[freebeard]

Whoops! Made a pretty good dog's breakfast of the chronology.
...
Sun Tsu explains how a nation state evolves

Sun TZU wrote Art of War. There were no nation states at that time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation_state#Origins

The origins and early history of nation-states are disputed. A major theoretical question is: "Which came first, the nation or the nation-state?" Scholars such as Steven Weber, David Woodward, Michel Foucault and Jeremy Black[10][11][12] have advanced the hypothesis that the nation-state did not arise out of political ingenuity or an unknown undetermined source, nor was it a political invention; rather, it is an inadvertent by-product of 15th-century intellectual discoveries in political economy, capitalism, mercantilism, political geography, and geography[13][14] combined with cartography[15][16] and advances in map-making technologies.[17][18] It was with these intellectual discoveries and technological advances that the nation-state arose.