Power, Presence and “Nothingness” Trump’s election could imperil Israel’s survival

Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Photo montage from Wikipedia Commons

by Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971), Emeritus Professor of International Law, Purdue University

“…all is power and presence for me here, where the theme of nothingness rises still in smoke.” Saint-John Perse, Exile

Though counter-intuitive, the US election of Donald J. Trump may not bode well for Israel’s survival. In various circumstances, this election could signal an eleventh-hour unwillingness to honor America’s alliance obligations to the Jewish State. If North Korea should sometime agree to act as nuclear surrogate of a still pre-nuclear Iran, Israel could find itself stripped of essential American support.

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The explanation here is straightforward and logic-based. In all foreseeable crises of competitive risk-taking with Iran’s North Korean ally, US support would be needed to maintain “escalation dominance.” For Jerusalem, such support would be indispensable.

 At present, North Korean military forces are actively preparing to enlarge Russian aggressions against Ukraine. North Korea, Jerusalem should recall, has a pertinent history of Middle East military involvement against Israel, including multiple air attacks during the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Now, inter alia, Pyongyang, backed by Putin, is magnifying Iran’s cyberwar capabilities against Israel. As for America’s recently elected president, it is no more likely that Donald Trump would defy Putin’s plans for Iran than that he would stand up for a battered Ukraine. Whatever Putin decrees for Iran-Israel (and this decree would probably unfold in calculated increments than as sudden declaration), that order will be taken as the last-word by “pro-Israel” President Trump.

Further clarifying particulars are in order. Even a pre-nuclear Iran could prod Israel to the point where Jerusalem’s only strategic options would be nuclear escalation or outright capitulation. Choosing the first option would be tantamount to choosing an “asymmetrical nuclear war.” This is not a substantive matter. It is merely true by definition.

But how could such an impasse arise? In one compelling view, Iran would target Israel’s Dimona nuclear reactor and/or employ radiation dispersal weapons against Israeli civilians. A limited Israeli nuclear response could also follow in the wake of Iranian resort to biological or electromagnetic pulse (EMP) ordnance. Most worrisome for Jerusalem would be direct interventions by a nuclear state ally of Iran. In this scenario, Israel could be deterred from striking preemptively against high-urgency Iranian targets by Russian and/or North Korean nuclear threats.

Where should Israel do about such prospectively formidable and overlapping nuclear foes? Looking toward expanding conflict with Iran, any “one-off” preemption against enemy weapons and infrastructures (an act of “anticipatory self-defense” under international law would be perilous. Accordingly, at this already-late stage, any defensive action against menacing Iranian assets would need to be undertaken in planned stages and amid ongoing war. As to launching defensive military actions against North Korean assets directly, any such moves would be out-of-the-question ipso facto. At a minimum, they would humiliate Vladimir Putin, prodding the Russian president to leverage global support of his White House devotee. In turn, Donald Trump would lean heavily upon Israel, ensuring that Jerusalem desist from any further military actions against North Korea deemed objectionable by Putin. Some of these voided actions could be necessary for Israel’s literal survival.

There is more. During intersecting and possibly synergistic interactions, a coherent dialectic would need to guide Israel’s strategic policy-making. As part of its expanding war against Iran, Israel could sometime calculate that it had no choice but to launch multiple and mutually-reinforcing preemptive strikes against nuclear-related targets. Simultaneously, Russian and/or North Korean threats of support for Iran could lay the groundwork for a multi-state nuclear war, one that could come to involve the United States and/or China. Though existential threats could originate with either Moscow or Pyongyang, only North Korea would be apt to carry them out.

Such a portentous narrative ought never to be dismissed out of hand in Jerusalem. It could be tempting for Israeli planners to regard such jaw-dropping interventions as “highly speculative” or “unlikely,” but there would be no science-based way to meaningfully estimate probabilities.  True probabilities, Israeli planners should continuously keep in mind, could never be determined for unique (sui generis) events.

