“The laws of physics are decrees of fate.”-Alfred North Whitehead, The Origins of Modern Science
Among the world’s nuclear trouble spots, North Korea is the most plainly time-urgent. In managing this threat, North Korean “denuclearization” would represent a futile objective. Pyongyang’s nuclear weapons and nuclear posture are a fait accompli. Plausibly, they are irreversible.
For the United States, this means that meaningful remedies for Kim Jong Un’s threatening nuclear capabilities and ambitions will have to be sought in more promising expectations. In the final analysis, viable American remedies should coalesce around requirements of credible nuclear deterrence.[1]Recalling former and re-aspiring US President Donald J. Trump’s Singapore Summit declaration, it will not be enough for the two leaders to “fall in love” again. Whoever wins the 2024 election, that successful candidate will need to prioritize tangible intellectual substance over irrelevant photo opportunities.
Past could become prologue. Fundamental and substantial policy errors were committed by former President Donald Trump, and there is little reason to believe that he would now suddenly value analytic substance over distracting entertainments. Though getting Kim Jong Un to reverse his aggressive posture on nuclear weapons would be welcome news for any American president, no such news should be reasonably anticipated. Much as we might wish it were otherwise, the nations in world politics do not yet coexist in a logic-based international order.[2]
Multiple questions are spawned by this narrative. What ought to be done by the United States concerning a North Korean nuclear crisis or nuclear war? What sort of time-line should be applied? How should America proceed in this bewildering cauldron of regional instability? What if already nuclear North Korea comes to the assistance of its not-yet-nuclear Iranian ally contra Israel? Could such an unexpected nuclear surrogacy involve the United States, Russia and/or China?
These questions don’t have easily discernible answers. For the most part, nuclear geopolitical issues involving North Korea would be without clarifying historical precedent. These issues would be sui generis; some promising remedies would be counter-intuitive.
Though North Korea’s nuclear arsenal and infrastructures are “less powerful” than America’s (at least from the standpoint of still-calculable range/yield measures), they are nonetheless capable of producing unacceptable levels of devastation in the United States, South Korea or Japan. Even if America’s “missile interception reliability” were conspicuously high, nothing short of 100% reliability could suffice vis-à-vis enemy nuclear weapons.
No individual state should reasonably expect perfect levels of missile interception reliability. Nothing science-based could be estimated regarding actual event probabilities. In logic and mathematics, valid statements of probability must always be based on the determinable frequency of pertinent past events. In the opaque matters at hand, there are no such events.[3]
For the next American president, there should be only one analytically defensible and law-enforcing stance toward North Korea. This means a determinably coherent posture of long-term mutual deterrence.[4] Accordingly, prudent and concept-based decision-making will be indispensable. Among other things, any US president would need to take scrupulous care never to exaggerate or overstate America’s military power advantage[5] or its associated risk-taking calculus.
Various jurisprudential clarifications are now in order. From the standpoint of international law, there is no plausible contradiction between enhanced nuclear deterrence and world legal order. Rather, in our anarchic or “Westphalian” system of international law (a system bequeathed at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648), law enforcement must ultimately rely upon continuously intersecting mechanisms of “self-help.” In this stratified “state of nature,” international conflict can be managed only via assorted stratagems of threat, counter-threat and manipulations of “balance.”
There is more. These stratagems are augmented and tempered by multiple and intersecting regimes of treaties, customs and “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations.”[6] But the de facto final arbiters of world politics are necessarily those state and regional actors who can present most persuasively as “powerful.”
In the best of all possible worlds, greater global centralization or governance would replace “balance of power” or Realpolitik dynamics. Still, for the foreseeable future, the core deterrence logic of world power politics will likely continue. From the properly valued standpoint of international law enforcement, this conclusion is not problematic. As a viscerally primal species, we are not yet ready for the flawed logic of belligerent nationalism to be discarded.
Even with a reasonable and reasoning US president, American military planners will remain limited in their capacity to learn meaningfully from the pre-nuclear past. Looking ahead, preventing nuclear war with North Korea should never again become a clownish or seat-of-the-pants decisional process. Never again should US national security calculations become a self-parodying presidential sideshow dominated by mountebanks, rented “intellectuals” and rabid pitchmen. To make a point that has never really been understood, the primary battlefield of any future nuclear war would be intellectual.[7]
These are complex and potentially synergistic matters.[8] In all such matters, decisional caution should become the cardinal watchword.[9] By definition, there are no “go to” experts on the subject of nuclear war, either civilian or military. As there has never been such a war,[10] there could be no way for American planners or decision-makers to calculate the mathematical probability of any US-North Korea nuclear conflict, whether begun as a direct bilateral belligerency or as “spillover” from other parts of Asia and/or the Middle East.
