Plus,
ca’ change. “The more things change, the more
they remain the same.” In world politics, anarchy is an
old and continuing story. Chaos is not.
But what
are the precise differences?
And why
do they matter?
In part,
at least, a helpfully correct answer must be law-focused or
jurisprudential. Under modern international law, system wide
anarchy was formally instituted and acknowledged at the Treaty
of Westphalia in 1648. Back at the end of the Thirty Years’
War (the last major religious war sparked by the Reformation),
a decentralized and sovereignty-centered system of world politics
was officially codified. In consequence, a global threat-system
of war and deterrence became the dominant and fixed template
of nation-state foreign policies. Concurrently, a “balance-of-power”
supplied clarifying “rules of the game” for all
“players.” These were more-or-less conspicuous
contestants in the bewildering game of nations.
Essentially,
this balance system was a simplifying fiction; intangible,
non-measurable and incrementally unmanageable. It offered
and still continues to offer intellectually-unambitious statesmen
and politicians a convenient slight-of-hand metaphor. Correspondingly,
this structure provides an always-ready pretext for every
manner of manipulative foreign policy intervention. Over time,
such behavior has triggered repeated systemic breakdowns and
fostered a seemingly permanent condition of global imbalance.
The ironies
are altogether evident.
Still, jurisprudence
must continuously be emphasized and re-interpreted, More precisely,
under international treaty law, language is always of signal
importance. Terms of the Westphalian Treaty call, inter
alia, for “a just equilibrium of power.”
Significantly, war avoidance is never even mentioned in the
defining document. In world law, aggressive war was not criminalized
until the Pact of Paris (aka Kellogg-Briand Pact) of 1928.
Another
staggering irony.
What are
the relevant law-based residuals? What do we actually have
left of this 17th century treaty-based Realpolitik regime?
Basically, we now preserve only the crumbling architecture
of what Irish poet William Butler Yeats in "The Second
Coming" termed “mere anarchy.” For the most
part, representative forms of chaotic disintegration are visibly
underway in the Middle East, and also in Africa, Asia and
assorted other places in Europe and South America.
In these
multiplying and dissembling areas, various traditional threat
mechanisms of Westphalian anarchy are either decreasingly
viable or entirely absent. In more places than we might ever
care to admit, many already-muted expressions of reason and
rationality have given way to unbridled passions or genuine
madness. Such transformations warrant serious intellectual
study. They ought never be given over to thinly educated politicians
or public mountebanks.
Significantly,
madness can never be consistent with the primary rules of
a deterrence and balance-of-power world legal order.
There is
more. War and genocide are sometimes mutually reinforcing
rather than mutually exclusive. Looking ahead to a world that
seems unlikely to reign in either source of horror, plausible
intersections between war and genocide are prospectively synergistic.
This means, by definition that any coinciding instances of
war and genocide could produce cumulative harms that exceed
the tangible sum of intersecting parts.
Nowadays,
there no longer remains any credible pretext of system-wide
national searches for “balance.” To some extent,
more traditionally “normal” calculations of equilibrium
have already been rendered infeasible or inconceivable because
of nuclear weapons proliferation. In these ominous cases,
individual states have generally become unable to decipher
or delineate any usable measures of balance with other pertinent
states.
Though the
concept may still be pleasing or reassuring, there is no ascertainable
balance of power in world politics.
None at
all.
This should
bring us back to jurisprudence. By itself, international law
will not save the United States or any other state or alliance
of states. Following former US President Donald Trump’s
multiple failures vis-à-vis Russia, North Korea, China
and Iran, further nuclear proliferation is virtually assured.
In quick succession, especially if accompanied by expectedly
deficient plans for national command and control among the
new or expanding nuclear powers, once “unthinkable”
weapons could become thinkable.
Quickly.
What then?
There is
more. In all cases, not merely those involving war and genocide,
there are various foreseeable interactions between individual
catastrophic harms, synergies that could make the overriding
risks of any looming global nuclear chaos substantially more
pressing. These more-or-less visible interactions must be
taken into suitable analytic account. Under no circumstances
should an American president be allowed once again to disregard
such complex interactions because they are too daunting, confusing
or bewildering. As a glaringly relevant example, former US
President Donald J. Trump effectively accelerated North Korean
nuclearization because he emphasized not preparation, but
attitude.
The best
way to deal with expanding global chaos is first to draw proper
intellectual lessons of anarchy, and then refine, modify and
adapt these lessons to chaos. By definition, the overriding
distinction here will center on disintegrating or disappearing
“rules of the game” from balance-of-power anarchy,
an evolving circumstance wherein traditional assumptions of
Reason and Rationality might no longer obtain. An obvious
and immediate casualty of such dissembling transformation
would be a decreasingly stable logic of deterrence, a Westphalian
logic which, despite its manifold failures, has still proven
generally indispensable to war avoidance and global stability.
