“Simple,” But “Still Difficult” – Improving the Underpinnings of Israel’s Strategic Future

Special to JewishWebSight

“Everything is very simple in war,  but the simplest thing is still difficult.”
Carl von Clausewitz, On War

Although an apparent paradox, Carl von Clausewitz’s classic juxtaposition of simplicity and difficulty is actually quite sensible. In essence, and in a timeless observation that could even elucidate Israel’s nuclear posture, the Prussian strategist already understood (1) that serious military planning must always be problematic (especially  in view of  what he called “friction,” or the “fog of war”); and (2) that a national army’s best effort must be tirelessly  comprehensive and systematic.[1] At the same time, he reminds that all planned tactical moves must remain tightly-fastened to a predetermined “political object.”

Always, warned Clausewitz, strategy and tactics must follow politics. Never, he cautioned, could it conceivably make any sense to detach such doctrinal and operational goals from expressly specific and readily-identifiable political outcomes. In this connection, a plainly glaring example of one nation’s misunderstandings is the post-World War II United States, most notably in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. In all of these more-or-less lamentable excursions, certain narrowly-conceived objectives of commanders (in the field, in the White House, and in Congress) became unhinged from overriding and achievable goals.

Today, the pertinent lessons apply equally well to Israel. For the Jewish State, core strategic problems must always be conceptualized as political and systemic. Looking ahead, a continuously nuclearizing Iran will likely encourage now latent nuclear ambitions in Saudi Arabia and possibly Egypt. Inter alia, such regional nuclear break-outs could readily intersect in various complex ways with both state and sub-state militarization, and also with certain corollary terrorist intentions. And in similarly foreseeable circumstances, these destabilizing break outs could measurably impact terrorist capabilities.

Confronted with such formidable analytic matters, Israel’s strategic planners will need to be exceedingly precise. “Synergies,” which might include the unique creation of state-sub-state or otherwise “hybrid” nuclear foes, could display various “cascading” effects,[2] and, accordingly, present as unfathomably dense or complicated.[3] Israel’s designated planners would then need to bear in mind a fundamental characteristic of  all pertinent synergistic interactions: The whole is effectively greater than the simple sum of its component parts. Here, for security planning purposes, the “whole” would represent the tangibly cumulative enemy nuclear threat posed by state and sub-state adversaries.[i4]

In any such scenario, a countervailing Saudi (Sunni) nuclear capacity will likely have been made possible by Pakistan, a state that is potentially unstable, and which in recent years embraced an unhidden tactical or “nuclear-war fighting” concept of nuclear deterrence. Plausibly, this openly enlarged emphasis upon theatre nuclear forces was intended to enhance Islamabad’s deterrence credibility vis-à-vis Delhi.[5] Still, it displays major systemic policy ramifications extending well beyond southwest Asia. Islamabad’s changed nuclear emphasis is likely very different from those presumptive nuclear deterrence strategies now being fashioned in Israel.[6]

There is more. Various threatening intersections of Saudi and Iranian interests could become most probable and problematic wherever they would also link ISIS, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda or other surrogate elements. To render such reasonably plausible geo-strategic intersections even more ominous, and perhaps more “opaque,” they could further be affected by an already emergent “Cold War II.”

Oddly, and for several readily determinable reasons (e.g., Russia has generally been a strong supporter of Iran and Syria),  Riyadh has been extending certain collaborative overtures to Moscow.  For Saudi Arabia, this means taking some novel steps toward cementing a unique and unpredictable sort of alignment with the “other” superpower. Just as oddly, perhaps, there are various visibly idiosyncratic indications that a Trump presidency could informally seek to reverse Cold War II, a potentially naive stance that might first sound distinctly promising for Israel and the United States, but could quickly represent a net strategic loss for both countries.

