World system
chaos is not emerging ex nihilo, out of nothing.
There have been conspicuous warnings. In law, though anarchy
has beleaguered humankind since the Peace of Westphalia
in 1648, chaos is just now becoming evident. In essence,
it is the cumulative result of centuries-long war and
suffering.
For comprehensive
clarifications, pertinent details should be consulted.
Above all, chaos should be recognized as an unprecedented
“form” of modern world politics. Moreover,
chaos is much worse than historic anarchy. It is unimaginably
worse.
But what are
the tangible differences? Anarchy means a system (here,
world politics) that lacks the centralized authority structures
of government. Still, even within dissembling anarchy,
states are able to make rational choices on variously
specified goals. In chaos, because state behaviors have
become unpredictable, rational decision-making is no longer
possible. In essence, the only predictable feature of
chaotic international relations is unpredictability.
What can and
should be done? Specifically, how should American security
policy-makers respond to chaotic global decline? Inter
alia, coherent answers will require that existing and
future security threats to the United States be considered
in all their complex intersections.
At times,
these intersections could become “force multiplying”
or “synergistic.”
At that stage,
traditional linear thinking would become conclusively
out-of-date.
Synergy: The
“Whole” and its “Parts”
For strategic
thinkers and policy-makers, there will be nuances. It
would be difficult enough for any state to deal singly
with each identifiable threat to its national security,
but rational decision-making becomes progressively more
daunting when the significant threats are erratic and
inconspicuous. Clarifying signs of such enlarged difficulty
could include unforeseen expansions of synergy within
a widening ambit of chaos. In such hard to decipher global
declensions, the calculable “whole” of plausible
harms would be greater than the sum of its identifiable
“parts.”
In philosophy
of science terms, this proposition is not a tentative
explanation or hypothesis of any kind. It is true by definition.
Moreover, this “geometric” clarification is
not intended as a peripheral or merely secondary judgment.
For US military and defense planners, there will be many
critical implications, both positive and negative.
On the positive
side, the cumulative outcome of constituent enemy threats
could blunt more serious hazards. Though seemingly counter-intuitive,
such “softening” could express the result
of a self-canceling impact by one component peril on another.
On the negative side, some synergies could have the effect
of magnifying one or several constituent threats, whether
foreseen or unforeseen.
Soon, these
already-difficult matters could become more bewildering.
Reciprocal expectations could surround synergies among
America’s foes. The consequences of synergistic
interactions would either be net-positive or net-negative,
both for impacted enemy states and for the United States.
At this point,
rudimentary questions should resurface. To begin, for
the United States, scholars and policy-makers will need
to inquire: What are the precise hazards that could comprise
a worrisome synergy? While the adversarial whole now facing
Americans is visibly diverse and multifaceted –
there are many significant foes and myriad axes of expected
conflict – four discernible threats outweigh all
others. These are the seemingly discrete but actually
linked dangers of (1) US-Russia “Cold War II”;
(2) Chinese geopolitical adventurism; (3) North Korean
nuclear weapons; and (4) resurgent Iranian nuclearization.
Here, #1 (above) includes Vladimir Putin’s egregious
crimes against Ukraine, violations of international law
involving crimes of war, crimes against peace and crimes
against humanity.
For the purpose
of ascertaining possible synergies or related “force-multipliers,”
there would be no need for strategic thinkers to arrange
these perils hierarchically according to presumed urgency.
It should also be borne in mind that any meaningful synergistic
“balancing” of specific perils could vary
from day to day, and according to the indecipherable foreign
policy intuitions of an “intuitive” American
President.
A derivative
observation now appears. For the express purpose of ascertaining
possible synergies, there would be no need to diminish
the plausibility of #4 above (resurgent Iranian nuclearization)
on the presumption that Donald Trump’s very public
assessment of “obliteration” was accurate.
Among other things, an Iranian decision not to resume
nuclear weapons preparation (uranium fuel plus missiles)
could be irrational.
INTERSECTIONS
AND SYNERGIES
For capable
US planners, all relevant synergies should be treated
with serious intellectual regard. By definition, these
force-multipliers are not easily figured out or measured.
