In certain matters of serious scholarship, there are times when looking backward can prove distinctly progressive. In this regard, Sun-Tzu’s classic text, The Art of War, still brings together a timeless compilation of pertinent strategic “rules.” Accordingly, it should now be studied by US President Donald Trump’s key military advisors. More than anything else, such examination should focus upon America’s multifaceted nuclear deterrent, and, even more specifically, on this country’s more-or-less decipherable “order of battle.”
Here, all explanatory factors will be conspicuously layered and substantially nuanced. Nonetheless, deliberately ignoring analytic complexity could produce correspondingly grievous policy errors. In the plausibly worst case, such errors could include an unexpected nuclear war.[1]
The American president has a great deal to learn. Guided by Sun-Tzu, he might still be persuaded not to confuse propagandistic bluster and empty witticisms with authentic American power. The president’s strategic counselors should start with Sun-Tzu’s Chapter 6: “Vacuity and Substance.” The core message of this argument is the difference between shallow verbal threats and meaningfully tangible policy options.
The American president could also learn, from Sun-Tzu’s subsidiary “Tao of Warfare,” that the military world, like the world in general, “is what it is.” Prima facie, it follows that any presidentially contrived reductions of complexity designed to render the overall intellectual effort less perplexing could quickly generate a too-risky distortion of strategic choices. In essence, these reductions would represent the reductio ad absurdum of required strategic thinking.
Most urgent, these days, is the starkly unstable situation involving North Korea. For now, at least, the protracted standoff with Pyongyang centers on dissuasion from all war, conventional as well as nuclear.[2] America’s general strategy remains embedded in various more or less explicit forms of deterrence, including nuclear deterrence. In turn, this basic strategy is rooted in one or several of six indispensable protective functions: (1) deterrence of large-scale conventional attacks by enemy-states; (2) deterrence of all levels of unconventional attack by enemy-states; (3) preemption of enemy-state nuclear attacks; (4) support of conventional preemptions against enemy-state nuclear assets; (5) support of conventional preemptions against enemy-state nonnuclear assets; and (6) nuclear war-fighting.
In the matter of North Korea, President Trump may need US nuclear weapons to best support certain contemplated forms of American conventional preemption. To proceed rationally, Mr. Trump – before making any defensive first strike decisions against Pyongyang – would first need to determine whether any such non-nuclear expressions of “anticipatory self-defense” could be operationally cost-effective. This vital determination would then depend on a number of critical and inter-penetrating security factors, including: expected probability of North Korean first-strikes; expected costs of North Korean first-strikes; expected schedule of North Korean nuclear weapons deployment; expected efficiencies of North Korean active defenses over time; expected efficiencies of US active defenses over time; expected efficiencies of US hard-target or “counterforce” operations over time; expected reactions of unaffected regional enemies; and expected U.S. and world community reactions to any considered American preemption.
“Weighing strength,” reminds Sun-Tzu, “gives birth to victory.” But any such measurement could be profoundly difficult to detach from any more distinctly subjective calculations. Above all, this means that the American president ought not to assume that he has too great a capacity to maintain pertinent control over all related events. In essence, if ever there was an occasion to be suitably modest about one’s predictive leadership capacities (or for diminished hubris in classical Greek tragedy terms), this is exactly such an occasion.
For President Trump and his counselors, assorted other connections will also need to be examined. Several of these linkages concern presumed relationships between nuclear threat functions, primarily deterrence, and binding law. Contrary to the widely prevailing conventional wisdom on law and geopolitics, nuclear deterrence (and also its various associated forms of nuclear posture and infrastructure) do not function outside the ambit of authoritative international law.[3]
This foundational appraisal is correct even for preemption, which can sometimes, under customary international law (including an 8 July 1996 advisory decision of the International Court of Justice) be properly construed as “anticipatory self-defense.”
The adequacy of international law in preventing both nuclear and conventional war in Northeast Asia – a war, incidentally, that could quickly “spill over” to other regions [4] – will inevitably depend upon much more than formal treaties, customs, or so-called “general principles of law recognized by civilized nations.”[5] It will also be contingent upon the discernible success or failure of US and North Korean military strategies in the region. At first, this conclusion may seem odd to those who have long been instructed that international law and military strategy are intrinsically opposed to one another, almost by definition, but it is nonetheless a position that was expressly codified at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
Seeing requires distance. If America’s selected nuclear strategy should sometime serve to reduce the threat and/or seriousness of war, either because of successful forms of nuclear deterrence, or even because of presumptively “no alternative” preemptive strikes launched against an illegally nuclearizing North Korea, this strategy could be “counted” as a genuine component of international law enforcement.
How should Washington proceed? Initially, from Sun-Tzu, President Trump should consider the ancient Chinese strategist’s favored principles concerning diplomacy. To be sure, suitable military preparations should never be neglected, but diplomacy must also have its proper place. By fusing power and diplomacy, says Sun-Tzu, the objective of every state to weaken its enemies without actually engaging in armed combat can be realized. As expressed in his classic work, this always overriding objective links the associated ideal of “complete victory” to a reciprocal strategy “for planning offensives.”
