The author, an Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue, argues that the Trump administration’s overconfidence in American military superiority dangerously underestimates how miscalculation, accident, or competitive escalation—rather than deliberate choice—could trigger a catastrophic nuclear war with North Korea…

Friction is the difference between war on paper and war as it actually is.

—Carl von Clausewitz, On War

North Korea is not Venezuela. While US President Donald J. Trump characterized his recent military actions against Venezuela as “an assault like people have not seen since World War II,”[1] that description was exaggeration prima facie. To be sure, this abduction of a foreign head of state was an illegal assault under international and national law, but it was hardly a heroic military assault. If, in the future, Trump should imagine that a full-scale war with North Korea could be compared with his lawless Venezuelan action, he would be sorely mistaken. As to an informed assessment of war probabilities – an elementary task of logical reasoning – a US-Korea conflict would not be sui generis or without precedent. Simultaneously, it is plausible that the American president knows nothing about US participation in the Korean War. This is a president, after all, who once alleged that American forces during the 18th century Revolutionary War “had taken successful control of all national airports” and (on a separate occasion) declared that “the moon is part of Mars.”

Credo quia absurdum, said the early Christian theologian Tertullian: “I believe because it is absurd.” Today, North Korea remains on a determinedly catastrophic trajectory with the United States. Unlike Venezuela, the Hermit Kingdom would be a fearsome adversary.[2] How might such a war begin? One increasingly compelling scenario would involve active North Korean support for Iran in a war started by Trump attacks against that failing “Islamic Republic.” In a worst case scenario, North Korea would act as Tehran’s nuclear proxy, a stance that could lead to catastrophe during any mutual (US and North Korea) search for “escalation dominance.”

To continue these clarifications, history will deserve some pride of place. At the Singapore Summit on June 12, 2018, Donald Trump promised Americans that North Korea was no longer a nuclear war threat. This was the case, assured the president, because he and Kim Jong Un had “fallen in love.”

But the dissembling second Trump presidency suggests rising risks of military confrontation between Washington and Pyongyang. Whether or not such a confrontation would result in nuclear war, however, cannot be determined scientifically.[3] In logic and mathematics, meaningful determinations of probability depend on the frequency of past events. Regarding such determinations, there have been no pertinent events.[4]

That’s a good thing. At the same time, the United States needs to render informed judgments on the plausibility of a nuclear war in this potential theatre of direct military conflict. To a significant but indeterminable extent, these judgments will depend on whether relevant belligerent risks would arise from deliberate or inadvertent nuclear escalations.

For the American president, there will be consequential nuances. More specifically, an inadvertent nuclear war with North Korea could be the result of decision-maker miscalculation, enemy hacking, computer error or mechanical/electrical accident. In the final analysis, though these risks could be expressions of individual leadership personality,[5] they are most apt to stem from inherently corrosive competitions for “escalation dominance.”[6] Inter alia, these risks would reflect the continuously “Westphalian” structure of world politics,[7] an always-unstable 17th century foundation that could at any point descend into unprecedented chaos.[8]

On such strategic matters, it is high time for candor. In significant measure, President Donald J. Trump’s incremental policy misunderstandings are setting the stage for nuclear crises with North Korea.[9] Earlier, when Trump ranted that “attitude is more important than preparation,” Kim positioned his nation for purposeful strategic planning.

Invariant Obligations of Correct Reasoning

During any upcoming crisis negotiations with North Korea, Mr. Trump should take scrupulous care not to exaggerate or overstate America’s military risk-taking calculus. Such diplomatic caution would derive in part from the absence of comparable nuclear crises. In world politics, as in any other subject of human interaction, probability judgments can never be derived ex nihilo, out of nothing.

This does not mean that Trump’s senior strategists and counselors should steer away from clear-eyed assessments regarding potential nuclear costs and risks, but rather that such assessments be drawn from shifting and hard-to-decipher geopolitical trends. Such significant trends should include variously complex considerations of worldwide nuclearization.[10] Though temporarily set back by US and Israeli preemptions in June 2025, Iran has returned to the task of nuclear weapons development.[11] In time, and in much the same fashion as its engagements with North Korea, the United States could find itself in a larger war with Iran. Such conflict would be plausible even if Tehran were to call upon Pyongyang to act as its belligerent nuclear proxy.

