The conceptual and historical background
Soon, Israel will need to make critical decisions on launching preemptive strikes against Iran. Such non-nuclear defensive actions – expressions of anticipatory self-defense”[i] under international law – would take calculated account of certain pro-Iran interventions. The point of such more-or-less plausible enemy state interventions would be to (1) deter Israel from making good on its residual preemption options; or (2) engage Israel in direct warfare if Jerusalem should choose to proceed with these options.
What would be the specific country sources of such pro-Iran interventions? Most reasonably, the states acting on behalf of Iran would be Russia and/or North Korea. If Russia were to act as Iran’s witting nuclear surrogate (because Iran would still be “pre-nuclear”), direct escalatory moves involving Moscow and Washington could ensue. There are no foreseeable circumstances under which direct Israeli moves against Russia would be rational or cost-effective.
Prima facie, all relevant analyses would be speculative. In strict scientific terms, nothing meaningful could be said concerning the authentic probabilities of unique events. This is because science-based estimations of probability must always depend on the determinable frequency of pertinent past events. Where there are no such events to draw upon, estimations must be less than scientific.
All potentially relevant scenarios involving Israel, Iran, Russia and/or the United States would be unprecedented (sui generis). At the same time, both Israel and its American ally will need to fashion “best possible” estimations based on applicable elements of deductive reasoning. More particularly, useful Israeli assessments will need to focus on presumed escalation differences between Vladimir Putin’s “firebreak theory” and that of incoming U.S. president Donald J. Trump.
Will Trump’s nuclear posture threshold remain unchanged from current doctrine; that is, will it continue to affirm the primacy of any escalation to nuclear engagement? Or will this escalation threshold more closely resemble the Russian theory that “small” nuclear weapons (i.e., tactical or theater ordnance) do not necessarily signal intent to initiate a full-blown nuclear war?
American and Russian nuclear escalation doctrines have always been asymmetrical; the implications of continuing such crucial difference could “spill-over” to Israel-Iran nuclear war calculations for the Middle East. Though counter-intuitive, a nuclear war could take place even while Iran remained pre-nuclear. And this risk has recently been heightened by Vladimir Putin’s nuclear policy “upgrades.”
With the United States in mind, the Russian president declared significant “enhancements” to his country’s nuclear doctrine. There are now additional reasons to worry about nuclear war stemming from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.[ii] Most worrisome is that (1) Moscow would react more forcefully against the United States and/or Ukraine because of President Joe Biden’s widened gamut of missile-firing authority to Volodymyr Zelensky; (2) Vladimir Putin’s reaction would include prompt Russian enlargements of theater nuclear forces; and (3) these Russian enlargements would lower Russia’s tangible threshold of nuclear weapons use.
Such lowering would apply at both doctrinal and operational levels. Although nothing theoretic[iii] could be determined about competitive risk-taking in extremis,[iv] probabilities concerning Moscow and Washington would still need to be estimated. This includes examining derivative warfare scenarios between Israel and Iran, deductive narratives in which Jerusalem would rely on US nuclear deterrence to protect against Russian-backed North Korean forces. In the parlance of traditional nuclear strategy, this would signify Israeli reliance on “extended nuclear deterrence.” North Korea is a nuclear Iranian ally with a documented history of actual warfighting against Israel.
Estimations of probability and Russia’s posture of “nuclear first use”
For strategists and policy-makers, there will be variously important specifics. At a minimum, all estimations of probability would need to be dialectical.[v] When examined from the standpoint of deterrent threat credibility, theatre nuclear forces would seemingly appear more persuasive than strategic nuclear forces. This is because the retaliatory use of shorter-range/lower-yield nuclear forces would seem less “unthinkable.”[vi]
This understanding is neither new nor contrived. Inter alia, it remains consistent with almost four generations of continuously self-refining strategic theory. Such theory has remained focused not only on enemy threat capabilities (e.g., conventional versus nuclear destructiveness), but also on decipherable enemy intentions.[vii]
For Israel-related assessments of US and Russian nuclear doctrine, adversarial capabilities and intentions will need to be examined in their widest conceivable assortment of possible intersections. Some of the most problematic possibilities could be synergistic.[viii] This would make any potentially useful estimations even more difficult.
Regarding Russia’s presumed war objectives in Ukraine, there are many “moving parts” for American and Israeli military planners to examine. During the Soviet Union’s last years, Moscow incorporated basic elements of nuclear “first use” into its codified strategic doctrine. Now, President Vladimir Putin is actively re-committing to this Soviet-era nuclear doctrine. Because United States policy firmly rejects the Russian assumption that a first-use of theatre nuclear weapons would not breach any critical escalatory firebreak ipso facto, Putin’s unwavering recommitment could soon (1) become radically destabilizing; and (2) impact Israel’s nuclear posture and strategy vis-à-vis Iran.
In understanding such still-developing matters, history will warrant disciplined pride of place. From 1949 onward, traditional Soviet nuclear doctrine intentionally minimized the most sensible and prudent firebreak between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons. Earlier Russian military doctrine conspicuously assumed few escalatory differences between theater nuclear forces and high-consequence conventional (including chemical and/or biological) forces.
For the United States, on the other hand, strategic posture and strategy have consistently identified the critical escalatory firebreak as one between conventional weapons and nuclear weapons per se – that is, nuclear weapons of any sort. Russian military doctrine continuously asserts that escalation from non-nuclear weapons to theater nuclear weapons need not signal any existential threat to the United States. Rather, proceeds this core assertion, such escalation would merely introduce a new warfighting weapon into a more localized theatre of combat. This assertion ignores certain correlative apprehensions that could arise in Washington and/or in Jerusalem’s leadership circles.
Israel would do best to understand these doctrinal asymmetries as an intellectual rather than political problem.[ix] In the context of any future US-Russia competition for “escalation dominance” (an unpredictable competition in strategic risk-taking), the primary battlefield would be neither terrestrial nor extraterrestrial. It would be a many-sided cognitive landscape, a not-always isolable arena of “mind.”
