Recalling Sun-Tzu: Ancient Chinese Lessons on North Korea
Although he composed long ago, Chinese strategist Sun-Tzu remains a useful font of insights for any impending American nuclear crisis with North Korea. Significantly, too, Pyongyang remains involved with Israel's enemies in the Middle East, aiding Syria, Iran, and certain of their surrogates. Opinion
Louis René Beres
| 05/09/2017
A US Air Force B-1B Lancer arrives at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam on July 26, 2017 (Photo: AP)
Despite plainly substantial transformations of weapons technologies and statecraft, certain ancient principles of warfare remain valid. By duly acknowledging that the even more primary human factors in war have basically remained constant, such utterly core principles warrant re-examining. For US President Donald Trump, this is usefully good advice with particular reference to North Korea, a refractory American adversary with which there exists a growing prospect of belligerent nuclear confrontation.
Special analytic benefits may lie latent in ancient Chinese military thought. More precisely, Sun-Tzu's The Art of War, written sometime in the fifth century BCE, meticulously synthesizes a still-coherent set of rules for gaining strategic advantage. This timeless work should now be studied by all of President Trump's military advisors who would systematically seek to strengthen their country's vital security posture. Such examination should ultimately focus upon America's nuclear deterrent, and on its more-or-less plausible "order of battle" vis-à-vis North Korea.
In these strategic matters, everything is complicated. Reciprocally, ignoring complexity could produce sorely grievous kinds of harm. By definition, of course, simplifications always make things "easier," and are always reassuring. But they are also ill-conceived and prospectively injurious to the United States.
This includes the stubborn confusion of empty bluster with national power, a dangerous misunderstanding that is seemingly integral to President Trump's approach to North Korea. Apropos of such an integral policy error, Mr. Trump would do well to consider the revealing title of Sun-Tzu's Chapter 6: "Vacuity and Substance." The point of this title is to highlight the stark and consequential differences between shallow verbal threats and genuinely tangible efficacy.
For now, at least, Mr. Trump seems to feel that making empty threats and materially affecting a determined adversary are one and the same.
Not by the standards of Sun-Tzu.
The president could learn, from the broader "Tao of Warfare," that the military world, like the world in general, "is what it is." It follows that any contrived reductions of complexity designed to somehow make the overall intellectual effort less demanding are prima facie a willful distortion, and are thus unacceptable. They represent, in essence, the reductio ad absurdum of required strategic thinking, a distinctly perilous reduction to absurdity.
For now, the crisis with North Korea is about dissuasion from war. Correspondingly, America's general strategy remains embedded in various more or less explicit forms of deterrence, including nuclear deterrence. Such core strategy is rooted in one or several of six indispensably protective functions: (1) deterrence of large-scale conventional attacks by enemy-states; (2) deterrence of all levels of unconventional attack by enemy-states; (3) preemption of enemy-state nuclear attacks; (4) support of conventional preemptions against enemy-state nuclear assets; (5) support of conventional preemptions against enemy-state nonnuclear assets; and (6) nuclear war-fighting.
In the currently pertinent matter of North Korea, President Trump may need US nuclear weapons to best support certain contemplated forms of conventional preemption. In making any defensive first strike decisions against Pyongyang, Mr. Trump would first need to determine whether any such non-nuclear expressions of "anticipatory self-defense" could be tactically or operationally cost-effective. This important determination, in turn, would depend on a number of critical and inter-penetrating security factors, including: expected probability of North Korean first-strikes; expected costs of North Korean first-strikes; expected schedule of North Korean nuclear weapons deployment; expected efficiencies of North Korean active defenses over time; expected efficiencies of US active defenses over time; expected efficiencies of US hard-target or "counterforce" operations over time; expected reactions of unaffected regional enemies; and expected US and world community reactions to any considered American preemption.
"Weighing strength," reminds Sun-Tzu, "gives birth to victory." But any such measurement could be difficult to detach from palpably subjective calculations.
For President Trump and his counselors, other connections must also be examined. Several concern the presumed relationship between nuclear threat functions, primarily deterrence, and law. Contrary to the widely prevailing conventional wisdom on law and geopolitics, nuclear deterrence (and also its various associated forms of nuclear posture and infrastructure) do not necessarily function outside the ambit of authoritative international law. This counter-intuitive appraisal is correct even for preemption, which can, under customary international law (including an 8 July 1996 advisory decision of the International Court of Justice) be accurately construed as "anticipatory self-defense."