Intersections and Synergies

In such complex geopolitical assessments, the world should be examined as a system. For Trump policy-planners focused on North Korea, there will be variously fixed obligations to consider, including intersections between Pyongyang’s nuclear escalation threats and Tehran’s re-started nuclearization. These obligations should take note of certain synergistic intersections. By definition, in such intersections, the “whole” of any conflict outcome would be greater than the sum of its “parts.”

There is more. These many-sided strategic issues ought never to be approached from the narrow perspectives of domestic politics. Plainly, some component problems would emerge as more complicated and problematic than others. As relevant intellectual background, world security processes should always be approached as a totality. What is happening now, in such far-flung places as India-Kashmir, China, Russia, Ukraine, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen could at some point have significant “spillover effects” in the northeast Asian theatre, and beyond.[12]

“My Button is Bigger Than Yours”

In one form or another, military threats from nuclear North Korea remain worrisome, substantive and “robust.” President Donald Trump’s ill-suited metaphors notwithstanding, the fact that his nuclear “button” is “bigger” than Kim’s (a statement made originally during “Trump 1”) is anything but meaningful. In all strategic deterrence relationships, a condition of relative nuclear weakness by one of the contending adversarial states need not imply any corollary diminution of military power. Even the presumptively weaker party in such asymmetrical dyads could deliver “unacceptable damage” to the stronger.

Although bewildering ipso facto, complexity could be crisis-defining. President Trump will need to bear in mind that many or all of northeast Asia’s continuously transforming developments could be impacted by “Cold War II,” an oppositional stance with Russia and (somewhat comparably or derivatively) with China. Similarly, important will be this US leader’s willingness to acknowledge and factor-in the consequential limits of “expert” military advice. These widely unseen limits are not based on any presumed intellectual inadequacies among America’s flag officers, but on the irrefutable knowledge that no person has ever fought in a nuclear war. In scientific terms (i.e., theory of probability) this bit of knowledge ought never to be underestimated or disregarded.

By definition – and going forward with all time-urgent considerations of US- North Korea policy formation – American strategic calculations will be fraught with daunting uncertainties. Still, it will be necessary that Donald Trump and his designated counselors remain able to offer best available war-related estimations. Among prospectively causal factors – some of them overlapping, interdependent or “synergistic”[13] – the risks of a nuclear war between Washington and Pyongyang will ultimately depend on whether such a conflict would be intentional, unintentional or accidental. In principle, at least, this tripartite distinction could prove vitally important to any hoped-for success in US nuclear war prediction and prevention efforts.

There is more. In facing future North Korean negotiations, it will be necessary that competent US policy analysts capably examine and carefully measure all foreseeable configurations of nuclear war risk. Expressed in the useful game-theoretic parlance of formal military planning, shifting configurations in the “state of nations”[14] could present themselves singly (one-at-a-time, the expected best case for Washington) or suddenly—unexpectedly, with apparent “diffusiveness,” or in overlapping “cascades” of strategic complexity.

Quo Vadis?

What is to be done? To properly understand such analytically dense cascades will require properly-honed, well-developed and formidable intellectual skills. Accordingly, this will not be a task for the intellectually faint-hearted. It will require, instead, sharply-refined combinations of historical acquaintance, traditional erudition and demonstrated capacity for advanced dialectical thinking. Clarifying elucidations of such disciplined thinking go back to the dialogues of Plato and to the ancient but timeless awareness that reliable analysis always calls for the continuously sequential asking and answering of interrelated questions.

This is a challenging task. It could require American strategic thinkers who are as comfortable with the classical prescriptions of Plato and Descartes as with more narrowly technical elements of modern military theory. Consequently, it will not be an easy task to fulfill.

There is more. Not all nuclear wars would have the same origin. It is conceivable that neither Washington nor Pyongyang is currently paying sufficient attention to residually specific risks of an unintentional nuclear war. To this point, each president would seem to assume the other’s decisional rationality.[15] If there were no such mutual calculation, it would make no ascertainable sense for either side to negotiate further security accommodations with the other.

Viable nuclear deterrence (not “denuclearization”) should be the overriding US strategic goal vis-a-vis North Korea. But this complicated objective is contingent on certain basic assumptions concerning enemy rationality. Are such assumptions realistic in the case of a potential war between two already-nuclear powers?

If President Donald Trump should sometime fear enemy irrationality in Pyongyang, issuing threats of a US nuclear retaliation could make diminishing diplomatic sense. At that unprecedented stage, American national security could come to depend upon some presumptively optimal combinations of ballistic missile defense and defensive first strikes. Nonetheless, by definition, determining such combinations would lack any decisional input or counsel from concrete and quantifiable historical data.

