At the beginning of the pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric… It is only in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, to silence.
—Albert Camus, The Plague
World system chaos is not emerging ex nihilo, out of nothing. There have been conspicuous warnings. In law, though anarchy has beleaguered humankind since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, chaos is just now becoming evident. In essence, it is the cumulative result of centuries-long war and suffering.
For comprehensive clarifications, pertinent details should be consulted. Above all, chaos should be recognized as an unprecedented “form” of modern world politics. Moreover, chaos is much worse than historic anarchy. It is unimaginably worse.
But what are the tangible differences? Anarchy means a system (here, world politics) that lacks the centralized authority structures of government. Still, even within dissembling anarchy, states are able to make rational choices on variously specified goals. In chaos, because state behaviors have become unpredictable, rational decision-making is no longer possible. In essence, the only predictable feature of chaotic international relations is unpredictability.
What can and should be done? Specifically, how should American security policy-makers respond to chaotic global decline? Inter alia, coherent answers will require that existing and future security threats to the United States be considered in all their complex intersections.
At times, these intersections could become “force multiplying” or “synergistic.”
At that stage, traditional linear thinking would become conclusively out-of-date.
Synergy: The “Whole” and its “Parts”
For strategic thinkers and policy-makers, there will be nuances. It would be difficult enough for any state to deal singly with each identifiable threat to its national security, but rational decision-making becomes progressively more daunting when the significant threats are erratic and inconspicuous. Clarifying signs of such enlarged difficulty could include unforeseen expansions of synergy[1] within a widening ambit of chaos.[2] In such hard to decipher global declensions, the calculable “whole” of plausible harms would be greater than the sum of its identifiable “parts.”
In philosophy of science terms, this proposition is not a tentative explanation or hypothesis of any kind. It is true by definition. Moreover, this “geometric” clarification is not intended as a peripheral or merely secondary judgment. For US military and defense planners, there will be many critical implications, both positive and negative.
On the positive side, the cumulative outcome of constituent enemy threats could blunt more serious hazards. Though seemingly counter-intuitive, such “softening” could express the result of a self-canceling impact by one component peril on another. On the negative side, some synergies could have the effect of magnifying one or several constituent threats, whether foreseen or unforeseen.
Soon, these already-difficult matters could become more bewildering. Reciprocal expectations could surround synergies among America’s foes. The consequences of synergistic interactions[3] would either be net-positive or net-negative, both for impacted enemy states[4] and for the United States.
At this point, rudimentary questions should resurface. To begin, for the United States, scholars and policy-makers will need to inquire: What are the precise hazards that could comprise a worrisome synergy? While the adversarial whole now facing Americans is visibly diverse and multifaceted – there are many significant foes[5] and myriad axes of expected conflict – four discernible threats outweigh all others. These are the seemingly discrete but actually linked dangers of (1) US-Russia “Cold War II”[6]; (2) Chinese geopolitical adventurism; (3) North Korean nuclear weapons; and (4) resurgent Iranian nuclearization. Here, #1 (above) includes Vladimir Putin’s egregious crimes against Ukraine,[7] violations of international law[8] involving crimes of war, crimes against peace[9] and crimes against humanity.
For the purpose of ascertaining possible synergies or related “force-multipliers,” there would be no need for strategic thinkers to arrange these perils hierarchically according to presumed urgency. It should also be borne in mind that any meaningful synergistic “balancing” of specific perils could vary from day to day, and according to the indecipherable foreign policy intuitions of an “intuitive” American President.[10]
A derivative observation now appears. For the express purpose of ascertaining possible synergies, there would be no need to diminish the plausibility of #4 above (resurgent Iranian nuclearization) on the presumption that Donald Trump’s very public assessment of “obliteration” was accurate. Among other things, an Iranian decision not to resume nuclear weapons preparation (uranium fuel plus missiles) could be irrational.[11]
Intersections and Synergies
For capable US planners, all relevant synergies should be treated with serious intellectual regard. By definition, these force-multipliers are not easily figured out or measured. Nonetheless, because a state’s geopolitical or strategic calculations are never analogous to what happens in “geometry,” certain synergies could only be ignored at peril to American survival.
