Just War

Wielding the divine power to destroy strongholds

The term "just war" contains an internal contradiction. War is inherently unjust, and the great challenge of our time is how to deal with evil, tyranny, and oppression without killing huge numbers of people. — Howard Zinn, Terrorism and War

How many wars has the U.S. been involved in?

It’s a surprisingly difficult question to answer. The Department of Veterans Affairs lists twelve, but at least a couple of them—the Indian Wars and the Global War on Terror—are vague at best. The dates given for the former are “approximately 1817-1898,” which is hilariously discordant from Wikipedia’s assertion of 1609-1890. The U.S. Army gives the range as 1790-1891. Casualty numbers are suspiciously round: The VA gives an estimate of battle deaths at 1,000, while a fellow by the name of Jeffrey Friedman, writing in The Journal of Conflict Resolution, wields an incomprehensible statistical trick to conjure up a very confident 10,476.

The Global War on Terror is even fuzzier. The mere fact of its absurd name appearing in government documents is part of the lasting legacy of the Bush administration’s flimsy attempt to cram its Iraq invasion into the U.S. response to 9/11. Plenty of people lambasted the notion of declaring war on an idea, but it looks all the sillier when you read the VA’s assertion that the war ended on September 11, 2021. I don’t recall any surrender documents being signed by terrorism on that date. We literally declared victory and went home. 

The lack of specificity in these two “wars” underlines something about the way the U.S. has operated for a very long time. For the (relative) crystal clarity of an event like the Second World War, a great deal of U.S. history has been characterized by warlike behavior that isn’t perhaps precisely war. Our navy is striking Houthi rebels in Qatar; are we at war with them? Well, technically no—the Houthi are not a nation-state so that can’t be a war, though anyone on the receiving end of a missile strike would probably be hard pressed to describe the difference. What about the countless military and quasi-military operations in Africa over the last thirty-plus years? For the last couple decades these have tended to get lumped into the Global War on Terror, presumably because twelve wars looks better on paper than a hundred, but a hundred is not a crazy number. Beyond the big twelve there are plenty of undisputed minor league actions ranging from sporadic airstrikes to the undermining of local elections. These included, depending who you ask and how you count them, the U.S. tally stands between 107 and 305 wars or hostile actions against other countries. 

I feel pretty safe in saying that however you define them, there are three that would be viewed by a solid majority of Americans as unequivocally necessary—The American Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II. My evidence for this comes mainly from film and television and popular history books, which tend toward hagiography as more or less the baseline take. You can find a more nuanced view of WWII in Studs Terkel’s oral history of the war, and it’s not impossible to find people who will tell you that the Revolution was mostly about a bunch of aristocrats trying to avoid paying taxes. But that kind of nuance doesn’t fit neatly into a two-hour movie about six guys representing each geographical region of the U.S. bonding under hostile fire. On the other hand, one can fairly readily conjure up reasonable arguments in favor of the War of 1812 or WWI or even Korea, but at best these wars lack the moral weight of whacking a couple evil empires or purging the nation of slavery. 

And then there are the others. Vietnam, the Indian Wars, the Mexican War, the Spanish American War, and all this business in the Middle East that kinda looks like three wars in a trenchcoat. None of these have a great reputation. 

So what is it, exactly, that distinguishes these wars from one another, from a moral or ethical standpoint? Well, who knows what sort of justifications for any and all wars have been laid to paper or spoken before wavering crowds of citizens called upon to allow their bodies to be torn up like pulled pork in the interest of some dictatorial government in a distant corner of the world or lebensraum or whatever, but the best of them probably rely upon—or in the case of immoral wars have sought to conceal—some manifestation of the theory of just war. 

This sounds like a circular argument: why was WWII a war worth fighting? Well, it was a just war. Turns out people have been struggling with this topic for a long while, and the frameworks or rubrics that have developed show enough commonalities to suggest that the struggle to contain—or concretely justify—war has some fundamental place in the human psyche. Kinda like war itself I suppose.

The modern European/American concept of just war owes a lot to the Catholic Church, and to Thomas Aquinas in particular for codifying the criteria for just war all the way back in the second half of the 13th century, although the foundations of his work were established by Saint Augustine in the early 5th century, and Augustine in turn drew from Greek philosophers a thousand years prior. Over this long history the idea has grown with almost teleological drive toward a modern consensus view, with a few interesting side quests in which governments sought without much success to establish nationalist or monarchical rationales. The idea that war is a necessary evil appears to be one that cuts across almost all cultures and all of history, and all serious thinkers on the matter have sought to justify or restrict it through this particular instrument.