Mirroring its myriad threats,[7] Israeli counter-measures will need to be comparably complex, and should promptly include an optimal assortment of interpenetrating remedies. Among other measured responses, this doctrinally-based configuration of “force multipliers” should eventually include: (1) a calculated and controlled end to “deliberate nuclear ambiguity;”[8] (2) recognizable enhancements of counter-value nuclear targeting doctrine;[9] (3) incrementally-greater deployments of ballistic-missile defenses[10];  and (4) a progressively greater reliance on selective sea-basing of national nuclear forces.[11]  It could also suggest taking appropriately new steps to challenge an inevitable barrage of substantially shrill “nonproliferation” demands, both from the United Nations organization, and also from the generally wider international community.

For Israel, any significant compliance with allegedly legal demands for denuclearization could prove massively injurious, or even catastrophic. Indeed, even if all the involved enemy states were to remain entirely non-nuclear themselves, these long-standing adversaries, and also their terrorist proxies,[12] could still find themselves in a palpably improved position to militarily overwhelm Israel. Already, Hezbollah, the Shiite militia run from Tehran, and in league with both Moscow and Damascus, may control more offensive rockets than all of the European NATO countries combined.

Sunni ISIS or certain of its still-surviving local surrogates, periodically launching rockets into southern Israel from the Egyptian Sinai, could sometime gain access to weapons-usable nuclear materials in Syria. Conceivably, such materials will have originated with the Israeli-destroyed Al Kibar reactor (built by North Korea) back in 2007. Of course, if Israel had never undertaken “Operation Orchard,” Syrian insurgent groups still fighting Bashar al-Assad (or the genocidal Assad regime itself) might by now have gained operational access to certain already-assembled nuclear weapons.

It is easy to understand Israel’s Arab and Iranian enemies’ recalcitrant insistence upon creating a non-nuclear Israel. Of course, should these Sunni and Shiite adversaries all be verifiably willing to remain non-nuclear after the P5+1 2015 agreement[13] – a tall order indeed – their cumulative conventional, chemical, and biological capabilities could still bring intolerable harms to Israel. In other words, without maintaining what Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, had originally conceived as a “great equalizer,” the Jewish State could then need to face an utterly refractory principle of warfare. This is that, ultimately, “mass counts.”

Israel, one needn’t be reminded, has virtually no mass, the key argument for Jerusalem’s presumptive submarine-basing of some nuclear weapons.

In law, as well as in strategy, war and genocide need not be mutually exclusive. Even today,  Palestinian and Iranian maps expose unhidden plans for a faith-driven genocide against “the Jews.” Religiously, these contemplated crimes against humanity – or “incitements to genocide,” in the more derivative language of the 1948 Genocide Convention – stem from the clearly animating eschatologies of “sacred” violence.[14]

With its own presumptive nuclear weapons, even if maintained as “deliberately ambiguous,” Israel could reasonably expect to deter a rational[15] enemy’s unconventional attacks, and also most large conventional ones. Further, while securely holding such fearful weapons, Israel could still launch certain cost-effective non-nuclear preemptive strikes against an enemy state’s hard (military) targets. Without nuclear weapons, any such purely conventional expressions of anticipatory self-defense would likely presage only the onset of a much wider and more obviously corrosive war.

The strategic rationale for any such under-explored nuclear argument is easy to explain. In essence, without a recognizable nuclear backup in its deterrence posture, there might no longer exist sufficiently compelling threats of an Israeli counter-retaliation. It follows that Israel’s nuclear arsenal actually represents a critically valuable impediment to regional nuclear war, a key point that should continue to be made plain to America’s president,[16] and to the United Nations.

There is more. Israel’s nuclear posture, especially if it is enhanced by assorted steps toward diminished ambiguity or partial disclosure, could prove vital to dealing with the country’s large conventional threats, and possibly also with prospective acts of mega-terrorism. To be sure, the plausibility/credibility of any appropriate Israeli threat of nuclear retaliation would be greatest where the particular aggression posed was also nuclear. Still, there are some foreseeable circumstances wherein a determined enemy or coalition of enemies might contemplate “only” a devastating conventional first-strike against Israel, and decide that such a strike would be cost-effective because it would not likely elicit any Israeli nuclear retaliation.

