What Would Sun Tzu Say About War with Iran?

What I’m paying attention to

John Spencer, Executive Director of the Urban Warfare Institute, writing on his Substack, 4 April 2026. Read the full piece here. Follow Spencer on X at @SpencerGuard.

What it says

Sun Tzu is one of the most quoted and least understood strategists in history. Spencer’s contribution is to strip away the slogans and explain what the framework actually says – and why it has endured. The core is a hierarchy: attack the enemy’s strategy first, disrupt their alliances second, engage their army third. Ground assault is explicitly the last resort – slow, expensive, and the most likely path to protracted war. Spencer applies this directly to the current US-Israeli-Iran conflict, and the parallel holds. The campaign as constructed – air strikes, proxy degradation, economic pressure – follows the logic. The objective, behavior change rather than regime change, is coherent.

Why I’m paying attention

What concerns me is the gap between that coherent strategy and the shifting language around it. Sun Tzu is explicit: ambiguity directed at the enemy can be a pressure tool. Ambiguity within your own command structure is how campaigns unravel. The danger here is not the current approach – it is objective creep. The moment boots on the ground enter the frame, the US steps outside Sun Tzu’s hierarchy entirely, into the one condition he warned against most clearly: prolonged war with no defined exit. Trump’s rhetoric has been moving in that direction. Spencer’s framework makes the risk precise.

Filed under: Geopolitics, Risk