It’s no longer just a “derangement syndrome.” US President Donald Trump’s musings about war with Venezuela, acquisition of Greenland, renewed nuclear weapons testing, strengthened Turkish military forces, and hi-tech weapon sales to Qatar will have injurious effects. These effects point cumulatively toward chaos.
The 2025 movie A House of Dynamite suggests a scenario in which the nuclear aggressor is not identifiable. This narrative is entirely credible. As the number of nuclear powers increases, the plausibility of an “anonymous attacker scenario” must also increase.
Since the 17th century, global stability has depended on a presumed “balance of power.” But this “balance” has never been anything more than simplifying fiction. In today’s world of rapidly approaching chaos, security deficits are being exacerbated by incoherent Trump policies.
Trump’s security policies cling tenaciously to crumbling architectures of belligerent nationalism. As a time-urgent example, chaotic disintegration is being boosted by US postures in the Middle East, where the president’s “peace” for Israel remains an evident caricature.
In world politics, metaphor can sometimes be clarifying, but analogy is still not the same as truth. There is no longer any defensible pretext for seeking a “balance of power.” Because of nuclear weapons proliferation and the resumption of American nuclear testing, calculations of system equilibrium are no longer meaningful.
'Unthinkable weapons will become thinkable.'
In essence, shrill threats of American reciprocity and vengeance will never help Israel. Following this American president’s conspicuous indifference to science and logic, nuclear spread is virtually assured. At low-tech levels (e.g., radiological weapons), this chaotic expansion includes sub-state terrorist organizations in Turkey and Syria.
There is more. During certain periods of competitive risk-taking, “unthinkable” weapons will become “thinkable.” Most worrisome will be (1) new nuclear powers that operate with deficient systems of command and control; and (2) already-nuclear powers led by unstable decision-makers.
Trump has mused openly about nuclear weapons as usable instruments of war and vengeance. But the only rational use of nuclear weapons is deterrence ex ante, not revenge ex post. Russian President Vladimir Putin expresses similarly dangerous nuclear musings, and North Korean nuclearization was never neutralized by Trump.
An integral aspect of geostrategic chaos would be enemy irrationality. If the United States or Israel should at some point have to face a jihadist state adversary with access to nuclear weapons (e.g., Iran backed by North Korea), both countries’ deterrence postures could be undermined. Inter alia, any such challenge could signal unique threats of nuclear terrorism or nuclear war.
These unprecedented threats would be enlarged by Trump’s seat-of-the-pants plan for resumed nuclear weapons testing. Moreover, Russian fears would be heightened by any US deployment of a “golden dome,” a public-relations relations-directed plan for missile defense. This plan would compel Moscow to continuously seek an “assuredly destructive” nuclear arsenal. Verifiably, it would hasten “great power” trajectories toward global chaos.
More than ever before, issues of adversarial irrationality and madness will demand refined scrutiny. In world politics, irrationality is never the same as madness. An irrational adversary is one that could at some point value intangible goals more highly than national self-preservation. An example would be a jihadist state adversary oriented to bewildering elements of “martyrdom.”
For the United States and Israel, a mad adversary could be “worse” than an irrational one. As this enemy would display no determinable preference ordering, it would not be subject to calculable threats of military deterrence. Here, too, Trump’s limited understanding of nuclear risk calibrations could lead America and Israel away from urgent policy reevaluations.
In any event, no choice between mad and irrational adversaries would be available to the United States or Israel. Whether the two allied states would do better to confront irrationality or madness will not be Washington’s or Jerusalem’s decision to make.
“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,” prophesied Irish poet William Butler Yeats, “and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” What should reasonably be expected regarding nuclear war “tides”? There would be no rescue by frenetic arms racing, no solutions from designated political authority, and no reassuring answers in Trump-favored “common sense.” It is only by elevating logic and science above US presidential intuition that a rapidly dissembling United States could avoid eventual nuclear war.
Species survival has not been a linear process. Unless the United States, Israel, and other major states refuse to accept Trump’s visceral policies, once-preventable nuclear wars could rage until every sturdy flower of culture has been trampled. At that already foreseeable stage, millions would perish in sequential quakes of primordial anti-reason.
Since the 17th-century Peace of Westphalia, world politics can best be examined as a system. Accordingly, events in any one part of this continuously anarchic world could affect what happens in some or all of the other parts.
Whenever deterioration would be marked and begin to spread from one country to another, various corollary effects would undermine the traditional infrastructures of “balance.” When deterioration would be rapid and catastrophic, as would be the case following the start of any unconventional war or act of unconventional terrorism, intolerable harms would accompany the poet’s “blood-dimmed tide.”
From such a determinable chaos, there would be neither escape nor sanctuary.
The writer, an emeritus professor of international law at Purdue University, is the author of many books and scholarly articles on international law, nuclear strategy, nuclear war, and terrorism, including Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; second edition, 2018).