Seen from within these fixed parameters, there exist ample policy grounds for greater US strategic “humility.” For the next American president, this is certainly not a proper time for gratuitous bellicosity, overweening pride or hubris. For an American president, it is always the correct time to display decision-making modesty in the country’s nuclear dealings with Kim Jong Un. When a prospectively belligerent path for a nation-state has never been walked before (e.g., nuclear warfare), it is incumbent on the calculating “traveler” to advance slowly, purposefully and with recognizable deliberateness.
There is more. All relevant strategic issues involving the United States and North Korea will concern many-sided matters of science, law and logic. These issues ought never to be considered merely as matters of wishful thinking or constructed faith. Though Trump’s original reference to his June 12, 2018 Singapore Summit with Kim Jong Un described an occasion where the two leaders “fell in love,” there remain no detectable or residual benefits to this “romance.” None at all.[11]
Regarding the North Korea nuclear problem, erudition should have its US policy-shaping pride of place. To wit, the American president will need to bear in mind that certain continuously transforming strategic developments across the Asian-Pacific region will inevitably be impacted by “Cold War II.” At its core, this “war” references an ongoing and primary oppositional stance with Russia, and – more or less derivatively – China.
More US planning precision will be required. How shall the United States best act vis-à-vis adversarial nuclear uncertainties? Proceeding with time-urgent considerations of US – North Korea policy, all significant US strategic calculations will be fraught with intersecting, overlapping and daunting uncertainties. It will be necessary for any American president and his designated counselors to remain ready to offer best available war-peace estimations.[12]
Among all potential causal factors – some of them maximally interdependent or authentically “synergistic” – the calculable risks of a nuclear war between Washington and Pyongyang (or between Pyongyang and South Korea) will depend on whether such a conflict would be intentional, unintentional or accidental. In these bewildering calculations, refined strategic theory would become an indispensable “net.” Ipso facto, only those who “cast” could expect to “catch.”
Some further clarifications will be needed. Any accidental nuclear war between the US and North Korea would be unintentional or inadvertent, but not all unintentional nuclear wars would be the result of an accident. Sometime, an unintentional nuclear war could be the result of decisional miscalculation or irrationality by either one or both of the two contending presidents. Such a worrisome understanding is realistic on its face, and ought to underscore the analysis-based need for US presidential humility.
There is still more to know. Facing future North Korean negotiations, it will be necessary that competent US policy analysts systematically examine and measure variously dynamic configurations of foreseeable nuclear risk. When expressed in the game-theoretic parlance of formal military planning, these shifting configurations could present themselves singly or one-at-a-time (the expectedly best case for Washington). They could also arise suddenly, unexpectedly, with apparent diffusiveness and in multiple or overlapping “cascades.”[13]
Whatever their nuances, these examinations will be comprehensively intellectualtasks, not narrowly political ones. To understand such determinative “cascades” will require carefully-honed, well-developed and formidable analytic skills. This will not be a graspable task for the intellectually faint-hearted or narrowly partisan politicians. It will require manifestly rare combinations of historical acquaintance, law-based erudition and previously well-demonstrated capacities for advanced dialectical thinking. This assessment points to a task that will require thinkers who are as comfortable elucidating the prescriptions of Plato,[14] Descartes and Grotius as they are with the more expressly technical elements of strategic nuclear planning.
Neither Washington nor Pyongyang is likely paying sufficient attention to the grave and potentially intersecting risks of unintentional nuclear war. To this point in their ongoing bilateral relations, each president would seem to assume the other’s decision-making rationality. If, after all, there were no such mutual assumption, it could make no sense for either side to negotiate nuclear security accommodations with the other.
For the American president, relevant goals should be made plain. Stable and viable deterrence, not Pyongyang’s “denuclearization,” should represent the overriding US strategic goal opposite North Korea. This complex goal remains contingent upon certain basic assumptions concerning incremental nuclear arms control and enemy rationality.
But are such assumptions valid in the case of potential war between two already-nuclear powers? If not, if a US president should sometime fear overt enemy irrationalityin Pyongyang, more explicit threats of US retaliation might only make matters substantially less stable. This is especially worrisome if the new threats were expressly disproportionate.
In the past, before “falling in love” with Kim Jung Un, and as part of an escalating bravado detached from any secure intellectual moorings, Donald Trump favored such vaporous threats as “complete annihilation” and “total destruction.” For the future, no such shallow preferences could ever stand a chance of meeting America’s core national security goals. Going forward, what might once have sounded “tough” to followers of a proudly anti-intellectual American president could only impair US nuclear deterrent persuasiveness. In such cases, contrived images of American toughness could actually produce unprecedented lethality.