The adequacy of international law in preventing both nuclear and conventional war in Northeast Asia – war, incidentally, that could quickly "spill over" to other regions (North Korea continues to send advanced weapons to Syria, thereby strengthening not only the criminal Damascus regime, but also Shi'ite terrorist group Hezbollah, and overall-terror sponsor state Iran) – will depend upon more than formal treaties, customs, or so-called "general principles of law recognized by civilized nations." It will also be contingent upon the discernible success or failure of US and North Korean military strategies in the region. At first, this conclusion may seem odd to those who have long been instructed that international law and military strategy are intrinsically opposed to one another, almost by definition, but it is nonetheless a position that was expressly codified at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
This landmark treaty put an end to the Thirty Years War.
Seeing requires distance. If America's selected nuclear strategy should sometime serve to reduce the threat and/or seriousness of war, either because of successful forms of nuclear deterrence, or even because of presumptively "no alternative" preemptive strikes launched against an illegally nuclearizing North Korea, this strategy could be "counted" as a genuine component of international law enforcement.
How should Washington proceed? Initially, from Sun-Tzu, President Trump should consider the ancient Chinese strategist's favored principles concerning diplomacy. To be sure, suitable military preparations should never be neglected, but diplomacy must also have its proper place. By fusing power and diplomacy, says Sun-Tzu, the objective of every state to weaken its enemies without actually engaging in armed combat can be realized. As expressed in his classic work, this always overriding objective links the associated ideal of "complete victory" to a reciprocal strategy "for planning offensives."
Today, this advice may seem obvious enough. Yet, current US strategic posture will depend heavily upon various implemented forms of ballistic missile defense (BMD). In principle, at least, by placing too much faith in its active defense systems, the US could be willing to accept certain excessive risks, and also to disavow any still-remaining preemption options.
None of this is meant to suggest that America's nuclear deterrence can somehow remediate all conceivable nuclear threats from North Korea. This country's advanced deterrent posture notwithstanding, there could still come a time in which the power of Washington's implicit nuclear threat would be immobilized by enemy miscalculation, inadvertence, mechanical accident, false warnings, unauthorized firings (e.g., coup d'etat) or even outright irrationality.
The single most compelling factor in any US presidential decisions on preemption against North Korea will likely be the expected rationality of Kim Jung-un. If, after all, Kim were expected to strike at America or certain US allies with nuclear weapons, irrespective of any anticipated US counterstrikes, American deterrence could fail altogether. This means that North Korean nuclear strikes could possibly be expected even if Kim Jung-un had already understood that President Trump was willing and able to respond with devastating nuclear reprisals.
A North Korean decision to strike would have been made in spite of US deployment of its own nuclear weapons in recognizably survivable modes, and despite the fact that these American nuclear weapons were predictably able to penetrate North Korea's most sophisticated and widespread active defenses.
Some might argue, even persuasively, that the US has already lost any once-residual preemption option with respect to North Korean nuclear weapons. As a result of enemy multiplication, dispersal, and hardening of these infrastructures, goes this particular argument, President Trump can now only wait until the time comes for an after-the-fact response, that is, for inflicting retaliation. Inevitably, if this retributive argument is correct, any such total reliance upon deterrence and corollary active defenses could represent indifference to the enduring general principles of classic Chinese military strategy.
It could prove to be an existential indifference.
There is another section of the Art of War that can help President Trump compensate for any theretofore disproportionate reliance upon nuclear deterrence and ballistic missile defense. This section concerns Sun-Tzu's repeated emphasis on the "unorthodox." Drawn from the conflation of thought that crystallized as Taoism, the ancient strategist observes: "...in battle, one engages with the orthodox, and gains victory through the unorthodox."
In another uniquely complex passage, Sun-Tzu discusses how the orthodox may be used in unorthodox ways, while an orthodox attack may still be unorthodox, at least when it is unexpected. Taken seriously by American strategic planners, this tricky but purposefully-nuanced passage could represent a subtle tool for meaningful tactical implementation, one that might most usefully exploit Kim Jung-un's matrix of identifiable military expectations.
For President Trump, the "unorthodox" should be fashioned not only on the battlefield, but also before the battle. To prevent the most dangerous forms of battle, moreover, or those military engagements which could be expressions of all-out unconventional warfare, Washington must examine and fashion a number of promising new military postures. These postures would focus upon a reasoned shift from "orthodox" rationality to one of "unorthodox" irrationality. This sort of thinking is what the late American nuclear strategist, Herman Kahn, had once called the "rationality of pretended irrationality."
