Always Preparing for a "Next War": The Infinite Lethality of World Politics

Courtesy: Louis René Beres

By Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971)
Emeritus Professor of International Law
Purdue University
lberes@purdue.edu

“Where will it end?
When will it all be lulled back into sleep, and cease, the bloody hatred, the destruction?”

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

In world politics, nothing fundamental really “ends.” Though specific events, personalities and weapon technologies do vary from minute to minute, the enabling structures of world politics remain ominously constant. To wit, if the anarchic system of states birthed at the 1648 Peace of Westphalia “stays the course,” all states will have to base life-or-death foreign policy decisions on expectations of chaos [1].

There is a tangible difference between chaos and anarchy. Chaos is not the same as anarchy. It is worse than anarchy - infinitely worse.

“Where will it end”? asked classical Greek playwright Aeschylus in Agamemnon. Amid the current and recent wars involving Russia/Ukraine, India/Pakistan and Israel/Iran/US, the global powers remain focused on immediate and particular security threats, not longer-term world system transformations. Such conspicuous policy inertia is understandable and situationally defensible. Still, chronic indifference to more visionary security obligations suggests that no traditional remediation could really “work.” This prognosis would remain valid even if all pertinent states were well-intentioned and presumptively rational.

Year after year, political leaders and pundits express concern about ongoing wars and armed struggles. Though there is nothing wrong with seeking to manage global conflicts “in time,” a concurrent concern for world system vulnerabilities is also needed. Potentially, leaving core vulnerabilities in place would signify a universal surrender to irremediable harms.

A medical metaphor could be clarifying. We may think here of a patient’s particular illness being treated as discrete and isolable harm rather than something system-related. Generally, in dealing with biological disease processes, it makes little sense to tackle disease manifestations without first understanding systemic causes. Similarly, in dealing with variously manifested “pathologies” of world politics, capable thinkers ought first to acknowledge underlying issues of interdependence and global unity. In the fashion of an individual human being, world politics needs to be treated as an organic “whole,” one that is more than the simple sum of its “parts” [2].

What next for global survival? Aren’t visionary suggestions for transformative world order reform unrealistic ipso facto? Perhaps. But these suggestions are still more realistic than continuing to embrace an infinitely lethal system of geopolitics. Here we may purposefully recall the deeper wisdom of Italian film director Federico Fellini: “The visionary is the only realist.”

There is more. The overall challenge to human survival in world politics is not “merely” conceptual. There are also complex details that need to be identified and managed. In certain foreseeable cases, the specific failures of “Westphalian” international law would not "merely” be catastrophic. They would also be unprecedented or sui generis.

For every state’s foreign policy planners, it is high time to take science seriously, not as demeaning background for self-driving cars or heated steering wheels, but for the prevention of nuclear war. Accordingly, a derivative question should promptly be raised: What to do if we should suddenly or incrementally find ourselves “in extremis,” in a uniquely perplexing nuclear crisis? Such portentous prospects already lie latent in assorted Russian, Chinese, and North Korean collaborations. Though scholars are unable to assign precise scientific probabilities to unique events – an inherent limitation of reasoning in logic and mathematics – they will still have to think systemically about improved survival options.

Conceptual errors continue to accumulate. World leaders continue to be guided by zero-sum orientations to world politics. For the United States and other major powers, these orientations are usually made manifest in the crude rhetorical flourishes of belligerent nationalism.

To survive as a planet, we will need far more than incoherent flourishes. In the years ahead, only one thing is certain about world politics and international law: The longstanding bellum omnium contra omnes – the “war of all against all” described by 17th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes - could never sustain planetary security.

Soon, all states, but especially those that rely implicitly or explicitly on nuclear deterrence, should think seriously about alternative systems of international relations. While even the tiniest hint of interest in global unification or integration (what French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin calls "planetization") will sound fanciful, it would still represent humankind’s only worthwhile opportunity to “stay alive.” Wherever it is expressed as a theory-directed "axiom" from which operational hypotheses could be deduced, the "every man for himself" ethos in world politics confronts a pitiless providence.