In a worst case scenario, scholars might think here of the High Lama’s warning in James Hilton’s Lost Horizon: “The storm… this storm that you talk of…. It will be such a one, my son, as the world has not seen before. There will be no safety by arms, no help from authority, no answer in science. It will rage until every flower of culture is trampled, and all human things are leveled in a vast chaos…. The Dark Ages that are to come will cover the whole world is a single pall; there will be neither escape nor sanctuary.”
In the end, it’s all about enhancing complex theoretical understandings, not just interminable compilations of “facts.” As a convenient metaphor for strategists and policy-makers, theory is a “net.” Only those who cast, can catch.[12] Because of the expectedly corrosive interactive effects involving threats from Russia, China, North Korea, Pakistan and Iran, the US will need to continuously update and refine its core theories of nuclear doctrine and nuclear strategy.[13] Ultimately, this will prove to be a uniquely challenging intellectual task, not merely a partisan exercise of political import.[14]
American leaders will have to accept that certain more-or-less identifiable leaders of prospectively overlapping enemy hazards might not always satisfy the many-sided criteria of rational behavior in world politics.[15] In such apparently improbable but still conceivable circumstances, all promising military strategies will need to be fashioned to best deal with unpredictable adversarial actions. Included in this task will be special attentiveness to any and all plausible synergies arising between America’s four principal arenas of geopolitical security concern. But prospectively irrational enemies could quickly confound all “normal” US military calculations, especially ones concerning presumed benefits of threatened US reprisals.
There is more. Sooner rather than later, facing new and incalculable synergies, Washington will need to take appropriate steps to assure that: (1) America does not become the object of non-conventional attacks from these enemies; and (2) the United States can successfully deter all possible forms of non-conventional conflict. To meet such an ambitious goal, Washington will need to retain a recognizably far-reaching conventional superiority in the interrelated areas of weapons, manpower and cyber-warfare.
On this last expectation, all major states in world politics will have access to “cyber-mercenary” surrogates. In principle, at least, such access could reduce the overall likelihood that the United States would ever have to enter into an actual chemical, biological, or nuclear exchange. On its face, this would not represent an insignificant strategic or tactical benefit.
In matters of critical national strategy, operational truth could sometimes emerge through paradox. To wit, US planners may soon have to acknowledge that the efficacy and credibility of America’s nuclear deterrence posture could vary inversely with enemy perceptions of American nuclear destructiveness. However ironic or counter-intuitive, enemy views of a too-large or too-destructive American nuclear deterrent force or of a US force that is not sufficiently invulnerable to first-strike attacks, could at some point undermine America’s deterrence posture.
To counter such views and their correspondingly heightened prospect of negative strategic synergies, US military planners and policy makers will need to better ensure adversarial perceptions of a “flexible” and variegated US nuclear deterrent capabilities. This would suggest forces that remain visibly (1) secure from any enemy first strike attacks and (2) capable of penetrating any enemy’s ballistic missile defenses. Apropos of this second basic requirement, the United States will need greater emphases on the deployment of up-to-date hypersonic missile systems.
Refining Strategic Deterrence
There is far more to be done. Washington should continue to strengthen America’s active defenses, but ought also to do everything possible to improve each critical component of the nation’s deterrence posture. In the stunningly complex and dialectical[16] process of strategic dissuasion, the American task will require more incrementally explicit disclosures of selected nuclear targeting doctrine and a steadily expanding role for cyber-defense and cyber-war. Before undertaking such delicate refinements, Washington will also need to more systematically differentiate between adversaries that are presumably rational,[17] irrational, or “mad.”[18] Going forward, types of plausible synergistic outcomes will depend in considerable measure on first acknowledging and applying this tripartite distinction.