In such fully conceivable circumstances, the pertinent enemy state or coalition of enemy states will have concluded that any non nuclear first-strike against a nuclear Israel, however massive, would be rational. This is because the Jewish State’s anticipated retaliation would expectedly stop short of crossing the nuclear threshold.

If, however, the would-be aggressor had previously been made aware that Israel was in actual possession of a meaningfully wide array of capable nuclear forces –  in terms of their range, yield and ultimate penetration-capability – these enemies would more likely be successfully deterred. Here, as a distinctly welcome consequence of certain incremental and previously nuanced “disclosures,” Jerusalem-Tel Aviv will have signaled its relevant foes that it can and would cross the nuclear retaliatory threshold to punish any potentially existential national  destruction. Expressed in more narrowly technical military parlance, Israel’s actions here would be correctly intended to ensure “escalation dominance.” In this particular scenario, moreover, the specific nuclear deterrence benefits to Israel of implementing certain moves way from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” would lie in the more-or-less compelling signal that it sends.

This signal should indicate that Israel would not need to retaliate using only massive and plainly disproportionate nuclear force.

Such benefits could extend beyond the enhancement of credible threats of Israeli nuclear retaliation to enhancing credible threats of Israeli nuclear counter-retaliation. If, for example, Israel should initiate a non nuclear defensive first strike against Iran before that adversarial state becomes nuclear capable (an act of “anticipatory self defense” under international law), the plausibility of any massive Iranian conventional retaliation could better be reduced if there had first been more openly disclosed and prior Israeli threats of a measured nuclear counter retaliation. More succinctly, by following an incremental path away from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” (sometimes also described as the “bomb in the basement”), Israel would be less apt to replicate America’s earlier nuclear stance vis-à-vis  the Soviet Union – that is, a “classical” doctrinal posture of “massive retaliation.”

In themselves, nuclear weapons are neither good nor evil. In some circumstances, especially in a world of international anarchy,[17]  they could serve as  needed implements of stable military deterrence. Moreover, there does exist, under long-settled international law, a “peremptory” national right to employ or even fire nuclear weapons in order to survive. This expressly last-resort right is even codified at the 1996 Advisory Opinion on Nuclear Weapons, an authoritative Opinion handed down by the U.N.’s International Court of Justice.

One policy message remains unambiguous. Diplomacy has very substantial limits in assuring or safeguarding Israel’s national survival. Even following the July 2015 Vienna prohibitions concerning Iranian nuclearization, Israel has much to fear from Tehran. In this connection, if  Iran’s religious leadership should ever choose to abandon the usual basic premises of rational behavior in world politics – that is, to forfeit the ordinary primacy of national survival in its established order of personal preferences –  Jerusalem’s exclusively defensive nuclear deterrence posture could suddenly and quite literally fail.

Nonetheless, even if Iran should sometime become a nuclear suicide-bomber in macrocosm,[18] Israel’s only rational strategy, moving forward, should remain focused upon a suitably reciprocal enhancement of its own core nuclear deterrent.[19]

There is more. Even if Israel’s nuclear planners could reasonably assume that all enemy leaderships, including Iran, were expectedly rational, this would say nothing about the accuracy of the information actually used in their calculations. In matters of military strategy, as strategists must steadfastly recall, rationality refers only to the intention of maximizing certain expressed values or preferences – most importantly, national survival. It does not suggest anything at all about whether the information being used by an enemy is either correct or incorrect.

