Crisis Lessons For Asia From Israel Attack

Good Morning,

Over the weekend, the news of Hamas attacks on Israel were surprising and shocking. The fact that the attacks were surprising to Israel made them even more shocking to everyone else. The current situation, as bad as it is, may get worse if more parties join in and the conflict spreads. More information is coming out by the minute, so we’ll leave the play by play for later.?

As it stands today, there are enormous lessons in what has occurred for us in Asia. In fact, if one were to want to design a conflict to yield the most insights into how we should be looking at our own situations here in Asia, it would be very close to the one we are witnessing in Israel right now.?

The current conflict in Israel has lessons far more relevant, in my opinion, to us than the one in Ukraine has so far yielded, although many analysts will continue to look at both a North Korea conflict and a Taiwan Straits conflict through the lens of the Ukraine war, in other words, through the lens of large militaries moving against each other.

Let’s look at some of the issues, one by one.?

The fact that the attack took place at all.

Do you think Hamas stands a chance of ‘winning’??

Does it look like there were some over-arching military objectives Hamas intended to achieve, where if achieved, Hamas would be able to hold its position and achieve lasting gain??

Does anyone now believe—looking through the lens of history—that Israel would not hit back hard, causing lasting damage to Hamas, if not outright ending Hamas’ ability to impact future events in the region?

Most people would say no to all of the questions above—even those on the Palestinians’ side. That fact implies that Hamas, themselves, conducted this attack knowing that the outcome would be ultimate defeat, and perhaps even destruction. They knew they would lose (because there is almost no analysis that yields any different outcome) and chose to attack anyway.?

This is hugely important for those of us in Asia who look at the Taiwan Problem, the South China Sea problem, and North Korea. That is because one of the first considerations on strategy for military planners and crisis planners is the sentence, “We know they won’t, because they know they will lose.”?

“China won’t attack Taiwan because it knows it can’t win.”?

“KJU won’t attack the South because he knows he’d lose his regime.”?

This logic is considered so fundamental and undeniable that it is considered god’s own truth. But it is flawed in many ways.

• Firstly, no, we don’t know that they know that. There is always the chance that under some crazy interpretation of the chess pieces, the attacking side believes it might win. We can NEVER be sure we’re looking at the board the same way they are looking at the board. After all, conflicts would NEVER occur if both sides saw the board the same way: conflicts, be they street fights or lawsuits or wars, arise from one side misunderstanding its odds of success. If both sides are looking at the board and come to the same calculus one of the fighters backs off, litigants settle, and countries negotiate.
• Wars still sometimes occur, attacks still sometimes occur, even if one side knows it will not win, or knows the chances of success are very low. This implies that:
• Winning, in a military sense, was not the objective. There are many other objectives for which terrorists and dictators will sacrifice pieces. Here the key point is that the attacking party must believe it will achieve a limited goal and some parts of it will live to fight again another day. Goals here include terror, causing lasting political damage, creating sympathetic sentiment for a cause, demonstrating weakness that will snowball into political change, etc.

The fact that the attack took place at all—part 2.?

• For North Korea, provocations are analogous here. Provocations serve the same functions as Hamas’ traditional attacks in Israel: they get attention, demonstrate weakness on the part of the receiving side, and demonstrate how they represent a problem that cannot be solved, only managed.?
• For China, provocations around the Taiwan Straits and Taiwan, itself, as well as in the South China Sea, serve the same purpose.
• The problem is that at some point, these provocations no longer serve that function. They no longer shock. They no longer move sentiment and/or create political change. They are no longer enough to move the needle. At that point, what can we expect? We can expect what happened in Israel. We can expect the ante to be upped. That should be extremely worrying to anyone planning for crises in Northeast Asia. North Korea is now at the stage where it may believe that traditional provocations are not enough. Thus, the desire to raise the stakes with Russia: meaning is added to action, local is made more globally impactful. China is at the stage where ‘quantity has a quality all its own’: it can still move the needle by adding more planes and more ships into the theater around Taiwan. What happens when that no longer moves us?
• The goal of sacrificing pieces to expose weakness, cause pain, and seed doubt, all are aimed at tilting the playing field so that resolution can be obtained more on the attacking side’s terms. “This won’t end until you acknowledge that you can’t end it through force.”

North Korea or China, although states, can adopt the tactics of Hamas, the tactics of a terrorist group—if doing so achieves the goals above, when ‘winning’ is not the immediate goal.

We must not only expect full-on invasions and declarations of war. This is where the Ukraine war example diverges from what might happen in crisis points in Asia. But how can large nation states get away with sponsoring or conducting small terror group tactics? Normally, they can’t—unless the damage inflicted in those attacks pales in comparison to the promise of damage yet to come.?