At some point, if it is once again made contingent upon politics-driven bellicosity,[15]American national security could come to depend on viable combinations of ballistic missile defense and defensive first strikes. Settling upon such untested combinations would lack decisional input from any material or quantifiable historical evidence and would prove existentially risky. In a conceivably worst case scenario, the offensive military element would entail a situational preemption – that is, a defensive first strike. At that portentous point, there would remain no “ordinary” circumstances wherein a preemptive strike[16] against an already-nuclear North Korea could still be rational.
In Washington’s nuclear relations with Pyongyang, none of these decisions should be made casually or without substantive intellectual foundations. More precisely, with the expanding development of “hypersonic” nuclear weapons, determining optimal US policy combinations from one crisis to another would quickly become overwhelming. Though counterintuitive, the fact that the United States is recognizably “more powerful” than North Korea could prove effectively irrelevant. Even worse, it could become the underlying cause of an actual military nuclear engagement between two adversarial nuclear states.
Some years back, Donald Trump, speaking of Kim Jong Un, bragged that though both leaders have a nuclear “button,” “my button is bigger than yours.”
In urgent matters of national nuclear strategy, however, size might not really matter. Concerning arcane matters of strategic nuclear deterrence, even a seemingly “weaker” nuclear force could sometime inflict unacceptable harms. In such historically unique matters, the weaker party could remain fully capable of wreaking “assuredly destructive” retaliations.
In all such more-or-less foreseeable circumstances, there would obtain various overlapping issues of law and strategy. Under international law, which remains an integral part of US law,[17] the option of a selective or comprehensive defensive first-strike might be correctly characterized as “anticipatory self-defense.” Juridical correctness would apply only if the American side could argue persuasively that the “danger posed” by North Korea was “imminent in point of time.”
Discernible “imminence” is specifically required by the relevant standards of international law[18] – that is, by authoritative criteria established and codified after an 1837 naval incident famously called “The Caroline.”[19] Today, however, in the infinitely perplexing nuclear age, precise characterizations of “imminence” could prove sorely abstract or densely problematic. What then?
For the time being, it seems plausible that Kim Jong Un would value his own personal life and that of his nation above any other conceivable preference or combination of preferences. In corresponding scenarios, moreover, Kim would be presumed technically rational, and remain subject to US nuclear deterrence. But it could still be important for a negotiating American president to distinguish accurately between authentic instances of enemy irrationality and instances of feigned or pretended enemy irrationality.
There is still more. Such an expectation might not be easily satisfied in the midst of any already-ongoing nuclear crisis; that is, in extremis atomicum. As for the potential effects of future disease pandemic upon accurate adversarial assessments, these could prove significant. But they could also prove indecipherable.
Although neither side would likely seek a shooting war, especially if both adversaries were fully rational, either or both heads of state could still commit catastrophic errors in offering individualized strategic choices. Such errors would likely represent an unintended consequence of jointly competitive searches for “escalation dominance.”[20] Arguably, these sorts of prospectively crucial errors are more apt to occur in circumstances where one or both presidents had chosen to reignite law-threatening exclamations of belligerent bravado.
An inadvertent nuclear war between Washington and Pyongyang could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between rational national leaders, but also as the unintended consequence (singly or synergistic) of mechanical, electrical, computer malfunctions, or of certain “hacking”-type interventions. These interventions could include still-unprecedented intrusions of “cyber-mercenaries.”
What essential “nuclear bargaining” dynamics ought now to be studied? In any crisis between Washington and Pyongyang, each side would expectedly strive to maximize two overriding goals at the same time. These objectives are (1) to dominate the dynamic and largely unpredictable process of nuclear crisis escalation; and (2) to achieve desired levels of “escalation dominance” without sacrificing vital national security obligations. This second objective means preventing one’s own state and society from suffering catastrophic or existential harms.
What is the strategic “bottom line” for an American president? All underlying issues of adversarial contention between Washington and Pyongyang are enormously complicated and subject to irremediable failure. Faced with such daunting complexities – operational and legal[21] – each side should proceed warily, in deliberate fashion, and with a posture that is militarily purposeful and prudentially risk-averse. Reciprocally, any aggressive over-confidence by either president will have to be scrupulously avoided.
