Proportional Response

(October 6th, 2024) 

This past week President Biden asked Israel to address Iran’s recent missile attack on Israel with a proportional response, and refrain from striking the Iranian oil industry or the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Rumor as of Sunday afternoon is that there’s been a specific offering to Israel if they will refrain - weapons and gear and that sort of thing.

To those who can remember, or have read the histories, proportional response brings back memories of Vietnam, though the idea was first enunciated several thousand years before the birth of Christ, summed up in the simple Old Testament phrase (Exodus): “An eye for an eye.” The same is also mentioned in Hammurabi’s code.

Just war also considers proportionality, though only the West really practices it, and really only since the end of World War II. It would seem the real motivation to practice proportional response had little to do with just war theory and more to do with nuclear weapons. The US began to consider proportional response in Vietnam because of concerns that the USSR - the other major nuclear power at the time (now there is China, too) - might view certain actions as escalation, and thus as a threat and we would find ourselves in a direct confrontation: nuclear power versus nuclear power. Accordingly, we sought to minimize certain actions, limiting where we could conduct air strikes, placing certain targets off limits, not mining the harbors, etc.

But deterrence actually exists when a country (or a person for that matter) believes that no matter what benefit may be gained by a certain action, the cost will be disproportionate, that is, far greater loss than any possible gain. Such a situation makes the risk unacceptable and further action is deterred; deterrence exists.

On the other hand, if a country adheres to proportionate responses, then the attacker gets to set the level of violence, the level of pain. Rather than being deterred, if a country knows that any response will be proportionate, they are free to decide when and what amount of violence to accept - or risk - and you thereby increase the probability of war. Consider the Houthis, where our responses have been proportional.

In Vietnam, proportional response had nothing to do with Vietnam itself, nor with any desire to comply with just war theory; rather, it was an effort to not anger the Soviets and thereby prevent the war from escalating into a direct confrontation with the Soviet Union. And thus we were never able to impose our will on the North Vietnamese.

All this is, oddly, almost exactly the opposite of where Israel is with Iran.

The Mullahs of Iran are in the process of building a nuclear arsenal. They’ve been working on it for at least 35 years. Search on line for AQ Khan, the “father” of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program. Khan, with some assistance from the Chinese government, began in the late 1980s transferring all sorts of technology to Iran. In fact, the unholy exchange of information and design work for weapons, missile, systems rocket antigens, uranium enrichment machinery (centrifuges) - the major elements of a nuclear weapons and missile delivery system industry, were in play, and the governments of China, North Korea, Iran and Pakistan all were involved. It’s worth noting that China is almost certainly still involved with nuclear proliferation; if not directly, then through North Korea, which has close relations with Iran, and does next to nothing without approval from Beijing.

Libya was involved initially, but Qaddafi turned all his information over to the US in 2003. That we attacked his country 9 years later underlines the point that nuclear weapons protect a nation’s independence, just ask Ukraine.

The one thing missing from the Iranian program was the enriched uranium. Per the IAEA report this past May, they should have been able to finish enriching enough Uranium in the past 3 months to have enough “weapons grade” uranium for 12 weapons. The question we might want to ask is: what do we do once they have nuclear weapons? Before they have nuclear weapons they can be stopped. Iran already has  missiles that can reach their neighbors, they also have a rocket that has put a satellite into orbit; they put a satellite into orbit 3 weeks ago. But they have no nuclear weapons to put in those missiles. Once they have a nuclear arsenal, like North Korea, the world will have do deal with them differently: “Proportionally.” Which is another way to say: gingerly. 

At the same time there is - strangely - less concern about proportional response vis-a-vis Russia. Russia has some 5,800 nuclear weapons (the US has about 5,000, China 500 the UK and France both about 300, India and Pakistan both about 175, Israel 90 and North Korea 50  (all numbers from the Federation of American Scientists).

For those who think Putin won’t use nuclear weapons, he has said that his criteria is a real threat to Russia, a condition that will be defined by him and him alone. Clearly, he has not seen that threat yet; he thinks he’s winning. Yet we have the cognoscenti arguing that we should go “hell for leather” with Moscow while Iran is dealt with “proportionally.” 

But, warfare is not about proportion, warfare is about will.

Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran are, and various predecessors, have been for 76 years, fighting an unlimited war against Israel, they wish to destroy Israel. Israel up until last year was fighting a limited war against all of them.

The problem with unlimited wars is that once a country decides that it (as embodied by the leadership) is literally fighting for survival, then that country rapidly starts shedding any limits on actions. That Israel, despite the horrible situation they have been in since 1948, maintains strict adherence to the modern laws of war is absolutely remarkable, even following the barbarism of last October that set off this latest war.

But the presence of nuclear weapons makes all this a very difficult point. Dealing with Iran “proportionately” and not addressing it now - while there is no nuclear weapon in Iran, opens up the Mid East to the likelihood that Iran will soon have nuclear weapons. 

Does anyone imagine that Iran and Hezballah consider proportionate response options when planning against Israel? What happens when they get nuclear weapons?

This is precisely the point where the Administration must stand with Israel; Iran’s nuclear “industries” must be broken while they can still be broken, that is, while Iran does not have nuclear weapons. That requires two things: breaking all the actual weapons related facilities, and breaking their ability to generate the money to rebuild those facilities, and that money comes from oil, and that means breaking the Iranian oil industry.

That will cause a spike in oil prices.

But the other option here is that Israel responds “proportionality,” and some time in the near future Iran will have a small - and growing - arsenal of nuclear weapons. Will that make the Mid East, and Mid East oil, the price of energy more or less stable?

As for Ukraine, the simple truth is that the tremendous strategic mistake of 1993 - agreeing to give up all its nuclear weapons in exchange for the security guarantee of President Clinton, compounded by the non-response of President Obama in 2014, created a situation for which there is, given the presence of nuclear weapons in Russia, no real answer. Letting Iran build nuclear weapons sets the world up for more “no real answers.”