In the end, it’s all about enhancing theoretical understanding, not just an interminable compilation of disjointed “facts.” As a convenient metaphor for strategists and policy-makers, theory is a “net.” Only those who cast, can catch.[12] Inter alia, because of the expectedly corrosive interactive effects involving threats from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran, the US will need to continuously update and refine its core theories of nuclear doctrine and nuclear strategy.[13] Ultimately, this will prove to be a challenging intellectual task, not just a partisan exercise of narrowly political import.[14]

                Among other things, 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 behaviorin world politics.[15] In such apparently improbable but still conceivable circumstances, all promising military strategies will need to be fashioned to best deal with variously unpredictable adversarial actions.[16] Included in this necessary task will be a special attentiveness to any and all plausible synergies arising between America’s four outlined arenas of geopolitical security concern. Still, prospectively irrational enemies could quickly confound all “normal” US military calculations, especially those concerning the presumed benefits of threatened US reprisals.

               There is more. Sooner rather than later, facing new and largely incalculable synergies, Washington will need to take appropriate steps to assure that: (1) America does not become the object of any non-conventional attacks from these assorted enemies; and (2) the United States can successfully deter all possible forms of non-conventional conflict. To meet such an ambitious goal, Washington should consciously try to retain its usually far-reaching conventional superiority in the interrelated areas of weapons, manpower and cyber-warfare. The US should also be able to conceptualize or re-conceptualize multiple adversarial interactions.

 On this last expectation, certain major states in world politics may now have access to variously fearsome “cyber-mercenary” surrogates. In principle, at least, such access could reduce the overall likelihood of the United States ever having to enter into any actual chemical, biological, or nuclear exchange. This is not an insignificant strategic or tactical benefit.

                In matters of critical national strategy, operational truth may emerge through apparent paradox. US planners, it follows, may soon have to acknowledge that the efficacy and credibility of their country’s nuclear deterrence posture could sometime vary inversely with enemy perceptions of US 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 sometime undermine this deterrence posture.

Toward More Nuanced US Deterrent Forces and Strategies

               To counter such views and their correspondingly heightened prospect of negative US strategic synergies, American military planners and policy makers will need to better ensure adversarial perceptions of a “flexible” or variegated US nuclear deterrent force. This would be a force that remains (1) visibly secure from any enemy first strike attacks and (2) visibly capable of penetrating any enemy’s ballistic missile defenses. Apropos of this second requirement, the United States would likely need greater emphasis on deploying certain kinds of hypersonic missile systems.

               Much remains to be done. As corollary, Washington should continue to strengthen its own active defenses, but also do everything possible to improve each critical and interpenetrating component of its deterrence posture. In this bewilderingly complex and dialectical[17] process of strategic dissuasion, the American task could also require certain more incrementally explicit disclosures of nuclear targeting doctrine and a steadily expanding role for cyber-defense and cyber-war. Long before undertaking such delicate refinements, Washington will need to more systematically differentiate between adversaries that are presumably rational,[18] irrational, or “mad.”[19]

               Going forward, types of plausible synergistic outcome will depend considerably upon first acknowledging and applying this useful tripartite distinction.

Acknowledging Hierarchical Preference Orderings in US Security Policy Making

               Overall, the success of American national deterrence strategies will be contingent upon an informed prior awareness of all relevant enemy preferences and of specific hierarchies of preferences. Altogether new and more open-minded attention will need to be focused on the plausible expansion of “Cold War II” between Russia and the United States, an emergence that is apt to shape the other three component hazards of still-fearful synergies –  Chinese political adventurism; North Korean nuclear weapons; and expected Iranian nuclearization.[20] Nonetheless, under US President Donald J. Trump, it is increasingly unlikely that Washington will side with Ukraine over Russia, a once unimaginable stance that would enhance the likelihood of a Russia-NATO nuclear war.[21] Here, NATO nuclear powers France and the United Kingdom would face-off against Russia without any direct US participation.

               Credo quia absurdum, said the ancient philosopher Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.”

Soon, American national leaders should learn to understand the strategic limits of “geometry” – wherein, quite mundanely, the whole is always equal to the sum of its parts – and to augment this enhanced understanding with new “geometric” orthodoxies. These decision-makers would then need to explore and acknowledge what amounts, paradoxically, to a “geometry of chaos.”