South Korea lived for years under this exact understanding: "Whatever the North does can be tolerated, because we don’t want to start a full-on war." It’s the same calculus Russia has been relying on, vis-a-vis the use of nuclear weapons, to deny Ukraine the more powerful weapons in NATO’s arsenal. Russia can get away with inflicting a large amount of damage because the promise of even greater damage hangs over everyone’s head.?

How far does this thinking stretch? That depends on the venue and the culture of the country being attacked. How many people can North Korea get away with killing before South Korea would risk total war? If the North were to fire a ballistic missile into Seoul, killing 1000 people, is it worth it to risk 200,000 more dead to escalate? That’s a decision each country makes on its own. The attacking side absolutely takes this into consideration when designing their attacks: they want maximum effect, without crossing the line of no return. For Taiwan, that line will be in a different place. For the Philippines, related to China’s South China Sea actions, it will be in yet another place.?

If anything, the attacks in Israel demonstrate a massive intelligence and security failure.

Over the years, I have long advocated that crisis managers in Asia need to build multi-scenario crisis plans. One of the scenarios should be for a full-blown conflict with no advance notice. Conflict in South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan, are NOT analogous to the kind of crises security people deal with elsewhere. They are not the kind of crises government can be relied upon to give advance notice, or even authoritative guidance. This is for several reasons.

• These conflicts are extremely difficult to predict. They are like earthquakes, not typhoons/hurricanes. We can’t always see them coming. Even when we can see indicators of problems, they are false positives 99% of the time. (So far 100% of the time.)
• Government is in denial (because it must be) and will be in denial until the last second. This is because it is in the interest of government to be in denial. Countries like South Korea, which has developed with a proverbial Sword of Damocles hanging over its head, have always had to broadcast “Problem? What problem?” to the wider world in order to do business. Investors don’t like to be reminded that existential risk is 42 seconds away by artillery shell. That same message has been in play at every crisis point and will be should a real conflict ever come—until it is absolutely undeniably impossible to stop. “Nothing to see here.” will be the message in Taiwan, Korea, and Japan, until the tanks are rolling by in the background, Iraqi Information Minister-style.?
• Just because an intelligence function exists, doesn’t mean it can’t fail magnificently. Israel is just the latest example. Assuming we’ll get advance notice and have plenty of time to make decisions is a mistake. Crisis plans should build for that assumption and build for the scenario where there is no advance notice at all. Those two plans will be so different they will look like they have been built for completely different crises.?

Forget about the military and watch the populace.

While most of the reporting from Israel will focus on the military and government, more lessons can be learned by watching the response of the population of Israel.

• Crisis response. What are the ‘immediate’ steps the population instinctively took? Did the reactions change based on perceived proximity to danger? Most crises begin in denial then move on to the search for more information before any action is taken. From initial news reports, the attacks in some areas were so fast that most civilians seemed to still be in the denial stage. This is important to note: the more trust and reliance a population has in government, the greater governmental/security/intelligence failure will impact the ability for the population to act autonomously. Israel’s past record of success, combined with the willingness of the population to live very close to danger zones shows immense trust by that population in the capabilities of the military and government to keep them safe.?
• In Asia, trust in government is extremely high. Even small failures of expected performance are analyzed to death and seen as great embarrassments. At the risk of overgeneralizing—most citizens of (Northeast) Asia have abdicated their own responsibility for their well-being in the event of a crisis to the government. This trust and reliance has the effect of stretching the denial and information search phases out. “It’s not possible.” gets longer and “Why aren’t they telling us what to do?” gets much much longer.?
• Migration. Was there mass migration? How did it occur? How did the ‘networks’ hold up? Normally failure of one network spills out to become failure of corresponding networks. If private traffic networks jam up, did that cause public transportation to fail, causing communications networks to fail? Was the migration away from or toward safety?
• Sentiment. Ultimately, what takeaways is the population leaving with? These ‘beliefs’ will determine their next decisions and actions. They will also determine what the aftermath of the crisis will be. Remember, the attacks were launched in the first place with the goal of impacting sentiment wide and deep.?

I will leave the geopolitical ramifications and possibilities for what happens next for another time. It looks like Iran was likely involved, which leads us to wonder about Russia as well. Nothing good can come from them being involved.?

We have talked in the past about how China and North Korea are watching the Ukraine war and how it will shape their thinking about conflict in this part of the world. It is important for us to understand they will be watching what happens in Israel with exactly the same intent of optimizing for their own goals.?

Thanks for reading. Go forth and protect thyself and thy charges.

Rodney J Johnson

Erudite Risk