Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un visit the Vostochny Сosmodrome in the far eastern Amur region, Russia, Sept. 13, 2023. Photo: Sputnik/Mikhail Metzel/Kremlin via REUTERS

Soon, Israel will need to make critical decisions on launching preemptive strikes against Iran. Such non-nuclear defensive actions — expressions of anticipatory self-defense” under international law — would take calculated account of certain pro-Iran interventions. The point of such more-or-less plausible enemy state interventions would be to (1) deter Israel from making good on its residual preemption options; or (2) engage Israel in direct warfare if Jerusalem should choose to proceed with these options.

What would be the specific country sources of such pro-Iran interventions? Most reasonably, the states acting on behalf of Iran would be Russia and/or North Korea. If Russia were to act as Iran’s witting nuclear surrogate (because Iran would still be “pre-nuclear”), direct escalatory moves involving Moscow and Washington could ensue. There are no foreseeable circumstances under which direct Israeli moves against Russia would be rational or cost-effective.

Prima facie, all relevant analyses would be speculative. In strict scientific terms, nothing meaningful could be said concerning the authentic probabilities of unique events. This is because science-based estimations of probability must always depend on the determinable frequency of pertinent past events. Where there are no such events to draw upon, estimations must be less than scientific.

All potentially relevant scenarios involving Israel, Iran, Russia, and/or the United States would be unprecedented (sui generis). At the same time, both Israel and its American ally will need to fashion “best possible” estimations based on applicable elements of deductive reasoning. More particularly, useful Israeli assessments will need to focus on presumed escalation differences between Vladimir Putin’s “firebreak theory” and that of incoming US president Donald Trump.

Will Trump’s nuclear posture threshold remain unchanged from current doctrine; that is, will it continue to affirm the primacy of any escalation to nuclear engagement? Or will this escalation threshold more closely resemble the Russian theory that “small” nuclear weapons (i.e., tactical or theater ordnance) do not necessarily signal intent to initiate a full-blown nuclear war?

American and Russian nuclear escalation doctrines have always been asymmetrical; the implications of continuing such crucial difference could “spill-over” to Israel-Iran nuclear war calculations for the Middle East. Though counter-intuitive, a nuclear war could take place even while Iran remained pre-nuclear. And this risk has recently been heightened by Vladimir Putin’s nuclear policy “upgrades.”

With the United States in mind, the Russian president declared significant “enhancements” to his country’s nuclear doctrine. There are now additional reasons to worry about nuclear war stemming from Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. Most worrisome is that (1) Moscow would react more forcefully against the United States and/or Ukraine because of President Joe Biden’s widened gamut of missile-firing authority to Volodymyr Zelensky; (2) Vladimir Putin’s reaction would include prompt Russian enlargements of theater nuclear forces; and (3) these Russian enlargements would lower Russia’s tangible threshold of nuclear weapons use.

Such lowering would apply at both doctrinal and operational levels. Although nothing theoretic could be determined about competitive risk-taking in extremis, probabilities concerning Moscow and Washington would still need to be estimated. This includes examining derivative warfare scenarios between Israel and Iran, deductive narratives in which Jerusalem would rely on US nuclear deterrence to protect against Russian-backed North Korean forces. In the parlance of traditional nuclear strategy, this would signify Israeli reliance on “extended nuclear deterrence.” North Korea is a nuclear Iranian ally with a documented history of actual warfighting against Israel. 

Facing an intellectual problem

Nuclear war avoidance should always be approached by pertinent national leaders as a preeminently intellectual problem.

What happens next? How might these developments impact Israel? What should be expected from “Trump II?” Most specifically, how would the answers impact Israel’s precarious war with Iran?

