Chess and warfare are filled with paradoxes. Most people don’t play chess, which means they don’t understand war. And it shows.
To be fair, the paradoxes of war often bamboozle the uninitiated and can look downright evil or brutal. However, refusing to follow the weird logic of war and strategy leads to a lot of unnecessary bloodshed and the exposure of lies.
Here’s one of those paradoxes: the worst road may be the best route to battle. To see how this is true, consider that when moving troops from location A to location B, separated by only 15km, it may be quicker to take a 100km detour than to go in a straight line. Although the distance appears to be close, that’s probably an illusion if the enemy has set ambushes that will slow you down or even force you into a retreat.
Another example of a paradox: you should prepare for war if you want peace. A politician might ask: why not simply disarm to bring about peace? This question is not an error; it is just an attempt to escape from the paradox of war. Yet every weapon is both offensive and defensive and by removing weapons you are removing your defences. A defenceless country invites conquest and without weapons it also loses any economic strength from having weapons. Either way, the attempt to remove the conditions for war only creates them.
The most important paradox of war for today’s geopolitical context is the maxim, overwhelming violence is actually less bloody than a long war with periodic ‘humanitarian’ ceasefires.
This is why everyone gets Israel/Palestine wrong. The ‘good’ people of the world genuinely believe that forcing Israel (clearly the stronger belligerent) to act ‘humanely’, and follow an encyclopaedia of combat rules and then demanding it accept a ceasefire just as the war gets going, is somehow a moral position.
Well, how’s that worked out?
Despite all the ‘humanitarian’ ceasefires, that conflict has been boiling for decades, with millions killed or displaced. Israel has the military means to crush Hamas and Hezbollah in a few weeks, but it is compelled by ‘good’ people to fight with two hands tied behind its back. Israel’s hands were loosened slightly in the latest fighting, but only because it ignored international laws – and the results are obvious. But the world still wants Israel to sign a ceasefire before it can finish the job.
This is precisely the opposite of what should happen.
In his 1999 essay Give War a Chance, Edward Luttwak argued that while war is unpleasant, this ickiness doesn’t cancel its utility in resolving conflicts and creating peace. He said when outside powers lead ‘humanitarian’ interventions or organise ceasefires this simply freezes a conflict in place, which can be started up again when the sides are rearmed. War must be allowed to continue until all sides are exhausted or one wins decisively.
“Since the establishment of the United Nations and the enshrinement of great-power politics, wars among lesser powers have rarely been allowed to run their natural course. Instead, they have typically been interrupted early on, before they could burn themselves out and establish the preconditions for a lasting settlement,” Luttwak wrote.
This is the paradox of war. In the case of Israel/Palestine, if the US wants to intervene, it should do so militarily on the side of the strongest power (Israel) to end the conflict and save lives. This logic recognises that anarchy is a state of disorder and advancing through disorder back to order as quickly as possible is the goal of any war. A ceasefire is a state of frozen disorder. If Palestine was the stronger power, the same logic would apply, by the way.
Put it this way: if the UN had been around to intervene in Europe’s wars over the past 2000 years, the continent would be filled with giant refugee camps hosting millions of Vandals, Visigoths and defeated Burgundians. These groups would never be encouraged to integrate into a new societal reality, and Europe would be a mess, just as the Middle East is today.
The fastest way to end the Israel/Palestine war would be to allow Israel to follow the rules of classical international law of Grotius and Vattel. Israel doesn’t even need to genocide the Palestinians. It could easily integrate them into its society, just as the Burgundians were integrated into France. Israel need only apply overwhelming force in the shortest possible timeframe in a way that convinces Palestinians they have no hope of winning. The war would be over in a few days with the minimum number of lives lost.
The Russia/Ukraine conflict is another example of the paradoxical logic of war being ignored.