There are more details.  Israel’s “high thinkers” will need to make gainful military decisions based on long-established standards of valid deduction and internal consistency (i.e., standards of logic). Though there exist no data on nuclear war, a usefully deductive analytic apparatus could and should be constructed. The core object of such an explanatory apparatus would be the systematic derivation of logically entailed and policy-relevant conclusions from expressly identified assumptions.  Without making such a challenging effort, Israel’s strategic decisions would be based more-or-less on disconnected assessments or “common sense.”

In matters of nuclear doctrine and strategy, “common sense” is a comforting euphemism for self-imposed folly. Whatever the particular circumstances, there could be no more inherently valueless decision-making standard than “common sense.”

There is even more to ponder. To the extent that they might be estimated, the risks of an Israel-Iran nuclear war will depend on whether such a conflict would be intentional, unintentional, or accidental. Apart from applying this three-part conceptual distinction, there would be no adequate reason to expect operationally-gainful assessments.  

Ensuring existential protections from openly declared Iranian aggressions, Jerusalem should always recall that even the Jewish State’s physical survival should never be taken as given. At some point, even a nuclear weapons state could be left with only irrelevant military options. That point could signify assorted residual options for revenge (and thereby bestow feelings of prowess or emotional satisfaction), but no options for tangible safety and security.

 An unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war between Jerusalem and Teheran could take place not only as the result of misunderstandings or miscalculations between rational leaders, but also as the unintended consequence of mechanical, electrical, or computer malfunction. This should raise a further distinction between an unintentional/inadvertent nuclear war and an accidental nuclear war. Though all accidental nuclear wars must be unintentional, not every unintentional nuclear war must be caused by accident. On one occasion or another, an unintentional or inadvertent nuclear war could represent the result of fundamental human misjudgments concerning enemy intentions. By definition, this would be a catastrophic result.

 There is still more. History matters. An authentic nuclear war has never been fought. There are no experts on “conducting” or “winning” a nuclear war. In Jerusalem, this understanding should be considered axiomatic and overriding.

 Plainly, Israel needs “high thinkers.” But who should be the appropriate models for such extraordinary thinkers? In reply, one may think here of such figures as Szilard, Fermi, Oppenheimer, Einstein, Bohr and assorted others.

To be sure, such thinking will need to be initiated and expanded at advanced theoretical levels. Such a task could never be fulfilled at normal operational levels. For Israel, much more will be needed than capable and industrious professionals. Much more.

 For national survival, good theory will be indispensable. Without a systematic and theory-based plan in place, Israel would render itself unprepared for an Iranian nuclear conflict that is deliberate, unintentional or accidental. At every decipherable stage of its existential competition with Tehran, Jerusalem should remember that the only acceptable rationale for national nuclear weapons and doctrine is stable war management and comprehensive nuclear deterrence.

          The particulars accumulate. Immediately, Israel should initiate a conspicuous policy shift from “deliberate nuclear ambiguity” to “selective nuclear disclosure.” The driving logic of this necessary shift would not be to restate the obvious (i.e., that Israel is an operational nuclear power), but rather to remind would-be aggressors that Jerusalem’s nuclear weapons are usable at every possible level of warfare. Nonetheless, even with optimal prudential planning, Russian and/or North Korean threats to Israel could sometime become overwhelming.

          Reduced to its essentials, a worst case scenario for Israel would commence with progressively explicit threats from Moscow or Pyongyang about Israeli preemption costs. Israel, aware that it could not reasonably expect to coexist indefinitely with a nuclear Iran, would proceed with its planned preemptions in spite of dire Russian or North Korean warnings. In subsequent response, North Korean military forces would act directly against Israel, seeking to persuade Jerusalem that Iran’s nuclear state surrogates in Pyongyang were in a position to dominate all imaginable escalations. In principle, Russian military forces (either singly or in concert with North Korea) could act against Israel on behalf of Iran, but that would present as a manifestly less believable threat narrative.