It may even have played a decisive role back in October 1962, when US President John F. Kennedy threatened to board any Soviet ship that defied his expressed "quarantine" of Cuba.
On several occasions, Mr. Trump has already hinted openly at his affection for feigned irrationality. Needless to say, any such pretense could become a double-edged sword, and would therefore have to be "played" with conspicuous care and exquisite finesse. Also worth noting is that any strategy of pretended irrationality is apt to represent the very opposite of Sun-Tzu's more general counsel. In Chapter one, "Initial Estimations," for example, he underscores that any final military success must be based on rationality and self-control.
Kim Jung-un may seriously be thinking about striking first. In seizing any such momentous belligerent initiative, North Korea would likely expect to gain some necessary advantage in "escalation dominance." This very risky sort of expectation would plausibly follow from a view in Pyongyang that Washington would never embrace the "unorthodox" on a strategic level, that its actions would always be confined to reactions, and that these reactions would always be limited.
There is more. President Trump requires a pattern of thinking adapted not only by Sun-Tzu, but also by certain of his contemporaries in ancient Greece. For fashioning a needed nuclear doctrine, a proper codification from which particular tactics and strategies could be systematically extrapolated, Mr. Trump will need a presumptively usable "strategic dialectic." This interrogative method would ask and answer pertinent questions, sequentially, again and again, until pertinent core security problems were confronted frontally.
Following Sun-Tzu's prescriptions on the "unorthodox," US strategists could approach their most urgent North Korea security problem as an interrelated series of thoughts, one where each thought would present a complication that then moves inquiry onward, directly or indirectly, to the next thought.
Contained in this strategic dialectic, as Sun-Tzu himself was already deeply aware, would be the unavoidable obligation to continue thinking. Logically, this particular imperative could never be met entirely, because of what the philosophers would call an "infinite regress problem," but it must still be attempted as completely and competently as possible. Armed with such an explicitly dialectical form of military strategy, President Trump could focus not only on assorted unique threats and situations (here, North Korean nuclear weapons development), but also upon various dynamic interactions between discrete threats, complex interactions known commonly as "synergies."
Again, a final way for President Trump to learn from Sun-Tzu's potentially promising emphases on "unorthodox" thinking would be to more actively embrace strategic complexity. In this connection, prospective threats from North Korea could be analogized to biology, to certain associated issues of individual human survival. In dealing therapeutically with cancer, for example, physicians need not only characterize relevant tumors in-depth, but also know as much as possible about (1) these tumors' "microenvironment;" and (2) the genetic background of the individual patient or "host."
Similarly, in dealing with the still-emerging nuclear threat from North Korea, President Trump will need to consider a broad variety of smaller or subsidiary intersecting threats. Just as a single biomarker can never truly explain any particular cancer's behavior, so too can the prospectively "malignant" North Korean nuclear danger never be explained, or suitably predicted, from the standpoint of only one or several readily identifiable threats. In the final analysis, inter alia, US strategists seeking to meet the gainful expectations of Sun-Tzu's "unorthodox" planning will require a more consciously dialectical style of military thinking.
All things considered, Sun-Tzu can help Donald Trump with the considered wisdom that strategy and war planning are fundamentally intellectual or analytic activities. More exactly, especially because Kim Jung-un now seemingly commands a nuclear arsenal – and because he could pose a nuclear threat to selected US allies by targeting Japanese or South Korean commercial nuclear reactors – US emphasis must be on using this country's own cumulative military assets for deterrence rather than war-waging.
Recalling The Art of War, "Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
In summarizing his insights, Sun-Tzu spends a good deal of effort on "ruler's qualifications." From this distillation of apt thoughts, President Trump could soon be reminded that "The ruler cannot mobilize the army out of any personal anger." As for his most immediate counselors, they can learn from The Art of War the following indispensable leadership strengths: Wisdom; Knowledge; Benevolence; Unconcern for Fame; Tranquility; and Righteousness. Correspondingly, presidential weaknesses would include Obsession with Achieving Fame; Easy to Anger; Haste to Act; Inability to Fathom the Enemy; and Personal Arrogance.
The opening words of The Art of War (section on "Initial Estimations") set the stage for the author's most sweeping observation: "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Way to survival or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
US President Donald Trump should quickly take heed.
***
Louis René Beres, a frequent contributor to Israel Defense, is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books and articles dealing with national security studies and Israel's nuclear strategy.
