Israel’s Old War Theory

October 19. 2024 by Anthony Matoria

Israel’s determination in its current conflicts with Hamas and Hezb’allah is vexing to Western political classes.  Whereas Israel asserts that it is attending to its immediate security and long-term survival, Western diplomats and heads of government have their own focus, perceiving that they are engaged in a sophisticated and nuanced Great Game campaign.

One way to think about Israel’s present conflicts — certainly not the exclusive way but a reasonable one, is to consider it as a war between Israel and Iran, with battles in Gaza and Lebanon.  Such consideration suggests two interrelated concepts that hint at the possibilities and perils of the present crisis.

The first such consideration is the Decisive Battle.  Throughout history, many wars ended as the result of a single engagement.  The Battle of Aegospotami ended the Peloponnesian War, the Battle of Zama ended the Second Punic War, the Battle of Tsushima ended the Russo-Japanese War, the battle of Waterloo ended the Napoleonic Wars, etc.  The pre–World War II Japanese war strategy was called Kantai Kessen, which means “decisive naval battle.”

There are some characteristics of decisive battle doctrine that may be useful in analyzing the position in which Israel presently finds itself.  In this regard, the experiences of Republican and Imperial Rome provide useful examples.

During the Second Punic War, the Romans suffered a devastating defeat at Cannae.  That battle, however momentous, was not decisive.  It did not end the war; the decisive Roman victory at Zama did.  Likewise, the Romans, in contending with Cimbric invasions of Roman territory, lost the battles of Noreia and Aurausio, but these were not decisive.  The Roman victory at Vercellae was.  It seems almost trivially obvious in retrospect that one of the things that enabled the expansion and success of ancient Rome was its tendency to avoid decisive defeats, while keenly attentive to opportunities for decisive victories. 

Another important point is that the Battle of Zama, although it ended the Second Punic War, did not prevent the third.  It did, however, establish a peace that lasted 52 years.

Not all wars end with decisive battles.  Belligerents may adopt strategies of attrition or driving an opponent to economic exhaustion.  Negotiated peace appears to be quite common throughout history, even in the absence of a decisive victory for one side or the other.  Whether or not a country pursues a strategy of decisive battle depends on other factors.  In the case of Israel, these may include the erratic support and unreliability of its supposed allies.

The Decisive Battle doctrine appears archaic in modern world politics.  The prevailing view seems to be that wars should not be won, and if it should happen that victory occurs, the modern preference is that the victory be abandoned, often in the most irrational and humiliating way possible.  The underlying reason for this seemingly bizarre situation is, arguably, that globalist ideology as expressed by so-called elites is not to want a hegemon, or even the appearance of one, in areas of the world that are important to world commerce and contain significant resources, particularly hydrocarbons.  They prefer low-level, persistent conflicts among surrogates, because the interests that animate the ideologies are not necessarily national or humanitarian interests, and the process of advancing those interests is not good-faith diplomacy.  Decisive battles are not favored because victory is not.

These circumstances are not novel.  The British, for example, sent a fleet to the Sea of Marmara to dissuade the ascendant Russians from sacking Constantinople during the Russo-Turkish war of 1877.  The intention was to maintain the balance of powers of Eastern Europe, with the arguable result of assisting the ascension of a unified Germany with its subsequent consequences.  Unintended consequences do not respect good intentions or insular interests.  This becomes particularly relevant when, as now, international elites appear to be singularly unimpressive.

What appears to drive present international policy is maintenance of a balance of resentments.  It seems that a narrow, obscure, and parasitic collection of globalist interests prefers policies implemented by perfidy, back-stabbing, alliances of convenience, and pandering to preferred constituencies. 

Maintaining a manageable tension in the Middle East is not the only consideration in international political thinking.  There are also considerations of domestic American politics.  Israel can obviously perceive that over-reliance on American support is liable to provoke an almost existential anxiety every four years, wondering which caricature of the Jewish State will predominate in a given American election cycle.

Israel knows that Iran cannot achieve its professed objectives without the use of proxies and surrogates.  Decisive battles are such because they destroy the ability of an opponent to maintain hostilities, without regard for that opponent’s underlying animus or motivation.  Decisive battles are not symmetrical.  Whether or not a battle is decisive often depends on which side wins.  Had the Romans lost at Zama, the war likely would have continued.  This fact makes the risk/benefit analysis favor decisive battles when victory would be decisive but defeat would not.  Because decisive defeats destroy a combatant’s ability to fight, if Israel were to sustain such a defeat, it would cease to exist.

Given these contingencies, one can see how Israel might perceive that emasculating Iran’s proxies might give it some version of a decisive victory, even if doing so might annoy fickle and inconsistent Western policy-makers.  Israel may believe that negotiation and submitting to diplomatic imperiousness is unlikely to bring a closure to at least this stage of the conflict.  It may be unwilling to endure sporadic atrocities on its soil and citizens to maintain the fiction that international elites care equally about everyone.  It may have decided that the more propitious course is to force a decisive battle, even if the results, like Rome’s victory at Zama, last only a few dozen years.  Perhaps that is why they have undertaken to eradicate the leadership of Iran’s proxies.  It might also explain why they have chosen to do so against the protests of an increasingly feckless international community.