Though such sound advice cannot be gainfully communicated to Kim Jong Un, the American president will still have to fashion this country’s law-supporting strategy upon dispassionate analyses and reason-based theory. Whatever its particular nuances, and whether it is expected or unexpected, such theory should point convincingly to realistic and still-achievable goals. Though it would be nice, in the best of all possible worlds, for Kim to accept some form of denuclearization, this is not yet the best of all possible worlds. Or as they would say “back home in Indiana” – “not hardly.”
The core policy “lesson” here should be unambiguous. Whatever an American president’s apparent preferences, this country’s pertinent security goals should not include North Korean denuclearization. Whatever its particular methods of expression, bargaining and operation, Washington’s strategic theory about Pyongyang should continuously emphasize will-based policies of strategic dissuasion.[22] Soon, for the American president, creating and sustaining stable nuclear deterrence with North Korea will represent the only game in town. Preparing to play this “game” effectively and expeditiously is far more important than any alleged presidential “attitude.”[23]
In Chapter 18 of his classic Gallic War, Julius Caesar comments: “Men as a rule willingly believe what they want to believe.” Understood in terms of current US foreign policy toward North Korean nuclear dangers, this observation suggests the futility of believing that Pyongyang would ever exchange its nuclear armaments for expanded financial incentives. In order to respond realistically to Kim Jong Un’s expansion of missile provocations, Washington’s only correct response should be based on a strategic reality that Americans may simply not want to believe.
Regarding North Korea, US strategic policies should continuously emphasize the centrality of stable nuclear deterrence. Among other things, this means a refined focus on (1) the expected rationality or irrationality of key decision-makers in North Korea; (2) the cumulative requirements of escalation dominance; and (3) the always-important distinctions between intentional, unintentional and accidental nuclear war.
In these matters, recalling philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “The laws of physics are decrees of fate.”
[1] See, by this author, Louis René Beres (Pentagon): https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/art/united-states-nuclear-strategy-deterrence-escalation-and-war
[2] On the continuing attractions of ant-reason, see: Karl Jaspers, Reason and anti-Reason in Our Time (1952): “There is something inside all of us that earns not for reason, but for mystery – not for penetrating clear thought but for the whisperings of the irrational….” (p. 67).
[3] North Korean nuclear-knowhow could impact other regions of the world. In this connection, Pyongyang has had significant nuclear dealings with Syria. Earlier, North Korea helped Syria build a nuclear reactor, the same facility that was later destroyed by Israel in its Operation Orchard, on September 6, 2007. Although, unlike earlier Operation Opera (June 7, 1981) this preemptive attack, in the Deir ez-Zor region, was presumptively a second expression of the so-called “Begin Doctrine,” it also illustrated, because of the North Korea-Syria connection, a wider globalthreat to US ally, Israel. See also: https://www.usnews.com/opinion/world-report/articles/2017-09-06/10-years-later-israels-operation-orchard-offers-lessons-on-north-korea
[4] To be maximally effective and law-enforcing, this posture must be combined with systematic and verifiable patterns of nuclear arms control. Prima facie, the long-term reliability of nuclear deterrence would necessarily be incompatible with any no-holds barred nuclear arms race. In essence, what is being proposed here is a “middle position” between total North Korean denuclearization (which is infeasible) and an unrestricted nuclear arms race (which would be radically destabilizing and intolerable).
[5] From the standpoint of stable nuclear deterrence, the likelihood of actual nuclear conflict between states could sometime be inversely related to the plausibly expected magnitude of catastrophic harms. This is only an “informal” presumption, however, because we are here considering a unique or unprecedented event, one of very limited predictive capacity precisely because is sui generis.
[6] From Art 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice.
[7] In contrast to today’s national political leaderships, the Founding Fathers of the United States were serious intellectuals. Explained succinctly by the distinguished 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. To be sure, we can detect elements of sexism and racism in these commending characterizations, but such sentiments should be viewed within their specific 18th century context.
[8] In synergistic interactions, whether in chemistry, medicine, or world politics, the “whole” of any combination must exceed the sum of its “parts.”
[9] “Everything is very simple in war,” says Clausewitz, in his classical discussion of “friction” in On War, “but the simplest thing is difficult.” Herein, this concept refers to the unpredictable effects of errors in knowledge and information concerning US-North Korea strategic uncertainties; on US and North Korean under-estimations or over-estimations of 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.
[10] The atomic bombings of Japan in August 1945 did not constitute an authentic nuclear war, but “only” the use of nuclear weapons in an otherwise conventional conflict. Significant, too, following Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no other atomic bombs existed anywhere on earth.