Although he composed long ago, Chinese strategist Sun-Tzu remains a useful font of insights for any impending American nuclear crisis with North Korea. Significantly, too, Pyongyang remains involved with Israel's enemies in the Middle East, aiding Syria, Iran, and certain of their surrogates. Opinion
A US Air Force B-1B Lancer arrives at Andersen Air Force Base, Guam on July 26, 2017 (Photo: AP)
Despite plainly substantial transformations of weapons technologies and statecraft, certain ancient principles of warfare remain valid. By duly acknowledging that the even more primary human factors in war have basically remained constant, such utterly core principles warrant re-examining. For US President Donald Trump, this is usefully good advice with particular reference to North Korea, a refractory American adversary with which there exists a growing prospect of belligerent nuclear confrontation.
Special analytic benefits may lie latent in ancient Chinese military thought. More precisely, Sun-Tzu's The Art of War, written sometime in the fifth century BCE, meticulously synthesizes a still-coherent set of rules for gaining strategic advantage. This timeless work should now be studied by all of President Trump's military advisors who would systematically seek to strengthen their country's vital security posture. Such examination should ultimately focus upon America's nuclear deterrent, and on its more-or-less plausible "order of battle" vis-à-vis North Korea.
In these strategic matters, everything is complicated. Reciprocally, ignoring complexity could produce sorely grievous kinds of harm. By definition, of course, simplifications always make things "easier," and are always reassuring. But they are also ill-conceived and prospectively injurious to the United States.
This includes the stubborn confusion of empty bluster with national power, a dangerous misunderstanding that is seemingly integral to President Trump's approach to North Korea. Apropos of such an integral policy error, Mr. Trump would do well to consider the revealing title of Sun-Tzu's Chapter 6: "Vacuity and Substance." The point of this title is to highlight the stark and consequential differences between shallow verbal threats and genuinely tangible efficacy.
For now, at least, Mr. Trump seems to feel that making empty threats and materially affecting a determined adversary are one and the same.
Not by the standards of Sun-Tzu.
The president could learn, from the broader "Tao of Warfare," that the military world, like the world in general, "is what it is." It follows that any contrived reductions of complexity designed to somehow make the overall intellectual effort less demanding are prima facie a willful distortion, and are thus unacceptable. They represent, in essence, the reductio ad absurdum of required strategic thinking, a distinctly perilous reduction to absurdity.
For now, the crisis with North Korea is about dissuasion from war. Correspondingly, America's general strategy remains embedded in various more or less explicit forms of deterrence, including nuclear deterrence. Such core strategy is rooted in one or several of six indispensably protective functions: (1) deterrence of large-scale conventional attacks by enemy-states; (2) deterrence of all levels of unconventional attack by enemy-states; (3) preemption of enemy-state nuclear attacks; (4) support of conventional preemptions against enemy-state nuclear assets; (5) support of conventional preemptions against enemy-state nonnuclear assets; and (6) nuclear war-fighting.
In the currently pertinent matter of North Korea, President Trump may need US nuclear weapons to best support certain contemplated forms of conventional preemption. In making any defensive first strike decisions against Pyongyang, Mr. Trump would first need to determine whether any such non-nuclear expressions of "anticipatory self-defense" could be tactically or operationally cost-effective. This important determination, in turn, would depend on a number of critical and inter-penetrating security factors, including: expected probability of North Korean first-strikes; expected costs of North Korean first-strikes; expected schedule of North Korean nuclear weapons deployment; expected efficiencies of North Korean active defenses over time; expected efficiencies of US active defenses over time; expected efficiencies of US hard-target or "counterforce" operations over time; expected reactions of unaffected regional enemies; and expected US and world community reactions to any considered American preemption.
"Weighing strength," reminds Sun-Tzu, "gives birth to victory." But any such measurement could be difficult to detach from palpably subjective calculations.
For President Trump and his counselors, other connections must also be examined. Several concern the presumed relationship between nuclear threat functions, primarily deterrence, and law. Contrary to the widely prevailing conventional wisdom on law and geopolitics, nuclear deterrence (and also its various associated forms of nuclear posture and infrastructure) do not necessarily function outside the ambit of authoritative international law. This counter-intuitive appraisal is correct even for preemption, which can, under customary international law (including an 8 July 1996 advisory decision of the International Court of Justice) be accurately construed as "anticipatory self-defense."