What are some foreseeable narratives? Again and again, and at some potentially irretrievable point, world system failures could become intolerable. For the moment, at least, it can still be rational for major states to use military force against barbarous enemies, whether states or sub-state terror groups. In the longer term, however, the only sort of realism that could make sense for self-imperiling states and their allies would point toward a much higher awareness of global “oneness.” In this connection, prima facie, the universal consequences of climate change already impact humankind as a whole.

In its most fully optimized expressions, a higher awareness of organic global interdependence would coalesce around what ancient philosophers called "cosmopolis.” Lamentably, the willing prophets of a more cooperative world civilization still remain few and far between. How then should we proceed?

“Cosmopolis” is not really a bewildering idea. It is hardly a biological secret that the basic factors and behaviors common to all human beings greatly outnumber those traits that superficially differentiate one segment from another. Unless the leaders of major states can finally understand that the durable survival of any one state would be contingent on the survival of all, true national security will become a glaring contradiction in terms.

There are still-remaining intellectual opportunities for world order visionaries. Inter alia, these opportunities lie in the foundational insights of Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton and Lewis Mumford: "Civilization,” says Mumford, “is the never ending process of creating one world and one humanity."

Powerful states ought never allow themselves to be "lulled back into sleep" by shortsighted calls for military "victory." For humankind in its entirety, the only triumph worth celebrating would be one that could transport itself beyond millennia of "bloody hatreds" and "destruction." As we may have learned from filmmaker Federico Fellini, so may we also learn from Aeschylus, the ancient Greek author of Agamemnon.

Soon, though seemingly farfetched, we will need to think more systematically and systemically about alternative world futures. Though problematic, if we could be endowed with capable and willing visionaries and imaginative and decent national leaders, there would still be enough time for eleventh-hour planetary rescue. Otherwise, all will suffer irreversibly from the lethal “Westphalian” legacy, a defiling inheritance of war, terrorism and genocide. Time is literally “running out.” Jean Jacques Rousseau, the Enlightenment philosopher so important to 18th century American political thought, wrote prophetically: “The majority of nations, as well as of men, are tractable only in their youth. They become incorrigible as they grow old.” Understood in terms of our human obligation to replace belligerent nationalism with an organically-unifying world politics, this suggests that all interim military victories would ultimately be defeats.

“Where will it end?” asks Aeschylus, the ancient Greek playwright. Without embracing an expanded vision of planetary “oneness,” the answer is both obvious and intolerable. But what could allow such a desperately-needed vision to be taken seriously as a state’s policy position? How could such vision actively guide national decision-makers? Until humankind recognizes the primacy of this question, there can be no correct answers [3].

Infinite lethality remains the continuous inheritance of “Westphalia.” It can be overcome only by getting beyond the sordid dynamics of “everyone for himself” orientations to world politics. For the immediate future, species “oneness” should be acknowledged not just as an abstract element of philosophy or science, but as a conceptual blueprint for world system transformation. Though any such expectation would be unrealistic, it would still be more realistic than remaining on a planetary collision course.

[1] During chaos, which is a "time of War," says English philosopher Thomas Hobbes in Chapter XIII of Leviathan, “. every man is Enemy to every man... and the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Hobbes believed, inter alia, that the condition of "nature" in world politics was less chaotic than was that same condition among individual human beings. This is because of what he called the "dreadful equality" of individual men in nature, an equality concerning the ability to kill others. This original differentiation has effectively disappeared with the manufacture and spread of nuclear weapons.

[2] In technical philosophy of science terminology, this means “synergy.”

[3] Says philosopher Paul Tillich: “Man cannot receive an answer to a question he has not asked.” See: The Courage to Be; 1952.

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Louis René Beres, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University, was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971). He is the author of many major books and several hundred articles dealing with world politics, philosophy and international law. His twelfth book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel's Nuclear Strategy. Dr. Beres’ related writings can be found at The New York Times; Yale Global Online; Modern War Institute (West Point); War Room (US Army War College); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; global-e; Oxford University Press (Yearbook of International Law and Jurisprudence); Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard); American Journal of International Law; American Political Science Review; BESA (Israel); The Hudson Review; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The Hill; Jurist; The Atlantic; Air-Space Operations Review (USAF) and World Politics (Princeton). Professor Beres was an original member of the Princeton-based World Order Models Project in the late 1960s. He was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.