PROFESSOR LOUIS R. BERES: WAR, TERROR AND REVOLUTION
Ongoing turmoil in the Middle East and North Africa signals potentially catastrophic geo-strategic transformations. For Israel, the greatest danger stems from interpenetrating and largely unpredictable effects of war, terrorism, and revolution in the region. In essence, these plainly destabilizing effects could spawn an unprecedented and thoroughly “game-changing” kind of chaos.
Chaos in any form can play havoc with the best laid plans of nations. By definition, at least from the standpoint of national military operations, it is a constantly changing condition that can preclude “normal” and possibly indispensable security preparations. Significantly, this condition is markedly different from the “normal” chaos associated with the “fog of war.” This chaos describes a genuinely deep and wholly systemic unraveling that can itself create war.
The most obvious chaos-based perils to Israel concern the prospect of abrogated peace treaties in Cairo, and/or Amman. Following any such abrogation, which, ironically, could be the result of either regime change, or regime preservation, in those countries, certain old battle fronts could reopen. Convergent threats of war and terror could then reemerge and harden, potentially impacting any newly-emergent state of “Palestine,” and also the corollary power positions of al-Qaeda, and the Muslim Brotherhood. For the moment, at least, al-Qaeda is in a primarily adversarial stance vis-à-vis the Brotherhood, and Hamas, recently re-bonded with Fatah, is itself a direct offshoot of the Brotherhood.
In a presumptively worst case scenario for Israel, Jihadists would take high command in several of the unstable Arab and North African governments. Ultimately, these “martyrdom-driven” leaders could get their hands on certain weapons of mass destruction. This conceivable prospect should bring to mind the literally dreadful scenario of the suicide-bomber in macrocosm. It is already a scenario that needs to be taken seriously in coup-vulnerable Pakistan, and in nearly nuclear Iran.
As the once-vaunted “Arab Spring” deteriorates into a not-so-democratic “Arab Winter,” Israel might have to face certain nuclear and ideologically Islamist enemies on both the Iranian and selected Arab fronts. Even in the absence of old enemies with new nuclear arms, nuclear and biological materials could still find their way to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and/or to Hamas. This movement would not necessarily take place by way of al-Qaeda (always the prevailing expectation, until now), but, rather, as a determinable consequence of chaos, perhaps by way of a newly-energized Muslim Brotherhood.
Preventing the spread of nuclear weapons to all enemy states must remain an immediate and overriding Israeli strategic objective. This prevention, of course, has always been a core objective for Israel’s military planners, but now, with potentially more regional players, both state and sub-state, it is becoming an increasingly complex and difficult task. To a considerable extent, this growing problem is the result of Israel’s decision not to preempt its Iranian enemy. A different decision could have been sustained under international law as “anticipatory self-defense.”
The seventeenth-century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, recognized that although international relations always exist in a “state of nature,” a condition of anarchy (not necessarily of chaos), these relations are more tolerable than the condition of individual human beings in anarchy. This is so, argued Hobbes, because nations lack the capacity of individuals to utterly destroy one another.
Now, proliferation of nuclear weapons, especially in the Middle East, could reduce the usual and more-or-less tolerable anarchy of international relations to the Hobbesian chaos of “nature” between individuals. As more and more nations come to share what Hobbes had called a “dreadful equality,” the more or less symmetrical capacity to render mortal destruction, the portent of regional nuclear calamity could become correspondingly more likely.
William Butler Yeats wrote prophetically of a time in which “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” Here, the great Irish poet revealed what still eludes historians, diplomats and scholars. In the not-too-distant future, there could come a moment wherein there will be no safety in numbers, treaties, or armaments; no help from “civilizations;” no counsel from public authority; and no last-minute rescues from science.
This dreadful “moment” may rage a long while, perhaps until every flower of human culture has been trampled, and until entire human communities have been leveled. Ominously, from this seemingly resurrected medieval darkness, there will be neither escape nor sanctuary. Instead, it will envelop whole nations in a single, suffocating pall.
For Israel, always the prime inheritor of Genesis, an expanding global chaos portends a very unusual, and paradoxical, kind of fragility. A relentlessly beleaguered microstate, Israel could become the principal victim of international disorder. In view of the exceptionally far-reaching interrelatedness of all world politics, this could be true even if the actual precipitating events of war and terror would occur elsewhere, in another “neighborhood.”