This advice may seem obvious enough. Still, current US strategic posture will depend heavily upon various implemented forms of ballistic missile defense (BMD). In principle, at least, by placing too much faith in its active defense systems, the US could be willing to accept certain excessive risks, and also to disavow any still-remaining preemption options. Significantly, following Russian president Vladimir Putin’s relatively recent and unambiguous nuclear threats against American BMD capacities, Donald Trump will need to be even more modest in making any major war policy decisions.
There are no good reasons to believe that America’s nuclear deterrence can suitably remediate all conceivable nuclear threats from North Korea. This country’s advanced deterrent posture notwithstanding, there could plausibly come a time during which the power of Washington’s implicit nuclear threat would be immobilized by enemy miscalculation, inadvertence, mechanical accident, false warnings, unauthorized firings (e.g., coup d’etat) or even outright irrationality. Moreover, any calculated US willingness to make such a threat more plainly explicit need not necessarily be matched by substantially greater likelihoods of success. On the contrary, it is prudent to conclude about even such an unprecedented set of circumstances, that more evident US bellicosity would produce manifestly worse security outcomes.
Assuming operational rationality in the White House and Pentagon, the single most compelling factor in any US presidential decision on preemption against North Korea will be the expected rationality of Kim Jung Un. If, after all, Kim were expected to strike at America or certain US allies with nuclear weapons, irrespective of any anticipated US counterstrikes, American deterrence could fail altogether. This means that North Korean nuclear strikes could be expected even if Kim Jung Un had already fully understood that President Trump was willing and able to respond to Pyongyang with devastating nuclear reprisals.
Here, a North Korean decision to strike would have been made in spite of US deployment of nuclear weapons in recognizably survivable modes, and despite the fact that these American rockets and bombs were predictably able to penetrate North Korea’s most sophisticated and widespread active defenses.
Some might presently argue, more-or-less persuasively, that the US has already lost any once-residual preemption option with respect to North Korean nuclear weapons. As a result of enemy multiplication, dispersal, and hardening of these infrastructures, proceeds this argument, President Trump can now only wait until the time comes for an after-the-fact response, that is, for inflicting retaliation. Inevitably, if this purely retributive argument is correct, any such total reliance upon deterrence and corollary active defenses could represent a fatal indifference to enduring general principles of classic Chinese military strategy.
It could prove, moreover, to be an existential indifference.
There is another section of the Art of War that could help President Trump compensate for any heretofore disproportionate reliance upon nuclear deterrence and ballistic missile defense. This section concerns Sun-Tzu’s repeated emphasis on the “unorthodox.” Drawn from the conflation of thought that crystallized as Taoism, the ancient strategist observes: “…in battle, one engages with the orthodox, and gains victory through the unorthodox.”
In another uniquely complex passage, Sun-Tzu discusses how the orthodox may be used in unorthodox ways, while an orthodox attack may still be unorthodox, at least when it is unexpected. Taken seriously by American strategic planners, this tricky but purposefully-nuanced passage could represent a subtle tool for meaningful tactical implementation, one that might most usefully exploit Kim Jung Un’s presumed matrix of identifiable military expectations.
For President Trump, the “unorthodox” should be fashioned not only on the battlefield, but also before the battle. To prevent the most dangerous forms of battle, or those military engagements which could become expressions of all-out unconventional warfare, Washington must examine and fashion a number of promising new military postures. These postures would focus upon a reasoned shift from “orthodox” rationality to one of “unorthodox” irrationality. This sort of thinking is what the late American nuclear strategist, Herman Kahn, had earlier called the “rationality of pretended irrationality.”
It may even have played a decisive role back in October 1962, when US President John F. Kennedy threatened to board any Soviet ship that defied his expressed “quarantine” of Cuba.
Already, on several occasions, Mr. Trump has hinted openly at his particular affection for feigned irrationality. Needless to say, however, any such pretense could become a double-edged sword, and would therefore have to be “played” with conspicuous care and exquisite finesse. Also worth noting is that any strategy of pretended irrationality is apt to represent the very opposite of Sun-Tzu’s more general counsel. For example, in Chapter one, “Initial Estimations,” he underscores that any final military success must be based upon rationality and self-control.
At some point, Kim Jung Un may seriously begin thinking about striking first. In seizing any such momentous belligerent initiative, North Korea would likely expect to gain some presumptively necessary advantage in “escalation dominance.” This very risky sort of expectation would expectedly follow from a view in Pyongyang that (1) Washington would never embrace the “unorthodox” on a strategic level; (2) US actions would always be confined to reactions, and (3) these American reactions would be limited.