The adequacy of international law in preventing both nuclear and conventional war in Northeast Asia – war, incidentally, that could quickly "spill over" to other regions (North Korea continues to send advanced weapons to Syria, thereby strengthening not only the criminal Damascus regime, but also Shi'ite terrorist group Hezbollah, and overall-terror sponsor state Iran) – will depend upon more than formal treaties, customs, or so-called "general principles of law recognized by civilized nations." It will also be contingent upon the discernible success or failure of US and North Korean military strategies in the region. At first, this conclusion may seem odd to those who have long been instructed that international law and military strategy are intrinsically opposed to one another, almost by definition, but it is nonetheless a position that was expressly codified at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
This landmark treaty put an end to the Thirty Years War.
Seeing requires distance. If America's selected nuclear strategy should sometime serve to reduce the threat and/or seriousness of war, either because of successful forms of nuclear deterrence, or even because of presumptively "no alternative" preemptive strikes launched against an illegally nuclearizing North Korea, this strategy could be "counted" as a genuine component of international law enforcement.
How should Washington proceed? Initially, from Sun-Tzu, President Trump should consider the ancient Chinese strategist's favored principles concerning diplomacy. To be sure, suitable military preparations should never be neglected, but diplomacy must also have its proper place. By fusing power and diplomacy, says Sun-Tzu, the objective of every state to weaken its enemies without actually engaging in armed combat can be realized. As expressed in his classic work, this always overriding objective links the associated ideal of "complete victory" to a reciprocal strategy "for planning offensives."
Today, this advice may seem obvious enough. Yet, current US strategic posture will depend heavily upon various implemented forms of ballistic missile defense (BMD). In principle, at least, by placing too much faith in its active defense systems, the US could be willing to accept certain excessive risks, and also to disavow any still-remaining preemption options.
None of this is meant to suggest that America's nuclear deterrence can somehow remediate all conceivable nuclear threats from North Korea. This country's advanced deterrent posture notwithstanding, there could still come a time in which the power of Washington's implicit nuclear threat would be immobilized by enemy miscalculation, inadvertence, mechanical accident, false warnings, unauthorized firings (e.g., coup d'etat) or even outright irrationality.
The single most compelling factor in any US presidential decisions on preemption against North Korea will likely be the expected rationality of Kim Jung-un. If, after all, Kim were expected to strike at America or certain US allies with nuclear weapons, irrespective of any anticipated US counterstrikes, American deterrence could fail altogether. This means that North Korean nuclear strikes could possibly be expected even if Kim Jung-un had already understood that President Trump was willing and able to respond with devastating nuclear reprisals.
A North Korean decision to strike would have been made in spite of US deployment of its own nuclear weapons in recognizably survivable modes, and despite the fact that these American nuclear weapons were predictably able to penetrate North Korea's most sophisticated and widespread active defenses.
Some might argue, even persuasively, that the US has already lost any once-residual preemption option with respect to North Korean nuclear weapons. As a result of enemy multiplication, dispersal, and hardening of these infrastructures, goes this particular argument, President Trump can now only wait until the time comes for an after-the-fact response, that is, for inflicting retaliation. Inevitably, if this retributive argument is correct, any such total reliance upon deterrence and corollary active defenses could represent indifference to the enduring general principles of classic Chinese military strategy.
It could prove to be an existential indifference.
There is another section of the Art of War that can help President Trump compensate for any theretofore disproportionate reliance upon nuclear deterrence and ballistic missile defense. This section concerns Sun-Tzu's repeated emphasis on the "unorthodox." Drawn from the conflation of thought that crystallized as Taoism, the ancient strategist observes: "...in battle, one engages with the orthodox, and gains victory through the unorthodox."
In another uniquely complex passage, Sun-Tzu discusses how the orthodox may be used in unorthodox ways, while an orthodox attack may still be unorthodox, at least when it is unexpected. Taken seriously by American strategic planners, this tricky but purposefully-nuanced passage could represent a subtle tool for meaningful tactical implementation, one that might most usefully exploit Kim Jung-un's matrix of identifiable military expectations.
For President Trump, the "unorthodox" should be fashioned not only on the battlefield, but also before the battle. To prevent the most dangerous forms of battle, moreover, or those military engagements which could be expressions of all-out unconventional warfare, Washington must examine and fashion a number of promising new military postures. These postures would focus upon a reasoned shift from "orthodox" rationality to one of "unorthodox" irrationality. This sort of thinking is what the late American nuclear strategist, Herman Kahn, had once called the "rationality of pretended irrationality."
