OPINION:
On several occasions, President Trump has exclaimed that America would start “winning” its wars again. Although these seemingly sensible announcements had a pleasing resonance among the many, it overlooked the obligations of serious strategic analysis. More specifically, Mr. Trump’s statements ignored that the achievement of tangible military victories requires prior success in pertinent crisis escalations; and the achievement of such real success via “escalation dominance” is potentially very dangerous.
Mr. Trump should not have affirmed that America will once again strive to “win,” but rather that any forthcoming search for success would be tempered by a prudent concern for national safety during crisis escalation. Even better, he ought already to have observed that because nation-states no longer typically declare wars, or enter into legally binding war-terminating agreements, applying the traditional criteria of “war-winning” no longer makes any conceivable sense.
In the “old days,” extending even well into the 20th century, states generally had to defeat enemy armies before being able to wreak any wished-for destruction upon that enemy’s cities and infrastructures. In other words, in the earlier days of more traditional arrangements concerning war and peace, any individual country’s demonstrated capacity to win was necessarily prior to its desired capacity to destroy. Today, however, a state adversary of the United States needn’t necessarily be able to first defeat our armies in order to harm us as a nation. Reciprocally, we now also needn’t first be able to win any identifiable war with enemy states in order to suitably threaten those foes (i.e., successful deterrence), or even to actually inflict upon them very considerable harms.
For our new president, the core lesson of these far-reaching transformations (which have thus far plainly eluded him) is twofold and unassailable.
First, jurisprudentially, winning and losing no longer mean very much. This consequential devaluation should be especially obvious with regard to our ongoing national wars on terror. Prima facie, we can never really “win” any war with al Qaeda, ISIS or Hezbollah primarily because we can never really know for certain that such a zero-sum conflict with virulent sub-state or assorted “hybrid” adversaries is ever certifiably over.
Second, operationally, winning and losing are now either altogether extraneous to our core collective interests, or, in those foreseeably unfortunate cases where “victory” is mistakenly expressed as a national objective, starkly injurious. In principle, at least — and very ironically, to be sure — the misconceived Trump orientation to “winning” could quickly lead this country toward certain palpable and potentially irreversible “losses.” Going forward, therefore, U.S. military posture should never be shaped according to the observably barren expectations of clamorous cliches and empty witticisms, but instead, only upon the most disciplined theses and antitheses of appropriately dialectical strategic thought.
Long ago, Sun-Tzu had reasoned famously: “Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.” To meet current U.S. national security objectives, this ancient Chinese military wisdom suggests, among other things, that our country’s orientation should now emphasize deterrence, and not victory. At the same time, any such informed emphasis should still be self-consciously connected to the complex requirements of controlling military escalations, both expected and unexpected.
“Escalation dominance” is not any less relevant today than in earlier human history; it is still critical, but in a markedly different way. Specifically, it is now fundamentally central to ensuring stable deterrence against a broad variety of enemies, both state and sub-state, and also in myriad circumstances that could plausibly range from entirely conventional (non-nuclear) to others that are more or less increasingly nuclear. Concretely, the likely best example is a forthcoming cycle of threat and counter-threat between North Korea and the United States.
During such a now widely expected spiral of deterrence and counter-deterrence, Mr. Trump’s most basic obligation should never be to “win” against Pyongyang, but rather to thoughtfully and consistently dominate escalatory processes without simultaneously putting into greater danger America’s most elementary security. Accordingly, should he ever seek some form of “victory” at all costs, Mr. Trump would much more likely cast elementary caution to the winds, and thereby invite manifestly unprecedented levels of American homeland destruction.
In the final analysis, managing such a genuinely demanding task as purposeful escalation dominance without catastrophe is fundamentally an intellectual obligation. Under no circumstances should it ever be undertaken with a primary view to simply pleasing injudicious public tastes. In the end, in the midst of some inevitably serious future crises, escalation dominance should remain an essential security objective of President Trump, but never with the narrowly self-defeating goal of “winning.”
• Louis Rene Beres is emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University. He is the author of 12 books including, most recently, “Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016).
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