               Even this long-hidden “geometry” could reveal a discernible sense of symmetry and form, including the precise shape of critically interwoven enemy threats.[22] Where the belligerent “whole” might sometime add up to more than the sum of its constituent “parts,” US leaders could discover the prospectively lethal hazards of adversarial synergies. Perhaps more than any other “negative force multiplier,” this coming together of impending threats now warrants resolute and rapt attention in Washington. Ipso facto, such attention would require antecedent declarations from the White House that the American president will refuse to act as a witting surrogate of the Russian president.[23]

Going forward, understanding synergies will be key. To be sure, any such complicated understanding will be difficult and elusive – hence, enthusiastically overlooked by military analysts and planners. Still, there is no reasonable alternative, because the subject matter is inherently complex and will not submit to anything short of a correspondingly complex investigation.[24]

               Understanding synergy will be indispensable to protracted US security. Counting on “divine intervention” to untangle complex[25]  analytic intersections is assuredly not a viable plan.[26] Ultimately, in both the art and science of war, the highest achievements should be sought in a determinedly resolute triumph of mind over mind.[27]  By definition, any such daunting task must be preeminently intellectual.[28]

               A final observation about chaos. Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,[29] 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. In principle, at least, international law can coexist with such an absence, but the results are rarely ones of peace and justice.[30]

Counter-Intuitive Truths

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.[31] 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 upcoming security calculations on complex conceptual 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 policy efficacy. For example, to generate useful assessments and prescriptions concerning nuclear warfare on the basis of isolable crises (e.g., North Korea, Ukraine, Iran, China/Taiwan) would be to ignore the most explanatory elements of world  system interrelatedness.[32]

               There is one last point. Purposeful US foreign policy decision making will be time-urgent. Failing to meet this temporal expectation, the United States and certain other countries could sometime find themselves in no-longer-remediable security losses. It follows that American decision-makers ought to do whatever is needed to keep the United States distant from T.S. Eliot’s “other side of despair.”[33]

[1] The most worrisome concern of this task should be nuclear war avoidance. See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Air-Space Operations Review (USAF): https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASOR/Journals/Volume-1_Issue-1/Beres_Nuclear_War_Avoidance.pdf

[2] Such synergies could shed light upon an entire world system’s state of disorder (a view that would reflect what the physicists prefer to call “entropic” conditions) and could be dependent upon each pertinent decision-maker’s subjective metaphysics of time. For an early article by this author dealing with linkages between such a subjective metaphysics and national decision-making, see: Louis René Beres, “Time, Consciousness and Decision-Making in Theories of International Relations,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. VIII, No.3., Fall 1974, pp. 175-186.

[3] Anarchy is an old story in international relations and international law (1648 and the Peace of Westphalia), but chaos is not inherently worse than anarchy. In certain circumstances, chaos could even represent a potentially positive development for world order reform. In this eccentric but still conceivably plausible view, chaos implies unique opportunity, a chance to finally change things from the 17^th century dynamic of “Westphalian” interactions. When compared or contrasted with Westphalian anarchy, chaos is prospectively 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 remaining civilizational opportunity can still originate. The 18th century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin observed: “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.

[4] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Harvard National Security Journal, Harvard Law School:  https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/  See also, by Professor Beres, at Modern War Institute, West Point, Pentagon:  https://mwi.usma.edu/threat-convergence-adversarial-whole-greater-sum-parts/

[5] America’s relevant foes could also include various sub-state or terrorist organizations, a fact that would have to be reckoned with in fashioning any comprehensive US plan for handling of potentially synergistic security hazards.

[6] These include assorted sub-national or insurgent adversaries.  Explicit applications of the law of war to insurgent combatants’ dates to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. As more than codified treaties and conventions must comprise the law of war, the obligations of jus in bello (justice in war) are part of “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations” (from Art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice) and thereby bind all categories of belligerents. (See Statute of the International Court of Justice, art. 38, June 29, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. 993).  Further, Hague Convention IV of 1907 declares that even in the absence of a precisely published set of guidelines regarding “unforeseen cases,” the operative pre-conventional sources of humanitarian international law obtain and still govern all belligerency. The related Martens Clause is included in the Preamble of the 1899 Hague Conventions, International Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War by Land, July 29, 1899, 187 Consol. T.S. 429, 430.

[7] Here it is also important to note that responsibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin for such crimes is not limited by his official position or by any requirement of direct personal actions.  On the principle of command responsibility, or respondeat superior, see: In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1945); The High Command Case (The Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb) 12 LAW REPORTS OF TRIALS OF WAR CRIMINALS 1, 71 (United Nations War Crimes Commission Comp. 1949); see: Parks, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR CRIMES, 62 MIL.L.REV. 1 (1973); O’Brien, THE LAW OF WAR, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY AND VIETNAM, 60 GEO.L.J. 605 (1972); U.S. DEPT OF THE ARMY, ARMY SUBJECT SCHEDULE No. 27 – 1 (Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Hague Convention No. IV of 1907) 10 (1970).  The direct individual responsibility of leaders for genocide and genocide-like crimes is unambiguous in view of the London Agreement, which denies defendants the protection of the Act of State defense.  See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Strat.  1544, E.A.S.  No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S.  279, Art. 7.  Under traditional international law, violations were the responsibility of the state, as a corporate actor, and not of individual human decision-makers in government or the military.