In an imaginably worst case scenario, the offensive military element could entail a situational or comprehensive preemption – a defensive first strike by the United States[16] – but at that manifestly late stage, all previous hopes for bilateral reconciliation would already have become moot. There would then obtain no “ordinary” circumstances wherein a preemptive strike[17] against a North Korean nuclear adversary could be considered “rational.”[18] What then? Whatever the answer, it is an intellectual question, not a political one.

There is more. None of these strategic decisions should be reached casually. With the expanding development of “hypersonic” nuclear weapons, figuring out optimal US policy combinations from one North Korean crisis to another could quickly become overwhelming. Though counterintuitive amid such prominently intersecting complications, the fact that one “player” (the US) was recognizably “more powerful” than the other (North Korea) could prove irrelevant.

Law and Strategy

In foreseeable circumstances, there would be overlapping issues of law and strategy. Under international law, which remains an integral part of US law,[19] the option of a selective or comprehensive defensive first-strike might sometime be correctly characterized as “anticipatory self-defense.” But this would be the case only if the American side could argue persuasively that the security “danger posed” by North Korea was “imminent in point of time.”

Such discernible “imminence” is required by the authoritative standards of international law; that is, by the formal criteria established after an 1837 naval incident famously called “The Caroline.”[20] Presently, offering aptly precise characterizations of “imminence” could prove confusingly abstract and densely problematic.[21]

For the moment, it seems reasonable that Kim Jong Un would value his own personal life and the survival of his nation above every other imaginable preference or combination of preferences. Despite his occasional bluster, Kim appears to be visibly and technically rational, and should therefore remain subject to US nuclear deterrence.[22] Still, going forward, it could become important for a negotiating American President to distinguish between authentic instances of enemy irrationality and instances of contrived or pretended irrationality.[23] This vague prospect adds yet another layer of complexity to the subject at hand, one that could at some point include assorted force-multiplying synergies.

In history, wars have often been the result of leadership miscalculation. Though neither side here would likely seek a shooting war, either Kim or Trump could still commit various errors in the course of rendering strategic calculations. At times, such consequential errors could represent an unintended result of jointly competitive searches for “escalation dominance.“[24] These errors are more apt to occur in circumstances where one or both presidents first decided to reignite threatening and hyperbolic rhetoric.

Even in reassuringly calm periods of polite diplomatic discourse, major miscalculations, accidents or “cyber-confusions” could accumulate. Such patently ill-fated accumulation could be hastened by unpredictable effects of a widespread disease pandemic. What then?

In more worst case scenarios,[25] negotiations gone wrong could result in a nuclear war.[26] This tangible prospect ought never to be overlooked. In the incontestable words of Swiss playwright Friedrich Durrenmatt, “The worst does sometimes happen.”[27]

Inadvertent Nuclear War with North Korea

An inadvertent nuclear war between Washington and Pyongyang could take place not only as the result of misunderstanding or miscalculation between fully rational national leaders, but also as the unintended consequence (singly or synergistically) of mechanical, electrical, computer malfunctions or “hacking”-type interventions. Going forward, these interventions could include clandestine intrusions of “cyber-mercenaries.”

While an accidental nuclear war would necessarily be inadvertent, certain forms of inadvertent nuclear war would not necessarily be caused by mechanical, electrical or computer accident. These difficult to anticipate but consequential forms of unintentional nuclear conflict would represent the unexpected result of some specific misjudgment or miscalculation, whether created by singular decisional error by one or both sides to a two-party nuclear crisis escalation or by still-unforeseen “synergies” arising between assorted singular miscalculations.[28]

In any upcoming crisis between Washington and Pyongyang, each side would strive to maximize two critical goals simultaneously: (1) to dominate the dynamic and largely unpredictable process of nuclear crisis escalation; and (2) to achieve “escalation dominance” without sacrificing vital national security interests. This second objective would mean preventing one’s own state and society from suffering catastrophic or existential harms.

In such circumstances, having a “bigger button” could become a source of weakness, not strength. Here, size would matter, but only in an unexpected or counter-intuitive way. It follows, among other things, that to take comfort from observing that North Korea was previously testing “only” shorter-range ballistic missiles would be to miss the point. Already during “Trump 1,” several of North Korea’s nuclear test firings expressed yields at least 16 times larger than the Hiroshima bomb. That 14KT WW II bomb (a “small” nuclear weapon today) produced almost 100,000 immediate fatalities.