During “Trump I,” major US national security problems were framed by an unprepared American president in needlessly rancorous terms. Today, armed with greater regard for applicable intellectual factors, American planners and policy-makers should look more systematically at what might lie ahead. What will happen next in Vladimir Putin’s determinedly cruel war against Ukraine? How can the United States best prepare for nuclear war avoidance? Playing Putin’s “nuclear firebreak” game, should Washington seek to persuade Moscow of America’s willingness to “go nuclear” according to Russian-defined policy thresholds, or should the United States proceed “asymmetrically” with its own preferred firebreak? How would Washington’s decision affect Israel’s national security?

In facing off against each other, even under optimal assumptions of mutual rationality, American and Russian presidents would have to concern themselves with all possible miscalculations, errors in information, unauthorized uses of strategic weapons, mechanical or computer malfunctions and assorted nuances of cyber-defense/cyber-war.

A still pre-nuclear Iran would still have access to radiation dispersal weapons and to conventional rockets for use against Israel’s nuclear reactor at Dimona. An Israeli nuclear war with a not-yet-nuclear Iran could arise if already- nuclear North Korea, a close ally of Iran, were willing to act as Tehran’s military surrogate against Israel. Such willingness, in turn, would be impacted by the presumed expectations of Russia and/or China.

Figuring all this out represents a survival-determining challenge for Jerusalem.

Pretended irrationality as nuclear strategy

Going forward, a joint US-Israel obligation will be to assess whether a nuanced posture of “pretended irrationality” could enhance nuclear deterrence posture. On several earlier occasions, it should be recalled, then US President Donald Trump openly praised the untested premises of such a posture. But was such presidential praise warranted on intellectual grounds?

In reply, US and Israeli enemies continue to include both state and sub-state foes, whether considered singly or in multiple forms of possible collaboration. Such forms could be “hybridized” in different ways between state and sub-state adversaries.

In principle, this could represent a potentially clever strategy to “get a jump” on the United States or Israel in any still-expected or already-ongoing competition for “escalation dominance.”

Nuclear weapons as instruments of war prevention, not punishment

A US president or Israeli prime minister should always bear in mind that any national nuclear posture ought to remain focused on war prevention rather than punishment. In all identifiable circumstances, using a portion of its available nuclear forces for vengeance rather than deterrence would miss the most essential point: that is, to fully optimize national security obligations.

Any American or Israeli nuclear weapons use based on narrowly corrosive notions of revenge, even if only as a residual or default option, would be glaringly irrational. Among other things, this would be a good time for both US and Israeli nuclear crisis planners to re-read Clausewitz regarding primacy of the “political object.” Absent such an object, there could be no meaningful standard of escalation rationality.

There remains one penultimate but critical observation.  It is improbable, but not inconceivable, that certain of America’s and Israel’s principal enemies would sometime be neither rational nor irrational, but mad. While irrational decision-makers could already pose special problems for nuclear deterrence — by definition, because these decision-makers would not value collective survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences — they might still be rendered susceptible to alternate forms of dissuasion.

Resembling rational leaderships, these decision-makers could still maintain a fixed, determinable, and “transitive” hierarchy of preferences. This means, at least in principle, that “merely” irrational enemies could sometimes be successfully deterred.

International law

From the standpoint of international law, it is always necessary to distinguish preemptive attacks from “preventive ones.” Preemption is a military strategy of striking first in the expectation that the only foreseeable alternative is to be struck first oneself.  A preemptive attack is launched by a state that believes enemy forces are about to attack.  A preventive attack, on the other hand, is not launched out of any concern about “imminent” hostilities, but rather for fear of some longer-term deterioration in prevailing military balance.

In a preemptive attack, the length of time by which the enemy’s action is anticipated is presumptively very short; in a preventive strike, the anticipated interval is considerably longer. A related problem here for the United States and Israel is not only the practical difficulty of accurately determining “imminence,” but also that delaying a defensive strike until imminence was more precisely ascertainable could prove existential. A resort to “anticipatory self-defense” could be nuclear or non-nuclear and could be directed at either a nuclear or non-nuclear adversary. Plainly, any such resort involving nuclear weapons on one or several sides would prove catastrophic.