In consequence of their differential assessments of nuclear escalation thresholds, Russian, American and Israeli strategists will find themselves confronted by accumulating challenges of layered complexity. In the most readily imaginable venues of prospective nuclear confrontation, latent and visible hazards to Israel would be exacerbated by asymmetries of basic nuclear doctrine and by corresponding interactions of nuclear doctrine. At some point, whether foreseen or unforeseen, any or all such interactions could become synergistic. By definition, such force-multiplying interactions would be ones wherein the recognizable “whole” of armed conflict would be greater than the expected sum of its “parts.”[x]
Facing an intellectual problem
To summarize gainfully: Nuclear war avoidance should always be approached by pertinent national leaders as a preeminently intellectual problem.[xi] For the United States, any such obligatory avoidance would reference a challenge that will need to be confronted in tandem with unique strategic circumstances. During the relentlessly anti-intellectual time of “Trump I,”[xii] an American era of military decision-making incoherence,[xiii] suggestions of scientific assessment were routinely brushed aside by the White House. All too frequently, these dismissals were accompanied by gestures and policies of proud analytic indifference.
What happens next? How might these developments impact Israel? What should be expected from “Trump II?” Most specifically, how would the answers impact Israel’s precarious war with Iran?
During “Trump I,” major US national security problems were framed by an unprepared American president in needlessly rancorous terms. Regarding present US concerns about a nuclear war triggered by Russia’s criminal behaviors in Ukraine,[xiv] these frameworks were founded upon militarily senseless appeals to ad hominem preferences. These frameworks were not founded upon what was most genuinely needed. Among other evident deficits, the haphazardly constructed American security policies of “Trump I” were not fashioned with any informed concern for the requirements of “escalation dominance.”[xv]
Routinely, as understood from the interrelated standpoints of disciplined doctrine and formal logic, Trump’s antipathy to science-based calculations exhibited grave errors in strategic reasoning.[xvi] Most obvious among these fallacies was an argument known correctly as the argumentum ad bacculum.[xvii] From the start of his first presidency, Donald J. Trump worked to aggravate this potentially irremediable misrepresentation. Warned the ancient philosopher Tertullian, about such human behaviors: Credo quia absurdum. “I believe because it is absurd.”
Today, armed with greater regard for applicable intellectual factors, American planners and policy-makers should look more systematically at what might lie ahead. What will happen next in Vladimir Putin’s determinedly cruel war against Ukraine,[xviii] a war of aggression and genocide being waged against hospitals, schools, nursing home and child-care centers?[xix] How can the United States best prepare for nuclear war avoidance or genocide[xx] in a European theater being rendered increasingly unstable by an un apologetic tyrant? Playing Putin’s “nuclear firebreak” game, should Washington seek to persuade Moscow of America’s willingness to “go nuclear” according to Russian-defined policy thresholds, or should the United States proceed “asymmetrically” with its own preferred firebreak? How would Washington’s decision affect Israel’s national security?
In the end, a crucial question is this: How could the United States best respond to any Russian war’s probable outcomes,[xxi] a hard-to-decipher military quandary that contains the existential perils of asymmetrical nuclear firebreak doctrine.[xxii]
For the United States and its Israeli ally, it is high time for fewer clichés and more intellection.[xxiii] Regarding their indispensable responsibilities for world peace and global stabilization (these goals can never be achieved by ordinary politicians of any ideological stripe), capable strategic thinkers will need to focus on two always-pertinent and closely interrelated criteria of military danger: probability and disutility. This first dimension concerns issues of presumed likelihood. The second deals with matters of presumed physical suffering.
Impacts of “Cold War II”
“Cold War II”[xxiv] represents a comprehensive systemic context within which virtually all contemporary world politics could be meaningfully categorized and systematically evaluated. Current “Great Power” dispositions to war, however ascertained, offer more-or-less auspicious analytic backgrounds for still-wider nuclear interactions. How could this portentous context be suitably tempered or decently modified?
Only the right questions can lead to right answers. Planning ahead, what explanatory theories and scenarios could best guide the United States and Israel in their foreseeable interactions with North Korea, China, Iran, India, Pakistan and Russia? Before answering this question with adequate conceptual clarity, the “correct” answers will depend on a more closely considered awareness of relevant intersections and overlaps.
Going forward with an informed understanding of Russian leadership orientations, US strategic decision-makers will have to consider one overarching assumption: This is the always-troubling expectation of adversarial irrationality.[xxv] Depending upon the outcome of any such consideration, determined judgments will be vastly different and variably urgent.
A primary “order of business” for American and Israeli strategic analysts and planners will be reaching accurate conclusions about any specified adversary’s ordering of preferences. By definition, only those adversaries who would value national survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences would be acting rationally. Will this category include Putin’s Russia? What about other prospective adversaries? What about China, North Korea and a nearly nuclear Iran? Above all, what about the asymmetrical nuclear firebreaks accepted by the two original superpowers?
For scholars and policy-makers, additional basic questions will need to be considered. First, what are the operational meanings of relevant terminologies and/or vocabularies? In the formal study of international relations and military strategy, decisional irrationality is never the same as madness. Nonetheless, certain residual warnings about madness ought still to warrant serious US and Israeli policy consideration. This is because both “ordinary” irrationality and full-scale madness could exert comparable effects upon an adversary state’s national security decision-making processes.
There is nothing here for the intellectually faint-hearted.[xxvi] This is not an issue about “attitude” (the analytically empty term Trump uses to describe what is allegedly most important to diplomatic negotiation), but science-based “preparations.”[xxvii]
Sometimes, for the United States, and derivatively for Israel, anticipating these ascertainable effects could display existential importance. In such considerations, word selection could matter a great deal. In normal strategic parlance, “irrationality” identifies a decisional foundation wherein national self-preservation is not summa, not the highest and ultimate preference. This preference ordering could have significant and palpable policy implications in both Washington and Jerusalem.
An irrational decision-maker in Moscow need not be determinably “mad” to become troubling for strategic policy planners in the United States and Israel. Such an adversary would need “only” to be more prominently concerned about discernible preferences or values other than its own collective self-preservation. Normally, though any such national behavior would be unexpected and counter-intuitive, it would still not be unprecedented or inconceivable. Moreover, identifying the specific criteria or decipherable correlates of such preferred alternatives could prove irremediably subjective.
Whether different decision-making adversaries were deemed irrational or “mad,” US and Israeli military planners would still have to input generally similar crisis calculations. The analytic premise would likely be advanced that a particular adversary “in play” might not be deterred from launching a military attack by threats of retaliatory destruction even where such threats would be fully credible and presumptively massive. Any such failure of US and/or Israeli military deterrence could include conventional and nuclear retaliatory threats.
