Know Your Enemy
From the Houthis to DEI
Well over 2000 years ago, Sun Tzu wrote in The Art of War, “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” In contemporary Western society, we are obsessed with ourselves (which is not the same as knowing ourselves) but barely know what an enemy is, let alone who our enemies are and how they think. Our ignorance manifests itself from the heights of geopolitics to the lows of misplaced “allyship,” from placation of those who would kill us to sympathy toward those who wouldn’t shed a tear if we die.
An enemy, at the most extreme level of enmity, wants you dead. Rarely do they say so directly, because then you’ll know them for who they are and possibly strike them first. (The Art of War: “Knowing the enemy enables you to take the offensive.”) But some enemies are bold enough—and contemptuous enough of your willingness or ability to confront them—to nakedly parade their desires. For example, the official slogan of the Houthis, the theocratic Yemeni militia currently disrupting global shipping, is "God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” Consider it their inspirational equivalent to America’s “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
In early 2021, the Biden administration revoked the Houthis’ terrorist designations, which had blocked their access to the global financial system. In early 2024, as the Houthis attempted to put their words into action by seizing ships and lobbing missiles, the less severe of these designations was reimposed. In the interim, the Houthi slogan—an unambiguous statement of their guiding principles—remained unchanged. According to the New York Times, Secretary of State Antony Blinken “said the designation could be removed if the Houthis stopped their aggressive behavior.” How about also demanding they change their slogan, which might have something to do with that aggressive behavior?
In 1956, when Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev said, “We will bury you,” it was widely seen as a provocation to the West. In the twenty-first century, when a militia literally writes “Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews” on its flag, it’s widely seen as a euphemism. Of course, the Houthis are not a global superpower on the level of the Soviet Union. But all the more reason not to accept their genocidal aspirations, even if delusional, as the cost of doing business in the Middle East. We cannot go to war with everyone who wishes our death. But by not taking a death wish seriously, we show a disregard for our enemies that they will rightly interpret as a weakness to exploit.
In addition to those who want us dead, we should count as enemies those who are diametrically opposed to our interests. At the very least, we shouldn’t try to be their “allies.” At selective colleges in the US, in a bid to ensure campuses meet an equally selective definition of diversity (racial diversity: yes, socioeconomic diversity: no), Asian Americans have been held to a higher standard than applicants of other races. For example, Asian Americans admitted to Harvard had SAT scores roughly 120 points higher than blacks and 50 points higher than whites who were admitted. Perhaps most stingingly, Asian Americans consistently ranked lower on Harvard’s “personal ratings” system (which, not coincidentally, was originally designed to exclude Jews in an earlier era of social engineering).
For obvious reasons of self-interest and self-dignity, then, a majority of Asian Americans say race should not factor in college admissions decisions. Yet a sizable minority do support a system that says they have bad personalities and denigrates their achievements as a result of “white adjacency.” A New York Times article features a photo of Harvard students protesting in favor of affirmative action, including an Asian woman holding a “Defend Diversity” sign. Presumably, there wasn’t enough space for “Asians for Fewer Asian Students.” Perhaps she’s actually acting out of extreme selfishness: she got into Harvard already, so who cares about people of similar backgrounds who didn’t? But more likely, she’s being a good “ally” to what an Ivy League education doesn’t allow her to see are her enemies.
Then there are the left-wing Jews who were shocked when, on October 7, many progressive supposed allies celebrated or justified the slaughter of their people. Yet they should be thankful for the clarity that the depravity of those reactions provided. Just as the Houthi flag that says “A Curse Upon the Jews” leaves little room for interpretation, the Black Lives Matter graphic featuring a Hamas paraglider reveals where the extreme of that movement’s sympathies lie. The historic upward mobility (“privilege”) and ancestral European admixture (“whiteness”) of most (Ashkenazi) American Jews make them enemies of the illiberal left, no matter how many racial justice protests they attended or solidarity Shabbats they held. In a worldview that reduces complexity to white and black, oppressor and oppressed, they will always be on the wrong side of a false duality.
Carl Schmitt, the controversial (ie, he joined the Nazi party) political theorist, saw the friend-enemy distinction as the essence of politics. He observed that while “political thinkers are always aware of the concrete possibility of an enemy,” their realism can frighten the bourgeoisie, who don’t want to “leave the apolitical riskless private sphere.”1 For “as long as man is well off or willing to put up with things, he prefers the illusion of an undisturbed calm and does not endure pessimism.” Liberalism attempts to transform the enemy into a mere competitor (in the economic sphere) or a debating partner (in the intellectual sphere). But a refusal to distinguish friends from enemies doesn’t make enemies disappear; it simply blinds us to political reality and increases our vulnerability.
Schmitt himself was an enemy of liberal democracy, but an enemy who helps us to know ourselves better. And as Sun Tzu said, we must know ourselves and know our enemy to ensure victory. On the geopolitical level, we are reluctant to acknowledge the existence of enemies because we believe that inflammatory rhetoric must hide the universal desire for peace and economic prosperity (eg, the Houthis). On the sociopolitical level, we go against our own interests because we can’t imagine that “diversity” and “equity” could mask zero-sum gamesmanship and de facto racism (eg, Asian American supporters of affirmative action). And the two levels meet when we discover that social justice rhetoric can be an obfuscatory argument for what the Houthis lay out in simple terms: “Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews” (as progressive Jews saw on October 7).
For Schmitt, “The high points of politics are simultaneously the moments in which the enemy is, in concrete clarity, recognized as the enemy.” When we mistake Western values for human nature and progressive language for moral virtue, those moments are likely to take us by surprise. On days like September 11 and October 7, some of us were jolted into a political awakening (or reawakening) to the reality that there are far enemies who actively plot our deaths, and near enemies who would happily dance on our graves. But we must learn to recognize our enemies before they strike first. Otherwise we will be, as George Orwell wrote on the cusp of the Second World War, “sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England [or America, or Canada, or…], from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.”
Schmitt quotations are from The Concept of the Political (1932).