Such vital understandings about nuclear “button size” would continue as long as Kim Jong Un’s “inferior” nuclear arms remained seemingly invulnerable to American preemptions and seemingly capable of penetrating ballistic missile defenses in the United States, Japan and/or South Korea. Because of the extraordinary harms generated by even “low-yield” nuclear weapons, a small percentage or tiny fraction of Kim’s “inferior” nuclear arsenal would still register as “unacceptably destructive” in Washington, Tokyo and Seoul. Worth noting as well is that in all these critical dimensions of strategic judgment, the only reality that would figure tangibly in adversarial calculations would be perceived reality.

An Issue of Overwhelming Complexity

The bottom line of all such informed assessments concerning US-North Korea nuclear war is that the underlying issues of contention and calculation are starkly complicated and potentially indecipherable. Faced with endlessly challenging layers of complexity, both operational and legal,[29] each side should proceed warily and in a fashion that is recognizably risk-averse. Though such prudent counsel could appear counter to US obligations of “escalation dominance,” any future Trump-Kim crises could take place in uncharted operational “waters.”

Looking ahead, any aggressive over-confidence (or what the ancient Greeks called “hubris” in tragic drama) by President Trump or President Kim ought to be avoided. While everything at some upcoming negotiation might first appear simple and calculable, history calls to mind Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz’s observation about “friction.” Succinctly, this ubiquitous fly in the ointment references “differences between war on paper, and war as it actually is.”

To avoid intolerable crisis outcomes between the United States and North Korea, a prudent, science-based[30] and informed nuclear posture should be fashioned, not with evident clichĂ©s but with refined intellect and cultivated erudition. The ancient Greeks and Macedonians had already understood that war planning should be treated as a disciplined matter of “mind over mind,” not one of “mind over matter.”[31]

Averting “Nightmare”

It would be best for the United States to plan carefully for all strategic eventualities and not to stumble into a nuclear war with North Korea – whether deliberate, unintentional or accidental. The fact that any such “stumble” could take place without any adversarial ill will or base motive should provide little palpable consolation. An ounce of diplomatic prevention will be well worth avoiding a strategic nightmare.

Nightmare. According to the etymologists, the root is niht mare, or niht maere, the demon of the night. Dr. Johnson’s famous Dictionary claims this corresponds to Nordic mythology, which identifies all nightmare as some unholy product of demons. This would make it a play on the Greek ephialtes or the Latin incubus. In all of these fearful interpretations of nightmare, the idea of demonic origin is integral and indispensable.

But America’s current security worries are of a different and more secular sort. Now there are inherent complexities in problem solving that must be accepted, understood and suitably overcome. At a time when our planet is imperiled by the simultaneous and potentially intersecting threats of nuclear war and disease pandemic (not to mention climate change), there can be no reasonable alternative to proper analytic emphases.

The risks of a nuclear war between North Korea and the United States should always be assessed on solid intellectual foundations. By correctly acknowledging that North Korean denuclearization is a futile expectation and diplomatic non-starter – Kim Jong Un would never accept such a condition of codified inferiority – an American president should focus more explicitly on creating a viable system of mutual deterrence. Though such an “egalitarian” focus might first appear demeaning for a Trump-era “Great Power” like the United States, national security policy should always be founded on rigorously-accurate theoretical assumptions and a correlatively apparent national “will.”[32]

Summing up, an “inferior” nuclear power such as North Korea could create unacceptable security harms for the United States.[33] In part, at least, these harms might be the result of Clausewitzian differences between “war on paper and war as it actually is.” In the final analysis, security harms of a nuclear war with North Korea could be quasi-existential for the United States and be impacted by coinciding nuclear crises involving Russia, China, India, Pakistan or Iran. In certain worst case scenarios, synergistic interactions between seemingly separate crises could generate harms that are sui generis and be greater than the calculable sum of their relevant parts.

North Korea is not Venezuela.

