The 33 Strategies of War

by Robert Greene

Understand: in any venture, your tendency to think in terms of winning or losing, success or failure, is dangerous. Your mind comes to a stop, instead of looking ahead. Emotions dominate the moment: a smug elation in winning, dejection and bitterness in losing. What you need is a more fluid and strategic outlook on life. Nothing ever really ends; how you finish something will influence and even determine what you do next. Some victories are negative—they lead nowhere—and some defeats are positive, working as a wake-up call or lesson. This fluid kind of thinking will force you to put more strategic emphasis on the quality and mood of the ending. It will make you look at your opponents and decide whether you might do better to be generous to them at the end, taking a step back and transforming them into allies, playing on the emotions of the moment. Keeping your eyes on the aftermath of any encounter, you will think more of the feeling you leave people with—a feeling that might translate into a desire to see more of you. By understanding that any victory or defeat is temporary, and that what matters is what you do with them, you will find it easier to keep yourself balanced during the thousands of battles that life entails. The only real ending is death. Everything else is a transition.

There are three kinds of people in the world. First, there are the dreamers and talkers, who begin their projects with a burst of enthusiasm. But this burst of energy quickly peters out as they encounter the real world and the hard work needed to bring any project to an end. They are emotional creatures who live mainly in the moment; they easily lose interest as something new grabs their attention. Their lives are littered with half-finished projects, including some that barely make it beyond a daydream. Then there are those who bring whatever they do to a conclusion, either because they have to or because they can manage the effort. But they cross the finish line with distinctly less enthusiasm and energy than they had starting out. This mars the end of the campaign. Because they are impatient to finish, the ending seems hurried and patched together. And it leaves other people feeling slightly unsatisfied; it is not memorable, does not last, has no resonance. Both of these types begin each project without a firm idea of how to end it. And as the project progresses, inevitably differing from what they had imagined it would be, they become unsure how to get out of it and either give up or simply rush to the end.

The third group comprises those who understand a primary law of power and strategy: the end of something—a project, a campaign, a conversation—has inordinate importance for people. It resonates in the mind. A war can begin with great fanfare and can bring many victories, but if it ends badly, that is all anyone remembers. Knowing the importance and the emotional resonance of the ending of anything, people of the third type understand that the issue is not simply finishing what they have started but finishing it well—with energy, a clear head, and an eye on the afterglow, the way the event will linger in people’s minds. These types invariably begin with a clear plan. When setbacks come, as setbacks will, they are able to stay patient and think rationally. They plan not just to the end but past it, to the aftermath. These are the ones who create things that last—a meaningful peace, a memorable work of art, a long and fruitful career.

The reason it is hard to end things well is simple: endings inspire overpowering emotions. At the end of a bitter conflict, we have a deep desire for peace, an impatience for the truce. If the conflict is bringing us victory, we often succumb to delusions of grandeur or are swept by greed and grab for more than we need. If the conflict has been nasty, anger moves us to finish with a violent, punitive strike. If we lose, we are left with a burning desire for revenge. Emotions like these can ruin all of our prior good work. There is in fact nothing harder in the realm of strategy than keeping our head on straight all the way to the end and past the end—yet nothing is more necessary.

The critical question in war is knowing when to stop, when to make your exit and come to terms. Stop too soon and you lose whatever you might have gained by advancing; you allow too little time for the conflict to show you where it is heading. Stop too late and you sacrifice your gains by exhausting yourself, grabbing more than you can handle, creating an angry and vengeful enemy.

Imagine that everything you do has a moment of perfection and fruition. Your goal is to end your project there, at such a peak. Succumb to tiredness, boredom, or impatience for the end and you fall short of that peak. Greed and delusions of grandeur will make you go too far. To conclude at this moment of perfection, you must have the clearest possible sense of your goals, of what you really want. You must also command an in-depth knowledge of your resources—how far can you practicably go? This kind of awareness will give you an intuitive feel for the culminating point.

Endings in purely social relationships demand a sense of the culminating point as much as those in war. A conversation or story that goes on too long always ends badly. Overstaying your welcome, boring people with your presence, is the deepest failing: you should leave them wanting more of you, not less. You can accomplish this by bringing the conversation or encounter to an end a moment before the other side expects it. Leave too soon and you may seem timid or rude, but do your departure right, at the peak of enjoyment and liveliness (the culminating point), and you create a devastatingly positive afterglow. People will still be thinking of you long after you are gone. In general, it is always best to end with energy and flair, on a high note.

