What rough beast? Israel, anarchy and the shape of chaos

Special to 'The Jerusalem Post': To survive, the Jewish State will need to exploit whatever pragmatic possibilities might still lie latent in deterrence, war, and diplomacy.

By LOUIS RENÉ BERES
Anti-Morsi protesters in Cairo 521 (photo credit: Reuters)
Anti-Morsi protesters in Cairo 521
(photo credit: Reuters)
With the steady deterioration of stability in both Egypt and Syria, a word on many observers' minds is Middle Eastern "chaos." Here, however, language must be precise. In the history of world politics, anarchy is actually a very old story. Chaos is not.
Significantly, there is an important difference.
Formally, under modern international law, anarchy was acknowledged and institutionalized in 1648, at the Peace of Westphalia. With the end of the Thirty Years’ War, the last of the great religious wars sparked by the Reformation, a decentralized and disordered world politics was effectively sanctified. Then, a “balance of power," but not “peace,” became the codified core objective in the principal game of nations.
In the exact language of the Treaty, an explicit expectation called for “a just equilibrium of power.” War avoidance was not even mentioned. Indeed, jurisprudentially, at least, aggressive war was not criminalized until the much later Pact of Paris, or Kellogg-Briand Pact, of 1928.
Now, we have the crumbling architecture of what Yeats had ironically termed “mere anarchy.” Already, perhaps even more authentically than in the always troubled Middle East, chaotic disintegration is underway in certain other fragile parts of the world.
For the United States, facing both unalterable military limitations and recurrent financial crises, the implications are plainly worrisome. For Israel, moreover, an increasingly-beleaguered mini-state, these implications are potentially existential.
International law will not save Israel. Nor will the United States. Assorted treaty expectations notwithstanding, including the New Start agreement between the US and Russia, both nuclear and biological weapons may still spread unobstructed. In short order, especially if accompanied by deficient plans for national command and control, these once “unthinkable” weapons, could become “thinkable.”
There is more. There are foreseeable interactions between individual catastrophic harms, so-called synergies, that could make the overriding risks of any looming global chaos still more pressing.
For Israel, a country smaller than Lake Michigan, the pertinent dangers are both particular and unique. Facing, among other things,  not only an unprecedented nuclear threat from Iran, but also the more or less simultaneous appearance of “Palestine,” the Jewish State could quickly find itself engulfed in mass-casualty terrorism, and/or in unconventional war.
The conspicuous portent of  expanding Middle East chaos – we may presently point to Egypt, Syria, and even Libya - could be enlarged by instances of enemy irrationality. If, for example, Israel should sometime have to face a Jihadi adversary that would value certain presumed religious expectations more highly than its own physical survival, the country’s core deterrent could be immobilized. Any such paralysis of Israeli power could signify a heightened threat of nuclear or biological war.
It could also place Israel in the cross hairs of mass-destruction terrorism.
In world politics, irrationality is never the same as madness. An irrational adversary is one that could value certain goals more highly than its own national self-preservation. A mad adversary would display no preferred ordering of goals or values at all. It follows, from the standpoint of maintaining successful Israeli deterrence, that facing enemy irrationality would be “better” than facing enemy madness.
But the choice is unavailable. Whether Israel or America shall confront irrationality, madness, neither, or both, is not up to Jerusalem or Washington to determine. More straightforwardly, these possible outcomes are undeterminable.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” prophesied Yeats, “and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”  Now, assembled in almost two hundred tribal armed camps, euphemistically called “nation-states,” all peoples coexist more-or-less insecurely on a fractionated planet. Ultimately, to reveal a suitably palpable understanding of where we are  heading, we may intentionally conjure up the nightmarish circumstances of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. On such a sorrowful landscape, the prescribed playbook of nations would shift perceptibly from Sun-Tzu and Clausewitz to De Sade and Dostoyevsky.
Our historic anarchy has become more portentous than ever before. This visible declension of global order owes largely to a prospective fusion of chaos with both leadership irrationality and apocalyptic weaponry.