Fully rational enemy leaderships could commit assorted errors in calculation leading them toward a conventional war, or, in the future, toward a nuclear war with Israel. There are also several associated command and control issues that could sometime impel a perfectly rational adversary or alliance of adversaries to undertake intolerably risky nuclear behaviors. These issues include: (1) uncontrollable consequences of certain pre-delegations of launch authority; (2) presumptive deterrence-enhancing measures called “launch-on-warning” (alternatively, called “launch-upon-confirmed-attack”); and/or (3) ongoing Pakistani instability and a consequent coup d’état.

“Everything is very simple in war,” says Carl von Clausewitz, On War, “but the simplest thing is still difficult.” For Israel, deciphering the strikingly complex connections between world politics[20] and national nuclear strategy will present a unique intellectual  challenge. In assessing this computational challenge, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv (prime minister and the IDF) will need to conceptualize both prospective threats and prospective remedies in broadly systemic terms.[21] For an obvious example, what develops in other parts of the world, such as northeast and southwest Asia, could inevitably impact the Middle East. And where nuclear weapons or nuclear war were involved, this impact could become utterly profound and historically unprecedented.

Just days after Donald Trump took office as president of the United States, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists reset its “Doomsday Clock” to 2 1/2 minutes to midnight. One year later, in January 2018, the Bulletin clock was again moved forward by 30 seconds. While plainly symbolic, such representations of grave systemic danger should raise the red flag of world security interdependence for decision makers in Israel.

To be sure, North Korea’s still-developing nuclear program will reverberate globally,[22] as will the conspicuous expansion of “Cold War II” between Russia and the United States;  still-growing tensions over the South China Sea; and steadily expanding nuclear arsenals in both Pakistan and India. A related concern is the seemingly unstoppable worldwide expansion of cyber threats, an expansion aimed not only at particular strategic and military assets directly, but also against certain vulnerable national infrastructures.[23] These possibly more indirect targets could include national power grids, vulnerable water supplies, and absolutely all forms of communication and transportation.

Although a Jesuit Father and distinguished paleontologist – and not a specifically military or strategic planner – Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s overarching vision of “system” applies usefully to Israel’s physical survival. In one sense, such an application must appear more than a little ironic, chiefly because Chardin’s ultimate vision for human evolution and human future is for the resounding triumph of species “oneness” and generalized cooperation. Such triumph Chardin had originally dubbed as “planetization.”

Nonetheless, any hoped-for or even expected victory of species convergence over divergence remains starkly improbable, at least from the sobering standpoint of a small state surrounded by assorted unrelenting foes, and the concept of “system” will need to remain an integral element of Israel’s strategic planning. To best optimize this indispensable element, Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv should never make the mistake of conceptualizing the country’s vital strategic weapons and doctrine from a narrowly regional or enemy-state perspective. Instead, its strategic planners must fully and continuously acknowledge the burdensome complexity of all pertinent inter-relationships and intersections, and also recognize the increasingly chaotic context of our multi-dimensional world system.

The chaos Israel faces today is much more daunting than the more usual conditions of structural anarchy that were originally bequeathed at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This newest chaos is more evidently primal, more primordial, even more self-propelled, “lascivious,” or viscerally destructive. Accordingly, what Israel’s planner must soon understand, inter alia, is that the more traditional and recurrent breakdowns of “equilibrium” in world politics are altogether benign in comparison to the near-total “state of nature” expected in any post-nuclear war world.

In this riveting regard, perhaps the best literary analogue to what ought to be studied in Jerusalem/Tel Aviv is William Golding’s conceivably prophetic parable, Lord of the Flies.

Long before Golding, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, had already warned insightfully about any state of nature. Then, cautioned Hobbes, in such daunting circumstances of extreme human disarray or disorder, there must always exist “continual fear, and the danger of violent death.” Famously, he continued, the “life of man” in nature must inevitably become “solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short.”[24] To some analytic extent, of course, relevant issues of chaos and nature must intersect with core issues of enemy rationality.