Notes

[1] These actions were egregious violations of both international law and US domestic law. International law is always an integral part of US law. On this incorporation, see especially art. 6 of the US Constitution (“The Supremacy Clause”) and the Pacquete Habana (1900). In the words used by the U.S. Supreme Court in The Paquete Habana, “International law is part of our law, and must be ascertained by the courts of justice of appropriate jurisdiction, as often as questions of right depending upon it are duly presented for their determination. For this purpose, where there is no treaty, and no controlling executive or legislative act or judicial decision, resort must be had to the customs and usages of civilized nations.” See The Paquete Habana, 175 U.S. 677, 678-79 (1900). See also: The Lola, 175 U.S. 677 (1900); Tel-Oren v. Libyan Arab Republic, 726 F. 2d 774, 781, 788 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (per curiam) (Edwards, J. concurring) (dismissing the action, but making several references to domestic jurisdiction over extraterritorial offenses), cert. denied, 470 U.S. 1003 (1985) (“concept of extraordinary judicial jurisdiction over acts in violation of significant international standards
embodied in the principle of `universal violations of international law.’”).

[2] From the standpoint of formal logic, Trump’s argument against Venezuela represents an “illegitimate appeal to force” or argumentum ad baculum. Ipso facto, it qualifies as a “fallacy.”

[3] See, by this author, Louis René Beres: https://mwi.usma.edu/theres-no-historical-guide-assessing-risks-us-north-korea-nuclear-war/

[4] No nuclear weapons were used during the Korean War. The atomic bombings of Japan in August 1945 did not properly constitute a nuclear war, but “only” the use of nuclear weapons in an otherwise conventional conflict. Moreover, following the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks, no other atomic bombs were available on earth.

[5] Reminds Sigmund Freud: “Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind, and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have wreaked havoc.”

[6] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Air-Space Operations Review (Pentagon: USAF): https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/ASOR/Journals/Volume-1_Issue-1/Beres_Nuclear_War_Avoidance.pdf

[7] This historical referent here is the Peace of Westphalia (1648), a treaty which concluded the Thirty Years War and created the continuously anarchic “state system.” See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabruck, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia. For the authoritative sources of international law, see art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice: STATUTE OF THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE, Done at San Francisco, June 26, 1945. Entered into force, Oct. 24, 1945; for the United States, Oct. 24, 1945. 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993, 3 Bevans 1153, 1976 Y.B.U.N., 1052

[8] See by this author, Louis René Beres, at Modern Diplomacy: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2025/11/15/calamity-truth-and-silence-america-and-world-system-chaos/

[9] According to a new and comprehensive book on US foreign policy and North Korean nuclearization (Joel S. Wit, Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s failure to Disarm North Korea; Yale University Press, 2025): “Unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump wasn’t a seasoned foreign policy hand. He had a short attention span, didn’t know that Korea had been divided into two countries and wasn’t interested in detail.” (p.6). At the start of Barack Obama’s presidency, North Korea’s nuclear arsenal could already devastate South Korea, Japan and American cities.

[10] See: https://sipri.org/media/press-release/2021/global-nuclear-arsenals-grow-states-continue-modernize-new-sipri-yearbook-out-now

[11] See, on deterring a prospectively nuclear Iran, Louis RenĂ© Beres and General John T. Chain, “Could Israel Safely deter a Nuclear Iran? The Atlantic, August 2012; and Professor Louis RenĂ© Beres and General John T. Chain, “Israel; and Iran at the Eleventh Hour,” Oxford University Press (OUP Blog), February 23, 2012. Though dealing with Israeli rather than American nuclear deterrence, these articles clarify common conceptual elements. General Chain was Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Strategic Air Command (CINCSAC).

[12] In jurisprudential terms, these effects could involve the crime of aggression under international law. Derivative from earlier criminalizing codifications at Nuremberg’s 1945 London Charter and the 1928 Pact of Paris, aggression has nothing to do with the particular nature of weaponry employed, whether conventional or unconventional. See: Resolution on the Definition of Aggression, Dec. 14, 1974, U.N.G.A. Res. 3314 (XXIX), 29 U.N. GAOR, Supp. (No.31) 142, U.N. Doc. A/9631, 1975, reprinted in 13 I.L.M. 710, 1974.

