David Kilcullen is a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of New South Wales, Australia, and a professor of practice in global security at Arizona State University. He heads Cordillera Applications Group, a strategic research firm. A former soldier and diplomat, he served as a counterinsurgency adviser during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. This article was adapted from his book, The Dragons and the Snakes: How the Rest Learned to Fight the West, published in 2020 by Oxford University Press.