“…all is power and presence for me here, where the theme of nothingness rises still in smoke.”
Saint-John Perse, Exile
Though counter-intuitive, the US election of Donald J. Trump may not bode well for Israel’s survival. In various circumstances, this election could signal an eleventh-hour unwillingness to honor America’s alliance obligations to the Jewish State. If North Korea should sometime agree to act as the nuclear surrogate of a still pre-nuclear Iran, Israel could find itself stripped of essential American support.
The explanation here is straightforward and logic-based. In all foreseeable crises of competitive risk-taking with Iran’s North Korean ally, US support would be needed to maintain “escalation dominance.” For Jerusalem, such support would be indispensable.
At present, North Korean military forces are actively preparing to enlarge Russian aggressions against Ukraine. North Korea, Jerusalem should recall, has a pertinent history of Middle East military involvement against Israel, including multiple air attacks during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Now, inter alia, Pyongyang, backed by Putin, is magnifying Iran’s cyberwar capabilities against Israel. As for America’s recently elected president, it is no more likely that Donald Trump would defy Putin’s plans for Iran than that he would stand up for a battered Ukraine. Whatever Putin decrees for Iran-Israel (and this decree would probably unfold in calculated increments rather than as a sudden declaration), that order will be taken as the last-word by “pro-Israel” President Trump.
Further clarifying particulars are in order. Even a pre-nuclear Iran could prod Israel to the point where Jerusalem’s only strategic options would be nuclear escalation or outright capitulation. Choosing the first option would be tantamount to choosing an “asymmetrical nuclear war.” This is not a substantive matter. It is merely true by definition.
But how could such an impasse arise? In one compelling view, Iran would target Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor and/or employ radiation dispersal weapons against Israeli civilians. A limited Israeli nuclear response could also follow in the wake of Iranian resort to biological or electromagnetic pulse (EMP) ordnance. Most worrisome for Jerusalem would be direct interventions by a nuclear state ally of Iran. In this scenario, Israel could be deterred from striking preemptively against high-urgency Iranian targets by Russian and/or North Korean nuclear threats.
Where should Israel do about such prospectively formidable and overlapping nuclear foes? Looking toward expanding conflict with Iran, any “one-off” preemption against enemy weapons and infrastructures (an act of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law[i]) would be perilous. Accordingly, at this already-late stage, any defensive action against menacing Iranian assets would need to be undertaken in planned stages and amid ongoing war. As to launching defensive military actions against North Korean assets directly, any such moves would be out-of-the-question ipso facto. At a minimum, they would humiliate Vladimir Putin, prodding the Russian president to leverage global support of his White House devotee. In turn, Donald Trump would lean heavily upon Israel, ensuring that Jerusalem desist from any further military actions against North Korea deemed objectionable by Putin. Some of these voided actions could be necessary for Israel’s literal survival.
There is more. During intersecting and possibly synergistic interactions,[ii] a coherent dialectic[iii] would need to guide Israel’s strategic policy-making. As part of its expanding war against Iran, Israel could sometime calculate that it had no choice but to launch multiple and mutually-reinforcing preemptive strikes against nuclear-related targets.[iv] Simultaneously, Russian and/or North Korean threats of support for Iran could lay the groundwork for a multi-state nuclear war, one that could come to involve the United States and/or China. Though existential threats could originate with either Moscow or Pyongyang, only North Korea would be apt to carry them out.
Such a portentous narrative ought never to be dismissed out of hand in Jerusalem. It could be tempting for Israeli planners to regard such jaw-dropping interventions as “highly speculative” or “unlikely,” but there would be no science-based way to meaningfully estimate probabilities. True probabilities, Israeli planners should continuously keep in mind, could never be determined for unique (sui generis) events.
There are more details. Israel’s “high thinkers” will need to make gainful military decisions based on long-established standards of valid deduction and internal consistency (i.e., standards of logic). Though there exist no data on nuclear war, a usefully deductive analytic apparatus could and should be constructed. The core object of such an explanatory apparatus would be the systematic derivation of logically entailed and policy-relevant conclusions from expressly identified assumptions. Without making such a challenging effort, Israel’s strategic decisions would be based more-or-less on disconnected assessments or “common sense.”