There are
pressing particulars. For Israel, a country smaller than Lake
Michigan, the dangers of chaotic disintegration are most plausibly
linked to various war-terrorism intersections. Facing not
only a still-expanding nuclear threat from Iran (largely because
of grievous decisional errors by former US President Donald
J. Trump), Israel could soon find itself with variably existential
adversaries on multiple and simultaneous fronts. These adversaries
could include assorted sub-state Jihadist enemies (Sunni and
Shiite) and also certain state-sub state hybrids. In this
regard, the Trump-brokered Abraham Accords will count for
little. Inter alia, these agreements made peace between only
non-belligerents and exacerbated Israel-Palestinian relations.
Whatever
the emergent configuration of meaningful foes, Israel could
then find itself face-to-face with a unique and unprecedented
species of ‘chaos.’
Plainly,
the portent of any Middle East chaos – here we may also
point convincingly to Syria, Libya, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Turkey
and perhaps even Pakistan – would be enlarged by enemy
irrationality. To wit, if Israel should sometime have to face
a Jihadist adversary that values certain presumed religious
expectations more highly than physical survival, the beleaguered
country’s core deterrent posture could be undermined
or even immobilized. Among other things, any such paralysis
of Israeli military power could signify a heightened threat
of nuclear war.
Some further
clarifications are necessary. In world politics, irrationality
is never the same as madness. An irrational adversary is one
that could sometime value particular goals more highly than
its own national self-preservation. A mad adversary, however,
would display literally no preferred ordering of goals or
values. It follows plausibly, at least from the standpoint
of maintaining successful Israeli deterrence, that having
to face enemy irrationality would be “better”
than facing enemy madness.
Realistically,
however, no such analytic choice would be available. Whether
Israel, the United States or any other state can capably confront
irrationality, madness, neither, or both is never up to pertinent
national decision-makers. Rather, these possible outcomes
are quite simply indeterminable.
“The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” prophesied the poet Yeats,
“and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”
Now, assembled in almost two hundred tribal armed camps known
formally as states, all peoples coexist insecurely on a mercilessly
fractionated planet. Ultimately, to reveal a more palpable
understanding of where all are heading, we may conjure up
the famously nightmarish circumstances of William Golding’s
Lord of the Flies. On any such fearfully sorrowful
landscape, the traditionally anarchic playbook of nations
would likely shift perilously from Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz
to De Sade, Dostoyevsky and Freud.
Prima
facie, our historic world system anarchy has become more
unstable than ever before. While this declension of global
order owes largely to a growing fusion of chaos with potential
leadership irrationality and apocalyptic weaponry, it is also
the result of America’s recently incoherent foreign
policy. Then led by a president who proudly proclaimed historical
illiteracy as an asset, as a conspicuous badge of insight
(“I love the poorly educated,” declared Trump
during the 2016 election campaign) the United States may no
longer represent a stabilizing force in world politics.
What should
humankind now expect? No longer operating with any Westphalian
pretext of a “just equilibrium of power,” there
might be no safety in arms, no rescue by political authority,
no reassuring answers from science or technology. Even though
we humans have seemingly become more civilized over time,
new wars could rage until every once-sturdy flower of culture
had been trampled. Then, civilization, unless rescued by presently
still-unforeseen remedies, could perish in relentlessly paroxysmal
quakes of some primordial disintegration.
What shall
we humans do to avoid any such unspeakable chaos? How shall
such unbearable circumstances best be averted or reverse?
Before answering, all must first acknowledge something markedly
counter-intuitive: It is that chaos and anarchy actually represent
opposite points of a single global continuum. Though contrary
to “common sense,” they define essentially opposite
conditions of world politics.
Since Westphalia,
“mere” anarchy or the absence of central world
authority has been “normal.” A coming chaos, however,
is anything but normal. To correctly fathom its “rules
of the game” will be a decidedly intellectual or analytic
task, not one best dealt with by publicity-seeking presidents,
kings or prime ministers.
There is
more. Since the seventeenth century, our anarchic world can
be described as a system. What happens in any one part of
this ungoverned and effectively ungovernable world can impact
what happens in some or all of the other parts. When deterioration
is marked, and begins to spread from one nation-state to another,
the corollary effects could undermine all previously existing
infrastructures or rules of balance.
Should this
deterioration be rapid and catastrophic, as would likely be
the case following the start of any unconventional war or
act of unconventional terrorism, the effects could be immediate
and overwhelming. These effects would be chaotic per se, or
perhaps represent the slide toward a more generalized system
of global chaos.