[13] See, by this writer, at Harvard Law School: Louis René Beres, https://harvardnsj.org/2015/06/core-synergies-in-israels-strategic-planning-when-the-adversarial-whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts/ See also, by this writer, at West Point: Louis René Beres https://mwi.usma.edu/threat-convergence-adversarial-whole-greater-sum-parts/

[14] Seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes notes that although the “state of nations” is in the anarchic “state of nature,” it is still more tolerable than the condition of individuals in nature. With individual human beings, he instructs, “
the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest.” But with the continuing advent of nuclear weapons, there is no persuasive reason to believe that the state of nations remains more tolerable. Now, nuclear weapons are bringing the state of nations closer to the true Hobbesian state of nature. See, in this connection, David P. Gauthier, The Logic of Leviathan: The Moral and Political Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), p. 207. As with Hobbes, philosopher Samuel Pufendorf argues that the state of nations is not quite as intolerable as the state of nature between individuals. The state of nations, reasons the German jurist, “lacks those inconveniences which are attendant upon a pure state of nature
.” In a similar vein, Baruch Spinoza suggests “that a commonwealth can guard itself against being subjugated by another, as a man in the state of nature cannot do.” See, A.G. Wernham, ed., The Political Works, Tractatus Politicus, iii, II (Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 295.

[15] In world politics, rationality and irrationality have very specific meanings. More precisely, an “actor” (state or sub-state) is presumed to be rational to the extent that its leadership always values national survival more highly than any other preference or combination of preferences. An irrational actor would not always display such a determinable preference ordering.

[16] For early scholarly commentary by this author on anticipatory self-defense under international law, with special reference to Israel, see: Louis RenĂ© Beres and (COL./IDF/Res.) Yoash Tsiddon Chatto, “Reconsidering Israel’s Destruction of Iraq’s Osiraq Nuclear Reactor,” TEMPLE INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW JOURNAL, Vol. 9., No. 2., 1995, pp. 437 – 449; Louis RenĂ© Beres, “Preserving the Third Temple: Israel’s Right of Anticipatory Self-Defense Under International Law,” VANDERBILT JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL LAW, Vol. 26, No. 1., April 1993, pp. 111- 148; Louis RenĂ© Beres, “After the Gulf War: Israel, Preemption and Anticipatory Self-Defense,” HOUSTON JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW, Vol. 13, No. 2., Spring 1991, pp. 259 – 280; Louis RenĂ© Beres, “Striking `First:’ Israel’s Post-Gulf War Options Under International Law,” LOYOLA OF LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW JOURNAL, Vol. 14, Nov. 1991, No. 1., pp. 1 – 24; Louis RenĂ© Beres, “Israel and Anticipatory Self-Defense,” ARIZONA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW, Vol. 8, 1991, pp. 89 – 99; and Louis RenĂ© Beres, “After the SCUD Attacks: Israel, `Palestine,’ and Anticipatory Self-Defense,” EMORY INTERNATIONAL LAW REVIEW, Vol. 6, No. 1., Spring 1992, pp. 71 – 104. For an examination of assassination as a permissible form of anticipatory self-defense by Israel, see, Louis RenĂ© Beres, “On Assassination as Anticipatory Self-Defense: The Case of Israel,” HOFSTRA LAW REVIEW, Vol. 20, No. 2., Winter 1991, pp. 321 – 340. For more general assessments of assassination as anticipatory self-defense under international law by this author, see: Louis RenĂ© Beres, “The Permissibility of State-Sponsored Assassination During Peace and War,” TEMPLE INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW JOURNAL, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1991, pp. 231 – 249; and Louis RenĂ© Beres, “Victims and Executioners: Atrocity, Assassination and International Law,” CAMBRIDGE REVIEW OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS, Winter/Spring, 1993.

[17] In law, there is an important distinction between preemptive attacks and preventive attacks. Preemption is a military strategy of striking an enemy first, in the expectation that the only 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, however, is launched not out of concern for any imminent hostilities, but rather for fear of a longer-term deterioration in some vital military balance.

[18] See, by this author, Louis René Beres: https://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/foreign-policy/344750-rationality-cant-be-assumed-in-potential-north-korea

[19]. For early decisions on the US “incorporation” of authoritative international law (by Chief Justice John Marshall) see: The Antelope, 23 U.S. (10 Wheat.) 66, 120 (1825); The Nereide, 13 U.S. (9 Cranch) 388, 423 (1815); Rose v. Himely, 8 U.S. (4 Cranch) 241, 277 (1808) and Murray v. The Schooner Charming Betsy, 6 U.S. (2 Cranch) 64, 118 (1804).

[20] See Beth Polebau, National Self-Defense in International Law: An Emerging Standard for a Nuclear Age, 59 N.Y.U. L. REV. 187, 190-191 (noting that The Caroline transformed the right to self-defense from an excuse for armed intervention into a customary legal doctrine).