In Leviathan, Hobbes explicitly indicates that all world politics exists in a genuine state of nature, but that the particular condition of nations in nature is more tolerable than the condition of individuals in anarchy. The is because, he argues, in the case of individual human beings, “…the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest.” With nuclear weapons, however, there is no longer any good reason to maintain that the “state of nations” is more tolerable. Rather, the proliferation of nuclear weapons will bring the much wider state of nations closer to a true Hobbesian state of nature.[25]

“Everything is very simple in war,” notes Clausewitz,[26]  “but the simplest thing is still difficult.” Among other reasons, this is because of the inevitably stark differences between written strategic plans, and actual operational outcomes. In the arts, to deploy a well-reasoned analogy, the printed dialogues of a play are no more an authentic rendition of theatrical meaning than a printed score of music can ever by itself represent an accurate rendition of intersecting sounds.

In essence, music does not really exist until it is played, and a stage play cannot really come to life until it is acted on stage. War can never be adequately predicted solely by study of its written plans, however meticulous and comprehensive. “Friction,” the potentially profound difference between such plans and a belligerency “as it actually is” (On War)[27] always stands ready to intrude and falsify.

The lesson for Israel, in fashioning an appropriate strategic posture, is never to minimize the importance of careful advance nuclear preparations, but rather to remain appropriately cautious and modest in the precise shaping of pertinent security expectations.

And what about the “political object?” What, precisely, will Israel want to accomplish with its presumptive nuclear weapons? If solely for deterrence, should pertinent doctrine reference certain conventional or non-nuclear threats, or only expressly nuclear ones? If the latter, should targeting emphases be on identifiable enemy populations (counter-value targeting) and/or on harder military and infrastructure assets?

Whatever targeting choices are ultimately made, ought these to remain entirely secret,  in the “basement,” or should they be less “deliberately ambiguous,” or disclosed?

These will all present very difficult questions, especially if Israel’s senior planners take into account utterly vital distinctions (1) between rational and irrational adversaries (both state and sub-state); (2) between deliberate and unintentional nuclear warfare; and (3) between war by accident and war by miscalculation.

“Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is still difficult.”

[1]“Friction,” the classic Clausewitzian term of military planning, references the inherently-unpredictable effect of errors in knowledge and information. Apropos of this concept, and in particular reference to the contemporary State of Israel’s strategic uncertainties, we must consider (1) both Israeli and adversarial underestimations or overestimations of relative power position; and (2) the unalterably vast and largely irremediable differences between abstract theories of deterrence and actual enemy intentions.

[2] Potential “cascades” of failure represent one particular iteration of complex threat intersection. In this connection, Israel’s strategic planners must remain attentive to any accumulating “torrent” of diverse security threats. Nonetheless, not all relevant synergies, even when they might actually “couple” sub-systems in different domains, should be expected to “cascade.”

[3] Whether or not a strategic synergy is expected to “cascade,” Israeli analysts should acquaint themselves with the related concept of “skipping.” This comes into play when one or more threats or issues would interact “surreptitiously” with several others, but only where some of them would actually react. On a more plainly technical note, these surreptitious reactions would be nonlinear and intermittent.

[4] See: Louis René Beres, “Like Two Scorpions in a Bottle: Could Israel and a Nuclear Iran Coexist in the Middle East,” The Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2014, pp. 23-32; Louis René Beres, “Facing Myriad Enemies: Core Elements of Israeli Nuclear Deterrence,” The Brown Journal of World Affairs, Vol. XX, Issue No. 1., Fall/Winter 2013, pp. 17-30; Louis René Beres, “Lessons for Israel From Ancient Chinese Military Thought: Facing Iranian Nuclearization with Sun-Tzu,” Harvard National Security Journal, 2013;  Louis René Beres, “Striking Hezbollah-Bound Weapons in Syria: Israel’s Actions Under International Law,” Harvard National Security Journal, 2013; Louis René Beres, “Looking Ahead: Revising Israel’s Nuclear Ambiguity in the Middle East,” Herzliya Conference presentation, 2013; and Louis René Beres and General (USAF/ret.) John T. Chain, “Could Israel Safely Deter a Nuclear Iran?”  The Atlantic, 2012. General Chain was CINCSAC, Commander-in-Chief,  US Strategic Air Command.