[8] Emmerich de Vattel’s “first principle” of the Law of Nations is the mutual independence and dependence of sovereign states. Though “foreign nations have no right to interfere in the government of an independent state….” (II, sec. 57), these states are “bound mutually to promote the society of the human race…” and, correspondingly, “owe one another all the duties which the safety and welfare of that society require.” As Vattel clarifies in the Introduction to his 1758 classic: “What one man owes to other men, one Nation, in its turn, owes to other Nations.” In principle, at least, this is a potentially transformative legal imperative, one abundantly rich in world-civilizational possibilities.

[9] Under contemporary international criminal law, crimes against peace are correctly identified as “aggression.” See: 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.

[10] The concept of a balance of power – an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is merely an analytic variant – has never been more than facile metaphor. It has never had anything to do with any calculable condition of equilibrium. As such a balance is always a matter of individual and subjective perceptions, adversary states may never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances are positioned in their favor. In consequence, as each side must perpetually fear that it will be “left behind,” the search for balance produces continually wider circles of national insecurity and escalating disequilibrium. 

[11] See:  https://thehill.com/opinion/international/411734-what-the-iaea-doesnt-know-or-want-to-know-about-irans-nuclear-program

In studies of world politics, rationality and irrationality have taken on specific meanings. More precisely, an actor (state or sub-state) is determinedly rational to the extent that its leadership always values national survival more highly than any other conceivable preference or combination of preferences. Conversely, an irrational actor would not always display such a determinable preference ordering.

[12] This convenient metaphor is generally attributed to Novalis, the late 18th-century German poet and scholar. See, for example, introductory citation by Karl R. Popper, in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Ironically, perhaps, Novalis’ fellow German poet, Goethe, had declared, in his early Faust fragment (Urfaust): “All theory, dear friend, is grey. But the golden tree of life is green.” (Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grűn des Lebens goldner Baum.)

[13]Military doctrine is not the same as military strategy. Rather, doctrine “sets the stage” or foundation for strategy. It identifies various central beliefs that must subsequently animate any actual “order of battle.” Among other things, military doctrine describes underlying general principles on how a particular war ought to be waged. The reciprocal task for military strategy is to adapt as required to best support previously-fashioned military doctrine.

[14]See by this author: Louis René Beres, “Nuclear War Avoidance: Why It Is Time to Start Worrying, Again,” Air and Space Operations Review, Spring 2022, United States Air Force, Pentagon, pp. 69-81.

[15] Expressions of decisional irrationality in world affairs could take different and overlapping forms. These forms include a disorderly or inconsistent value system; computational errors in calculation; an incapacity to communicate efficiently; random or haphazard influences in the making or transmittal of particular decisions; and the internal dissonance generated by any structure of collective decision-making (i.e., assemblies of pertinent individuals who lack identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements impact their willing capacity to act as a single or unitary national decision maker).

[16] In this connection, under international law the question of whether or not a condition of war exists between states is generally unclear.  Traditionally, a “formal” war was said to exist only after a state had issued a formal declaration of war.  The Hague Convention III codified this position in 1907.  This Convention provided that hostilities must not commence without “previous and explicit warning” in the form of a declaration of war or an ultimatum.  See Hague Convention III on the Opening of Hostilities, Oct. 18, 1907, art. 1, 36 Stat. 2277, 205 Consol. T.S. 263.  Presently, a declaration of war could be tantamount to a declaration of criminality because international law prohibits “aggression.” See Treaty Providing for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, Aug. 27, 1948, art. 1, 46 Stat.  2343, 94 L.N.T.S.  57 (also called Pact of Paris or Kellogg-Briand Pact); Nuremberg Judgment, 1 I.M.T.  Trial of the Major War Criminals 171 (1947), portions reprinted in Burns H. Weston, et. al., INTERNATIONAL LAW AND WORLD ORDER  148, 159 (1980); U.N. Charter, art. 2(4).  A state may compromise its own legal position by announcing formal declarations of war.  It follows that a state of belligerency may exist without formal declarations, but only if there exists an armed conflict between two or more states and/or at least one of these states considers itself “at war.”

[17] Dialectic formally originated in the fifth century BCE, as Zeno, author of the Paradoxes, had been acknowledged by Aristotle as its inventor. In the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges as the supreme form of philosophical/analytic method. Here, Plato describes the dialectician as one who knows best how to ask and answer questions. This particular knowledge – how to ask, and to answer questions, sequentially – should now be insistently transposed to the organized study of Israeli security issues.

