Prof. Louis René Beres
Normally, geometry and chaos are mutually exclusive. Still, when applied to complex considerations of American national security and foreign policy, this juxtaposition could make perfect sense. Even in chaos, prima facie, there can be sense and form. Accordingly, for those seeking optimal national security postures for the United States, the key task must be to (1) uncover component parts of world system chaos; and (2) “navigate” through these interrelated parts toward more conspicuously promising global futures.
Sometimes, the strategist can learn from then poet. Recalling TS. Eliot’s The Family Reunion (1939), it has always been a “world of insanity.” Today, however, the perils are both universal and existential. Now, the ultimate task is to avoid “the other side of despair.”[1]
American National Security Policy as Intellectual Responsibility
How to proceed? Core answers lie in concept formation, hypotheses and theories. Theories are “nets,” observes the German poet Novalis: “Only those who cast, can catch.”
It would be hard enough for the United States to deal singly with each prospective threat to national security, but the challenge will be even more daunting because these threats are multiple, intersecting and “force-multiplying.” Among other things, this greater difficulty could include widening ambits of synergy[2] within our extant system of global anarchy or chaos.[3] In any such hard to decipher expansions, the calculable “whole” of all plausible harms would be greater than the sum of its “parts.”
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