America and Israel are not automatically made safer by having only rational adversaries. Even fully rational enemy leaderships could commit serious errors in calculation that would lead them toward nuclear confrontation and/or a nuclear/biological war. There are also certain related command and control issues that could impel a perfectly rational adversary or combination of rational adversaries (both state and sub-state) to embark upon variously risky nuclear behaviors. It follows that even the most pleasingly “optimistic” assessments of enemy leadership decision-making could not reliably preclude catastrophic outcomes.

For the United States and Israel, issues of calibrated nuclear deterrence remain fundamentally intellectual challenges, issues requiring meticulous analytic preparation rather than any particular leadership “attitude.” Such planning ought never become just another contest of “mind over matter” — that is, just a vainly overvalued inventory of comparative weaponry or identifiable “order of battle.”  war.

In both Ukraine and portions of the Middle East, the historical conditions of nature bequeathed at the Peace of Westphalia (1648) could soon come to resemble the primordial barbarism of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Long before Golding, Thomas Hobbes, the seventeenth-century English philosopher, warned insightfully in Leviathan (Chapter XIII) that in any such circumstances of human disorder there must exist “continual fear, and danger of violent death….”

Perceptions of credibility

If Putin should sometime prove willing to cross the conventional-tactical nuclear firebreak on the assumption that such a move would not invite any reciprocal cycle of nuclear escalation with the United States, the American president could face an overwhelmingly tragic choice: total capitulation or nuclear war. Though it would be best for the United States to avoid ever having to reach such a fateful decisional moment, there could still be no guarantees of “mutual assured prudence” between Washington and Moscow. It follows that growing perils of asymmetrical nuclear doctrine should be countered incrementally and intellectually.

Looking ahead at “Cold War II,” American and Israeli security will hinge on fostering vital “perceptions of credibility,” Regarding Russia’s changing nuclear doctrine, only dedicated analytic minds could ever distance Planet Earth from World War III. Taken together with Russia’s war against Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s strategic doctrine blurs essential conceptual lines between conventional and nuclear conflict and creates existential hazards for both the United States and Israel. The solely rational response from Washington and Jerusalem should be to understand these unsustainable hazards and to plan appropriately for their most efficient minimization or removal.

For the United States and Israel, the threat posed by asymmetrical nuclear firebreaks could impact the likelihood of both deliberate and inadvertent nuclear war.

These are daunting intellectual issues. Sorting out the most urgent ones, Israel could soon find itself confronting North Korean military assets that threaten on behalf of a pre-nuclear Iran. Whether or not these proxy weapons and forces were under the overall direction of Moscow, asymmetries in nuclear escalation doctrine between Russia and the United States would be material to pertinent event outcomes. Left unanticipated or unmodified, they could sometime prove determinative.

Louis René Beres was educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books, monographs, and scholarly articles dealing with military nuclear strategy. In Israel, he was Chair of Project Daniel. Over recent years, he has published on nuclear warfare issues in Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists; International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs; The Atlantic; Israel Defense; Jewish Website; The New York Times; Israel National News; The Jerusalem Post; The Hill and other sites. A different version of this article appeared in JewishWebsight.

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Quebec Premier François Legault wants Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante to get her house in order. Speaking to reporters in Quebec City on Nov. 26, Legault talked about the violent demonstrations […]

The post Quebec premier urges Montreal mayor to take a harder line on rioters after a weekend of violence appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.

UN peacekeeper (UNIFIL) vehicle drives in Bent Jbeil, after a ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah took effect, southern Lebanon, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Aziz Taher

A ceasefire between Israel and the Lebanese terrorist group Hezbollah held on Wednesday after the two sides struck a deal brokered by the US and France, but Israel warned local residents not to return to the border area yet.

The ceasefire agreement, a rare diplomatic feat in a region wracked by conflict for months, ended the deadliest confrontation between Israel and the Iran-backed Islamist group in years, but Israel is still fighting its other arch foe the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

Cars and vans piled high with mattresses, suitcases, and even furniture streamed through the heavily-bombed southern port city of Tyre, heading south where hundreds of thousands of people had been forced to flee their homes by the violence.

