The piece nobody has written yet because they would need to have read Sawyer's The Tao of Deception and the vault's deprecation-of-deception material in the same week: there is a single argument that runs from the Duke of Sung at the Hung River straight through to the modern strategist who is shocked — shocked — that the rival did not fight fair, and the West loses this argument over and over not because it cannot win it but because winning would require giving up something it is more attached to than victory. The zheng/qi tradition never had the hang-up. It put deception at the center of strategy and built 3,000 years of doctrine on it. The Western tradition inherited a chivalric-Clausewitzian frame in which war is honest force honestly applied, treats cunning as a moral discount on the win, and then walks into the same ambush every generation — the mirroring-failure of assuming the opponent shares your contempt for the trick.
The West keeps losing the deception argument on purpose, because the only way to win it is to stop believing that honest force is morally superior to the well-laid trap — and that belief is load-bearing for how the West likes to see itself.
The angle is not "China is sneaky" — that's the cheap version and it's wrong (it mistakes a sophisticated tradition for a national character flaw). The angle is that the deprecation of deception is itself a strategic vulnerability, a self-inflicted blind spot, and that it persists because it is fused to a flattering self-image. You would need: (1) Sawyer's zheng/qi spine and the plasticity doctrine for the Chinese position; (2) the vault's just-war / effectiveness-vs-virtue material and the Duke of Sung as the in-tradition foil who shows the Chinese tradition also debated this and mostly came down on effectiveness; (3) the honest counter-case — that the Western frame is not pure naïveté but partly a coordination technology (rules of war reduce mutual destruction, and a civilization that abandons them entirely may win battles and lose the peace, which is the Ch'in problem: the state that out-deceives everyone unifies the realm and is hated and brief); (4) the closing turn — this is not a "be more ruthless" essay; it is a "stop confusing your aesthetic preference for honest force with a law of nature" essay. The audience that resists it: anyone whose identity rests on being the honorable party, which in a conflict is almost everyone.
Essay seed for The Platform/Essays pipeline. Pairs with the "pacifist mask" spark (the professed virtue as cover) and the existing Limited War Is Sport vs Just-War collision (the time-horizon reframe is the honest counter-case this essay needs).