[5] http://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1318&context=auilr

[6] Actual nuclear war-fighting must never become a sought-after strategic option for Israel. This point was a major conclusion of the Final Report of Project Daniel: Israel’s Strategic Future, ACPR Policy Paper No. 155, ACPR, Israel, May 2004, 64 pp. See also: Louis René Beres, “Facing Iran’s Ongoing Nuclearization: A Retrospective on Project Daniel,” International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, Vol. 22, Issue 3, June 2009, pp. 491-514. Professor Beres was Chair of Project Daniel. See also: Louis René Beres, “Israel’s Uncertain Strategic Future,” Parameters: Journal of the U.S. Army War College, Vol. XXXVII, No. 1., Spring 2007, pp. 37-54.

[7] At the end of January 2018, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Vladimir Putin to discuss Israel’s concerns about an expanding Iranian military foothold in Syria. Israel fears that there could soon be a permanent Iranian garrison in Syria, extending its core national security threats to include Lebanon/Hezbollah. Russia had played a dominant role in Syria itself during the civil war, ensuring Assad’s eventual success – and, thereby, the genocidal dictator’s regional allies.

[8] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, Looking Ahead: Revising Israel’s Nuclear Ambiguity in the Middle East, Herzliya Conference paper, Herzliya Conference, March 11-14, 2013 (Herzliya, Israel). See also: Louis René Beres and Leon (Bud) Edney (Admiral/USN/ret.), “Facing a Nuclear Iran, Israel Must Rethink its Nuclear Ambiguity,” U.S. News & World Report, February 11, 2013, 3 pp; and Professor Louis René Beres and Admiral Leon (Bud) Edney, “Reconsidering Israel’s Nuclear Posture,” The Jerusalem Post, October 14, 2013. Admiral Edney was NATO Supreme Allied Commander, Atlantic.

[9] The overriding danger of a counter-force nuclear targeting doctrine (a danger foreseen by Project Daniel) is an enlarged risk of actual nuclear war-fighting.

[10] On Israel-related matters of ballistic missile defense, see: Louis René Beres and (Major-General/IDF/Ret.) Isaac Ben-Israel, “The Limits of Deterrence,” Washington Times; November 21, 2007; Professor Louis René Beres and MG/Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, “Deterring Iran,” Washington Times, June 10, 2007; and Professor Louis René Beres and MG/Professor Isaac Ben-Israel, “Deterring Iranian Nuclear Attack,” Washington Times, January 27, 2009.

[11] On submarine-basing issue, see: Louis René Beres and Admiral (USN/ret.) Leon “Bud” Edney, “Israel’s Nuclear Strategy: A Larger Role for Submarine Basing,” The Jerusalem Post, August 17, 2014; and also Professor Beres and Admiral Edney, “A Sea-Based Nuclear Deterrent for Israel,” Washington Times, September 5, 2014. Admiral Edney was NATO Supreme Allied Commander (Atlantic).

[12] It is assuredly worth noting that enlarged Palestinian terrorism or even Palestinian statehood could present greater security risks to Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor. Already, in 1991 and 2014, this small reactor came under missile and rocket fire from Iraqi and Hamas aggressions respectively. For authoritative assessments of these particular attacks and related risks to Israel, see:  Bennett Ramberg, “Should Israel Close Dimona? The Radiological Consequences of a Military Strike on Israel’s Plutonium-Production Reactor,” Arms Control Today, May 2008, pp. 6-13.

[13] On a purely jurisprudential level of assessment, this agreement – which is not a proper treaty itself – violates both the pre-existing Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (1968) and the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948).