Overall, the success of American national deterrence strategies will be contingent on informed prior awareness of all relevant enemy preferences and specific hierarchies of preferences. Altogether new and more open-minded attention will need to be focused on the seeming expansion of “Cold War II” between Russia and the United States, an emergence that is apt to impact the other three component hazards of fearful synergies: Chinese political adventurism; North Korean nuclear weapons; and re-started Iranian nuclearization.[19]
Immediately, American national leaders will need to understand the strategic limits of “normal geometry” – that is, limits wherein the whole is equal to the sum of its parts – and to augment such understanding with certain new “arithmetic” orthodoxies. Paradoxically, these decision-makers will then have to explore what amounts to a “geometry of chaos.”
Even this dense “geometry” could reveal a discernible sense of symmetry and form, including the precise shape of high-urgency enemy threats.[20] Where the belligerent “whole” might sometime add up to more than the sum of its constituent “parts,” US leaders could uncover the prospectively lethal hazards of adversarial synergies. Indeed, perhaps more than any other “negative force multiplier,” this coming-together of impending threats now warrants resolute and rapt attention in Washington.
Going forward, understanding complicated synergies will be key. To be sure, as any such understanding will be difficult and elusive, it will be minimized or disregarded by military analysts and policy planners. Still, there is no reasonable alternative here to waging a multidimensional intellectual struggle.[21]
There is still more. Understanding synergy will be indispensable to long-lasting US security. Counting on “divine intervention” to untangle complex[22] analytic intersections is surely not a viable plan.[23] Ultimately, in the art and science of war, the highest achievements should always be sought in resolute triumphs of mind over mind.[24] Prima facie, such “victories” must always be preeminently intellectual.[25]
Final Thoughts on Chaos
It is time for a concluding observation about chaos. Since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648,[26] the world security system has functioned amid anarchy, but not amid chaos. There are vital differences. Westphalian anarchy is “merely” the absence of any centralized global governance. By definition, international law can coexist with such an absence, but the results are rarely ones of peace and justice.[27]
Whether described in the Old Testament or in certain other evident sources of Western philosophy, chaos can be as much a wellspring of large-scale human improvement as a source of decline.[28] It is this prospectively positive side of chaos that is intended by Friedrich Nietzsche’s telling remark in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883): “I tell you, ye have still chaos in you.”
When compared or contrasted with Westphalian anarchy, chaos is that condition which prepares the world for all things, whether sacred or profane. It represents that yawning gulf of “emptiness” where nothing is as yet, but where still-remaining civilizational opportunity can still originate. The 18th century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin observes: “There is a desert sacred and chaotic, which stands at the roots of the things, and which prepares all things.” Insightfully, in the ancient pagan world, Greek philosophers thought of this particular “desert” as logos, a primal concept which indicates that chaos is anything but starkly random or without any intrinsic merit.
More than ever before, American thinkers and foreign policy planners will need to base their existential security calculations on variously complex intersections Several aspects of world system structure will have to be examined in conjunction with one another, especially anarchy, chaos and synergy. To continue to favor one-condition at-a-time analyses because of their comparative simplicity would be to mistake short-term decision-making utility for long-term program efficacy. For example, to generate policy assessments and prescriptions concerning nuclear warfare on the basis of isolable current crises (e.g., North Korea, Ukraine, Iran, China/Taiwan, India/Pakistan) would be to ignore the most clarifying elements of world system interrelatedness.[29]
There is one last observation. Purposeful US foreign policy decision-making is time-urgent. By failing to meet this temporal expectation, the United States and assorted other countries could find themselves in circumstances they are already too late for remediation. As Albert Camus reminds in The Plague: “At the beginning of the pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric…It is only in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth, to silence.”
America’s task should be to limit calamity “at the beginning.” For the United States, making sense of its evolving security landscape should be conceptualized as an intellectual or analytic obligation. The most calamitous prospects that Americans now face are ones that will supplant traditional world system anarchy with chaos. To limit the harms of this ongoing replacement, truth should be sought only in disciplined applications of “mind.” Passive citizen submission to the viscerally eruptive commands of presidential authority could lead an already imperiled United States to Camus’ everlasting “silence.”