[21] Under international law, the question of whether or not a condition of war exists between states is often unclear. Traditionally, a “formal” war was said to exist only after a state had issued a formal declaration of war. The Hague Convention III codified this position in 1907. This Convention provided that hostilities must not commence without “previous and explicit warning” in the form of a declaration of war or an ultimatum. See Hague Convention III on the Opening of Hostilities, Oct. 18, 1907, art. 1, 36 Stat. 2277, 205 Consol. T.S. 263. Presently, a declaration of war could be tantamount to a declaration of criminality because international law prohibits “aggression.” See Treaty Providing for the Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, Aug. 27, 1948, art. 1, 46 Stat. 2343, 94 L.N.T.S. 57 (also called Pact of Paris or Kellogg-Briand Pact); Nuremberg Judgment, 1 I.M.T. Trial of the Major War Criminals 171 (1947), portions reprinted in Burns H. Weston, et. al., INTERNATIONAL LAW AND WORLD ORDER 148, 159 (1980); U.N. Charter, art. 2(4). A state may compromise its own legal position by announcing formal declarations of war. It follows that a state of belligerency may exist without formal declarations, but only if there exists an armed conflict between two or more states and/or at least one of these states considers itself “at war.” In the matter of North Korea, Kim Jong Un considers his country to be “at war” with the United States.

[22] Even before the nuclear age, ancient Chinese military theorist, Sun-Tzu, counseled, in The Art of War: “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.” (See: Chapter 3, “Planning Offensives”).

[23] Expressions of decisional irrationality in US dealings with North Korea could take different or overlapping forms. These include a disorderly or inconsistent value system; computational errors in calculation; an incapacity to communicate efficiently; random or haphazard influences in the making or transmittal of particular decisions; and the internal dissonance generated by any structure of collective decision-making (i.e., assemblies of pertinent individuals who lack identical value systems and/or whose organizational arrangements impact their willing capacity to act as a single or unitary national decision maker).

[24] On this concept, see, by this author: Louis René Beres, at The War Room, US Army War College, Pentagon: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/nuclear-decision-making-and-nuclear-war-an-urgent-american-problem/

[25] Such scenarios resonate with a warning offered by Hermann Hesse in Steppenwolf (1927): “This world, as it is now, wants to perish
.” See also the fearful metaphors of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s the Phenomenon of Man: “A rocket rising in the wake of time’s arrow, that only bursts to be extinguished; an eddy rising on the bosom of a descending current – such then must be our picture of the world.”

[26] There is now a substantial literature that deals with the expected consequences of a nuclear war. For earlier works by this author, see, for example: APOCALYPSE: NUCLEAR CATASTROPHE IN WORLD POLITICS (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1980); MIMICKING SISYPHUS: AMERICA’S COUNTERVAILING NUCLEAR STRATEGY (Lexington Books, 1983); REASON AND REALPOLITIK: U.S. FOREIGN POLICY AND WORLD ORDER (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1984); and SECURITY OR ARMAGEDDON: ISRAEL’S NUCLEAR STRATEGY (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1986).

[27] In history, this ‘worst” has often stemmed from a presumptively life-preserving identification of individual human beings with the fate of their respective countries. In his posthumously published lecture on Politics (1896), German historian Heinrich von Treitschke observed: “Individual man sees in his own country the realization of his earthly immortality.” Earlier, German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel opined, in his Philosophy of Right (1820), that the state represents “the march of God in the world.” The “deification” of Realpolitik, a transformation from mere principle of action to a sacred end in itself, drew its originating strength from the doctrine of “sovereignty” advanced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Initially conceived as a principle of internal order, this doctrine underwent a specific metamorphosis, whence it became the formal or justifying rationale for international anarchy – that is, for the global “state of nature.” First established by Jean Bodin as a juristic concept in De Republica (1576), sovereignty came to be regarded as a power absolute and above ordinary law. When it is understood in terms of modern international relations, this doctrine encouraged the corrosive notion that states lie above and beyond legal regulation in their various interactions with each other. Concerning “ordinary law,” however, it is always subordinate to “Natural Law.” This Natural Law is based upon the acceptance of certain principles of right and justice that prevail because of intrinsic merit. Eternal and immutable, they are external to all acts of human will and interpenetrate all human reason. The core idea and its attendant tradition of human civility runs continuously from Mosaic Law and the ancient Greeks and Romans to the present day. For a comprehensive and far-reaching assessment of the Natural Law origins of international law by this author, see Louis RenĂ© Beres, “Justice and Realpolitik: International Law and the Prevention of Genocide,” The American Journal of Jurisprudence, Vol. 33, 1988, pp. 123-159.