Early in his term as president, John F. Kennedy embroiled the country in the Bay of Pigs fiasco, a failed invasion of Cuba. While he accepted full responsibility for the debacle, he did not overdo his apologies; instead he went to work on correcting the mistake, making sure it would not happen again. He kept his composure, showing remorse but also strength. In doing so he won public and political support that helped him immensely in his future fights.

Third, if you see that defeat is inevitable, it is often best to go down swinging. That way you end on a high note even as you lose. This helps to rally the troops, giving them hope for the future. At the Battle of the Alamo in 1836, every last American fighting the Mexican army died—but they died heroically, refusing to surrender. The battle became a rallying cry—“Remember the Alamo!”—and an inspired American force under Sam Houston finally defeated the Mexicans for good.

In a competitive world, deception is a vital weapon that can give you a constant advantage. You can use it to distract your opponents, send them on goose chases, waste valuable time and resources in defending attacks that never come.

An enemy that thinks it knows our size and intentions, and is unaware that it has been misled, will act on its false knowledge and commit all kinds of mistakes. It will move its men to fight an enemy that is not there. It will fight with shadows.

The appearance of weakness often brings out people’s aggressive side, making them drop strategy and prudence for an emotional and violent attack. When Napoleon found himself outnumbered and in a vulnerable strategic position before the Battle of Austerlitz, he deliberately showed signs of being panicked, indecisive, and scared. The enemy armies abandoned their strong position to attack him and rushed into a trap. It was his greatest victory.

Controlling the front you present to the world is the most critical deceptive skill. People respond most directly to what they see, to what is most visible to their eyes. If you seem clever—if you seem deceptive—their guard will be up and it will be impossible to mislead them. Instead you need to present a front that does the opposite—disarms suspicions. The best front here is weakness, which will make the other side feel superior to you, so that they either ignore you (and being ignored is very valuable at times) or are baited into an aggressive action at the wrong moment. Once it is too late, once they are committed, they can find out the hard way that you are not so weak after all.

The camouflage strategy can be applied to daily life in two ways. First, it is always good to be able to blend into the social landscape, to avoid calling attention to yourself unless you choose to do so. When you talk and act like everyone else, mimicking their belief systems, when you blend into the crowd, you make it impossible for people to read anything particular in your behavior. (Appearances are all that count here—dress and talk like a businessman and you must be a businessman.) That gives you great room to move and plot without being noticed. Like a grasshopper on a leaf, you cannot be picked from your context—an excellent defense in times of weakness. Second, if you are preparing an attack of some sort and begin by blending into the environment, showing no sign of activity, your attack will seem to come out of nowhere, doubling its power.

The use of the unconventional can startle and give you an advantage, but it does not often create a sense of terror. What will bring you ultimate power in this strategy is to follow the Windigokan and adapt a kind of randomness that goes beyond rational processes, as if you were possessed by a spirit of nature. Do this all the time and you’ll be locked up, but do it right, dropping hints of the irrational and random at the opportune moment, and those around you will always have to wonder what you’ll do next. You will inspire a respect and fear that will give you great power. An ordinary appearance spiced by a touch of divine madness is more shocking and alarming than an out-and-out crazy person. Remember: your madness, like Hamlet’s, must be strategic. Real madness is all too predictable.

Understand: you cannot win wars without public and political support, but people will balk at joining your side or cause unless it seems righteous and just.

Once you realize you are under attack by a moral warrior using the exterior maneuver, it is vital to keep control of your emotions. If you complain or lash out angrily, you just look defensive, as if you had something to hide. The moral warrior is being strategic; the only effective response is to be strategic, too. Even if you know that your cause is just, you can never assume that the public sees it the same way. Appearances and reputation rule in today’s world; letting the enemy frame these things to its liking is akin to letting it take the most favorable position on the battlefield. Once the fight for moral terrain has begun, you must fight to occupy the high ground in the same way you would in a shooting war.

To succeed, Adams had to resort to exaggeration, picking out and emphasizing the cases in which the English were heavy-handed. His was not a balanced picture; he ignored the ways in which the English had treated the colonies rather well. His goal was not to be fair but to spark a war, and he knew that the colonists would not fight unless they saw the war as just and the British as evil. In working to spoil your enemy’s moral reputation, do not be subtle. Make your language and distinctions of good and evil as strong as possible; speak in terms of black and white. It is hard to get people to fight for a gray area.