Notes
[1] Such synergies could shed light upon an entire world system’s state of disorder (a view that would reflect what the physicists prefer to call “entropic” conditions) and could themselves be dependent upon each pertinent decision-maker’s own subjective metaphysics of time. For an early article by this author dealing with linkages between such a subjective metaphysics and national decision-making, see: Louis René Beres, “Time, Consciousness and Decision-Making in Theories of International Relations,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, Vol. VIII, No.3., Fall 1974, pp. 175-186.
[2] Anarchy is an old story in international relations and international law (1648 and the Peace of Westphalia), but chaos is not inherently worse than anarchy. In certain circumstances, chaos could even represent a potentially positive development for world order reform. In this eccentric but still conceivably plausible view, chaos implies unique opportunity, a chance to finally change things from the 17th century dynamic of “Westphalian” interactions. When compared or contrasted with Westphalian anarchy, chaos is prospectively that condition which prepares the world for all things, whether sacred or profane. It represents that yawning gulf of “emptiness” where nothing is as yet, but where remaining civilizational opportunity can still originate. The 18th century German poet Friedrich Hölderlin observed: “There is a desert sacred and chaotic, which stands at the roots of the things, and which prepares all things.” Insightfully, in the ancient pagan world, Greek philosophers thought of this particular “desert” as logos, a primal concept which indicates that chaos is anything but starkly random or without any intrinsic merit.
[3] See, by this author, Louis René Beres, at Harvard National Security Journal, Harvard Law School: 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 Professor Beres, at Modern War Institute, West Point, Pentagon: https://mwi.usma.edu/threat-convergence-adversarial-whole-greater-sum-parts/
[4] America’s relevant foes already include various sub-state terrorist organizations, a fact that will have to be reckoned with in fashioning a comprehensive US plan for handling potentially synergistic adversities.
[5] These include assorted sub-national or insurgent adversaries. Explicit applications of the law of war to insurgent combatants dates to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949. As more than codified treaties and conventions must comprise the law of war, the obligations of jus in bello (justice in war) are part of “the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations” (from Art. 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice) and thereby bind all categories of belligerents. (See Statute of the International Court of Justice, art. 38, June 29, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. 993). Further, Hague Convention IV of 1907 declares that even in the absence of a precisely published set of guidelines regarding “unforeseen cases,” the operative pre-conventional sources of humanitarian international law obtain and still govern all belligerency. The related Martens Clause is included in the Preamble of the 1899 Hague Conventions, International Convention with Respect to the Laws and Customs of War by Land, July 29, 1899, 187 Consol. T.S. 429, 430.
[6] Hypothesizing the emergence of “Cold War II” sometimes means expecting that the world system is becoming increasingly bipolar. For early writings, by this author, on the global security implications of such an expanding bipolarity, see: Louis René Beres, “Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and the Reliability of Alliance Commitments,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 25, No.4., December 1972, pp. 702-710; Louis René Beres, “Bipolarity, Multipolarity, and the Tragedy of the Commons,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 26, No.4., December 1973, pp, 649-658; and Louis René Beres, “Guerillas, Terrorists, and Polarity: New Structural Models of World Politics,” Western Political Quarterly, Vol. 27, No.4., December 1974, pp. 624-636.More accurate representations today would emphasize the addition of China to “superpower” status, hence to a tripolar system of international relations.
[7] Here it is also important to note that responsibility of Russian President Vladimir Putin for such crimes is not limited by his official position or by any requirement of direct personal actions. On the principle of command responsibility, or respondeat superior, see: In re Yamashita, 327 U.S. 1 (1945); The High Command Case (The Trial of Wilhelm von Leeb) 12 LAW REPORTS OF TRIALS OF WAR CRIMINALS 1, 71 (United Nations War Crimes Commission Comp. 1949); see: Parks, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY FOR WAR CRIMES, 62 MIL.L.REV. 1 (1973); O’Brien, THE LAW OF WAR, COMMAND RESPONSIBILITY AND VIETNAM, 60 GEO.L.J. 605 (1972); U.S. DEPT OF THE ARMY, ARMY SUBJECT SCHEDULE No. 27 – 1 (Geneva Conventions of 1949 and Hague Convention No. IV of 1907) 10 (1970). The direct individual responsibility of leaders for genocide and genocide-like crimes is unambiguous in view of the London Agreement, which denies defendants the protection of the Act of State defense. See AGREEMENT FOR THE PROSECUTION AND PUNISHMENT OF THE MAJOR WAR CRIMINALS OF THE EUROPEAN AXIS, Aug. 8, 1945, 59 Strat. 1544, E.A.S. No. 472, 82 U.N.T.S. 279, Art. 7. Under traditional international law, violations were the responsibility of the state, as a corporate actor, and not of individual human decision-makers in government or the military.