[28] Regarding strategic “spillovers” from the Middle East, see Louis RenĂ© Beres, Israel’s Nuclear Strategy and America’s National Security, Tel-Aviv University, Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology and Security, December 2016: https://sectech.tau.ac.il/sites/sectech.tau.ac.il/files/PalmBeachBook.pdf. This monograph has a special postscript by General (USA/ret.) Barry McCaffrey.

[29] For legal background, see: AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS POWERS AND CHARTER OF THE INTERNATIONAL MILITARY TRIBUNAL. Done at London, August 8, 1945. Entered into force, August 8, 1945. For the United States, Sept. 10, 1945. 59 Stat. 1544, 82 U.N.T.S. 279. The principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal were affirmed by the U.N. General Assembly as AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Adopted by the U.N. General Assembly, Dec. 11, 1946. U.N.G.A. Res. 95 (I), U.N. Doc. A/236 (1946), at 1144. This AFFIRMATION OF THE PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED BY THE CHARTER OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL (1946) was followed by General Assembly Resolution 177 (II), adopted November 21, 1947, directing the U.N. International Law Commission to “(a) Formulate the principles of international law recognized in the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and in the judgment of the Tribunal, and (b) Prepare a draft code of offenses against the peace and security of mankind
.” (See U.N. Doc. A/519, p. 112). The principles formulated are known as the PRINCIPLES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW RECOGNIZED IN THE CHARTER AND JUDGMENT OF THE NUREMBERG TRIBUNAL. Report of the International Law Commission, 2nd session, 1950, U.N. G.A.O.R. 5th session, Supp. No. 12, A/1316, p. 11.

[30] “Science,” says philosopher Jose Ortega y’Gasset in Man and Crisis (1958) “by which I mean the entire body of knowledge about things, whether corporeal or spiritual, is as much a work of imagination as it is of observation
The latter is not possible without the former.”

[31] See: F.E. Adcock, The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), p. 63.

[32] Modern philosophic origins of “will” lie in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, especially The World as Will and Idea (1818). For his own inspiration, Schopenhauer drew freely upon Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Later, Nietzsche drew just as freely and perhaps even more importantly upon Schopenhauer. Goethe was also a core intellectual source for Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset, author of the singularly prophetic work, The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas (1930). See, accordingly, Ortega’s very grand essay, “In Search of Goethe from Within” (1932), written for Die Neue Rundschau of Berlin on the occasion of the centenary of Goethe’s death. It is reprinted in Ortega’s anthology, The Dehumanization of Art (1948) and is available from Princeton University Press (1968).

[33] This is a core conclusion of Joel S. Wit’s Fallout: The Inside Story of America’s Failure to Disarm North Korea (Yale University Press, 2025). Wit, a former US State Department official, recounts almost four decades of US efforts to halt Pyongyang’s work on nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. In essence, Fallout is a comprehensive and authoritative history of North Korean nuclearization and Kim Jong Un’s capacity to exploit his country’s formidable nuclear capacity. At this moment of global anarchy and impending chaos, Wit’s well-documented book offers a refined starting point for US military thinkers to identify and rank-order residual strategic options. Among other things, Donald J. Trump’s specially-named posture of belligerent nationalism – “America First” – will render meaningful diplomatic progress with Kim Jong Un unlikely.

LOUIS RENÉ BERES (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue. His twelfth book is Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy. Beres’ principal strategic writings have appeared in JURIST; Harvard National Security Journal (Harvard Law School); International Security (Harvard University); Yale Global (Yale University); Oxford University Press (Oxford University); Oxford Yearbook of International Law (Oxford University Press); Parameters: Journal of the US Army War College (Pentagon); Special Warfare (Pentagon); Modern War Institute (Pentagon); Horasis (ZĂŒrich); The War Room (Pentagon); Modern Diplomacy; World Politics (Princeton); INSS (The Institute for National Security Studies; Tel Aviv); Israel Defense (Tel Aviv); Air-Space Operations Review (USAF); The American Political Science Review; Princeton Political Review; BESA Perspectives (Israel); International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence; The Atlantic; Yale Global Online; The New York Times and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Professor Beres was born in ZĂŒrich at the end of World War II.

 

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