Enemy rationality, irrationality and nuclear war by accident
In fashioning nuclear strategy vis-à-vis nuclear and not-yet-nuclear adversaries,[xxviii] US and Israeli military planners would have to include a mechanism to determine whether the pertinent foe will more likely be rational or irrational. Operationally, this means calculating whether this enemy would value its collective survival (whether as a sovereign state or organized terror group) more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences. Always, this early judgment would need to be based on defensibly sound analytic and intellectual principles. In principle, at least, this judgment should never be affected by what any particular analysts might simply “want to believe.”[xxix]
At this stage, a further analytic distinction will be needed between inadvertent nuclear war and accidental nuclear war. By definition, an accidental nuclear war would be inadvertent. Reciprocally, however, an inadvertent nuclear war need not be accidental.[xxx] False warnings, which could be spawned by mechanical, electrical or computer malfunction (or by hacking)[xxxi] would not signify the origins of an inadvertent nuclear war. They would fit under the more clarifying conceptual narratives of an accidental nuclear war.
Most concerning would be avoiding a nuclear war caused by miscalculation. In striving for “escalation dominance,” competitive nuclear powers caught up with multiple bewildering complexities in extremis atomicum could sometime find themselves embroiled in an inadvertent nuclear exchange. Ominously, any such unendurable outcome could arise suddenly and irremediably, even though neither side had actually wanted such a war.[xxxii]
A problem, in this regard, would be asymmetrical views on what constitutes the critical nuclear threshold or firebreak. If the Russian side believed that the critical threshold was between theatre and strategic nuclear weapons and the American or Israeli side believed this threshold must obtain between conventional and nuclear weapons of any size or range, there would arise certain mutual and extraordinary decisional risks. These risks would aptly be without any historical precedent.
In facing off against each other, even under optimal assumptions of mutual rationality, American and Russian presidents would have to concern themselves with all possible miscalculations, errors in information, unauthorized uses of strategic weapons, mechanical or computer malfunctions and assorted nuances of cyber-defense/cyber-war. Even if Putin were suddenly judged to be entirely rational, Europe could still descend rapidly into some form of uncontrollable nuclear conflagration. If this prospect of unprecedented chaos were not sobering enough, it is also reasonable to expect that the corresponding erasure of a once-universal nuclear taboo would heighten the likelihood of future nuclear risk-taking and conflict in other parts of the globe, especially the Middle East (herein, Israel, Iran and potentially North Korea).
A still pre-nuclear Iran would still have access to radiation dispersal weapons and to conventional rockets for use against Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona. An Israeli nuclear war with a not-yet-nuclear Iran could arise if already- nuclear North Korea, a close ally of Iran, were willing to act as Tehran’s military surrogate against Israel. Such willingness, in turn, would be impacted by the presumed expectations of Russia and/or China.
Figuring all this out represents a survival-determining challenge for Jerusalem. In mid-November 2024, Vladimir Putin announced that an already- nuclear state willing to transfer nuclear weapons to an enemy of Russia (i.e., from the United States to Ukraine) would be regarded as a “co-belligerent” of Russia’s foe. In essence, this announcement declares that a “state of war” would exist with the United States as well as with Ukraine, and that this condition of belligerency would allow Moscow to employ nuclear weapons as needed. Plausibly, such employment would be consistent with recently updated Russian firebreak theory.
For Israel, there is a conspicuous irony and opportunity to Moscow’s forceful declaration. Ipso facto, if Russia is entitled to use nuclear weapons against non–nuclear Ukraine because that adversary now has a cooperating nuclear ally in Washington, Israel could be similarly entitled to use nuclear weapons against Iran. This is because that Iranian adversary had a nuclear enabling ally in Pyongyang. In this scenario, Vladimir Putin’s change in national nuclear doctrine vis-à-vis the United States and NATO would be “turned on its head” and used against Iran if that Islamic regime were to accept nuclear military assistance from North Korea. For Jerusalem, the overriding rationale of any nuclear weapons use would be deterrence ex ante, not revenge ex post.[xxxiii]
What about the “Trump-I” brokered “Abraham Agreements?” There was never any convincing reason to believe that these politically contrived accords could ever reduce the tangible risks of a nuclear war in the Middle East. On the contrary, the intended effect of these agreements to weaken Shiite Iran is apt to backfire in variously unforeseen and force-multiplying ways. In candor, Israel never had any credible reason to worry about suffering a major war with Bahrain, Morocco or the United Arab Emirates.
Bottom line: For Israel, the Abraham Agreements “put an end” to nonexistent hazards. Simultaneously, however, they likely did enlarge Sunni national hopes (e.g., Egypt, Saudi Arabia) to join the “nuclear club.” Under no circumstances did “Abraham” ever create meaningful nuclear advantages for Israel.
Pretended irrationality as nuclear strategy
Going forward, a joint US-Israel obligation will be to assess whether a nuanced posture of “pretended irrationality” could enhance nuclear deterrence posture. On several earlier occasions, it should be recalled, then US President Donald Trump openly praised the untested premises of such a posture. But was such presidential praise warranted on intellectual grounds?
In reply, US and Israeli enemies continue to include both state and sub-state foes, whether considered singly or in multiple forms of possible collaboration. Such forms could be “hybridized” in different ways between state and sub-state adversaries.[xxxiv] Moreover, in dealing with Washington, each recognizable class of enemies could sometime choose to feign irrationality.
In principle, this could represent a potentially clever strategy to “get a jump” on the United States or Israel in any still-expected or already-ongoing competition for “escalation dominance.”[xxxv] Naturally, any such calculated pretense could fail, perhaps calamitously. Accordingly, cautionary strategic behavior based on serious conceptual thinking should always be the US and Israeli “order of the day.”[xxxvi] Nothing ought to be more obvious.
There is something else. On occasion, enemies of Israel or the United States could “decide,” wittingly or unwittingly, to actually be irrational.[xxxvii] In such dissembling circumstances, it would become incumbent on strategic planners to capably assess which basic form of irrationality – pretended or authentic – was determinedly in play. Thereafter, these planners would need to respond with a dialectically orchestrated and optimally counterpoised set of plausible reactions.
In this context, the term “dialectically” (drawn originally from ancient Greek thought, especially Plato’s dialogues) should be used with precision. This warning is suggested to signify a continuous or ongoing question-and-answer format of strategic reasoning. For an American president or an Israeli prime minister, nothing less disciplined could reasonably suffice.
By definition, any instance of enemy irrationality would value certain specific preferences (e.g., presumed religious obligations or personal and/or regime safety) more highly than collective national survival. For America and potentially Israel, the prospect of facing an irrational nuclear adversary is most worrisome with regard to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Apropos of all such apprehensions, it is unlikely that they could ever be reduced solely by formal treaties or similarly traditional law-based agreements.[xxxviii]
For the United States and Israel, it would be worth remembering seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ classic warning in Leviathan: “Covenants, without the sword, are but words….”[xxxix] If this enduring problem of global anarchy were not daunting enough for strategists and decision-makers in Washington and Jerusalem, it is further complicated by the foreseeably opaque effects of any consequent chaos.
