Asymmetric Strategies as Strategies of the Strong

Abstract

O ne needs merely to wade into the shallow waters of today's deepest debates over American foreign policy to stub one's toe against the notion of asymmetric strategies. Like the very strategies that it describes, the concept often seems frustratingly amorphous yet disturbingly omnipresent—and, most importantly, distinctly threatening to the United States. 1 This article takes the notion of asymmetric strategy seriously but re-conceptualizes it in a crucial way. The article questions the persistent iden-tification of asymmetric strategies as strategies of the weak, instead revealing the many ways in which asymmetric strategies are becoming strategies of the increasingly strong. Consequently, the article also rejects the notion that asym-metric strategies can be deployed only against the United States, and aims to stimulate thinking about ways in which asymmetric strategies might be adopted for use by the United States. In the end, the article concludes that the American foreign policy community should cease thinking of asymmetric strategies as the exclusive province of weak nonstate actors and, instead, should conceive of such strategies as even more important when intelligently wielded by strong state actors—including America itself. The first part of the article isolates a definition of asymmetric strategy that, unlike many definitions proposed previously, defines such strategies inde-pendently of the actors that execute them: asymmetric strategies transform an adversary's perceived strength into a vulnerability, often by revealing one's own perceived vulnerability as a strength. The article's second part employs that definition to reveal the ways in which asymmetric strategies are already being adopted by America's adversaries, including states. The final portion of the article calls for new thinking about ways in which the United States might employ asymmetric strategies against its various adversaries.