In matters of nuclear doctrine and strategy, “common sense” is a comforting euphemism for self-imposed folly. Whatever the particular circumstances, there could be no more inherently valueless decision-making standard than “common sense.”
There is even more to ponder. To the extent that they might be estimated, the risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war will depend on whether such a conflict would be intentional, unintentional, or accidental. Apart from applying this three-part conceptual distinction, there would be no adequate reason to expect operationally-gainful assessments.
Ensuring existential protections from openly declared Iranian aggressions, Jerusalem should always recall that even the Jewish State’s physical survival should never be taken as given. At some point, even a nuclear weapons state could be left with only irrelevant military options. That point could signify assorted residual options for revenge (and thereby bestow feelings of prowess or emotional satisfaction), but no options for tangible safety and security.
An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war between Jerusalem and Teheran could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between rational leaders,[v] but also as the unintended consequence of mechanical, electrical, or computer malfunction. This should raise a further distinction between an unintentional/inadvertent nuclear war and an accidental nuclear war. Though all accidental nuclear wars must be unintentional, not every unintentional nuclear war must be caused by accident. On one occasion or another, an unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war could represent the result of fundamental human misjudgments concerning enemy intentions. By definition, this would be a catastrophic result.
There is still more. History matters. An authentic nuclear war has never been fought. There are no experts on “conducting” or “winning” a nuclear war. In Jerusalem, this understanding should be considered axiomatic and overriding.
Plainly, Israel needs “high thinkers.” But who should be the appropriate models for such extraordinary thinkers? In reply, one may think here of such figures as Szilard, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr and assorted others.[vi]
To be sure, such thinking will need to be initiated and expanded at advanced theoretical levels. Such a task could never be fulfilled at normal operational levels. For Israel, much more will be needed than capable and industrious professionals.[vii] Much more.
For national survival, good theory will be indispensable. Without a systematic and theory-based plan in place, Israel would render itself unprepared for an Iranian nuclear conflict that is deliberate, unintentional or accidental. At every decipherable stage of its existential competition with Tehran, Jerusalem should remember that the only acceptable rationale for national nuclear weapons and doctrine[viii] is stable war management and comprehensive nuclear deterrence.
The particulars accumulate. Immediately, Israel should initiate a conspicuous policy shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” to “selective nuclear disclosure.” The driving logic of this necessary shift would not be to restate the obvious (i.e., that Israel is an operational nuclear power), but rather to remind would-be aggressors that Jerusalem’s nuclear weapons are usable at every possible level of warfare. Nonetheless, even with optimal prudential planning, Russian and/or North Korean threats to Israel could sometime become overwhelming.[ix]
Reduced to its essentials, a worst case scenario for Israel would commence with progressively explicit threats from Moscow or Pyongyang about Israeli preemption costs. Israel, aware that it could not reasonably expect to coexist indefinitely with a nuclear Iran, would proceed with its planned preemptions in spite of dire Russian or North Korean warnings. In subsequent response, North Korean military forces would act directly against Israel, seeking to persuade Jerusalem that Iran’s nuclear state surrogates in Pyongyang were in a position to dominate all imaginable escalations. In principle, Russian military forces (either singly or in concert with North Korea) could act against Israel on behalf of Iran, but that would present as a manifestly less believable threat narrative.
Unless the United States were willing to enter an already-chaotic situation with openly unrestricted support for Israel,[x] Kim Jung Un would have no foreseeable difficulties in establishing “escalation dominance.” Correspondingly, well-intentioned supporters of Israel could over-estimate the Jewish State’s relative nuclear capabilities and options, a judgment that Sigmund Freud[xi] would likely have called “wish fulfillment” and that could steeply endanger Israel’s physical continuance as a state. Moreover, during his previous presidential tenure, Donald J. Trump declared that he had personally obviated the North Korean dictator as a threat to the United States. Trump did this, per public announcement at the Singapore Summit, because he and Kim had “fallen in love.”
In war, even state-of-the-art military operations have determinable limits. In essence, there is no clear way in which the capabilities and options of a state smaller than America’s Lake Michigan could “win” at competitive risk-taking vis-à-vis Russia or North Korea. For Israel in such blatantly asymmetrical circumstances, self-deflating candor would prove much safer than any self-deluding bravado. Especially sobering in this regard would be the patent unreliability and intellectual incapacity of the re-elected American president.