President Trump requires a pattern of thinking adapted not only by Sun-Tzu, but also by certain of the Chinese strategist’s contemporaries in ancient Greece. For fashioning a needed nuclear doctrine, a proper codification from which particular tactics and strategies could be systematically extrapolated, Mr. Trump will need a genuinely usable “strategic dialectic.” Such interrogative method would ask and answer intersecting questions, sequentially, again and again, until all core security problems were confronted frontally.
Following Sun-Tzu’s prescriptions on the “unorthodox,” US strategists could approach their most urgent North Korea security problem as an interrelated series of thoughts, one where each thought presents a complication that then moves inquiry onward, directly or indirectly, to the next thought.
Contained in this strategic dialectic, as Sun-Tzu himself was already no doubt aware, would be the relentless obligation to continue thinking. Logically, this particular imperative could never be satisfied entirely, because of what the philosophers would call an “infinite regress problem,” but it must still be attempted as completely and competently as possible. Armed with such an explicitly dialectical form of military strategy, President Trump could choose to focus not only upon assorted threats and situations (most plausibly, North Korean nuclear weapons development), but also upon various dynamic interactions between discrete threats, complex interactions known more commonly as “synergies.”
Again, a final way for President Trump to learn from Sun-Tzu’s potentially promising emphases on “unorthodox” thinking would be to more actively embrace strategic complexity. In this connection, prospective threats from North Korea could be analogized to biology, to certain associated issues of individual human survival. In dealing therapeutically with cancer, for example, physicians need not only characterize relevant tumors in-depth, but also know as much as possible about (1) these tumors’ “microenvironment;” and (2) the genetic background of the individual patient or “host.”
Similarly, in dealing with the still-emerging nuclear threat from North Korea, President Trump will need to consider a broad variety of smaller or subsidiary intersecting threats. Just as a single biomarker can never truly explain any particular cancer’s behavior, so too can the prospectively “malignant” North Korean nuclear danger never be explained, or adequately predicted, from the standpoint of only one or several readily identifiable threats. In the final analysis, among other things, US strategists seeking to meet the gainful expectations of Sun-Tzu’s “unorthodox” planning will require a more self-consciously dialectical style of military thinking.
All things considered, Sun-Tzu can supply Donald Trump with the still-timely wisdom that strategy and war planning are fundamentally intellectual or analytic activities. More exactly, especially because Kim Jung Un now seemingly already commands a nuclear arsenal – and because he could pose a nuclear threat to selected US allies by targeting Japanese or South Korean commercial nuclear reactors – America’s emphases must be on using this country’s own cumulative military assets for stable deterrence, rather than any actual war-waging.
Always, the US strategic objective must remain deterrence ex ante, not revenge ex post.
Summarizing Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War, “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.”[6] For US President Donald Trump, no strategic advice could possibly prove more important. Accordingly, it is high time for his relevant counselors to start looking backward in order to best move forward.
[1] By definition, of course, any nuclear war would be unprecedented. Moreover, because there has never been any actual nuclear war, nothing can reliably be said about such a conflict’s true probability. In science, proper assessments of event probability must always be based upon the determinable frequency of pertinent past events.
[2] The prevention of “merely” conventional conflict with Pyongyang is important not only because such engagement could itself prove vastly injurious to US forces and allies, but also because it could quickly escalate to an expressly nuclear threshold level. Again, because there has never been a nuclear war, US President Trump’s military planners would have no available way to reliably ascertain the true probabilities of any such escalation.
[3] In this connection, the president may need to be reminded that international law is part of US law, an incontestable “incorporation” that includes both various treaty-based obligations, and certain expectations of customary international law. In addition to Art. 6 of the US Constitution (the “Supremacy Clause”), pertinent US Supreme Court decisions include the Paquete Habana (1900) and Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic (1984).
[4] North Korea continues to send advanced weapons to Syria, including outlawed chemical weapons, thereby strengthening not only the criminal Damascus regime, but also Shiite terrorist group Hezbollah, and Iran. The injurious consequences of any such arms transfers will be especially consequential for US ally Israel, as it seeks to best prepare for an already expanding Iranian military presence within Syria. See, on these complex issues: Ehud Eilam, “The Linkage Between Hezbollah and North Korea,” The Jerusalem Post, March 1, 2018.
[5] These authoritative sources of international law are identified sequentially at Art. 38 of the UN’s Statute of the International Court of Justice.
[6] In summarizing his comprehensive insights, Sun-Tzu devotes a good deal of effort to “ruler’s qualifications.” From this coherent distillation of apt thoughts, President Trump should soon be reminded that “The ruler cannot mobilize the army out of any personal anger.” As for his most immediate counselors, they can also learn from The Art of War the following indispensable leadership strengths: Wisdom; Knowledge; Benevolence; Unconcern for Fame; Tranquility; and Righteousness. Correspondingly, for Sun-Tzu, evident presidential weaknesses would include: Obsession with Achieving Fame; Easy to Anger; Haste to Act; Inability to Fathom the Enemy; and Personal Arrogance.