The latest book by historian Barry Strauss, Hoover’s Corliss Page Dean Senior Fellow and a recipient of the 2025 Bradley Prize, is the forthcoming Jews vs. Rome: Two Centuries of Rebellion Against the World’s Mightiest Empire (Simon & Schuster, 2025).
Of all the Greek myths, none resonates like the Trojan horse. You know the story. After trying and failing to take the city of Troy for ten years, the invading Greek army employs a ruse. They up stakes and pretend to go home, leaving behind only a towering wooden horse as a gift to the gods. The war-weary Trojans open their gates and triumphantly bring in the horse. But they discover that night that the “horse” is full of Greek soldiers. The intruders come down on the sleeping city and, with the help of the rest of their army, hidden nearby, destroy it.
The story is not fact, although it may dimly reflect the history of an era long ago in which deception played a part in war. But don’t dismiss the horse as just a tall tale. Deceit has always been with us, and not just on the battlefield. Today, information is the battlefield and our phones are all invaders. For that matter, so are our letters and potentially the pills we take. You might even say that we live in the era of the Trojan horse.
The Trojan horse has gone digital. Consider the infamous Trojan horse virus or, rather, malicious software or malware. Unlike a virus, which replicates on its own, Trojan horse malware works only if someone voluntarily opens the gates by downloading it. “Urgent! Your computer has been hacked. Click on this link for help.” Or “You’ve won a free phone! Click here!” typify the come-ons aimed at unsuspecting users. One click and your information is at the mercy of a hacker.
Then there are telemarketing scammers who usually prey on the elderly, promising huge rewards in return for, say, giving up their bank account information. Lonely seniors may know on some level that they are being cheated but they forge ahead because they just want some company. In one case, an elderly widow defended her scammer after he was exposed, calling him her friend. It’s as if Cassandra, the wise Trojan seer who tried in vain to stop the horse, instead welcomed it into Troy because she missed the Greeks.
In politics, labeling an opponent or an initiative a Trojan horse is now a cliché, so much so that comments have piled up blaming the other side for using it. Scholars even publish about the dangers of “Trojan horse discourse” in populist politics. In 2020 President Donald Trump, running for re-election, took heat for repeatedly pinning the Trojan horse label on his opponent, then–Vice President Joe Biden. That did not stop Trump’s foes from calling him a Trojan horse in 2024, or Vice President Kamala Harris’s antagonists from making the same charge against her.
Sports are relatively free of Trojan horses, but they are full of ruses and feints, so it is no surprise that the label pops up from time to time. Football’s hallowed trick plays, for example, ranging from the quarterback sneak to the halfback pass, have been labeleled . . . what else? Trojan horses.
But the Trojan horse truly reaches bluegrass country when it comes to warfare. Hannibal, the Vikings, and an Italian Renaissance warlord all used Trojan horse tactics, as did the British against Native Americans and Americans against Filipino rebels (or freedom fighters, depending on your point of view).
In 1943, during the Second World War, British intelligence launched Operation Mincemeat, originally called Operation Trojan horse. They dressed up a civilian corpse as a British officer and had him wash up from the sea in Spain. He was carrying fake secret documents, aimed at misleading the other side. As hoped, the documents fell into enemy hands and tricked the Germans into expecting an allied invasion of Greece or Sardinia. Their defenses were down when the Allies invaded the real target, Sicily.
Fast forward eighty years to 2003. In the Iraq War that summer, US Marines were faced with continual ambushes by criminals and Saddam loyalists in central Iraq. One of the Marines’ more effective methods to counter them was to run so-called “Trojan horse” convoys through the area. They took Humvees and other small tactical vehicles and lined them with walls of MRE (meals ready to eat) boxes. Inside were Marine riflemen, ready to attack. It took only a few days to drive the ambushers away from the roads.
The Russians too disguised their weapons as harmless vehicles when they invaded Crimea in 2014. They smuggled arms to their invasion troops by hiding the weapons in what looked like ambulances—Trojan ambulances, if you will.