[8] Emmerich de Vattel’s “first principle” of the Law of Nations is the mutual independence and dependence of sovereign states. Though “foreign nations have no right to interfere in the government of an independent state….” (II, sec. 57), these states are “bound mutually to promote the society of the human race…” and, correspondingly, “owe one another all the duties which the safety and welfare of that society require.” As Vattel clarifies in the Introduction to his 1758 classic: “What one man owes to other men, one Nation, in its turn, owes to other Nations.” In principle, at least, this is a potentially transformative legal imperative, one rich in world-civilizational possibilities.
[9] Under contemporary international criminal law, crimes against peace are correctly identified as “aggression.” 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; and CHARTER OF THE UNITED NATIONS, Art. 51. Done at San Francisco, June 26, 1945. Entered into force for the United States, Oct. 24, 1945, 59 Stat. 1031, T.S. No. 993, Bevans 1153, 1976, Y.B.U.N. 1043.
[10] The concept of a balance of power – an idea of which the nuclear-age balance of terror is merely an analytic variant – has never been more than facile metaphor. It has never had anything to do with any calculable condition of equilibrium. As such a balance is always a matter of individual and subjective perceptions, adversary states may never be sufficiently confident that strategic circumstances are positioned in their favor. In consequence, as each side must perpetually fear that it will be “left behind,” the search for balance produces continually wider circles of national insecurity and escalating disequilibrium.
[11] In studies of world politics, rationality and irrationality have taken on very specific meanings. More precisely, an actor (state or sub-state) is determinedly rational to the extent that its leadership always values national survival more highly than any other conceivable preference or combination of preferences. Conversely, an irrational actor might not always display such a determinable preference ordering.
[12] This convenient metaphor is generally attributed to Novalis, the late 18th-century German poet and scholar. See, for example, introductory citation by Karl R. Popper, in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Ironically, perhaps, Novalis’ fellow German poet, Goethe, had declared, in his early Faust fragment (Urfaust): “All theory, dear friend, is grey. But the golden tree of life is green.” (Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie, Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.)
[13] Military doctrine is not the same as military strategy. Rather, doctrine “sets the stage” or foundation for strategy. It identifies various central beliefs that must subsequently animate any actual “order of battle.” Among other things, military doctrine describes underlying general principles on how a particular war ought to be waged. The reciprocal task for military strategy is to adapt as required in order to best support previously-fashioned military doctrine.
[14] See by this author: Louis René Beres, “Nuclear War Avoidance: Why It Is Time to Start Worrying, Again,” Air and Space Operations Review, Spring 2022, United States Air Force, Pentagon, pp. 69-81.
[15] Expressions of decisional irrationality in world affairs could take different and overlapping forms. These forms 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).
[16] Dialectic formally originated in the fifth century BCE, as Zeno, author of the Paradoxes, had been acknowledged by Aristotle as its inventor. In the middle dialogues of Plato, dialectic emerges as the supreme form of philosophical/analytic method. Here, Plato describes the dialectician as one who knows best how to ask and answer questions. This particular knowledge – how to ask, and to answer questions, sequentially – should now be insistently transposed to the organized study of Israeli security issues.
[17] Americans are inclined to project their own dominant sense of rationality upon adversaries. Acknowledging that western philosophy has always oscillated between Plato and Nietzsche, between rationalism and irrationalism, we have all routinely cast our psychological lot with the Greek thinkers and their inheritors.