However, the Israeli army’s Arabic spokesperson cautioned southern Lebanon residents against moving south of the Litani river from 5 pm local (1500 GMT) to 7 am (0500 GMT), noting that Israeli forces were still present in the area.

Lebanon’s army, tasked with ensuring the ceasefire lasts, said it began deploying additional troops south of the Litani, into a region heavily bombarded by Israel in its battle against Hezbollah. The river runs about 30 km (20 miles) north of Israel‘s border.

Israel‘s attacks have also struck eastern cities and towns and Hezbollah’s stronghold in the southern suburbs of Beirut, and Israeli troops have pushed around 6 km (4 miles) into Lebanon in a series of ground incursions launched in September.

Under the terms of the ceasefire, Israeli forces can remain in Lebanon for 60 days and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had instructed the military not to allow residents back to villages near the border, after four Hezbollah operatives were detained in the area.

The Lebanese army urged returning residents not to approach areas where Israeli forces were present for their own safety.

The ceasefire deal, which is designed to end a conflict across the Israeli-Lebanese border that has killed thousands of people since it was ignited by Hamas’s invasion of southern Israel last Oct. 7, is a major achievement for the US in the waning days of President Joe Biden’s administration.

Diplomatic efforts will now turn to Gaza, where Israel has vowed to destroy Hamas, which led the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israeli communities. However, there were no hopes of peace returning any time soon to the Palestinian enclave.

Israel has said its military aim in Lebanon had been to ensure the safe return of nearly 70,000 Israelis who fled from their communities along the northern border when Hezbollah started firing rockets at them almost daily in support of Hamas in Gaza.

In Lebanon, some cars flew national flags, others honked, and one woman could be seen flashing the victory sign with her fingers as people started to return to homes they had fled.

Many of the villages the people were likely returning to have been destroyed.

Hussam Arrout, a father of four, said he was itching to return to his home.

“The Israelis haven’t withdrawn in full, they’re still on the edge. So we decided to wait until the army announces that we can go in. Then we’ll turn the cars on immediately and go to the village,” he said.

‘PERMANENT CESSATION’

Announcing the ceasefire, Biden spoke at the White House on Tuesday shortly after Israel‘s security cabinet approved the agreement in a 10-1 vote.

“This is designed to be a permanent cessation of hostilities,” Biden said. “What is left of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations will not be allowed to threaten the security of Israel again.”

Israel will gradually withdraw its forces as Lebanon’s army takes control of territory near its border with Israel to ensure that Hezbollah does not rebuild its infrastructure there after a costly war, Biden said.

He said his administration was also pushing for an elusive ceasefire in Gaza.

Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri told Reuters that the group “appreciates” Lebanon’s right to reach an agreement which protects its people, and hopes for a deal to end the Gaza war.

White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan said the US would start its renewed push for a Gaza ceasefire on Wednesday.

Iran reserves the right to react to Israeli airstrikes on Iran last month but also bears in mind other developments in the region, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said.

Araghchi told reporters during a trip to Lisbon that Iran welcomed Tuesday’s ceasefire agreement in Lebanon and hoped it could lead to a permanent ceasefire.

The Israeli military said on Wednesday Israeli forces fired at several vehicles with suspects to prevent them from reaching a no-go zone in Lebanese territory and the suspects moved away.

Defense Minister Israel Katz said he instructed the military to “act firmly and without compromise” should it happen again.

Hezbollah lawmaker Hassan Fadlallah said that the group would retain the right to defend itself if Israel attacked.

The ceasefire would give the Israeli army an opportunity to rest and replenish supplies, and isolate Hamas, said Netanyahu.

“We have pushed them [Hezbollah] decades back. We eliminated [the late Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah, the axis of the axis. We have taken out the organization’s top leadership, we have destroyed most of their rockets and missiles,” he said.

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