minister Cardinal Richelieu made it a kind of political bible. Napoleon consulted it often. The American president John Adams kept it by his bedside. With the help of Voltaire, the Prussian king Frederick the Great wrote a tract called The Anti-Machiavel, yet he shamelessly practiced many of
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Over the centuries millions upon millions of readers have used Ma-chiavelli’s books for invaluable advice on power. But could it possibly be the opposite—that it is Machiavelli who has been using his readers? Scattered through his writings and through his letters to his friends, some of them uncovered centuries after his death, are signs that he pondered deeply the strategy of writing itself and the power he could wield after his death by infiltrating his ideas indirectly and deeply into his readers’ minds, transforming them into unwitting disciples of his amoral philosophy.
To Machiavelli the ultimate good was a world of dynamic change in which cities or republics were reordering and revitalizing themselves in perpetual motion. The greatest evil was stagnation and complacency. The agents of healthy change were what he called “new princes”—young, ambitious people, part lion, part fox, conscious or unconscious enemies of the established order. Second, Machiavelli analyzed the process by which new princes rose to the heights of power and, often, fell from it. Certain patterns were clear: the need to manage appearances, to play upon people’s belief systems, and
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He left his writing open-ended, never telling people exactly what to do. They must use their own ideas and experiences with power to fill in his writing, becoming complicit partners in the text. Through these various devices, Machiavelli gained power over his readers while disguising the nature of his manipulations. It is hard to resist what you cannot see.
Understand: you may have brilliant ideas, the kind that could revolutionize the world, but unless you can express them effectively, they will have no force, no power to enter people’s minds in a deep and lasting way. You must focus not on yourself or on the need you feel to express what you have to say but on your audience—as intently as a general focuses on the enemy he is strategizing to defeat.
For some time I have never said what I believed, and never believed what I said, and if I do sometimes happen to say what I think, I always hide it among so many lies that it is hard to recover it. — Niccolò Machiavelli, letter to Francesco Guicciardini (1521)
An event occurs that shakes us up emotionally, breaks up our usual patterns of looking at the world, and has a lasting impact on us. Something we read or hear from a great teacher makes us question what we know, causes us to meditate on the issue at hand, and in the process changes how we think.
According to Alcibiades, one of the young men whom Socrates had bewitched, you never knew what he really believed or what he really meant; everything he said was a rhetorical stance, was ironic. And since you were unsure what he was doing, what came to the surface in these conversations were your own confusion and doubt. He altered your experience of the world from within.
When the famous Roman lawyer and orator Cicero wanted to defame the character of someone he was prosecuting, he would not accuse or rant; instead he would mention details from the life of the accused—the incredible luxury of his home (was it paid for out of illegal means?), the lavishness of his parties, the style of his dress, the little signs that he considered himself superior to the average Roman.
One of Machiavelli’s most revolutionary ideas was to apply this standard to politics: what matters is not what people say or intend but the results of their actions, whether power is increased or decreased. This is what Machiavelli called the “effective truth”—the real truth, in other words, what happens in fact, not in words or theories.
Authority: I cannot give birth to wisdom myself and the accusation that many make against me, that while I question others, I myself bring nothing wise to light due to my lack of wisdom, is accurate. The reason for this is as follows: God forces me to serve as a midwife and prevents me from giving birth. —Socrates (470–399 B.C.)
The results of Canaris’s work from the inside are astounding: one man played a major role in saving England, Spain, and Italy from disaster, arguably turning the tide of the war. The resources of the German war machine were essentially at his disposal, to disrupt and derail its efforts.
Salvador Dalí was an extremely ambitious man. Although he appeared eccentric to say the least, his diaries show the extent to which he applied strategy to get what he wanted. Languishing in Spain early on in his career, he saw the importance of capturing the Paris art world, the center of the modern-art movement, if he were to rise to the heights of fame. And if he were to make it in Paris, his name would have to be attached to some kind of movement—that would demonstrate his avant-garde status and give him free publicity.
Considering the nature of his work and paranoiac-critical method, surrealism was the only logical choice.
What is surrealism?
The surrealists were grateful for the new life he had given them, but in reality he was using their name and presence to propel his career. Then, once his fame was secure, he proceeded to dynamite the group from the inside.
If you decide to wage a war for the total triumph of your individuality, you must begin by inexorably destroying those who have the greatest affinity with you. —Salvador Dalí (1904–1989)
Yet the North Vietnamese were somehow able to take the Citadel with remarkable ease. They held it for several weeks, then disappeared from Hue as if by magic after a massive U.S. counterattack. The Citadel was unimportant to them as a physical or strategic possession; what they were after was the symbolism of being able to take it, showing the world that American invincibility was a myth.
the lotus strategist thinks first of opening an inner front. Confederates on the inside will provide valuable intelligence on the enemy’s vulnerabilities. They will silently and subtly sabotage him. They will spread internal dissension and division. The strategy can weaken the enemy to the point where you can finish him off with a penetrating blow; it can also bring down the enemy in and of itself.