As a strategic objective, Israel ought always to avoid armed struggle against a vastly superior nuclear adversary. This imperative would not pose problems with regard to a newly-nuclear Iran (though Jerusalem ought still to do whatever possible to prevent Iranian nuclearization), but it would present an incomparably serious problem if it concerned a “mature” nuclear adversary in Pyongyang.
Would US president Donald J. Trump honor alliance commitments to Israel that could place millions of Americans in a position of existential vulnerability? Would Mr. Trump accept such a law-based commitment under any circumstances, even in principle? Prima facie, considering Trump’s history with the Russian president, he would do as little as possible to offend Vladimir Putin. This could mean “letting him do whatever the hell he wants,” Trump’s declared comment on Putin and Ukraine of February 10, 2024. At that stage, Jerusalem could have no choice but to accept a nuclear Iran as fait accompli.
There will be additionally important issues of nuclear doctrine for the re-elected American president. In his continuing war of aggression and genocide against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been recycling provocative elements of Soviet-era strategic thinking. One such element concerns the conspicuous absence of any “firebreak” between conventional and tactical nuclear force engagements. Much as matters were conducted during the “classical” era of US-Soviet nuclear deterrence, Moscow still identifies the determinative escalatory threshold with first-use of high-yield, long-range strategic nuclear weapons, not with a first use of tactical (theater) nuclear weapons.
This “fuzzy” nuclear escalation doctrine was never shared by the United States, Israel’s ultimate ally, and could erode any once-stabilizing barriers of intra-war deterrence between Washington and Moscow or Washington and Pyongyang. Whether sudden or incremental, such erosion could impact the plausibility of both a deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war. As Israel could require doctrinally-based US support in countering Russian or North Korean nuclear threats, Vladimir Putin should be granted a prominent place in Israeli threat assessments of Iranian nuclear progress. Most significantly, with Putin admirer Donald J. Trump back in the White House, Jerusalem will need to take seriously the intra-crisis prospect of last-minute American abandonment. This generally ignored prospect would mean nothing less than a Trump-led forfeiture of Israel to existential harms. Remembering the words of French Poet Saint-John Perse, it would be a forfeiture wherein “the theme of nothingness rises still in smoke.”
[i] The international law origins of anticipatory self-defense lie in The Caroline, a case that concerned the unsuccessful rebellion of 1837 in Upper Canada against British rule. Following this case, the serious threat of armed attack has generally justified selected militarily defense actions. In an exchange of diplomatic notes between the governments of the United States and Great Britain, then U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster outlined a framework for self-defense that did not require an antecedent attack. Here, the jurisprudential framework permitted a military response to a threat so long as the danger posed was “instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.” See: Beth M. Polebaum, “National Self-defense in International Law: An Emerging Standard for a Nuclear Age,” 59 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 187, 190-91 (1984) (noting that the Caroline case had transformed the right of self-defense from an excuse for armed intervention into a legal doctrine). Still earlier, see: Hugo Grotius, Of the Causes of War, and First of Self-Defense, and Defense of Our Property, reprinted in 2 Classics of International Law, 168-75 (Carnegie Endowment Trust, 1925) (1625); and Emmerich de Vattel, The Right of Self-Protection and the Effects of the Sovereignty and Independence of Nations, reprinted in 3 Classics of International Law, 130 (Carnegie Endowment Trust, 1916) (1758). Also, Samuel Pufendorf, The Two Books on the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, 32 (Frank Gardner Moore., tr., 1927 (1682).
[ii] In synergy, the “whole” of any injurious effect would exceed the sum of individual “parts.”
[iii] Israel’s strategists should always approach their subject as a dialectical series of thoughts, one wherein each important idea presents a complication that moves onward to the next thought or idea. Central to this dialectic is the obligation to continue thinking, an obligation that can never be fulfilled altogether because of what the philosophers call an infinite regress problem. Still, it is an obligation that must be undertaken as fully and as competently as possible. The term “dialectic” originates from an early Greek expression for the art of conversation. A currently more common meaning is that dialectic is a method of seeking truth by correct reasoning. More precisely, it offers a method of refutation by examining logical consequences, and also the logical development of thought via thesis and antithesis to an eventual synthesis of opposites. In the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges as the quintessential form of proper philosophical/analytical method. Here, Plato describes the dialectician as one who knows how to ask, and then answer, questions. In the particular matter of Israeli nuclear strategy, this kind of knowledge must precede all other compilations and inventories of military facts, figures, force structures and power balances.
