“Do not swallow a bait offered by the enemy. Do not interfere with an army that is returning home.”
Do not be lured by what is offered, and do not strike a foe already withdrawing; both are traps or wastes.
Chapter 7 issues two refusals in one verse: do not swallow a bait offered by the enemy; do not interfere with an army that is returning home. The pairing defines the boundaries of pursuit — the too-attractive and the already-withdrawing. Both tempt through the same illusion: that the moment’s appearance equals the moment’s value.
A consultancy is invited to bid on a marquee project — famous client, huge visibility, suspiciously urgent timeline, and the incumbent mysteriously absent from the process. It bids low to win. Six months of scope-free heroism later, the truth surfaces: the client’s board had already chosen another incumbent track, and the "opportunity" was a stakeholder’s political theater. The returning-home clause: a rival who had already exited the account warned them, and was ignored for being a sore loser.
Not all attractive offers are bait, and the verse does not counsel refusing opportunity on suspicion — that is paranoia as strategy. The discipline is provenance: an offering’s value depends on who benefits from your taking it. And the withdrawing foe is spared not from mercy but math — pressing him converts his exit energy into combat, at prices Sun Tzu declines to pay.