Global chaos may reveal both sense and form. Generated by explosions of mega-war and mega-terror, disintegrations of world authority could still have a discernible shape. How, precisely, should this shape, this particular “geometry” of chaos, be deciphered and understood by Israel? As a corollary and utterly vital question, Israel’s leaders must also inquire: “How, exactly, shall we deal with potentially irrational nuclear adversaries, both state and terrorist groups?”
The world, like the individual nation-states that comprise it, is best understood as a system. What happens in any one part of this system, therefore, always affects what happens in some or all of the other parts. When global deterioration is marked, and begins to spread from one country to another, the effects can undermine international stability in general. When deterioration is sudden and catastrophic, as it would be following the onset of unconventional war and/or unconventional terrorism, the unraveling effects could be immediate and overwhelming.
The State of Israel, a system of interdependent and interpenetrating parts like every other state, exists precariously in a larger world system. Aware that an incremental collapse of world authority structures will, in one way or another, impact its (few) friends as well as its (many) enemies, leaders of the Jewish State must now advance informed expectations of collapse (social scientists would call these expectations, “plausible scenarios”) in order to prepare suitable forms of response. Finally, recognizing that rapid and far-reaching global collapse could even spawn a more or less complete return to “everyone for himself” in world politics, what the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes called a “war of all against all,” Israel’s leaders must now even consider how they should respond to future life in a global “state of nature.”
Such considerations will be all the more critical to the extent that the triggering mechanism of collapse would originate within the Middle East, from massive chemical, biological and, in the future, even nuclear attacks, against Israel.
Chaotic disintegration of the world system, whether slow and incremental, or sudden and catastrophic, will dramatically impact the Israeli system. In the clearest manifestation of this impact, Israel will have to orient its military planning and doctrine to a variety of worst-case possibilities, focusing much more on the whole range of self-help security options, than on traditional forms of cooperative alliance guarantees. Within the country, any diplomatic processes still premised on outdated assumptions of reason and rationality would have to be curtailed in recognition of now fully apparent regional “insults” to civilization.
Israel’s wavering judgments about a “Two-State Solution” with Palestinians will soon need to be made in consequence of anticipated world-system changes. Such a problematic reorientation of planning, from expectations of largely separate and unrelated threats, to informed presumptions of interrelated dangers, could provide an essential framework for facing the increasingly uncertain future. The conceptual or philosophic origin of this framework would be a prior Israeli government willingness to extract pertinent policy implications from the emerging geometry of chaos.
There is also an important “feedback loop” here. Israel’s particular reactions, as a system within a system, to growing expressions of worldwide chaos, will themselves impact these expressions. Should Israel’s leaders react to seemingly unstoppable regional disorder by hardening their commitment to all relevant forms of self-reliance, including appropriate and lawful resorts to preemptive military force, Israel’s enemies would surely respond, individually or collectively, in similarly “self-reliant” ways.
What are these ways? How, exactly, should Israel respond to such responses? These are primary dialectical questions that should now be raised by Israel’s strategic planners. It is now time for these planners to consider the crucial feedback implications of creation in reverse.
By likening both the world as a whole, and their own mini-state in particular, to the biological concept of “system,” Israel’s leadership could learn, before it is too late, that states “die” not only because of a direct, mortal blow, but also in reaction to a series of distinctly less than mortal blows. This is because, after a time, even multiple “minor” insults to an organism can produce a breakdown of “immunities” that pave the way for life-endangering “pathogens.” Taken by itself, any one such insult; e.g., a local infection, an injury, an impediment to vision or hearing or memory, will not cause death. But, cumulatively, over time, these attacks can be fatal, either by affecting the organism’s overall will to live, and/or by making it possible for a “major insult” to take place without any adequate defense.
Taken by themselves, Israel’s intermittent and still-planned surrenders of land for nothing, its continuing reluctance to accept certain preemption options, and its adherence to always-asymmetrical “peace agreements” may not bring about national disappearance. Taken together, however, these insults, occurring, as they do, within a far broader worldwide pattern of escalating chaos, could have a weakening effect on the Israeli “organism.”
What is already clear is that Israel’s leaders must now ask forthrightly: What are the true sense and form of chaos in the world system, and exactly how should this discoverable geometry of chaos affect our country’s national survival strategy?
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LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on international relations and international law. In Israel, where he was Chair of Project Daniel (2003), he has been involved with national security, military and intelligence matters for almost forty years. Professor Beres was born in Zürich, Switzerland, on August 31, 1945.
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