On Strategy, Speed, and Just War
Editor’s Note: This essay is a reprint from the author’s Substack letter. The author has granted permission to reprint this essay. Only minor edits were made; otherwise, it is as it appears in its original form.
The quite estimable* Brad East has a good piece in Christianity Today pushing back on those who would toss aside the moral considerations associated with the just war tradition in the name of efficiency and strategic advantage in our war in Iran. But I think he’s only partly right and may in fact concede too much to the tradition’s critics.
The realist concern with the tradition has long been that to truck too much with “justice” in war can mean letting an enemy—maybe a terrible enemy—win a conflict because they will be willing to do what the moralists will not. Fussiness over distinguishing between combatants and non-combatants, pursuing proper and proportionate means, and the like is for suckers, not for those who are willing to genuinely exercise their responsibility to advance the nation’s interests.
The better understanding of the tradition starts, rather, from the premise that war, though genuinely terrible, can be understood properly as an exercise of political justice. Like all other exercises of political justice, it’s never quite as clean as we might hope (to traffic in some understatement). But it is, or should be, an exercise in doing what is right, even in the context of what are almost always ghastly consequences. That inevitably means that there are simply things you may not do, even if it means winning a war becomes that much more difficult. In extremis, I think the just war tradition carries with it the willingness to lose rather than to do what is wrong.
So in that respect, yes, the realist worry about the tradition makes a great deal of sense, as does Brad’s rejoinder. But I think Brad concedes too much to the worry by arguing that part of the point of the tradition is to “lessen certain strategic advantages” and make it more difficult to prosecute a successful campaign. It seems to me, rather, that in the case of the Iran war—and maybe war more broadly—playing by the rules, so to speak, is actually a strategic advantage and it is the Trump administration’s entirely unsurprising disregard for at least some of those rules that has made it harder to win.
Consider the odd disjunction between our obvious and clear operational successes and the broader confusion and disquiet about the war’s ultimate conclusion. President Trump’s wild rhetorical swings between declaring his “military operation” all but over and threatening to end Iranian civilization—and everything in between—in part just reflects his unsteady governing style (there’s that understatement again) but also reflects a lack of publicly articulated clarity about what would constitute a successful conclusion to the war. Is it “regime change”? The end of the Iranians’ nuclear program? The end of their ballistic missile program? A share of oil revenues for some Trump-related company? The administration’s inability and, at this point, studied unwillingness to offer a clear and consistent rationale for the war that explains why we had to attack Iran and attack them now gives our efforts in the war a kind of strategic instability. We can achieve (and have achieved) any number of operational and tactical successes, but because it seems as though we don’t have a clear sense of what would constitute victory, the war as a whole seems terribly muddled. (Perhaps it’s the case that deep in the bowels of the White House, there is a strategy document that states an end clearly and all of the public confusion is merely misdirection or a kind of negotiating strategy. The “art of the deal,” you could imagine. But that seems unlikely.)
Now, of course, I don’t think that President Trump himself has much use for fusty old things like the just war tradition. But as a practical matter, had he felt compelled to get Congressional approval to launch the war, his administration might—might!—have then had to say clearly why we needed to go to war, and why now. And that would have been better. Pay no attention to those who suggest it would have undermined the element of surprise: it turns out that parking a couple of aircraft carriers off the shores of a country that has, in practice, been at war with us for four decades means that we might indeed be thinking of returning the favor. The Venezuelan government knew that we were coming for Maduro. The truth, I suspect, is that the administration didn’t go to Congress both because it didn’t want the legislature to think it had some kind of power over presidential prerogative and because it had such a jumbled mix of strategic objectives that to get the Congressional GOP to sign off on them would be too hard a lift. If there was a clear and compelling rationale for going to war and for going to war now, would it really have been hard to get it through Congress while our ships headed to the region?
The point is this: the tradition demands that we enter into war only for just ends, to repel an unjust aggression or prevent mass killings, for example. It also demands that wars be authorized only by proper authorities who have responsibility to pursue those ends. As Brad notes, this limits what wars you can initiate and how you can initiate them. But in the demand to pursue only just ends, the tradition forces those political authorities to think clearly about what those ends actually are and thus what would constitute a victory. If the president had clearly described to the American public—and the Iranians—why we were going to war, even without that little formality of a Congressional vote, it seems to me that we would be in a much clearer and even stronger position than we are currently. After all, if you’re in the top reaches of the Iranian government, from what we know publicly, what do you think the terms of settlement might be? Are you sure that even the Americans know? The lack of clarity about our ends means that it is much more difficult for us to achieve them.
The just war tradition’s critics are right: the tradition does make demands that “get in the way” of doing what is expedient and necessary. So has Machiavelli and his heirs always claimed about any suggestion that political authorities should try to do the right thing. And life is such that, no doubt, they are all too often correct. But life is also such that doing right, attending to the very real and inescapable moral fabric of the universe, is not some hapless, wooly-headed foolishness. It is instead, or at least it can be, the most effective way of pursuing a just and decent order in a fragmented and fallen world. It is rarely clean, and in matters of war, it may ask us to do tragic and terrible things. But in declaiming the doing of evil things because they are evil, we make more possible the securing of good things in the end.
*Aside from his occasionally lamentable taste in movies.