It may even have played a decisive role back in October 1962, when US President John F. Kennedy threatened to board any Soviet ship that defied his expressed "quarantine" of Cuba.
On several occasions, Mr. Trump has already hinted openly at his affection for feigned irrationality. Needless to say, any such pretense could become a double-edged sword, and would therefore have to be "played" with conspicuous care and exquisite finesse. Also worth noting is that any strategy of pretended irrationality is apt to represent the very opposite of Sun-Tzu's more general counsel. In Chapter one, "Initial Estimations," for example, he underscores that any final military success must be based on rationality and self-control.
Kim Jung-un may seriously be thinking about striking first. In seizing any such momentous belligerent initiative, North Korea would likely expect to gain some necessary advantage in "escalation dominance." This very risky sort of expectation would plausibly follow from a view in Pyongyang that Washington would never embrace the "unorthodox" on a strategic level, that its actions would always be confined to reactions, and that these reactions would always be limited.
There is more. President Trump requires a pattern of thinking adapted not only by Sun-Tzu, but also by certain of his contemporaries in ancient Greece. For fashioning a needed nuclear doctrine, a proper codification from which particular tactics and strategies could be systematically extrapolated, Mr. Trump will need a presumptively usable "strategic dialectic." This interrogative method would ask and answer pertinent questions, sequentially, again and again, until pertinent core security problems were confronted frontally.
Following Sun-Tzu's prescriptions on the "unorthodox," US strategists could approach their most urgent North Korea security problem as an interrelated series of thoughts, one where each thought would present a complication that then moves inquiry onward, directly or indirectly, to the next thought.
Contained in this strategic dialectic, as Sun-Tzu himself was already deeply aware, would be the unavoidable obligation to continue thinking. Logically, this particular imperative could never be met entirely, because of what the philosophers would call an "infinite regress problem," but it must still be attempted as completely and competently as possible. Armed with such an explicitly dialectical form of military strategy, President Trump could focus not only on assorted unique threats and situations (here, North Korean nuclear weapons development), but also upon various dynamic interactions between discrete threats, complex interactions known commonly as "synergies."
Again, a final way for President Trump to learn from Sun-Tzu's potentially promising emphases on "unorthodox" thinking would be to more actively embrace strategic complexity. In this connection, prospective threats from North Korea could be analogized to biology, to certain associated issues of individual human survival. In dealing therapeutically with cancer, for example, physicians need not only characterize relevant tumors in-depth, but also know as much as possible about (1) these tumors' "microenvironment;" and (2) the genetic background of the individual patient or "host."
Similarly, in dealing with the still-emerging nuclear threat from North Korea, President Trump will need to consider a broad variety of smaller or subsidiary intersecting threats. Just as a single biomarker can never truly explain any particular cancer's behavior, so too can the prospectively "malignant" North Korean nuclear danger never be explained, or suitably predicted, from the standpoint of only one or several readily identifiable threats. In the final analysis, inter alia, US strategists seeking to meet the gainful expectations of Sun-Tzu's "unorthodox" planning will require a more consciously dialectical style of military thinking.
All things considered, Sun-Tzu can help Donald Trump with the considered wisdom that strategy and war planning are fundamentally intellectual or analytic activities. More exactly, especially because Kim Jung-un now seemingly commands a nuclear arsenal – and because he could pose a nuclear threat to selected US allies by targeting Japanese or South Korean commercial nuclear reactors – US emphasis must be on using this country's own cumulative military assets for deterrence rather than war-waging.
Recalling The Art of War, "Subjugating the enemy's army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence."
In summarizing his insights, Sun-Tzu spends a good deal of effort on "ruler's qualifications." From this distillation of apt thoughts, President Trump could soon be reminded that "The ruler cannot mobilize the army out of any personal anger." As for his most immediate counselors, they can learn from The Art of War the following indispensable leadership strengths: Wisdom; Knowledge; Benevolence; Unconcern for Fame; Tranquility; and Righteousness. Correspondingly, presidential weaknesses would include Obsession with Achieving Fame; Easy to Anger; Haste to Act; Inability to Fathom the Enemy; and Personal Arrogance.
The opening words of The Art of War (section on "Initial Estimations") set the stage for the author's most sweeping observation: "Warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Way to survival or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analyzed."
US President Donald Trump should quickly take heed.
***
Louis René Beres, a frequent contributor to Israel Defense, is Emeritus Professor of International Law at Purdue University. He is the author of many books and articles dealing with national security studies and Israel's nuclear strategy.