[11] Throughout history, geopolitics or Realpolitik have often been associated with personal immortality. In his posthumously published lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined, in his Philosophy of Right (1820), that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” The “deification” of Realpolitik, a transformation from mere principle of action to a sacred end in itself, drew its originating strength from the doctrine of sovereignty advanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Initially conceived as a principle of internal order, this doctrine underwent a specific metamorphosis, whence it became the formal or justifying rationale for international anarchy – that is, for the global “state of nature.” First established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De Republica (1576), sovereignty came to be regarded as a power absolute and above the law. Understood in terms of modern international relations, this doctrine encouraged the notion that states lie above and beyond any form of legal regulation in their interactions with each other.
[12] Under authoritative international law, the question of whether or not a “state of war” exists between states can be ambiguous. Traditionally, it was held that a formal declaration of war was necessary before a true state of war could be said to exist. Hugo Grotius divided wars into declared wars, which were legal, and undeclared wars, which were not. (See Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, Bk. III, Chaps. III, IV, and XI.) By the start of the twentieth century, the position that war obtains only after a conclusive declaration of war by one of the parties was codified by Hague Convention III. This treaty stipulated that hostilities must never commence without a “previous and explicit warning” in the form of a declaration of war or an ultimatum. (See Hague Convention III Relative to the Opening of Hostilities, 1907, 3 NRGT, 3 series, 437, article 1.) Currently, declarations of war may be tantamount to admissions of international criminality because of the express criminalization of aggression; it could therefore represent a clear jurisprudential absurdity to tie any true state of war to formal and prior declarations of belligerency. It follows, inter alia, that a state of war may now exist without any formal declarations, but only if there exists an actual armed conflict between two or more states and/or at least one of these affected states considers itself “at war.”
[13] Regarding authoritative international law, there could be coinciding jurisprudential concerns expressed about the crime of “aggression.” See especially: 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.
[14] “Dialectic” is Plato’s term for what science and philosophy “do.” It is rooted in the Greek word for conversation, and stipulates that only through conversation can one genuinely discover “what each thing is” (Republic 533b).
[15] The belligerent nationalismof Donald Trump stands in marked contrast to authoritative legal assumptions concerning inter-state solidarity. Among other things, these jurisprudential assumptions concern a presumptively common legal struggle against aggression and terrorism. Such a “peremptory” expectation, known formally in law as a jus cogens assumption, were 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).
[16] From a jurisprudential standpoint, it is necessary to distinguish preemptive attacks from preventive attacks. More precisely, 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 is launched not out of any genuine concern about “imminent” hostilities, but rather for fear of a longer-term deterioration in a pertinent military balance. In a preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is anticipated is presumptively very short; in a preventive strike, the anticipated interval is considerably longer. A related problem here for the United States is not only the practical difficulty of accurately determining “imminence,” but also that by delaying a defensive strike until appropriately ascertained urgencies can be acknowledged could prove “fatal.”
[17] 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. 1984) (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.’”).
[18] Regarding the sources of international law, see art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice: 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.
[19] 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) (1758). Also, Samuel Pufendorf, The Two Books on the Duty of Man and Citizen According to Natural Law, 32 (Frank Gardner Moore., tr., 1927 (1682).
[20]See earlier by this author, Louis Ren€ Beres: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/jun/3/miscalculating-north-korea/
[21] International law remains “Westphalian.” 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.
[22] The modern philosophic origins of “will” lie in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, especially The World as Will and Idea (1818). For his own inspiration, Schopenhauer drew freely upon poet and dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Later, Nietzsche drew just as freely and perhaps more importantly upon Schopenhauer. Goethe was also a core intellectual source for Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset, author of the singularly prophetic twentieth-century work, The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas (1930). See, accordingly, Ortega’s very grand essay, “In Search of Goethe from Within” (1932), written for Die Neue Rundschau of Berlin on the occasion of the centenary of Goethe’s death. It is reprinted in Ortega’s anthology, The Dehumanization of Art (1948), and is available from Princeton University Press (1968).
[23] When meeting in Singapore with Kim Jung Un on June 11, 2018, Trump dismissed all usual presidential leadership obligations to capably prepare. Instead, he emphasized, again and again: “I don’t think I have to prepare very much. It’s all about attitude.”
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LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth and most recent book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (2016) (2nd ed., 2018) https://paw.princeton.edu/new-books/surviving-amid-chaos-israel%E2%80%99s-nuclear-strategy Some of his principal strategic writings have appeared in Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard University); Yale Global Online (Yale University); Oxford University Press (Oxford University); Oxford Yearbook of International Law (Oxford University Press); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (Pentagon); The War Room (Pentagon); World Politics (Princeton); INSS (The Institute for National Security Studies)(Tel Aviv); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); BESA Perspectives (Israel); International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The Atlantic; The New York Times and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.