Salami biting wolves

 Claude finished the response

A wolf is more likely to succeed if it is sneaky and takes only a bit at a time.

Alexander the Great was generous to cities that surrendered without a fight and engaged in general slaughter and rape and enslavement and looting when there was resistance.  It worked, and he was able to take Asia Minor with only a few real sieges. (I have to wonder, though, if a more generous policy might have brought many to not defend as fiercely as they had less to lose). 

I don't think marching armies across the territory works at all in today's world.  It alerts politicians and the public to the presence of a wolf.  The wolf needs to take small bites, protested but not worth war over.

Some terrorist groups think the old brutality and fear tactic still works.  That was behind 9-11, which only served to give Bush the chance to invade Iraq and Afghanistan and destroy the group responsible.  At least for a couple of years the public understood the danger, but they don't like sacrifices and want them to stop.  A couple of years is about all a determined leader has before the clamor forces compromise with evil.

In other words, terrorism today is stupid.  It achieves very little if anything except alert the world to your presence.
6:29 AM

You're touching on some genuinely interesting strategic and historical threads here.

On Alexander — your counterpoint is actually well-supported by history. The cities that surrendered readily, like many in Ionia, often received considerable autonomy and favorable treatment, which encouraged further surrenders down the line. But the brutal examples — Tyre, Gaza, Persepolis (partially) — were partly theatrical, meant to signal costs. Whether a purely generous policy would have worked is debatable, since some resistance was driven by Persian pressure and loyalty rather than calculation about Alexander's behavior.

Your "small bites" observation about modern geopolitical aggression is essentially what strategists call salami tactics — the deliberate slicing of territory or influence in increments too small to individually justify a military response. The logic is sound: each bite is below the threshold of retaliation, but the cumulative effect is significant. We've seen this argued in relation to Russian behavior in eastern Ukraine before 2022, Chinese island-building in the South China Sea, and similar incremental moves. The problem for the "wolf" is that it requires sustained patience and discipline — and sometimes domestic audiences demand bolder moves.

On terrorism — you're essentially restating what many counterterrorism analysts concluded after 9/11. Spectacular mass-casualty attacks tend to be strategically self-defeating for non-state actors. They trigger responses that dwarf the original attack, they unify populations that might otherwise be indifferent, and they hand governments emergency powers. Smaller, persistent, lower-visibility pressure — the IRA's "long war" model, for instance — has historically achieved more political results than catastrophic spectacle.

The deeper irony you're pointing at is that visibility is the enemy of the predator. The wolf that announces itself gets hunted. The one that leaves you wondering whether anything is happening at all is far more dangerous.

Tyre resisted because they thought themselves safe.  Alexander had to accept a year's delay and huge cost.  I just have to wonder if he had been more patient and offered really generous terms and even partnership he might have gotten on better.  Of course that is not what happened so we have no way of deciding.
6:37 AM

You're right that Tyre was essentially an island fortress — they genuinely believed Alexander couldn't reach them, which made the negotiation dynamic completely different from a mainland city weighing costs and benefits. Their resistance wasn't purely about what Alexander might do to them if they lost; it was a calculated bet that he couldn't win at all. So generosity in terms offered might not have moved them regardless.

That said, your counterfactual is interesting. Alexander's genius was military and motivational, but his political imagination had limits. He did adopt Persian customs and tried to integrate Persian elites, which was actually quite sophisticated for a conqueror — and deeply unpopular with his Macedonian officers. But his instinct when facing defiance was almost always overwhelming force rather than creative diplomacy.

The partnership model you're suggesting has historical precedent in other contexts. Rome, at its most successful, was essentially offering a deal — submit, and you get Roman law, Roman roads, Roman markets, and eventually Roman citizenship. The carrot was genuinely valuable. That sustained an empire for centuries in a way pure fear never could have.

The fundamental problem with Alexander's situation at Tyre specifically is that he needed the port. It wasn't optional. A naval power at his rear, potentially allied with Persia, was an existential operational risk. So even if generous terms had somehow worked, he needed Tyre cooperative and controllable, not merely neutral. That may have narrowed his options more than his temperament did.

The unknowable question is whether Tyre's leadership would have recognized a genuinely good offer even if made. Besieged leaderships rarely do.

I would suggest 9/11 was at least partly a state actor using a client.  At least that is largely how it read, hence the Afghanistan war.
6:41 AM

You're touching on something that serious analysts have debated for decades without full resolution.

The Afghanistan connection was straightforward — the Taliban government was providing sanctuary and operational base to al-Qaeda, making them a legitimate target under any reasonable definition of state sponsorship, even if the relationship was more host-and-guest than director-and-agent.

The Saudi connection is considerably more uncomfortable. Fifteen of the nineteen hijackers were Saudi nationals. Bin Laden came from a prominent Saudi family. The financing trails led in directions the 28 redacted pages of the 9/11 Commission report — finally partially released in 2016 — suggested were awkward for U.S.-Saudi relations. Whether that represented state direction, factional support from within the Saudi government, or wealthy private actors operating with unofficial tolerance is still genuinely murky. The Saudis had their own reasons to want the U.S. entangled in the Middle East, and their own reasons to fear what al-Qaeda represented to the House of Saud's legitimacy.

Pakistan's ISI relationship with various militant groups adds another layer. The ISI had essentially created the Taliban, and their relationship with militant networks was notoriously ambiguous — sometimes directing, sometimes tolerating, sometimes genuinely losing control.

The "clean hands non-state actor" model of 9/11 was probably always somewhat simplified for public consumption. The operational reality of groups like al-Qaeda existing without any state actors finding them useful strains credibility.

What it means for responsibility and response is where it gets genuinely difficult.

My assertion was that terrorist acts are self-defeating; you reduce that somewhat to mass casualty terrorist acts.  I imagine that reduces to the principle of the wolf taking one victim at a time and hence not disturbing the flock that much.
6:46 AM

That's a fair and sharp distinction to draw back to your original point.

The IRA example actually illustrates it well. Their campaign was long, grinding, and kept below the threshold that would trigger overwhelming response or unify British public opinion into demanding total annihilation of the movement. It was painful enough to eventually bring the British government to the negotiating table, but never spectacular enough to make compromise politically impossible. The Good Friday Agreement would have been unthinkable after something like 9/11 in scale.

So your wolf principle generalizes quite elegantly across contexts — military, terrorist, geopolitical. The unifying logic is threshold management. Stay below the threshold of response that would be disproportionately damaging to you, while still accumulating meaningful gains. The moment you cross that threshold, you've handed your enemy both the justification and the public will to destroy you.

The paradox for terrorist or insurgent groups is that spectacular violence is often what attracts recruits, funding, and attention — their internal incentives push toward visibility while their strategic interests demand restraint. That internal contradiction probably explains a lot of historically self-defeating terrorist behavior. The people making operational decisions aren't always the same people thinking strategically, and dramatic action feels like progress even when it isn't.

The flock analogy extends further too — a flock that sees one member taken quietly may not even attribute it to a predator at all. Whereas a dramatic attack on several at once produces exactly the collective alarm response that makes the predator's continued hunting nearly impossible.


Claude is AI and can make mistakes. Please double-check responses.