Course correction

Can we discuss just-war principles without reference to current events?

Welcome back to our Substack Seminar on just-war principles!

If you are just joining us, I’d encourage you to look back on previous episodes, to gain a better sense of what we’re about and to learn the “ground rules” for this discussion. For the full experience, read up from the bottom of the segments listed here. But you don’t need to know everything, and you can always catch up later; we’re happy to have you join us right now!

Once again let me encourage readers (and listeners) to join in our discussion, asking your questions or making your arguments in the Comments section. I know from experience that this topic provokes lively and enlightening debates, and I’m waiting for our little Substack Seminar to reach what you might call a “critical mass.” As I explained last week, I’ve set aside the outline that I’d presented for our discussion, in hope of jump-starting those debates.

Current events have thoroughly derailed my original plans for this Substack Seminar. I had intended to set a schedule roughly similar to the one I had used for a college course: setting out the basic principles of just-war teaching, then taking a brief historical tour, explaining how the teaching has developed over the centuries. Moreover, I had envisioned a detached, strictly non-partisan, almost academic approach to the topic, avoiding current political controversies.

But as I explained at the outset, it is difficult to avoid those controversies completely, and during the past several weeks, they have seemed unavoidable. How can one talk about just-war practices today, without thinking about the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza (and elsewhere)? What is the use of trying to illustrate a point with a reference to, say, the Boer War, when these current conflicts are front-and-center in our everyday thoughts?

So I have tried to steer a middle course: emphasizing the principles of the just-war tradition, while using contemporary illustrations. There are dangers in that approach, because a) some readers may be annoyed by my political perspective, and b) the facts about contemporary conflicts are very much in dispute— they always are— and so nearly any judgment is necessarily provisional. I am trying to be clear in saying, when I refer to current conflicts, that IF the facts are as stated, then we can draw certain conclusions. That way, if a reader thinks I have the facts wrong, he can draw a different conclusion without dismissing the fundamental moral principle in question.

At this point I think I should pause— not only in this presentation, but in the course of this discussion generally— and ask you, the participants, which way you would like to proceed. Should we make this a forum for discussion on contemporary conflicts: a discussion that would be based on the principles of just-war reasoning? Or should I steer back toward my original plan, and avoid the heated debates? I’m be grateful for your input.

For today, however, let me focus on the recent events that make me reluctant to discuss the implications of the Battle of Agincourt. (We might get to that topic next week!)

First, the Israeli air strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar.

There can be little debate that leaders of Hamas are legitimate military targets; in that respect the attack is easy to justify. However, they were in Qatar preparing for unofficial ceasefire negotiations. Needless to say, the attack ended any prospect of negotiations. So did this attack bring Israel any closer to a just peace?

Insofar as the air strike wiped out the leadership of Hamas, Israel could declare a major victory. But after initial claims that the entire terrorist organization had been effectively decapitated, follow-up reports were more restrained; some top Hamas leaders apparently escaped. And those survivors, it’s safe to say, will be even more reluctant to enter into negotiations with Israel in the future.

Targeted attacks on an enemy’s military leadership— “decapitation,” in strategic parlance— always carry another danger. Deprived of leadership, the enemy forces are more likely to surrender. But if no one is left with the authority to surrender, the war may drag on needlessly.

The strike in Qatar was problematic for another reason: precisely because it was an air attack on a target in Qatar: a sovereign country, with which Israel is not at war. Under any ordinary circumstances this would itself be an act of war. But the circumstances are far from ordinary. The leadership of Hamas was living comfortably in Qatar, with the tacit consent of that country’s leadership. So the relevant question becomes: At what point does an aggrieved nation have the moral right to attack its enemies when they seek shelter in another, theoretically neutral nation? On that question, the just-war tradition has not developed the sort of guidance that is needed in the 21^st century.

To complicate matters still further, the international response to the Israeli strike has been muted. Even the protest lodged by Qatar seemed a pro forma performance, entered into the record but not followed up with the vigor one might expect from an outraged nation. Is it possible that some quiet backdoor talks had occurred, and Israel knew that Qatar would not react too angrily? Even if that was not the case here, surely it could be in some other case: A country that lacked the power to evict terrorists from its territory might even welcome a third-party attack on them.

Second, the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Wait, a reader might say; that murder was a domestic crime, arguably domestic terrorism, not an act of war. But is that altogether clear?

We have not yet discussed revolution: a tricky topic from the just-war perspective. But the leading theorists of Marxism, like Leon Trotsky and Karl Kautsky and Rosa Luxemburg, saw terrorism as an instrument of revolutionary warfare. It is not clear whether the assassin who killed Charlie Kirk thought of himself as a revolutionary or as a terrorist. But the rising tide of leftist political violence certainly has the “look and feel” of a revolutionary movement, and the rhetoric of leftist leaders is frequently quite explicit in calling for regime change. And whether or not he had thought through the consequences of his action, the shooter certainly did advance the goals that Trotsky and the other revolutionary theorists explained.

Terrorism has several related purposes. First and most obvious, terrorists eliminate their political rivals. (The militaristic government that drove Japan into World War II came to power after years in which assassination was almost a routine political tactic.) Second the crimes committed by terrorists constitute a direct challenge to the rule of law, and thus to the governing regime. Third the climate of fear induced by random violence encourages panic, making effective government impossible, thus paving the way for revolutionary change— or for another country to step in and seize control.

No regime, however powerful, can endure for long without the consent— even if it is the enforced consent— of the governed. (Recall how the Soviet empire, which had used brutal force to quash dissent for so many years, finally collapsed, not because of any external threat but because the people simply refused to obey.) Domestic terrorists directly challenge the authority of the government, and their violent actions are oriented toward that same end. In that respect, I would argue, they are revolutionaries, and thus can be scrutinized in the just-war perspective.

A final note: Terrorism in one country can be encouraged and financed by leaders in another country. (Again Trotsky explained how it could be done; today Islamic countries are providing clear examples.) We must now recognize that terrorism— whether international or domestic, state-sponsored or not— is a new form of warfare, requiring new forms of moral analysis in the just-war tradition.

Enough! I really did not intend to devote so much time to contemporary conflicts. In fact my intention, in proposing this topic, was to revive the tradition of just-war thinking: a tradition that is in danger of being lost today, because that just-war tradition is in turn based on a Christian frame of reference, which itself has been so badly eroded. That is why I propose— if readers will agree— to look next at the early history of the just-war tradition, and show its development through the centuries when Christian faith came to dominate the thinking of the Western world. In his fine book War and the Christian Conscience, Paul Ramsey made the argument beautifully:

If we live in a post-Christian age, it is not surprising that we also live in a post-just-war age. Instead of tinkering with this age by making scientific studies of how policy decisions are in fact made in it, it may be necessary for us to awaken to the fact that we have to go forward with the patient work of entering a new age. To this end, perhaps it may be helpful to take a look backward into that period of Christian history in which, whatever the brutalities of actual war, war was in theory never to be engaged in unless it was just to do so, and then only in a just manner, and when war was at least attempted to be kept just in practice— precisely because generations of men had their consciences formed by love-directed conceptions of justice and of right conduct.