[14] “I believe,” warned Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West,” is the one great word against metaphysical fear.” Regarding connections between such eschatology and international law, see:  Louis René Beres, “Religious Extremism and International Legal Norms: Perfidy, Preemption and Irrationality,” Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, Vol. 39, No.3., 2007-2008, pp. 709-730.

[15] A rational enemy state is defined as one that always values its own physical survival more highly than any other single preference or combination of preferences. Regarding Israeli nuclear deterrence, wherever there might exist a different hierarchy of preferences (i.e., a decipherable rank-ordering in which an enemy state would value certain preferences even more highly than national self-preservation), successful dissuasion would become exceedingly problematic.

[16] In this connection, it is worth noting that Israel’s nuclear strategy could have certain meaningful implications for U.S. national security. On these connections, see Louis René Beres and (General/USA/ret.) Barry McCaffrey, ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR STRATEGY AND AMERICA’S NATIONAL SECURITY, Tel-Aviv University and Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, Tel-Aviv, December 2016: https://sectech.tau.ac.il/sites/sectech.tau.ac.il/files/PalmBeachBook.pdf

[17] This condition of “Westphalian” anarchy (going back to the end of the Thirty Years’ War, and the corresponding Peace of Westphalia) stands in stark contrast to formal legal assumptions of solidarity between all states. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known technically in jurisprudence as a “jus cogens” assumption, had already been mentioned in Justinian’ Corpus Juris Civilis (533 CE); Hugo Grotius, 2 De Jure Belli ac Pacis Libri Tres, 1625; and Emmerich de Vattel, The Law of Nations or Principles of Natural Law (1758).

[18] On entire nations as “mad,” see Seneca (Letters):  “We are mad, not only individuals, but nations also….”

[19] See Louis René Beres and General (USAF/ret) John T. Chain, “Could Israel Safely Deter a Nuclear Iran”? The Atlantic, 2012. General Chain was Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command (CINCSAC). In the worst case scenario, of course, an Iranian nuclear leadership (or any other adversarial nuclear leadership) would be genuinely mad. “Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman,” inquires Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello’s Henry IV: “Madmen, lucky folk, construct without logic, or rather with a logic that flies like a feather.”

[20] The classic indictment of statecraft’s often inherent shortcomings, of course, is Thomas Hobbes oft-quoted but rarely heeded observation at Chapter XVII of Leviathan: “And Covenants without the Sword are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all.”

[21] At some point, these terms should factor in the changing global geopolitics of energy. This is because the importance of the “oil weapon” has diminished, Israel has emerged as a natural gas producer, and the Paris Agreement on the environment now requires a meaningful reduction in global oil consumption.

[22] North Korea has continuously supported the Palestinian cause against Israel. Relations with the PLO began in 1966. Kim Il-Sung, the current North Korean leader’s grandfather – maintained a very close relationship with Yasser Arafat. North Korea supplied arms and other aid to the PLO, PFLP, and DFLP throughout the 1970s, and well into the 1980s. Since Yasser Arafat’s original declaration of a State of Palestine back in 1988, North Korea has fully recognized this self-declared sovereignty. Over the years, Pyongyang has also supplied various weapon systems, missile technologies and even mass-destruction technologies to Iran, Syria, Libya, Egypt, Iraq (under Saddam Hussein), Hezbollah, and Hamas.

[23] See Joseph S. Nye, “Can Cyber Warfare Be Deterred,” Project Syndicate, December 10, 2015.

[24] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Ch. XIII.

[25] Similarly, the German legal philosopher, Samuel Pufendorf, also unable to ever imagine the
equalizing effects of nuclear weapons, reasoned that the state of nations “lacks those inconveniences which are attendant upon a pure state of nature….” And said Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza: “A commonwealth can guard itself against being subjugated by another, as a man in the state of nature cannot do, (See: A.G. Wernham, ed., The Political Works, Tractatus Politicus, iii, II; Clarendon Press, 1958, p. 295.

[26] 1780 – 1831.

[27] Vom Kriege