Chaos or anarchy?
Further conceptual clarifications are now in order. Chaos is not the same as anarchy. Chaos is more than anarchy.[xl] We have all lived with anarchy or the absence of central government in modern world politics since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,[xli] but we have yet to descend into any genuine chaos.[xlii]
Even in the midst of anarchy (unlike chaos), there can be law. Since the 17th century, international law has functioned according to an often unpredictable “balance of power.” For an American president conversant with the Constitution, international law[xliii] is integrally a part of United States law. When then President Trump actively sought on several occasions to undermine international law (“Trump I”), he was acting contrary to both systems of law, national (domestic/municipal) and international.[xliv] The fact that these that systems were overlapping and inter-penetrating went widely unacknowledged.
How should the American president proceed to manage potential nuclear war risks over Ukraine, a decision with potentially existential consequences for Israel? If Putin would escalate military options in the Ukraine war to include tactical/theatre nuclear forces, the United States “firebreak” interpretation of this escalation could be starkly different from what Russia had intended and expected. Though Moscow would not likely view this regional escalation as existentially threatening to the United States, Washington could still calculate otherwise. In short order, there could take place an American escalation to more destructive military involvements and ultimately to strategic nuclear weapons.
How likely is such a catastrophic misinterpretation and outcome? The scenario is sui generis. It is impossible, therefore, to answer any such question in logical and scientific terms.
In specific regard to crisis decision-making, the American side should consider how its nuclear weapons could best be leveraged in any plausible nuclear war scenario. A rational answer here could likely never include the actual operational use of such weapons. The only relevant questions for a president’s strategic planners should concern the calculable extent to which an asymmetrical US threat of nuclear escalation (from theater/tactical to strategic nuclear weapons) could be simultaneously credible and prudent.[xlv]
All this implies a primary obligation for the United States and Israel to focus on critical incremental enhancements to nuclear deterrence posture and develop a sufficiently wide and nuanced range of nuclear retaliatory options. The specific rationale of any such developments would be the counter-intuitive understanding that credibility of nuclear threats could vary inversely with perceived levels of destructiveness. In certain foreseeable circumstances, this means that successful nuclear deterrence could depend upon nuclear weapons that are ascertainably low-yield or “small.”
Sometimes, in fashioning a national nuclear deterrence posture,[xlvi] counter-intuitive strategic insight is convincingly “on the mark,” When Donald Trump liked to remind his North Korean counterpart that though both had a “nuclear button,” his was “bigger,” the then first-time president displayed near-total unawareness of disciplined nuclear deterrence. In nuclear crisis circumstances, however unique, threat-based credibility could vary inversely with threat-related harms. At this moment in history, moreover, such an understanding will also be indispensable to Israel’s impending war with Iran, a war for national survival in which Iran would be pre-nuclear, but wherein “going nuclear” could still prove purposeful for Israel.
Nuclear weapons as instruments of war prevention, not punishment
There is more. A US president or Israeli prime minister should always bear in mind that any national nuclear posture ought to remain focused on war prevention rather than punishment. In all identifiable circumstances, using a portion of its available nuclear forces for vengeance rather than deterrence would miss the most essential point: that is, to fully optimize national security obligations.
Any American or Israeli nuclear weapons use based on narrowly corrosive notions of revenge, even if only as a residual or default option, would be glaringly irrational. Among other things, this would be a good time for both US and Israeli nuclear crisis planners to re-read Clausewitz regarding primacy of the “political object.” Absent such an object, there could be no meaningful standard of escalation rationality.
Technologically advanced anti-missile systems should remain indefinitely as a steadily-modernizing component of America’s and Israel’s core nuclear deterrence posture. Significantly, too, there are certain hard-to-foresee interactions or synergies taking place between policy decisions and those of corresponding adversaries. In those more perplexing matters involving an expectedly irrational nuclear enemy,[xlvii] successful US or Israeli deterrence would need to be based on credible threats to enemy values other than (or additional to) national survival.
Foreseeably, America will have to rely on a broadly multi-faceted doctrine of nuclear deterrence.[xlviii] In turn, like its already-nuclear Israeli ally,[xlix] specific elements of this “simple but difficult” doctrine (see von Clausewitz On War), should immediately be rendered less “ambiguous.” This complex and finely nuanced modification will require an even more determined focus on prospectively rational and irrational enemies, and include both national and sub-national foes.[l] This means eschewing any “seat-of-the-pants” attraction to each and every new strategic development or eruption, and (instead) to derive or extrapolate all specific policy reactions from pre-fashioned and comprehensive strategic nuclear doctrine.
There remains one penultimate but critical observation. It is improbable, but not inconceivable, that certain of America’s and Israel’s principal enemies would sometime be neither rational nor irrational, but mad. While irrational decision-makers could already pose special problems for nuclear deterrence – by definition, because these decision-makers would not value collective survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences – they might still be rendered susceptible to alternate forms of dissuasion.
Resembling rational leaderships, these decision-makers could still maintain a fixed, determinable and “transitive” hierarchy of preferences. This means, at least in principle, that “merely” irrational enemies could sometimes be successfully deterred. This observation warrants further analytic study, especially when more sweeping Russian or Iranian aggressions could become de rigeur.
Mad or “crazy” adversaries would have no such calculable hierarchy of preferences and would not be subject to any strategy of American or Israeli nuclear deterrence. Although it would likely be worse for the United States to face a mad nuclear enemy than a “merely” irrational one, Washington would have no real choice in defining this sort of emergency. Like it or not, the US and Israel will need to maintain, perhaps indefinitely, a “three track” system of nuclear deterrence and defense, one track each for identifiable adversaries that are presumptively (1) rational (2) irrational or (3) mad.
This will not be task for narrowly political or intellectually adverse strategic decision-makers. Among other things, it will require a capable assessment of plausible synergies, some of them dissemblingly subjective. For the most notably unpredictable third track, special plans would also be needed for potentially indispensable preemptions and for overlapping efforts at ballistic missile defense.
There could be no reliable assurances that any one “track” would consistently present exclusively of the other two. This means that American or Israeli decision-makers could sometimes have to face deeply intersecting or interpenetrating tracks, and that these always-complicated simultaneities could be synergistic.[li]
Even if American and Israeli military planners could reassuringly assume that enemy leaderships were fully rational, this would say nothing about the accuracy of the information used by these foes in making their own strategic calculations. Always, it should never be forgotten, rationality refers only to the intention of maximizing specifically designated preference or values. It says nothing about whether the information used is correct or incorrect.