Which brings us to 2024’s Israeli “Grim Beeper” operation, as one pundit has called it. It was a modern-day Trojan horse, as the major media around the world agreed. In that operation, Israel threw Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia into disarray by simultaneously exploding thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies owned by members of the terrorist group. Israeli intelligence had planted the miniature explosives in the pagers and walkie-talkies, working for years to pull off the mission. Israel set up shell companies that persuaded Hezbollah to buy the gadgets that led to their own ruin. The explosions injured thousands and killed more than thirty people, almost all Hezbollah members and supporters, some mid- or high-level operatives, but also a few civilians. The operation shredded the terror group’s morale and softened it up for Israeli follow-up attacks by air and ground. In November, Hezbollah sued for peace.
Like many of its predecessors, the mission was ingenious and effective, but it did not win the war singlehandedly. Trojan horse operations almost never do. The operations discussed here were all tactical. We are currently living through what may be the biggest Trojan horse of all, and it is not merely tactical but strategic. That horse is China.
In 1999, two Chinese colonels published a book called Unrestricted Warfare. They argued that future wars would be fought less on the battlefield than in other realms such as trade, finance, culture, information, and the cyber realm. They saw the United States as the enemy and they recognized that China lacked the strength to attack directly. Instead, they called for espionage, sabotage, and theft, all while putting on a friendly face. They wrote in the tradition of the classic Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote that “all war is the art of deception.” And they followed China’s late-twentieth-century leader, Deng Xiaoping, who advised his countrymen to “hide your strength, bide your time.”
Americans love Chinese apps such as TikTok, WeChat and, recently, Red Note. But the apps are Trojan horses that camouflage espionage as entertainment. They suck up the data on users’ phones and send it back to China, where it is used to hone propaganda messages aimed at getting Americans to see the world China’s way. The apps have been described as effective political warfare. That’s why the United States is insisting that TikTok be sold to an American company or shut down.
Now, amid President Trump’s trade war, the gloves have come off. More and more commentators speak openly of China’s growing military, industrial, and pharmaceutical strengths as a threat to the United States. The Chinese, for their part, have replaced “hide your strength” with so-called “wolf warrior” diplomacy, an aggressive stance based on a Chinese action-film series. Chinese propaganda describes Americans as fat and lazy peasants who are doomed to “wail” in the face of China’s superior civilization. It is as if the Greeks came out of the Trojan horse, brandished their weapons, and announced their presence within the walls.
China is the leader in weaponizing information on a global scale, but it is not alone. Russia has been a trailblazer in disinformation going back to czarist days, when the secret police forged The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an alleged exposé of a plot for world domination by Freemasons and Jews. It took years to spread and establish that malicious fraud, but nowadays nanoseconds would suffice. Russia currently uses artificial intelligence to generate prettily packaged disinformation to share on social media with unsuspecting users.
The threat of biological warfare opens another door to Trojan horse attacks. Most states have signed the 1975 Biological Weapons Convention and renounced biowarfare, but that doesn’t cover nonstate actors. Moreover, states have been known to break treaties. A biological attack has already happened: after the attacks of September 11, 2001, someone sent anthrax spores through the US mail. Unsuspecting people opened a letter; five Americans died and seventeen were injured. The FBI called this postal Trojan horse the worst biological attack in American history, but far worse might happen. Imagine someone poisoning on an industrial scale a popular medicine, say, a dietary supplement. Hundreds of people might blithely take their daily pill and fall dead before the word got out to stay away. Or imagine poisoning the feed of thousands of livestock. Every day, advanced methods to produce pathogens become easier and cheaper. Biological warfare could kill millions. One wonders if even now people are plotting ways to trick an enemy into voluntarily accepting the microorganism that will destroy them.
Digital Trojan horses are inescapable. Biological Trojan horses represent a looming threat, while old-fashioned, physical Trojan horses remain a standard part of warfare. If we want to protect ourselves in this new age of anxiety, we need to accept that we live in haunted woods. We need to think differently. That presents a particular challenge to Americans.
Americans like to think of war as a straightforward matter of overwhelming force. We take our cues from such film classics as The Longest Day (1962), which shows GIs hitting the beach at Normandy on D-day, or Patton (1970), which depicts “Old Blood and Guts,” as General George S. Patton was known, hammering his way to battlefield success. We love shock and awe in wartime, just as we love the ground game in football, but the enemy gets a vote, as the saying goes. And that vote is sometimes for Pearl Harbor or for 9-11. Or for Trojan horses.
Today, as in days long ago, the battle is not to the strong. Deception matters.