Nonetheless, because a state’s geopolitical or strategic
calculations are never analogous to what happens in “geometry,”
certain synergies could only be ignored at peril to American
survival.
In a worst
case scenario, scholars might think here of the High Lama’s
warning in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon: “The
storm . . . this storm that you talk of . . . It will
be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before.
There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority,
no answer in science. It will rage until every flower
of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled
in a vast chaos . . . The Dark Ages that are to come will
cover the whole world is a single pall; there will be
neither escape nor sanctuary.”
In the end,
it’s all about enhancing complex theoretical understandings,
not just interminable compilations of “facts.”
As a convenient metaphor for strategists and policy-makers,
theory is a “net.” Only those who cast, can
catch. Because of the expectedly corrosive interactive
effects involving threats from Russia, China, North Korea,
Pakistan and Iran, the US will need to continuously update
and refine its core theories of nuclear doctrine and nuclear
strategy. Ultimately, this will prove to be a uniquely
challenging intellectual task, not merely a partisan exercise
of political import.
American leaders
will have to accept that certain more-or-less identifiable
leaders of prospectively overlapping enemy hazards might
not always satisfy the many-sided criteria of rational
behavior in world politics. In such apparently improbable
but still conceivable circumstances, all promising military
strategies will need to be fashioned to best deal with
unpredictable adversarial actions. Included in this task
will be special attentiveness to any and all plausible
synergies arising between America’s four principal
arenas of geopolitical security concern. But prospectively
irrational enemies could quickly confound all “normal”
US military calculations, especially ones concerning presumed
benefits of threatened US reprisals.
There is more.
Sooner rather than later, facing new and incalculable
synergies, Washington will need to take appropriate steps
to assure that: (1) America does not become the object
of non-conventional attacks from these enemies; and (2)
the United States can successfully deter all possible
forms of non-conventional conflict. To meet such an ambitious
goal, Washington will need to retain a recognizably far-reaching
conventional superiority in the interrelated areas of
weapons, manpower and cyber-warfare.
On this last
expectation, all major states in world politics will have
access to “cyber-mercenary” surrogates. In
principle, at least, such access could reduce the overall
likelihood that the United States would ever have to enter
into an actual chemical, biological, or nuclear exchange.
On its face, this would not represent an insignificant
strategic or tactical benefit.
In matters
of critical national strategy, operational truth could
sometimes emerge through paradox. To wit, US planners
may soon have to acknowledge that the efficacy and credibility
of America’s nuclear deterrence posture could vary
inversely with enemy perceptions of American nuclear destructiveness.
However ironic or counter-intuitive, enemy views of a
too-large or too-destructive American nuclear deterrent
force or of a US force that is not sufficiently invulnerable
to first-strike attacks, could at some point undermine
America’s deterrence posture.
To counter
such views and their correspondingly heightened prospect
of negative strategic synergies, US military planners
and policy makers will need to better ensure adversarial
perceptions of a “flexible” and variegated
US nuclear deterrent capabilities. This would suggest
forces that remain visibly (1) secure from any enemy first
strike attacks and (2) capable of penetrating any enemy’s
ballistic missile defenses. Apropos of this second basic
requirement, the United States will need greater emphases
on the deployment of up-to-date hypersonic missile systems.
REFINING STRATEGIC
DETERRENCE
There is far
more to be done. Washington should continue to strengthen
America’s active defenses, but ought also to do
everything possible to improve each critical component
of the nation’s deterrence posture. In the stunningly
complex and dialectical process of strategic dissuasion,
the American task will require more incrementally explicit
disclosures of selected nuclear targeting doctrine and
a steadily expanding role for cyber-defense and cyber-war.
Before undertaking such delicate refinements, Washington
will also need to more systematically differentiate between
adversaries that are presumably rational, irrational,
or “mad.” Going forward, types of plausible
synergistic outcomes will depend in considerable measure
on first acknowledging and applying this tripartite distinction.
Overall, the
success of American national deterrence strategies will
be contingent on informed prior awareness of all relevant
enemy preferences and specific hierarchies of preferences.