International law
From the standpoint of international law, it is always necessary to distinguish preemptive attacks from “preventive ones.” Preemption is a military strategy of striking first in the expectation that the only foreseeable 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, on the other hand, is not launched out of any concern about “imminent” hostilities, but rather for fear of some longer-term deterioration in prevailing military balance.
In a preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is anticipated is presumptively very short; in a preventive strike, the anticipated interval is considerably longer. A related problem here for the United States and Israel is not only the practical difficulty of accurately determining “imminence,” but also that delaying a defensive strike until imminence was more precisely ascertainable could prove existential. A resort to “anticipatory self-defense” could be nuclear or non-nuclear and could be directed at either a nuclear or non-nuclear adversary. Plainly, any such resort involving nuclear weapons on one or several sides would prove catastrophic.
America and Israel are not automatically made safer by having only rational adversaries. Even fully rational enemy leaderships could commit serious errors in calculation that would lead them toward nuclear confrontation and/or a nuclear/biological war. There are also certain related command and control issues that could impel a perfectly rational adversary or combination of rational adversaries (both state and sub-state) to embark upon variously risky nuclear behaviors. It follows that even the most pleasingly “optimistic” assessments of enemy leadership decision-making could not reliably preclude catastrophic outcomes.[lii]
For the United States, and to a lesser extent for Israel, classical Greek commentaries concerning hubris could bring forth once unimaginable spasms of “retribution.”[liii] The ancient tragedian playwrights, after all, were not yet called upon to reason about nuclear decision-making. None of this suggests ad hoc thinking upon reasonable fears or apprehensions, but rather to remind that competent national security planning in Washington and Jerusalem should be conceptualized as a detailed struggle of “mind over mind.”[liv]
For the United States and Israel, issues of calibrated nuclear deterrence remain fundamentally intellectual challenges, issues requiring meticulous analytic preparation[lv] rather than any particular leadership “attitude.”[lvi] Such planning ought never become just another contest of “mind over matter;”[lvii] that is, just a vainly overvalued inventory of comparative weaponry or identifiable “order of battle.” Unless this rudimentary point is more completely understood by senior US and Israeli strategic policymakers – and until these same policymakers can begin to see the overriding wisdom of expanded visions of human “oneness”[lviii] – America and Israel could never render themselves sufficiently secure from a nuclear war.
In both Ukraine and portions of the Middle East, the historical conditions of nature bequeathed at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) could soon come to resemble the primordial barbarism of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Long before Golding, Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, warned insightfully in Leviathan (Chapter XIII) that in any such circumstances of human disorder there must exist “continual fear, and danger of violent death….”
Perceptions of credibility
In the end, differences between Russian and American views on nuclear “firebreak” theory may not prove conclusive or policy-determinative, but they would nonetheless warrant analytic attention in Washington and Jerusalem. As the Russians are already re-cycling Soviet-era doctrines on tactical nuclear weapons, these updated iterations will still need to be expertly vetted and constantly re-assessed. Among other things, such obligatory examinations by American and Israeli strategists should focus on plausible meanings of lower yields and shorter ranges in adversarial military doctrine.
If Putin should sometime prove willing to cross the conventional-tactical nuclear firebreak on the assumption that such a move would not invite any reciprocal cycle of nuclear escalation with the United States, the American president could face an overwhelmingly tragic choice: total capitulation or nuclear war. Though it would be best for the United States to avoid ever having to reach such a fateful decisional moment, there could still be no guarantees of “mutual assured prudence” between Washington and Moscow. It follows that growing perils of asymmetrical nuclear doctrine should be countered incrementally and intellectually.
Looking ahead at “Cold War II,” American and Israeli security will hinge on fostering vital “perceptions of credibility,” Regarding Russia’s changing nuclear doctrine, only dedicated analytic minds could ever distance Planet Earth from World War III. Taken together with Russia’s war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s strategic doctrine blurs essential conceptual lines between conventional and nuclear conflict and creates existential hazards for both the United States and Israel. The solely rational response from Washington and Jerusalem should be to understand these unsustainable hazards and to plan appropriately for their most efficient minimization or removal.
For the United States and Israel, the threat posed by asymmetrical nuclear firebreaks could impact the likelihood of both deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war. The central situation of asymmetrical nuclear firebreak theory cannot be remediated by international treaty or unilateral fiat, but it still deserves a place of subject matter primacy in American and Israeli strategic planning. For Jerusalem, inter alia, this means an uninterrupted obligation to convince its Russian-backed adversary in Tehran that use of North Korea as a nuclear surrogate could invite an Israeli nuclear reprisal. Ironically, Jerusalem would find compelling support for just such a policy position in Vladimir Putin’s recently-changed nuclear stance vis-à-vis the United States. By this stance, Putin declared a nuclear-state ally of Ukraine that allowed its nuclear assets to be used against Russian territory would be considered Ukraine’s co-belligerent.
By this stance, Putin has brought Russia and the United States closer to a nuclear war. Were this war to happen, all other global crises and conflicts would effectively become moot.
These are daunting intellectual issues. Sorting out the most urgent ones, Israel could soon find itself confronting North Korean military assets that threaten on behalf of a pre-nuclear Iran. Whether or not these proxy weapons and forces were under the overall direction of Moscow, asymmetries in nuclear escalation doctrine between Russia and the United States would be material to pertinent event outcomes. Left unanticipated or unmodified, they could sometime prove determinative.
[i]The precise origins of anticipatory self-defense under international law 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 certain militarily defensive 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)
[ii] See: Resolution on the Definition of Aggression, Dec. 14, 1974, U.N.G.A. Res. 3314 (XXIX), 29 U.N. GAOR, Supp. (No. 31) 142, U.N. Doc. A/9631, 1975, reprinted in 13 I.L.M. 710, 1974; and Charter of the United Nations, Art. 51. Done at San Francisco, June 26, 1945. Entered into force for the United States, Oct. 24, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993, Bevans 1153, 1976, Y.B.U.N. 1043.
[iii] “Theory is a net,” 20th century philosopher Karl Popper learned from the German poet Novalis, “only those who cast, can catch.” See epigraph to Popper’s classic The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959).