[iv] From the standpoint of international law, it is necessary to distinguish preemptive attacks from “preventive ones.” Preemption is a military strategy of striking an enemy first, in the expectation that the only alternative is to be struck first oneself. A preemptive attack is launched by a state that believes enemy forces are about to attack. A preventive attack, however, is launched not out of genuine concern about “imminent” hostilities, but for fear of a longer-term deterioration in a pertinent military balance. In a preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is anticipated is very short, while in a preventive strike the interval is considerably longer. A core problem for Israel, in regard to Iran and its already-nuclear allies, is not only the practical difficulty of determining imminence, but also that delaying a defensive strike until imminence is fully verified could be fatal.
[v] Expressions of decisional irrationality could take various different and overlapping forms. These include a disorderly or inconsistent value system; computational errors in calculation; an incapacity to communicate efficiently; random or haphazard influences in the making or transmittal of particular decisions; and the internal dissonance generated by any structure of collective decision-making (i.e., assemblies of pertinent individuals who lack identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements impact their willing capacity to act as a single or unitary national decision maker).
[vi] An obvious example of such “assorted others” is Yuval Ne’eman, whose assessment of Israel’s 7 June 1981 strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osiraq is included in the Menachem Begin Heritage Center’s authoritative collection (Jerusalem, September 2003). Other principal collection contributors were former PM Yitzhak Shamir; Lt. Gen. (res.) Rafael Eitan (Raful); Maj. Gen. (res.) David Ivri (IAF commander at time of “Operation Opera”); and this writer, Professor Louis René Beres USA). Professor Beres’ contribution was co-authored with former IAF Chief of Planning, COL. Yoash Tsiddon-Chatto.
[vii] To the extent that IDF strategy is accessible to the public, we know that conflict missions are designed inter alia to eliminate “the enemy’s” will to fight and achieve long-term deterrence. IDF planning also envisions “cumulative deterrence” via a series of unequivocal military victories, and “intelligence superiority,” which is not the same thing as the “intellectual superiority.” Overall, IDF military posture calls for a continuing search for “targets of opportunity,” a concept of offense that is based on Israel’s qualitative edge and a sustainable “critical mass” of forces and capabilities. It could reasonably be assumed that this IDF “critical mass” concept embraces both metaphoric and literal meanings.
[viii] Military doctrine is not the same as military strategy. Doctrine “sets the stage” for strategy. It identifies various central beliefs that must subsequently animate any actual “order of battle.” Among other things, military doctrine describes underlying general principles on how a particular war ought to be waged. The reciprocal task for military strategy, more specific than doctrine, is to adapt as required to support a previously-fashioned military doctrine
[ix] The expected security benefits to Israel of any considered reductions in “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” would remain more-or-less dependent upon Clausewitzian “friction.” This classic term of operational military planning references the always-unpredictable effects of errors in knowledge and information concerning intra-Israel (IDF/MOD) strategic uncertainties, Israeli and adversarial underestimations or overestimations of relative power position and the unalterably vast and largely irremediable differences between abstract theories of deterrence and actual enemy intentions.
[x] On interconnections between US and Israeli nuclear strategy, see by this author, with special postscript by USA General Barry McCaffrey (ret.) (a 2016 monograph published at Tel Aviv University): https://sectech.tau.ac.il/sites/sectech.tau.ac.il/files/PalmBeachBook.pdf
See also: Louis René Beres, http://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pubs/parameters/Articles/07spring/beres.pdf
[xi] Sigmund Freud always sought to “excavate” deeper meanings concerning human behavior. In essence, he was a modern-day philosophe, a proud child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment who discovered profound analytic and therapeutic advantages in sometimes-arcane literary insights. Freud maintained an extensive personal collection of antiquities which suggested variously penetrating psychological insights. Some of his special collection was placed directly on his work desk; reportedly, he would often touch and turn the individual artifacts while engaged in some challenging thought.