 Unless the United States were willing to enter an already-chaotic situation with openly unrestricted support for Israel, Kim Jung Un would have no foreseeable difficulties in establishing “escalation dominance.” Correspondingly, well-intentioned supporters of Israel could over-estimate the Jewish State’s relative nuclear capabilities and options, a judgment that Sigmund Freud would likely have called “wish fulfillment” and that could steeply endanger Israel’s physical continuance as a state. Moreover, during his previous presidential tenure, Donald J. Trump declared that he had personally obviated the North Korean dictator as a threat to the United States. Trump did this, per public announcement at the Singapore Summit, because he and Kim had “fallen in love.”

In war, even state-of-the-art military operations have determinable limits. In essence, there is no clear way in which the capabilities and options of a state smaller than America’s Lake Michigan could “win” at competitive risk-taking vis-à-vis Russia or North Korea.  For Israel in such blatantly asymmetrical circumstances, self-deflating candor would prove much safer than any self-deluding bravado. Especially sobering in this regard would be the patent unreliability and intellectual incapacity of the re-elected American president.

As a strategic objective, Israel ought always to avoid armed struggle against a vastly superior nuclear adversary. This imperative would not pose problems with regard to a newly-nuclear Iran (though Jerusalem ought still to do whatever possible to prevent Iranian nuclearization), but it would present an incomparably serious problem if it concerned a “mature” nuclear adversary in Pyongyang.

           Would US president Donald J. Trump honor alliance commitments to Israel that could place millions of Americans in a position of existential vulnerability? Would Mr. Trump accept such a law-based commitment under any circumstances, even in principle? Prima facie, considering Trump’s history with the Russian president, he would do as little as possible to offend Vladimir Putin. This could mean “letting him do whatever the hell he wants,” Trump’s declared comment on Putin and Ukraine of February 10, 2024. At that stage, Jerusalem could have no choice but to accept a nuclear Iran as fait accompli.

          There will be additionally important issues of nuclear doctrine for the re-elected American president. In his continuing war of aggression and genocide against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin has been recycling provocative elements of Soviet-era strategic thinking. One such element concerns the conspicuous absence of any “firebreak” between conventional and tactical nuclear force engagements. Much as matters were conducted during the “classical” era of US-Soviet nuclear deterrence, Moscow still identifies the determinative escalatory threshold with first-use of high-yield, long-range strategic nuclear weapons, not with a first use of tactical (theater) nuclear weapons.

          This “fuzzy” nuclear escalation doctrine was never shared by the United States, Israel’s ultimate ally, and could erode any once-stabilizing barriers of intra-war deterrence between Washington and Moscow or Washington and Pyongyang. Whether sudden or incremental, such erosion could impact the plausibility of both a deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war. As Israel could require doctrinally-based US support in countering Russian or North Korean nuclear threats, Vladimir Putin should be granted a prominent place in Israeli threat assessments of Iranian nuclear progress. Most significantly, with Putin admirer Donald J. Trump back in the White House, Jerusalem will need to take seriously the intra-crisis prospect of last-minute American abandonment. This generally ignored prospect would mean nothing less than a Trump-led forfeiture of Israel to existential harms. Remembering the words of French Poet Saint-John Perse, it would be a forfeiture wherein “the theme of nothingness rises still in smoke.”

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), and is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth book, Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy, was published in 2016. His other writings have been published in Harvard National Security Journal; Yale Global Online; World Politics (Princeton); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; Israel Defense; Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College; Special Warfare; Oxford University Press; The Jerusalem Post; Infinity Journal; BESA Perspectives; US News & World Report; The Hill; and The Atlantic.

His Terrorism and Global Security: The Nuclear Threat (Westview, first edition, 1979) was one of the first scholarly books to deal specifically with nuclear