[iv] On “escalation dominance,” see article by Professor Louis René Beres at The War Room, US Army War College, Pentagon: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making-and-nuclear-war-an-urgent-american-problem/
[v] The term “dialectic” originates from the Greek expression for the art of conversation. A common contemporary meaning is method of seeking truth by correct reasoning. From the standpoint of shaping Israel’s strategy vis-à-vis Iran, the following operations could be regarded as essential but nonexclusive components: (1) a method of refutation conducted by examining logical consequences; (2) a method of division or repeated logical analysis of genera into species; (3) logical reasoning using premises that are probable or generally accepted; (4) formal logic; and (5) the logical development of thought through thesis and antithesis to fruitful synthesis of these opposites.
[vi]This key term was made famous among nuclear thinkers by Herman Kahn in seminal works On Thermonuclear War, Thinking About the Unthinkable (1962) (above) and Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s (1984).
[vii] See, for example, by this writer: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (The University of Chicago Press, 1980).
[viii]See earlier, by this author, at Harvard National Security Journal, Harvard Law School: Louis René Beres, https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/)
[ix] See, by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zürich): https://horasis.org/capping-existential-nuclear-crisis-in-ukraine/
[x] For early accounts by this author of nuclear war risks and effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018). https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy
[xi] As part of this problem, Sun-Tzu’s Art of War calls for gaining the upper hand through the “unorthodox.” In Chapter 5, on “Strategic Military Power,” Sun-Tzu states succinctly: “In general, in battle, one engages with the orthodox and gains victory through the unorthodox.” The ancient Chinese author’s idea of “battle” would surely include present-day nuclear deterrence. After all, as he says elsewhere in the Art of War, at Chapter 3, “Planning Offensives:” “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting, is the true pinnacle of excellence.”
[xii] See, by this writer, Louis René Beres: https://jewishwebsite.com/opinion/folly-redux-the-deeper-meanings-of-a-second-trump-presidency/79330/ . Ironically, the Founding Fathers of the United States were authentic intellectuals. As explained by American historian Richard Hofstadter: “The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.” See Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 145.
[xiii] North Korean nuclearization was allegedly kept “under control” by Trump because Kim Jong Un had “fallen in love” with the American president. But that “love” was not lasting. Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosophers: “I believe because it is absurd.”
[xiv]This brings up the jurisprudential issues of Nuremberg-category criminality. Three principal categories of criminality were identified at the London Charter (August 1945) and in the subsequent Nuremberg Tribunal indictments. Similar but not identical terms were used at the later Tokyo Trial of Japanese war criminals. For the Nuremberg prosecutions, see: Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal, Nuremberg, 14 November 1944-1 October 1946, 42 vols., IMT Secretariat, Nuremberg, 1947-9. Cited by A.P. D’entreves, Natural Law 110 (1951).
[xv] See, by this author, at The War Room (Pentagon): Louis René Beres, https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making/
[xvi] See, by this writer, at US News & World Report: Louis René Beres, https://www.usnews.com/opinion/op-ed/articles/2017-07-13/donald-trump-and-the-triumph-of-anti-reason-in-america
[xvii] See, by this author, at US News & World Report, Louis René Beres: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/articles/2017-08-17/how-donald-trump-fails-logic-and-presidential-thinking. As policy, “America First” always stood in sharp contrast to authoritative legal principles concerning solidarity between states. These jurisprudential standards concern a presumptively common legal struggle against aggression, genocide and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known formally in law as a jus cogens assumption, was already mentioned in Justinian, Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, Ch. 20 (Francis W. Kesey., tr, Clarendon Press, 1925) (1690); and Emmerich de Vattel, 1 Le Droit des Gens, Ch. 19 (1758).
[xviii]In law, responsibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin for such crimes is not limited by his official position or by any requirement of his direct personal actions. On the principle of command responsibility, or respondeat superior, see: In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1945); The High Command Case (The Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb) 12 LAW REPORTS OF TRIALS OF WAR CRIMINALS 1, 71 (United Nations War Crimes Commission Comp. 1949); see: Parks, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR CRIMES, 62 MIL.L.REV. 1 (1973); O’Brien, THE LAW OF WAR, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY AND VIETNAM, 60 GEO.L.J. 605 (1972); U.S. DEPT OF THE ARMY, ARMY SUBJECT SCHEDULE No. 27 – 1 (Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Hague Convention No. IV of 1907) 10 (1970). The direct individual responsibility of leaders for crime s of war, genocide and genocide-like crimes is unambiguous in view of the London Agreement, which denies defendants the protection of the Act of State defense. See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Strat. 1544, E.A.S. No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, Art. 7. Under traditional international law, violations were the responsibility of the state, as a corporate actor, and not of individual human decision-makers in government or the military. Today, even if Putin could somehow argue persuasively that Russian military violations in Ukraine were being committed without his express authorization, he would remain legally responsible.
[xix]International humanitarian law, or the laws of war, comprise: (1) laws on weapons; (2) laws on warfare; and (3) humanitarian rules. Codified primarily at The Hague and Geneva Conventions, and known thereby as the law of The Hague and the law of Geneva, these rules seek to bring discrimination, proportionality and military necessity into belligerent calculations. On the main corpus of jus in bello, see: Convention No. IV, Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land, With Annex of Regulations, Oct. 18, 1907, 36 Stat. 2277, T.S. No. 539, 1 Bevans 631 (known commonly as the “Hague Regulations”); Convention for the Amelioration of the Condition of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T. 3114, T.I.A.S. No. 3362, 75 U.N.T.S. 85; Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T. 3316, T.I.A.S. No. 3364, 75 U.N.T.S. 135; Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, Aug. 12, 1949, 6 U.S.T. 3516, T.I.A.S. No. 3365, 75 U.N.T.S. 287.
[xx]But neither international law nor US law specifically advises particular penalties or sanctions for states that choose not to prevent or punish genocide by others. All states, most notably the “major powers” belonging to the UN Security Council, are bound, among other things, by the peremptory obligation (defined at Article 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties) known as pacta sunt servanda, to act in continuous “good faith.” This pacta sunt servanda obligation is itself derived from an even more basic norm of world law commonly known as “mutual assistance.” This civilizing norm was famously identified within the classical interstices of international jurisprudence, most notably by eighteenth-century Swiss legal scholar, Emmerich de Vattel, in The Law of Nations (1758).
[xxi] There are pertinent legal questions and answers here. According to William Blackstone, echoing Vattel (supra), each state and nation is expected “to aid and enforce the law of nations, as part of the common law, by inflicting an adequate punishment upon offenses against that universal law….” See: 2 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Book 4, “Of Public Wrongs.” Lest anyone ask about the significance of Blackstone for American jurisprudence, one need only remind that his Commentaries represent the core foundation of United States law.
