Just wars (1) – Civility on the battlefield and in the Oval Office

A ‘day of American infamy’?

The Oval Office on a peaceful day (White House, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

War. There’s a lot of it going around.

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has just marked its third anniversary with a verbal bust-up between the embattled president of Ukraine and his imperious counterpart in Washington.

• The ceasefire of sorts in Gaza has just ended its first phase with a second still to be imagined, let alone agreed. A febrile atmosphere surrounds the pause in hostilities in Lebanon. On the weekend, Israel stopped aid shipments until Hamas agrees to prolong phase one.

• Syria seems to have ended a war we had stopped paying attention to. It’s not clear what any peace that follows will look like.

• M23 rebels have seized territory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo with support of the government of neighbouring Burundi.

• Crowded out of public attention, a civil war in Sudan persists with devasting impact on a fragile population caught in the crossfire and facing famine. No one who cares has a voice that can rise above the din.

Standing on the sidelines, we wish for peace, but wishing won’t make it so. Fighting won’t either. But then, not fighting might not bring peace.

As he scolded Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the Oval Office on Friday, February 28, Donald Trump insisted that what he wanted most was not Ukraine’s rare earth metals and other minerals, but “to end the death”. As civility disintegrated, the two men – and then Vice President J.D. Vance – talked over each other. “You’re gambling with World War Three,” Trump said. Twice. “And what you’re doing is very disrespectful to the country, this country, that’s backed you far more than a lot of people said they should have.”

After scrapping a planned celebratory lunch and signing of an accord to let America exploit much of Ukraine’s natural resources, Trump dismissed Zelenskyy from the White House and wrote on social media: “I don’t want advantage, I want PEACE. He disrespected the United States of America in its cherished Oval Office. He can come back when he is ready for Peace.”

Meanwhile, sirens sounded across Kyiv, warning of the potential of renewed shelling from Russian forces.

Let’s use this as the backdrop to think aloud about the justifications for war, about what makes warfare just. It calls our attention of other important issues facing the world today: migration, climate change, friendship and its opposites.

Over the next several weeks these posts will pull back from the daily horrors on the battlefields and tragic-comic episodes of what we might call the recent un-diplomacy in the Oval Office. This is the first of series on the idea of a just war and the concepts it feeds into: justice itself, the nature of sovereignty; the conduct of war, of peace, and of peace-making.

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In the Western philosophical tradition, the notion of a just war has occupied the minds of many thinkers, e.g., Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Grotius. Michael Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars (published first in the aftermath of the Vietnam war and revised in 2006) used the example of World War Two to warn against an simple slide into pacifism, attracting a great following and much critique. Scholars and practitioners of politics, religion and ethics have described many layers of nuance. They invite us to think at several levels:

War

What are the dimensions of war? When does skirmish or conflict turn into war? How does aggression stack up – legally, morally – against defence? Is there a clear line between them?

We know war, by definition, involves enemies. Possibly friends or maybe allies. But are there other types of actors? The adage “You’re either for us or against us” is an expression with many fathers (the Book of Joshua, Aristotle, Matthew, Mark, Luke, Cicero, Lenin, Orwell, Mussolini) and some mothers (Hillary Clinton, Sarah Palin). But is it accurate?

Justice

All wars are bad. They kill people and destroy what people have made of the territory they attack and defend. Being bad may not be the same thing as being wrong. What justifies war?

And this: Is all killing in war bad? Or the other way around: What justifies killing in war?

Sovereignty

In its usual definition, the sovereign reigns over a territory, making the final decision over disputes. The authority of the sovereign must come from somewhere. Where? From power (i.e., might makes right)? Wealth? Privilege? Intellect? A supernatural ordination of the sovereign? Or is it consent of the governed, and if so, how constructed?

And what are the dimensions of territory? Boundaries are frequently mere conventions, agreed among sovereigns and accepted by their successors. But boundaries are difficult to defend, and the difficulty rises with developments of new technologies – the wheel, the boat, the internal combustion engine, the airplane.

Let’s not stop there. When countries are connected electronically, aggression needn’t mean any physical person crossing any physical boundaries (i.e., not quite territory, with is roots in terra firma). What of territory created, like a man-made island?

And what of airspace, or the space above the air?

Peace

What conditions constitute peace? How does it differ from ceasefire, or armistice, or truce? Does peace require peacekeepers, whether in personnel, defence systems, or incentives?

Peace-making and -keeping

“It is harder to make peace than to destroy it.” That’s another adage with many fathers and some mothers. The processes of getting from W back to P – of rolling the alphabet backwards and the clock forwards – seem to matter.

… and in the New Washington …

Back, then, to that encounter in the Oval Office, and to establish some historical perspective.

Bret Stephens, a columnist on the conservative side of the New York Times opinion spectrum, put it this way:

If Roosevelt had told Churchill to sue for peace on any terms with Adolf Hitler and to fork over Britain’s coal reserves to the United States in exchange for no American security guarantees, it might have approximated what Trump did to Zelensky. Whatever one might say about how Zelensky played his cards poorly – either by failing to behave with the degree of all-fours sycophancy that Trump demands or to maintain his composure in the face of JD Vance’s disingenuous provocations – this was a day of American infamy.

Over the next month, and perhaps a bit more, let’s think about current affairs and some of these ancient concepts and contemporary instances. This will be, for me, an exploration, a chance to learn. I claim only modest knowledge. But I’ll add motivated curiosity, a desire to understand both the possibilities and limitations of thoughts and actions.

Let’s look at what thinkers write and say about them. Next time, though, I’ll tell you a story about what my father called my war, Vietnam, where the justice of war becomes personal. It’s a story I don’t recall having ever told anyone before.

These are stories about …

Walzer, M. (2006). Just and Unjust Wars (4th ed.). New York: Basic Books.