In general, in a conflict that is potentially nasty, in which you are certain the enemy will resort to almost anything, it is best that you go on the offensive with your moral campaign and not wait for their attacks. Poking holes in the other side’s reputation is easier than defending your own. The more you stay on the offensive, the more you can distract the public from your own deficiencies and faults—and faults are inevitable in war. If you are physically and militarily weaker than your enemy, all the more reason to mount an exterior maneuver. Move the battle to the moral terrain, where you can hamstring and beat a stronger foe.

The best defense against moral warriors is to give them no target. Live up to your good name; practice what you preach, at least in public; ally yourself with the most just causes of the day. Make your opponents work so hard to undermine your reputation that they seem desperate, and their attacks blow up in their faces. If you have to do something nasty and not in harmony with your stated position or public image, use a cat’s-paw—some agent to act for you and hide your role in the action. If that is not possible, think ahead and plan a moral self-defense. At all costs avoid actions that carry the taint of hypocrisy.

Wars are most often fought out of self-interest: a nation goes to war to protect itself against an invading, or potentially dangerous, enemy or to seize a neighbor’s land or resources. Morality is sometimes a component in the decision—in a holy war or crusade, for example—but even here self-interest usually plays a role; morality is often just a cover for the desire for more territory, more riches, more power.

It is human nature to not be able to endure any kind of void. We hate silence, long stretches of inactivity, loneliness. (Perhaps this is related to our fear of that final void, our own death.) We have to fill and occupy empty space. By giving people nothing to hit, being as vaporous as possible, you play upon this human weakness. Infuriated at the absence not just of a fight but of any kind of interaction at all, people will tend to chase madly after you, losing all power of strategic thought. It is the elusive side, no matter how weak or small its force, that controls the dynamic. The bigger the enemy, the better this strategy works: struggling to reach you, the oversize opponent presents juicy targets for you to hit. To create the maximum psychological disturbance, you must make your attacks small but relentless, keeping your enemy’s anger and frustration at a constant boil. Make your void complete: empty negotiations, talks leading nowhere, time passing without either victory or defeat. In a world of accelerated pace and activity, this strategy will have a powerfully debilitating effect on people’s nerves. The less they can hit, the harder they will fall.

Most wars are wars of contact, both forces striving to keep in touch…. The Arab war should be a war of detachment: to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing themselves till the moment of attack…. From this theory came to be developed ultimately an unconscious habit of never engaging the enemy at all. This chimed with the numerical plea of never giving the enemy’s soldier a target. —T. E. Lawrence, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)

supply. It may take several battles to end the war, as each side works to dominate the key positions that will give it control of the theater, but military leaders must try to end it as quickly as possible. The longer it drags on, the more the army’s resources are stretched to a breaking point where the ability to fight collapses. Soldiers’ morale declines with time as well. As with any human activity, however, this positive, orderly side generates a negative, shadow side that contains its own form of power and reverse logic. The shadow side is guerrilla warfare. The rudiments of guerrilla warfare originated thousands of years ago, when smaller nations found themselves invaded by more powerful neighbors; to survive, their armies were forced to flee the invader, for any direct engagement would have destroyed them. It soon became clear that the longer they fled and eluded battle, the more they ruined the enemy’s strategies and confused it by not conforming to the usual logic of engagement.

The word “guerrilla”—“small war” in Spanish—was coined in reference to the Peninsular War of 1808–14, which began when Napoleon invaded Spain. Melting into their country’s mountains and inhospitable terrain, the Spaniards tortured the French, making it impossible for them to profit from their superior numbers and weaponry. Napoleon was bedeviled by an enemy that attacked without forming a front or rear.

The power of guerrilla warfare is essentially psychological. In conventional warfare everything converges on the engagement of two armies in battle. That is what all strategy is devised for and what the martial instinct requires as a kind of release from tension. By postponing this natural convergence indefinitely, the guerrilla strategist creates intense frustration. The longer this mental corrosion continues, the more debilitating it gets. Napoleon lost to the Russians because his strategic bearings were pushed off course; his mind fell before his army did.

The primary consideration should always be whether a guerrilla-style campaign is appropriate for the circumstances you are facing. It is especially effective, for instance, against an opponent who is aggressive yet clever—a man like Napoleon. These types cannot stand lack of contact with an enemy. They live to maneuver, outwit, and outhit. Having nothing to strike at neutralizes their cleverness, and their aggression becomes their downfall. It is interesting to note that this strategy works in love as well as in war and that here, too, Napoleon was its victim: it was by a guerrilla-style seduction—by enticing him to chase her, giving tantalizing lures but offering him nothing solid to grasp—that Empress Josephine made him her slave.