[xxii]This condition of anarchy is structural, and dates back specifically to the historic Peace of Westphalia in 1648. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia.
[xxiii] See, by this author: Louis René Beres, “Nuclear War Avoidance: Why It Is Time to Start Worrying, Again,” Air and Space Operations Review, Spring 2022, United States Air Force, Pentagon, pp. 69-81.
[xxiv]Earlier, “Cold War II” meant expecting the world system to once again become “tightly” bipolar. For previous writings, by this author, see: Louis René Beres, “Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and the Reliability of Alliance Commitments,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 25, No.4., December 1972, pp. 702-710; Louis René Beres, “Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 26, No.4., December 1973, pp, 649-658; and Louis René Beres, “Guerillas, Terrorists, and Polarity: New Structural Models of World Politics,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 27, No.4., December 1974, pp. 624-636. Today, at the end of 2024, “Cold War II” means a hardening of US-Russian dualism, but also a concurrent “third pole” in China.
[xxv] Expressions of enemy 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).
[xxvi]The Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin coined a new term to denote the vital sphere of intellect or “mind.” This term is “noosphere;” it builds upon Friedrich Nietzsche’s stance well-known (especially in Zarathustra) that human beings must always challenge themselves, must continuously strive to “overcome” their otherwise meager “herd”-determined yearnings.
[xxvii] Says 20th-century Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in Man and Crisis: “…science – by which I mean the entire body of knowledge about things, whether corporeal or spiritual – is as much a work of imagination as it is of observation…the latter is not possible without the former.”
[xxviii] For analysis of deterring not-yet-nuclear adversaries in the case of Israel, see article co-authored by Professor Louis René Beres and (former Israeli Ambassador) Zalman Shoval at the Modern War Institute, West Point (Pentagon): https://mwi.usma.edu/creating-seamless-strategic-deterrent-israel-case-study/
[xxix] Recall here the classic statement of Julius Caesar: “Men as a rule believe what they want to believe.” See: Caesar’s Gallic War, Book III, Chapter 18.
[xxx] Reminds strategic theorist Herman Kahn in his On Escalation (1965): “All accidental wars are inadvertent and unintended, but not vice-versa.” In his seminal writings, Kahn introduced a novel distinction between a surprise attack that is more-or-less unexpected and a surprise attack that arrives ex nihilo or “out of the blue.” The former, he counseled, “…is likely to take place during a period of tension that is not so intense that the offender is essentially prepared for nuclear war….” A total surprise attack, however, would be one without any immediately recognizable tension or warning signal. This particular subset of a surprise attack scenario could be difficult to operationalize for any tangible national security policy benefit. See: Herman Kahn, Thinking About the Unthinkable in the 1980s (Simon & Schuster, 1984).
[xxxi] This prospect now includes the plausible advent of so-called “cyber- mercenaries.”
[xxxii]This brings to mind the nuclear deterrence issue of “deliberate ambiguity,” a doctrinal issue most commonly associated with Israel in the Middle East. In the end, nuclear deterrence is as much a matter of perceived intent as perceived capacity. Israel’s posture of “deliberate ambiguity” has centered on the latter; that is, on the country’s presumptive possession of nuclear weapons. For the United States, however, now facing potential prospects of nuclear engagement with Russia over Ukraine, any matters of deliberate ambiguity could focus only on the former. Here, the only plausible issues of doubt would concern the credibility of American nuclear intent.
[xxxiii] This brings to mind classical Chinese strategist Sun-Tzu’s axiomatic point that “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.” See by this writer at Harvard Law School, Harvard National Security Journal, Louis René Beres: https://harvardnsj.org/2013/10/24/lessons-for-israel-from-ancient-chinese-military-thought-facing-iranian-nuclearization-with-sun-tzu/
[xxxiv] This “hybrid” concept could also be applied to various pertinent ad hoc bilateral state collaborations against US strategic interests. For example, during June 2019, Russia and China collaborated to block an American initiative aimed at halting fuel deliveries to North Korea. The US-led cap on North Korea’s fuel imports had been intended to sanction any continuing North Korean nuclearization. Prima facie, this narrowly visceral plan was intrinsically futile.
[xxxv] On “escalation dominance,” see article by Professor Louis René Beres at The War Room, US Army War College, Pentagon: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making-and-nuclear-war-an-urgent-american-problem/
[xxxvi]Anticipating 20th century Spanish thinker Jose Ortega y’Gasset (cited above), the seventeenth-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal remarks prophetically in Pensées: “All our dignity consists in thought…It is upon this that we must depend…Let us labor then to think well: this is the foundation of morality.” Similar reasoning characterizes the writings of Baruch Spinoza, Pascal’s 17th-century contemporary. In Book II of his Ethics Spinoza considers the human mind, or the intellectual attributes, and – drawing further upon René Descartes – strives to define an essential theory of learning and knowledge.
[xxxvii] In his own work, Sigmund Freud sought to “excavate” certain deeper meanings concerning irrational human behavior. Always, he was a modern-day philosophe, a proud child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, one who discovered profound analytic and therapeutic advantages in exploring sometimes-arcane literary paths to psychological knowledge. Freud maintained an extensive personal collection of antiquities which suggested various penetrating psychological insights to him. Some of his collection was placed directly on his work desk; reportedly, he would often touch and turn the individual artifacts while deeply engaged in some challenging thought.
[xxxviii] See, for example, by this author, at Yale: Louis René Beres, https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/nuclear-treaty-abrogation-imperils-global-security
[xxxix] Regarding “covenants,” US decision-makers should nonetheless be continually attentive to relevant considerations of law as well as strategy. More particularly, under authoritative law, states must judge every use of force twice: once with regard to the underlying right to wage war (jus ad bellum) and once with regard to the means used in conducting an actual war (jus in bello). Following the Kellogg-Briand Pact (1928) and the United Nations Charter (1945), there remains no defensible legal right to waging an aggressive war. However, the long-standing customary right of post-attack self-defense does remain codified at Article 51 of the UN Charter. Similarly, subject to conformance, inter alia, with jus in bello criteria, certain instances of humanitarian intervention and collective security operations may also be consistent with jus ad bellum standards. The law of war, the rules of jus in bello, comprise: (1) laws on weapons; (2) laws on warfare; and (3) humanitarian rules. Codified primarily at The Hague and Geneva Conventions, these rules attempt to bring discrimination, proportionality and military necessity into all (state and sub-state) belligerent calculations.