[18] Americans are inclined to project their own dominant sense of rationality upon adversaries. Acknowledging that western philosophy has always oscillated between Plato and Nietzsche, between rationalism and irrationalism, we have all routinely cast our psychological lot with the Greek thinkers and their inheritors.

[19] “Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman,” inquires Luigi Pirandello, “with one who shakes the foundations of all you have built up in yourselves, your logic, the logic of all your constructions? Madmen, lucky folk, construct without logic, or rather, with a logic that flies like a feather.”

[20] See by this author, Louis Rene Beres: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/10/24/to-prevent-a-nuclear-war-americas-overriding-policy-imperative/

[21] Such a defiling stance would also express a matter of law. See, by this writer, at Modern Diplomacy: Louis René Beres, https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/03/03/a-government-of-laws-not-if-trump-continues-to-support-putin-crimes-against-ukraine/

[22] This raises the complementary idea of avant garde in US national security planning, See, by this author, Louis René Beres:  https://besacenter.org/improving-israeli-military-strategy-through-avant-garde-analysis/

[23] Under international law, which is a part of US law, expressing such refusal would represent a “peremptory” obligation. According to Article 53 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties: “…a peremptory norm of general international law is a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of states as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character.” See: Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Done at Vienna, May 23, 1969. Entered into force, Jan. 27, 1980. U.N. Doc. A/CONF. 39/27 at 289 (1969), 1155 U.N.T.S. 331, reprinted in 8 I.L.M.  679 (1969).

[24] An apt analogy here would be cancer research. Because the likelihood of a single biomarker explaining a particular cancer’s “behavior” is always extremely low, a more genuinely multidimensional approach must be widely embraced. Implementing such a substantially more complex approach would expectedly allow researchers to conduct in-depth characterizations of pertinent tumors; also, the microenvironment and genetic background for each individual patient.

[25] The problems stemming from complexity also bring to mind the Clausewitzian concept of “friction” in war, a concept that is not the same as synergy, but that also does emphasize the key elements of interaction and unpredictability. See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, especially Chapter VI, “Friction in War.”

[26] In ancient Greece, classic playwright Euripides sometimes concluded his plays with a deus ex machina, a “god out of the machine.” Appearing above the action, in a sort of theatrical crane, the relevant god was seemingly able to solve all sorts of dreadful complications arising from the action, and thereby to supply a more-or-less happy ending.

[27] See, on this triumph, F.E. Adcock, The Greek and Macedonian At of War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), especially Chapter IV: “Cavalry, Elephants, and Siege craft.”

[28] As part of this fundamentally intellectual task, Sun-Tzu’s Art of War calls for gaining the upper hand through the “unorthodox.” In his Chapter 5, on “Strategic Military Power,” Sun-Tzu states succinctly: “In general, in battle, one engages with the orthodox and gains victory through the unorthodox.” To be sure, the ancient Chinese author’s idea of “battle” would include present-day deterrence. After all, as he says elsewhere in the Art of War, at Chapter 3, “Planning Offensives:”  “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting, is the true pinnacle of excellence.”

[29] Reference here is to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which first created and codified our “balance of power” system of international law. 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.

[30] Writing about law in the “state of nature?” In Chapter XIII of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes comments famously: “Where there is no common Power, there is no Law.” Though the 17^th century English philosopher notes that the “state of nations” is in the always-anarchic condition of “war,” that condition is still more tolerable than that of individuals coexisting in nature. With these individual human beings, he instructs, “…the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest.” Now, however, with the continuing advent of nuclear weapons, a circumstance clearly unforeseen by Hobbes, there is no persuasive reason to believe that the “state of nations” remains more tolerable. Nuclear weapons are bringing the state of nations closer to a true Hobbesian state of nature. See, in this connection, David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 207. Similar to Hobbes, German philosopher Samuel Pufendorf argues that the state of nations is “not as intolerable” as the state of nature between individuals. The state of nations, reasoned the German jurist, “lacks those inconveniences which are attendant upon a pure state of nature….” Baruch Spinoza also suggested “that 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.

[31] “Is it an end that draws near,” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951) “or a beginning.”

[32] On this point, we may consider an earlier remark by Thomas Mann that identifies the downfall of civilizations with the `simplification’ of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life.” In short, warned Mann (and as also understood by Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset), “barbarization.” See Stanley Corngold, The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022), ix. As was the case for Thomas Mann, the present writer (Louis René Beres) has had important life connections to both Zürich and Princeton.

[33] At a minimum, this means staying supportive of all European allies, including Ukraine, and not becoming a pawn of Vladimir Putin’s tyranny. Significantly, this imperative is also an obligation of international law and US law. It is never lawful for a state to stand in support of flagrant international aggression. International law, too, is an integral part of US domestic law. In the precise 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.’”).