Ok so enough with the past. What defines a just war? The modern consensus is divided into two parts: jus ad bellum—the right to go to war, and jus in bello—right conduct in war. There are some formulations that address a third category: jus post bellum, which concerns the behavior of belligerents post-conflict. We can discuss these in greater detail later; what interests me at the moment is jus ad bellum. What criteria must be met to justify a nation going to war? There are four. Let’s address them one at a time:

Just authority. The idea here is that just wars may only be declared by governments that are themselves just. Any society that represses justice within its own borders has no authority to bring military force to bear against others. This disqualifies, for instance, Nazi Germany, and the Confederate States of America, since both repressed, enslaved, and/or murdered a good portion of their own constituencies. By contrast, the United States and its immediate precedents could make at least a defensible case¹ for its authority to wage WW2, the Civil War, and the Revolution. 

Just cause. The nation in question must be able to show that it has been wronged in a way that only war can put right. Unprovoked aggression is about as good a reason as you can get, as is oppression of one people by another, and further more this requirement extends to the defense of allies, so again the U.S. can make a strong case for just cause in each of the aforementioned conflicts. Nazi Germany not so much. 

Just intention. This criterion limits just war to the pursuit of the just cause, and no further. Whatever you think of the 1991 Gulf War, the United States limited its actions to the expulsion of the Iraqi army from Kuwait, and did so specifically to adhere to the principle of just intention. George H.W. Bush may have been a pinched, cold, propagandizing spook, but he wasn’t without principles. Similarly, during WW2 the U.S. and its allies stopped once the Nazi regime had been defeated, and did not, as many advocated, continue to push east to similarly defeat the Soviets. 

Last resort. War can be prosecuted only when all other options have been exhausted. During WW2 and the Civil War the U.S. were spared deliberation over this question since both wars began with hostile attacks on U.S. military installations. The American Revolution is perhaps slightly more ambiguous, although the complaints enumerated in the Declaration of Independence are substantial, and in any event the American colonies didn’t technically start the war—they simply declared their separation from Britain, to which the latter responded with force. 

And that’s it. Meet those criteria and you too can start a war with a clean conscience. Have fun out there and don’t get hurt!

So the obvious thing to do at this point is to take these criteria and apply them to one of the wars we’ve got cooking in the world today. Is Ukraine fighting a just war? Well, they have a democratically elected government which, while still struggling with corruption, is moving in the right direction and is capable of providing justice for its population. They were invaded without any legitimate reason, which addresses both just cause and last resort. And they aren’t trying to nuke Russian cities or take over Moscow or anything like that; they simply want the Russians out of their territory.² For these same reasons the U.S. is arguably justified in assisting Ukraine. 

What about Russia? Well, their recent election was clearly a sham; political opposition leaders are routinely jailed or murdered; even citizens risk imprisonment for merely expressing their political opinion. So there’s no just authority. The invasion of Ukraine was predicated on the highly dubious pretense of “de-Nazifying” the country, which would frankly be a weak cause even if it were true—just war doesn’t give countries carte blanche to decapitate regimes that manage their internal affairs in ways they find distasteful, and Russia has produced no evidence of any kind of humanitarian crime beyond a few extremists with ugly tattoos. So no just cause. How one would in fact “de-Nazify” a country by force of arms is an open question; The only example we have of de-Nazification is the utter destruction of Germany in WW2, which was followed by an unprecedented reconstruction effort that preserved Germany’s sovereignty—here we touch lightly on that third category of just war, jus post bellum. Russia’s aim, stated often by proxies of Putin and underlined by Russian behavior in occupied territory, is very clearly to eliminate Ukraine as an independent nation—there’s no way this can be construed as just intention. And of course, Russia made no attempts to resolve whatever conflicts they claimed to have through peaceful means. No last resort. 

Of course, there are always matters of interpretation involved, and more than one writer has noted that wars are always just in the minds of those who need them. And yet, for better or worse, I believe just war theory is as good a tool as we possess to choose what to do in the face of Zinn’s great challenge. I would expect our policy makers to follow its guidance as honestly as possible in deliberations about war, and at the least it becomes abundantly clear, applying it to this war and that, when they did not. 

It also goes without saying that one cannot apply the theory unless one knows the truth, and truth is a difficult thing to come by these days. Whatever judgement we lay upon the head of Vladimir Putin, who commits crimes in the full knowledge that they are in fact crimes, I wouldn’t expect the average Russian to be aware of the moral weakness of their country’s actions. They may suspect, but in the absence of an independent press, how can they know? But similarly here in the West we have our own problems with truth, though for different reasons. The absence of independent, verifiable truth is corrosive, eating away at the foundations of society until one day it finds itself hanging in the air, some distance from the cliff edge, holding a sign reading…

1. I’m not asserting the the U.S. has been spotless in these conflicts; merely that the U.S. state was predicated on an honest thirst for justice, however imperfect in practice.

2. Just intent explains the squeamishness with which Western powers look upon drone strikes Ukraine has inflicted upon installations within Russia—especially those in which civilians are harmed. The justice of Ukraine’s position is fairly clear insofar as the specific aims of those attacks are clearly related to the struggle for strategic supremacy and not simply terrorism, but the line is very, very fine, and Russia can use Ukraine’s attacks as cover for their own.