Once you have determined that a guerrilla war is appropriate, take a look at the army you will use. A large, conventional army is never suitable; fluidity and the ability to strike from many angles are what counts. The organizational model is the cell—a relatively small group of men and women, tight-knit, dedicated, self-motivated, and spread out. These cells should penetrate the enemy camp itself. This was how Mao Tse-tung organized his army in the Chinese Revolution, infiltrating the Nationalist side, causing sabotage in the cities, leaving the deceptive and terrifying impression that his men were everywhere.

Remember: this war is psychological. It is more on the level of strategy than anything else that you give the enemy nothing to hold on to, nothing tangible to counter. It is the enemies’ minds that are grasping at air and their minds that fall first.

A common mistake is to think that the more allies we have, the better; but quality is more important than quantity. Having numerous allies increases the chances we will become entangled in other people’s wars. Going to the other extreme, we sometimes think a single powerful ally is all we need; but allies like that tend to get what they can from us and then drop us when our usefulness is exhausted, just as Louis dropped the Swiss. It is in any case a mistake to become dependent on one person. Finally, we sometimes choose those who seem the friendliest, who we think will be loyal. Our emotions lead us astray.

Bowen’s strategy in the experiment he conducted on his family was simple: he would make it impossible for any family member to make him take sides or hook him into any kind of alliance. He would also deliberately cause an emotional tempest to break up the stale family dynamic, particularly targeting June and his mother, that dynamic’s centrifugal forces. He would make his family see things anew by getting them to talk about personal matters rather than avoiding them. He would work on himself to stay calm and rational, squelching any desire either to please or to run away from confrontation. And in the midst of this experiment, Bowen experienced an unbelievable feeling of lightness—a near euphoria.

He could engage, argue, and banter without either regressing into childish tantrums or striving to be falsely agreeable. The more he dealt with the family this way, the easier it became.

His refusal to take sides made it easier to open up to him.

No one can get far in life without allies. The trick, however, is to recognize the difference between false allies and real ones. A false alliance is created out of an immediate emotional need. It requires that you give up something essential about yourself and makes it impossible for you to make your own decisions. A true alliance is formed out of mutual self-interest, each side supplying what the other cannot get alone. It does not require you to fuse your own identity with that of a group or pay attention to everyone else’s emotional needs. It allows you autonomy.

The first step is to understand that all of us constantly use other people to help and advance ourselves. (Bowen went so far as to use his own family in an experiment to solve a professional dilemma.) There is no shame in this, no need to ever feel guilty. Nor should we take it personally when we realize that someone else is using us; using people is a human and social necessity. Next, with this understanding in mind, you must learn to make these necessary alliances strategic ones, aligning yourself with people who can give you something you cannot get on your own. This requires that you resist the temptation to let your decisions about alliances be governed by your emotions; your emotional needs are what your personal life is for, and you must leave them behind when you enter the arena of social battle. The alliances that will help you most are those involving mutual self-interest. 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.

It is a common strategy in bicycle races not to go out in front but to stay right behind the leader, a position that cuts down wind resistance—the leader faces the wind for you and saves you energy. At the last minute, you sprint ahead. Letting other people cut resistance for you and waste their energy on your behalf is the height of economy and strategy.

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. But the mask is like the scar tissue covering a wound: touch it the wrong way and it hurts. Your victims’ responses start to go out of control: they complain, act defensive and paranoid, or show the arrogance they try so hard to conceal. For a moment the mask falls.

Begin by doing something to prick the underlying wound, creating doubt, insecurity, and anxiety. It might be an offhand comment or something that your victims sense as a challenge to their position within the court. Your goal is not to challenge them blatantly, though, but to get under their skin: they feel attacked but are not sure why or how. The result is a vague, troubling sensation. A feeling of inferiority creeps in.

You will often come across McClernands in your daily battles—people who are outwardly charming but treacherous behind the scenes. It does no good to confront them directly; they are proficient at the political game. But a subtle one-up campaign can work wonders. Your goal is to get these rivals to put their ambition and selfishness on display. The way to do this is to pique their latent but powerful insecurities—make them worry that people do not like them, that their position is unstable, that their path to the top is not clear. Perhaps, like Grant, you can take action that thwarts their plans in some way while hiding your own beneath a veneer of politeness. You are making them feel defensive and disrespected. All the dark, ugly emotions they strive so hard to hide will boil up to the surface; they will tend to lash out, over-playing their hand. Work to make them grow emotional and lose their habitual cool. The more they reveal of themselves, the more they will alienate other people, and isolation will be their doom.

