  We provide a calculation of N-body (N>2) nucleon interactions at short
distances in holographic QCD. In the Sakai-Sugimoto model of large N_c massless
QCD, N baryons are described by N Yang-Mills instantons in 5 spacetime
dimensions. We compute a classical short distance interaction hamiltonian for N
'tHooft instantons. This corresponds to N baryons sharing identical classical
spins and isospins. We find that genuine N-body nuclear forces turn out to
vanish for N>2, at the leading order. This suggests that classical N-body
forces are always suppressed compared with 2-body forces.