[18] “Do you know what it means to find yourselves face to face with a madman,” inquires Luigi Pirandello, “with one who shakes the foundations of all you have built up in yourselves, your logic, the logic of all your constructions? Madmen, lucky folk, construct without logic, or rather, with a logic that flies like a feather.”
[19] See by this author, Louis Rene Beres: https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/10/24/to-prevent-a-nuclear-war-americas-overriding-policy-imperative/
[20] This raises the complementary idea of Avant garde in US national security planning, See, by this author, Louis René Beres: https://besacenter.org/improving-israeli-military-strategy-through-avant-garde-analysis/
[21] A good analogy here would be oncology or cancer research. Because the likelihood of a single biomarker explaining a particular cancer’s “behavior” is always extremely low, a more genuinely multidimensional approach should be widely embraced. Implementing such a substantially more complex approach will expectedly allow researchers to conduct appropriately in-depth characterizations of pertinent tumors; also of the microenvironment and genetic background for each individual patient.
[22] The problems stemming from complexity also bring to mind the Clausewitzian concept of “friction” in war, a concept that is not the same as synergy, but that also does emphasize the key elements of interaction and unpredictability. See Carl von Clausewitz, On War, especially Chapter VI, “Friction in War.”
[23] In ancient Greece, classic playwright Euripides sometimes concluded his plays with a deus ex machina, a “god out of the machine.” Appearing above the action, in a sort of theatrical crane, the relevant god was seemingly able to solve all sorts of dreadful complications arising from the action, and thereby to supply a more-or-less happy ending.
[24] See, on this triumph, F.E. Adcock, The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962), especially Chapter IV: “Cavalry, Elephants, and Siege craft.”
[25] As part of this fundamentally intellectual task, Sun-Tzu’s Art of War calls for gaining the upper hand through the “unorthodox.” In his Chapter 5, on “Strategic Military Power,” Sun-Tzu states succinctly: “In general, in battle, one engages with the orthodox and gains victory through the unorthodox.” To be sure, the ancient Chinese author’s idea of “battle” would include present-day deterrence. After all, as he says elsewhere in the Art of War, at Chapter 3, “Planning Offensives:” “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting, is the true pinnacle of excellence.”
[26] Reference here is to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which first created and codified our “balance of power” system of international law. See: Treaty of Peace of Munster, Oct. 1648, 1 Consol. T.S. 271; and Treaty of Peace of Osnabrück, Oct. 1648, 1., Consol. T.S. 119, Together, these two treaties comprise the Peace of Westphalia.
[27] Writing about law in the “state of nature?” In Chapter XIII of Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes comments famously: “Where there is no common Power, there is no Law.” Though the 17th century English philosopher notes that the “state of nations” is in the always-anarchic condition of “war,” that condition is still more tolerable than that of individuals coexisting in nature. With these individual human beings, he instructs, “…the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest.” Now, however, with the continuing advent of nuclear weapons, a circumstance clearly unforeseen by Hobbes, there is no persuasive reason to believe that the “state of nations” remains more tolerable. Nuclear weapons are bringing the state of nations closer to a 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. Similar to Hobbes, German philosopher Samuel Pufendorf argues that the state of nations is “not as intolerable” as the state of nature between individuals. The state of nations, reasoned the German jurist, “lacks those inconveniences which are attendant upon a pure state of nature….” Baruch Spinoza also suggested “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.
[28] “Is it an end that draws near,” inquires Karl Jaspers in Man in the Modern Age (1951) “or a beginning.”
[29] On this point, we may consider an earlier remark by Thomas Mann that identifies the downfall of civilizations with the `simplification’ of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life.” In short, warned Mann (and as also understood by Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset), “barbarization.” See Stanley Corngold, The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022), ix. As was the case for Thomas Mann, the present writer (Louis René Beres) has important life connections to both Zürich and Princeton.
Louis René Beres (Ph.D., Princeton, 1971) is Professor Emeritus of Political Science and International Law at Purdue. He is the author of twelve books and several hundred journal articles in the field. Dr. Beres’ opinion articles appear in many US, Israeli and European publications. He was born in Zürich on August 31, 1945.