Altogether new and more open-minded attention will need
to be focused on the seeming expansion of “Cold
War II” between Russia and the United States, an
emergence that is apt to impact the other three component
hazards of fearful synergies: Chinese political adventurism;
North Korean nuclear weapons; and re-started Iranian nuclearization.
Immediately,
American national leaders will need to understand the
strategic limits of “normal geometry” –
that is, limits wherein the whole is equal to the sum
of its parts – and to augment such understanding
with certain new “arithmetic” orthodoxies.
Paradoxically, these decision-makers will then have to
explore what amounts to a “geometry of chaos.”
Even this
dense “geometry” could reveal a discernible
sense of symmetry and form, including the precise shape
of high-urgency enemy threats. Where the belligerent “whole”
might sometime add up to more than the sum of its constituent
“parts,” US leaders could uncover the prospectively
lethal hazards of adversarial synergies. Indeed, perhaps
more than any other “negative force multiplier,”
this coming-together of impending threats now warrants
resolute and rapt attention in Washington.
Going forward,
understanding complicated synergies will be key. To be
sure, as any such understanding will be difficult and
elusive, it will be minimized or disregarded by military
analysts and policy planners. Still, there is no reasonable
alternative here to waging a multidimensional intellectual
struggle.
There is still
more. Understanding synergy will be indispensable to long-lasting
US security. Counting on “divine intervention”
to untangle complex analytic intersections is surely not
a viable plan. Ultimately, in the art and science of war,
the highest achievements should always be sought in resolute
triumphs of mind over mind. Prima facie, such
“victories” must always be preeminently intellectual.]
FINAL THOUGHTS
ON CHAOS
It is time
for a concluding observation about chaos. Since the Peace
of Westphalia in 1648, the world security system has functioned
amid anarchy, but not amid chaos. There are vital differences.
Westphalian anarchy is “merely” the absence
of any centralized global governance. By definition, international
law can coexist with such an absence, but the results
are rarely ones of peace and justice.
Whether described
in the Old Testament or in certain other evident sources
of Western philosophy, chaos can be as much a wellspring
of large-scale human improvement as a source of decline.
It is this prospectively positive side of chaos that is
intended by Friedrich Nietzsche’s telling remark
in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883): “I tell
you, ye have still chaos in you.”
When compared
or contrasted with Westphalian anarchy, chaos is that
condition which prepares the world for all things, whether
sacred or profane. It represents that yawning gulf of
“emptiness” where nothing is as yet, but where
still-remaining civilizational opportunity can still originate.
The 18th century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin
observes: “There is a desert sacred and chaotic,
which stands at the roots of the things, and which prepares
all things.” Insightfully, in the ancient pagan
world, Greek philosophers thought of this particular “desert”
as logos, a primal concept which indicates that chaos
is anything but starkly random or without any intrinsic
merit.
More than
ever before, American thinkers and foreign policy planners
will need to base their existential security calculations
on variously complex intersections Several aspects of
world system structure will have to be examined in conjunction
with one another, especially anarchy, chaos and synergy.
To continue to favor one-condition at-a-time analyses
because of their comparative simplicity would be to mistake
short-term decision-making utility for long-term program
efficacy. For example, to generate policy assessments
and prescriptions concerning nuclear warfare on the basis
of isolable current crises (e.g., North Korea, Ukraine,
Iran, China/Taiwan, India/Pakistan) would be to ignore
the most clarifying elements of world system interrelatedness.
There is one
last observation. Purposeful US foreign policy decision-making
is time-urgent. By failing to meet this temporal expectation,
the United States and assorted other countries could find
themselves in circumstances they are already too late
for remediation. As Albert Camus reminds in The Plague:
“At the beginning of the pestilence and when it
ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric .
. . It is only in the thick of a calamity that one gets
hardened to the truth, to silence.”
America’s
task should be to limit calamity “at the beginning.”
For the United States, making sense of its evolving security
landscape should be conceptualized as an intellectual
or analytic obligation. The most calamitous prospects
that Americans now face are ones that will supplant traditional
world system anarchy with chaos. To limit the harms of
this ongoing replacement, truth should be sought only
in disciplined applications of “mind.” Passive
citizen submission to the viscerally eruptive commands
of presidential authority could lead an already imperiled
United States to Camus’ everlasting “silence.”
