“I tell you, ye have still chaos in you.”- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Amid a rapidly dissembling American foreign policy, global futures point unswervingly toward chaos. Though President Donald J. Trump just offered his personal remedy for peace in the Middle East, it represents little more than a time-worn compendium of unpromising prescriptions. As was earlier the case with his plan to end Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine (i.e., a de facto surrender), Trump’s “Board of Peace” is simplistic and ahistorical.
World peace requires enforceable world law. Under modern international rules, system-wide anarchy was codified at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, but anarchy is now morphing into something far more ominous. It is becoming chaos.
Presumptively, since the 17th century, global stability has depended on a global “balance of power.” But this purported balance has never been more than reassuring fiction. In our present world of approaching chaos, longstanding security deficits will be enlarged.[1] It follows that leaders of both major and minor states will need to devise more thoughtful strategies of counter-terrorism and war avoidance.
Living strenuously against intellect, humankind clings desperately to the crumbling architectures of Westphalian anarchy. Transitional forms of chaotic disintegration are already well underway in the Middle East. In all bewildering arenas, traditional threat mechanisms of Westphalian anarchy are becoming even less viable. In US President Trump’s peace plan for Israel and Hamas, jihadi terrorists have been granted a new safe haven in Qatar. Guaranteed by Trump’s new mutual defense agreement with Doha, jihadi terror criminals can now expect reliable immunization from punishment in that Persian Gulf state.
In world politics, metaphor can sometimes be convincing, but it is never truth. There is no longer any defensible reason for seeking a regional or global “balance of power.” Among other things, because of nuclear weapons proliferation, all "normal" calculations of system-equilibrium have been become futile prima facie. In all pertinent regions of conflict, but especially in the Middle East, imperiled states will be unable to identify any advantages of “equilibrium.”
Traditional threats of reciprocity and vengeance will not save Israel. Further nuclear spread is virtually certain. This includes sub-state terror groups. Accordingly, during periods of competitive risk-taking, once “unthinkable” weapons would become altogether “thinkable.” Most worrisome would be (1) new nuclear powers that operate with deficient systems of command and control; and (2) already-nuclear powers led by unstable decision-makers. In the second scenario, “unstable” would reference friends as well as foes.
US President Donald Trump has mused openly about nuclear weapons as usable instruments of war - not just elements of strategic deterrence. Portentously, Russian president Vladimir Putin has voiced similarly dangerous nuclear musings. Under Trump’s recently-proposed peace plan for Gaza, no action is contemplated against jihadism in any of its potentially more insidious forms. Even an alleged “defeat” of Hamas would do nothing to reduce the expanding risk of radiation dispersal weapon attacks by jihadi elements in Sinai, "West Bank" (Judea/Samaria), Lebanon, Syria, Afghanistan or Yemen.
Trump’s plan for placing assorted Arab forces in control of Gaza could only heighten the chances of a more widespread regional conflict. Should anyone plausibly expect that terror-supporting Islamic states (both Sunni and Shiite) would somehow discourage Gaza deployments of “Hamas replacements”? Could anyone reasonably deny that Trump policies toward Israel are also a welcome gift to Vladimir Putin?
There is more. Various interactions between catastrophic harms could render the risks of regional chaos more urgent. If Jerusalem should soon have to face a jihadist state adversary with access to nuclear weapons (e.g., Iran backed by North Korea), Israel’s strategic deterrence posture could be fatally undermined. In principle, at least such a challenge would signify unassailable threats of nuclear terrorism and nuclear war.
There will be core questions of rationality. In world politics, irrationality is never the same as madness. An irrational adversary could sometime value certain intangible goals even more highly than national self-preservation. A mad adversary, on the other hand, would display no determinable preference ordering of any sort, and thus not be subject to any calculable threats of deterrence.
Realistically, for Jerusalem, no analytic choice will be available. Whether Israel would prefer to confront irrationality, madness or both, will not be Jerusalem’s decision to make. On this existential issue, the only sensible posture for Jerusalem would base all conflict preparations on firm intellectual foundations.
“Ye have still chaos in you,” observes the philosopher Nietzsche in Zarathustra. Now, assembled in almost two hundred tribal camps known as states, chaos of the individual becomes chaos of world politics. Here, microcosm makes macrocosm.
What lies ahead? Soon, there could be no safety in arms, no rescue by political authority, no reassuring answers from science. Even though we western humans have seemingly become progressively more "civilized" since the 17th century Peace of Westphalia, new wars could rage until every once-sturdy flower of culture had been trampled. Then, civilization, unless it could be rescued by still-unforeseen remedies, would perish in paroxysmal quakes of anti-reason and belligerent rancor.
What should Israel do to slow down approaching chaos? How shall such potentially irremediable circumstances be averted? To begin, it will need to be acknowledged in Jerusalem that geopolitical chaos is not “normal.” By definition, it cannot provide any experience-based template for national security decision-making. But it can clarify that the American president’s peace plan for the Middle East falls below any acceptable level of analytic worthiness.
Since the seventeenth century, our anarchic world can best be described as a “system.” What happens in any one part of the ungovernable world will more-or-less affect what happens in some or all other parts. When deterioration becomes marked and begins to spread from country to another, corollary effects will undermine all previously-existing “balance of power” infrastructures. When this deterioration becomes rapid and catastrophic, as would likely be the case following start of unconventional war or unconventional terrorism, the cascading effects would usher in chaos.
LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on war, terrorism, and nuclear security matters. Born in Zürich at the end of World War II, he is the author of twelve major books on international relations and international law. Dr. Beres, a frequent contributor to law and strategy journals, is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University.
Notes:
[1] Still, there are places where chaos is seen as much a source of human betterment as of catastrophic declension. In the Hebrew Bible, chaos is regarded as the primal condition which prepares the world for all things, peaceful and violent, sacred and profane. As its core etymology reveals, chaos represents the unfathomable gap in which nothing is as yet, but from which civilizational opportunity must originate. The classical German poet Holderlin observed: "There is a desert, sacred and chaotic, which stands at the roots of the things and which prepares all things." Ancient Greek philosophers and playwrights identified this special “desert” as logos, thus indicating the precise opposite of a random universe.