[xl]Whether it is described in the Old Testament or other major sources of ancient Western thought, chaos can also be viewed as a source of human betterment. In essence, chaos is that which prepares the world for all things, both sacred and profane. Further, as its conspicuous etymology reveals, chaos represents the yawning gulf or gap wherein nothing is as yet, but where all civilizational opportunity must inevitably originate. Appropriately, the great German poet Friedrich Hölderlin observed: “There is a desert sacred and chaotic which stands at the roots of the things and which prepares all things.” Even in the pagan ancient world, the Greeks thought of such a desert as logos, which indicates to us that it was presumed to be anything but starkly random or without conceivable merit.
[xli]International law remains a “vigilante” or “Westphalian” system. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia.
[xlii]Though composed in the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan may still offer us a prophetic vision of this prospective condition in modern world politics. During chaos, which is a “time of War,” says the English philosopher in Chapter XIII (“Of the Natural Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery.”): “… every man is Enemy to every man… and where the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Still, at the actual time of writing Leviathan, Hobbes believed that the condition of “nature” in world politics was less chaotic than that same condition extant among individual human beings. This was because of what he had called the “dreadful equality” of individual men in nature concerning the ability to kill others. Significantly, this once-relevant differentiation has effectively disappeared with the continuing manufacture and spread of nuclear weapons, a dispersion soon apt to be exacerbated by an already-nuclear North Korea, by a not-yet-nuclear Iran and by the largely unpredictable effects of an ongoing disease pandemic.
[xliii]For the authoritative sources of international law, see art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice; done at San Francisco, June 26, 1945. Entered into force, Oct. 24, 1945; for the United States, Oct. 24, 1945. 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993, 3 Bevans 1153, 1976 Y.B.U.N., 1052.
[xliv]In the words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 184) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards…embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.'”).
[xlv]Regarding Israel, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, at BESA (Israel): Limited Nuclear War and Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, https://besacenter.org/limited-nuclear-war-and-israels-national-strategy/. Regarding the United States, American strategic thinkers should inquire whether accepting a visible posture of limited nuclear war would exacerbate enemy nuclear intentions or whether it would enhance this country’s overall nuclear deterrence. Such questions have been raised by this author for many years, but usually in more explicit reference to broadly theoretical or generic nuclear threats. See, for example, Louis René Beres, The Management of World Power: A Theoretical Analysis (1972); Louis René Beres, Terrorism and Global Security: The Nuclear Threat (1979; second edition, 1987); Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order (1984); Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (1986); and Louis René Beres, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (2016).
[xlvi] Such fashioning would need to distinguish elements of strategy from elements of doctrine. Military doctrine is not the same as military strategy. Rather, doctrine “sets the stage” or foundation 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 is to adapt as required in order to best support previously-fashioned military doctrine.
[xlvii] See, on deterring a prospectively irrational nuclear Iran, Louis René Beres and General John T. Chain, “Could Israel Safely deter a Nuclear Iran? The Atlantic, August 2012; and Professor Louis René Beres and General John T. Chain, “Israel; and Iran at the Eleventh Hour,” Oxford University Press (OUP Blog), February 23, 2012. Though dealing with Israeli rather than American nuclear deterrence, these articles authoritatively clarify the common conceptual elements. General Chain was Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command (CINCSAC).
[xlviii] On the primary importance of doctrine, by this author, see Louis René Beres, https://www.jurist.org/commentary/2020/01/louis-beres-seeking-plausible-strategic-goals-iran/ See also, concerning US ally Israel: https://strategicassessment.inss.org.il/wp-content/uploads/antq/fe-676949421.pdf
[xlix] See, by this author (who was Chair of Project Daniel for Israeli PM Ariel Sharon): http://www.acpr.org.il/ENGLISH-NATIV/03-ISSUE/daniel-3.htm See also: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/israel-nuclear-ambiguity/ and https://www.idc.ac.il/he/research/ips/Documents/2013/%D7%A0%D7%99%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%95%D7%AA/LouisReneBeres.pdf
[l]The prospect of sub-national nuclear foes brings to attention the threat of nuclear terrorism. See, by this author, Louis René Beres, https://digitalcommons.law.uga.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=https://search.yahoo.com/&httpsredir=1&article=1410&context=gjicl
[li] See, for example, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Harvard National Security Journal: https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/
[lii] In this connection, expressions of decisional error (including mistakes by the United States) could take different and overlapping forms. These forms 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 internal dissonance generated by any authoritative structure of collective decision-making (e.g., the US National Security Council).
[liii] For much earlier similar warnings, by this author, see his October 1981 article at World Politics (Princeton): https://www.jstor.org/stable/2010149?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
[liv] Clausewitzian friction refers to the unpredictable effects of errors in knowledge and information concerning strategic uncertainties; on presidential under-estimations or over-estimations of US relative power position; and on the unalterably vast and largely irremediable differences between theories of deterrence and enemy intent “as it actually is.” See: Carl von Clausewitz, “Uber das Leben und den Charakter von Scharnhorst,” Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, 1 (1832); cited in Barry D. Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, McNair Paper No. 52, October, 1996, Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University Washington, D.C. p. 9.
[lv] Or “thorough study,” in the language of Sun-Tzu.
[lvi] The trivializing bifurcation of “attitude” and “preparation” was invoked by Donald Trump before going off to his June 2018 “Singapore Summit” meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. In that inane distinction, the former US President favored the former.
[lvii] This vital reminder is also drawn from the strategic calculations of ancient Greece. See, for example, F.E. Adcock, The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (University of California, 1962).
[lviii] We may learn from ancient Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus, “”You are a citizen of the universe.” A broader idea of such “oneness” followed the death of Alexander in 322 BCE; with it came a coinciding doctrine of “universality.” By the Middle Ages, this political and social doctrine had fused with the notion of a Respublica Christiana, a worldwide Christian commonwealth, and Thomas, John of Salisbury and Dante were looking at Europe as a single and unified Christian community. Below the level of God and his heavenly host, all the realm of humanity was to be considered as one. This is because all the world had been created for the same single and incontestable purpose; that is, to provide background for the necessary drama of human salvation. Only in its relationship to the universe itself was the world correctly considered as a part rather than a whole. Said Dante in De Monarchia: “The whole human race is a whole with reference to certain parts, and, with reference to another whole, it is a part. For it is a whole with reference to particular kingdoms and nations, as we have shown; and it is a part with reference to the whole universe, which is evident without argument.” Today, of course, the idea of human oneness can be fully justified and explained in more purely secular terms of analytic understanding.