In time, there may be no residual safety in arms, no rescue by any respected political authority, no reassuring answer from science or technology. Even though we had become "civilized," new wars could rage until almost every sturdy flower of culture had been trampled, and until all things human are leveled, utterly, in a relentlessly paroxysmal quake of disintegration.      
How shall such intolerable circumstances be averted? Before answering, we much first acknowledge something distinctly counter-intuitive. Chaos and anarchy exhibit different end points of a single global continuum. They are opposites.
“Mere” anarchy, or the absence of central world authority, has always been “normal.” Chaos, however, is sui generis. It is “abnormal.”
At least since the seventeenth century, our anarchic world could best be described as a system.  Necessarily, what happens in any one part of this ungoverned world affects what happens in some or all of the other parts.  When deterioration is marked, and begins to spread from one nation to another, the corollary corrosive effects can undermine all previously existing infrastructures of intended stability.
When this deterioration is rapid and catastrophic, as would be the case following the start of any unconventional war or unconventional terrorism, the effects would be correspondingly immediate and overwhelming. In our own present terminology, these particular effects would be chaotic.
Aware that even an incremental collapse of remaining world authority structures would impact its few friends as well as its many enemies, leaders of Israel will need to advance certain precise and plausible premonitions of collapse. The point would be to chart appropriately durable paths to national survival. Israel’s leaders should finally understand that they have been wasting precious time with predictably ritualistic consideration of assorted “peace plans.” Soon, in consequence of these American-generated and supported false hopes, they may need to consider just how to respond to life in a much more broadly global state of nature.
The specific triggering mechanism of any global descent into chaos could originate from a variety of different mass-casualty attacks against Israel, or from similar or even simultaneous assaults against other western democracies. In these distressing but plausible scenarios, even the traditionally powerful United States would not be immune to a remorseless communal vulnerability.
Reciprocally, any chaotic disintegration of the broader world system could impact and possibly transform the Israeli system. Such a conceivable metamorphosis could involve total or near-total patterns of destruction. In proper and purposeful anticipation, Israel will soon have to orient its strategic planning to a sobering assortment of worst-case prospects, now focusing much more deliberately on a wide range of primarily self-help security options.      
Israel's persistently one-sided surrender of territories, and also its evident reluctance to accept certain critical preemption options, may not produce direct or complete defeat. Taken together, however, these indisputably interpenetrating policy errors will have a weakening effect on Israel.  Whether the principal consequence here will be one that “merely” impairs the Jewish State's commitment to endure, or one that also opens it up, operationally, to a devastating missile or terror attack, is open to question.
The already fragmenting situations in the Middle East and North Africa are likely just the beginning. For Israel, wider patterns of anarchy and disorder are distinctly probable. What might still be avoided, however, are chaos, mega-destruction, and a subsequently unendurable sorrow.
To survive, the Jewish State will need to exploit whatever pragmatic possibilities might still lie latent in deterrence, war, and diplomacy.
Success will require an early awareness, in Jerusalem, that in current world politics, as in any other primordial state of nature, survival demands collaborative courage, intellectual imagination, and a resolutely tragic willingness to suffer substantial short-term harms in order to prevent longer-term disappearance.
In The Second Coming, perhaps the most recognizable work of William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet’s “rough beast...slouches toward Bethlehem to be born.” Unwittingly, and also ironically, Yeats’s eerily sinister geography could turn out to be deeply prophetic. Nonetheless, for Israel, there is still time to acknowledge and respond to the emerging tilt toward chaos in both regional and world politics.
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) lectures and publishes widely on war, terrorism, and nuclear security matters. Born in Zürich, Switzerland, at the end of World War II, and Chair of Project Daniel (Israel, 2003), he is the author of ten books on international relations and international law, including some of the earliest major works on Israel’s nuclear strategy. Dr. Beres has been a frequent contributor of working papers to the annual Herzliya Conference, and also of opinion articles to The Jerusalem Post. He is Professor of Political Science and International Law at Purdue.