The worst colleagues and comrades are often the ones with inflated egos, who think everything they do is right and worthy of praise. Subtle mockery and disguised parody are brilliant ways of one-upping these types. You seem to be complimenting them, your style or ideas even imitating theirs, but the praise has a sting in its tail: Are you imitating them to poke fun at them? Does your praise hide criticism? These questions get under their skin, making them vaguely insecure about themselves. Maybe you think they have faults—and maybe that opinion is widely shared. You have disturbed their high sense of self, and they will tend to respond by overreacting and overplaying their hand. This strategy works particularly well on those who fancy themselves powerful intellectuals and who are impossible to best in any kind of argument. By quoting their words and ideas back at them in slightly grotesque form, you neutralize their verbal strengths and leave them self-doubting and insecure.

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. A subtle comment that makes them self-conscious and gets under their skin will turn them inward, get them lost in the labyrinth of their own thoughts. A seemingly innocent action that stirs an emotion like frustration, anger, or impatience will equally cloud their vision. In both cases they will tend to misfire and start making mistakes. This works particularly well against rivals who must perform in some way—deliver a speech, say, or present a project: the fixating thought or bad emotion you create in them makes them lose touch with the moment and messes up their timing. Do this right, too, and no one will be aware of your involvement in the bad performance, not even the rival you have one-upped.

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

Lee Atwater believed that adults could be divided into two groups: the overly mature and the childlike. The overly mature are inflexible and overserious, making them highly vulnerable in politics, particularly in the age of television. Dole was clearly the mature type, Atwater the child.

If someone else tells a funny story, do not, whatever happens, tell your own funny story in reply, but listen intently and not only refrain from laughing or smiling, but make no response, change of expression or movement whatever. The teller of the funny story, whatever the nature of his joke, will then suddenly feel that what he has said is in bad taste. Press home your advantage.

The easiest types to one-up are those who are rigid. Being rigid does not necessarily mean being humorless or charmless, but it does mean being intolerant of anything that breaks their code of acceptable behavior. Being the target of some anarchic or unconventional antic will trigger an overreaction that makes them look sour, vindictive, unleaderlike. The calm exterior of the mature adult is momentarily blown away, revealing something rather peevish and puerile.

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 maneuver. That gives you the double delight of showing you are no one to mess with and inflicting a wound that sticks around. As they say, revenge is a dish best served cold.

The truth is that most people are conservative by nature. Desperate to keep what they have, they dread the unforeseen consequences and situations that conflict inevitably brings. They hate confrontation and try to avoid it. (That is why so many people resort to passive aggression to get what they want.) You must always remember this fact of human nature as you plot your way through life. It is also the foundation for any fait accompli strategy.

Only nibble at what you want and you never spark enough anger, fear, or mistrust to make people overcome their natural reluctance to fight. Let enough time pass between bites and you will also play to the shortness of people’s attention spans.

In interviews Hitchcock often told a story about his childhood: When he was around six, his father, upset at something he had done, sent him to the local police station with a note. The officer on duty read the note and locked little Alfred in a cell, telling him, “This is what we do to naughty boys.” He was released after just a few minutes, but the experience marked him indelibly. Had his father yelled at him, as most boys’ fathers did, he would have become defensive and rebellious. But leaving him alone, surrounded by frightening authority figures, in a dark cell, with its unfamiliar smells—that was a much more powerful way to communicate. As Hitchcock discovered, to teach people a lesson, to really alter their behavior, you must alter their experience, aim at their emotions, inject unforgettable images into their minds, shake them up. Unless you are supremely eloquent, it is hard to accomplish this through words and direct expression. There are simply too many people talking at us, trying to persuade us of this or that. Words become part of this noise, and we either tune them out or become even more resistant. To communicate in a deep and real way, you must bring people back to their childhood, when they were less defensive and more impressed by sounds, images, actions, a world of preverbal communication. It requires speaking a kind of language composed of actions, all strategically designed to effect people’s moods and emotions, what they can least control. That is pr...

The success of the Socratic method was staggering: a whole generation of young Athenians fell under his spell and were permanently altered by his teachings. The most famous of these was Plato, who spread Socrates’ ideas as if they were gospel. And Plato’s influence over Western thought is perhaps greater than that of anyone else. Socrates’ method was highly strategic. He began by tearing himself down and building others up, a way of defusing his listeners’ natural defensiveness, imperceptibly lowering their walls. Then he would lure them into a labyrinth of discussion from which they could find no exit and in which everything they believed was questioned. 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.