Consider how strange that war is. According to conventional wisdom, Russia is a nuclear-armed state with a military doctrine that says a first-use of nukes at the tactical level would be a ‘de-escalatory step’, as in, if it lets its nukes fly, Russia won’t lose. And the Americans think it’s a good idea to poke this country with a stick! Something doesn’t make sense here. Either nuclear weapons are real, or they aren’t. Why is everyone acting like they don’t exist?
Now, longtime readers of this column will know I have serious doubts that nuclear weapons exist at all. Given the lies of the 20th century and the constant obfuscation about why nukes ‘can never be used’, I have more questions than answers. And don’t get me started on the physics of controlled runaway chain reactions. It’s so mathematically implausible to be ridiculous and many nuclear physicists have their suspicions that it could ever work, to put it mildly.
Nothing about modern societies suggests that nukes exist. The US has dozens of major cities where millions of people live (about 38 per cent of the total population). Similarly, a large chunk of Russians live in either Moscow or St Petersburg (about 12–15 per cent of the total population). Those people are the best of both countries, their ‘elite human capital’. So a few medium-sized nukes dropped on those cities would pop the American and Russian bubbles pretty quickly.
Both Washington and Moscow know this, but defence planners refuse to spread out the population to ensure their countries can survive a nuclear war. All they do is create hyperbolic propaganda that a nuclear war would be ‘world-ending’ for all parties involved – so you better not try it! Yet the governments continue to act like they don’t believe their own propaganda. “Curiouser and curiouser,” cried Alice.
Let’s link this back to Luttwak’s discussion on the paradoxes of war.
We are expected to believe that Russia would rather allow thousands of its youth to be killed for 1000-plus days, chipping away at Ukraine’s territory with few major strategic gains, rather than use low-yield nuclear weapons that would end the war in a few days.
Add to this the aforementioned Russian military doctrine of a nuclear first-use at a tactical level as a way of cooling down a war before it got out of hand. The Russian doctrine wasn’t a ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ strategy. It was a practical application of Luttwak’s wisdom that a fast conflict is less bloody. Russians are the best chess players in the world. So, what’s the point of having a strategy that guarantees a win for your side if it’s never used? Curiouser.
And any NATO troops fighting in Ukraine are doing so without the formal approval of their respective governments. So, any nuclear strike on Ukrainian forces that accidentally immolates NATO troops wouldn’t necessarily invoke NATO’s ‘collective defence’ clause. Ukraine isn’t part of NATO yet because NATO can’t admit a country into the pact if it is still at war.
A surprise nuclear strike would be dangerous. But nothing is stopping Moscow from phoning Washington to warn them that it is about to use nukes on Ukraine. No one needs to be surprised by a mushroom cloud on the six o’clock news. Ukraine’s general staff could even join the call. Russia could deliver an ultimatum: give up or we will vaporise a few thousand Ukrainian soldiers. It’s not like Russia doesn’t know where all of Ukraine’s troops are located.
In other words, the way I see it, there are almost no downsides to Russia using nukes to end the war in Ukraine quickly. A few thousand troops killed in a few nuclear blasts is tiny compared to the million men killed by artillery and drones over the last three years. There are no good reasons for the war to drag on for years if it can be ended in an afternoon, but there are plenty of bad reasons.
Of course, maybe the truth is that the Russians are terrible at maintaining their nukes. After all, modern nuclear missiles (apparently) are enormously complex and require lots of big brains and money to upkeep. Russia has been running out of both brains and money for years. So, it’s entirely plausible that the electronics have deteriorated and the nukes can’t be used.
But it’s always excuses when it comes to nukes.
Excuses about why they can’t be used, why they should never be used, why they never will be used, why now is not the right time to use them, why they are only a deterrent and why we need them but can’t use them, etc. Nukes just sit in their silos, out of your eyesight, and the last time they were reportedly used in combat fades further into the distant past to become just another episode in a world war that we know was full of lies.
All I’m saying is the way people talk about nukes doesn’t match the paradoxical logic of war – and it never has. The entire narrative is so bizarre that it leaves me with profound suspicion.
