Well, good morning. It’s good to meet you all or at least to one-sidedly meet you all. Thank you to Mark and to IRD for hosting this conference. I heard yesterday’s talks were informative and helpful. I look forward to our talk today.

This is a conference on Christianity and National Security, but we can’t ignore the elephant in the room about our domestic conflicts and competitions. With such divisiveness and such a fierce, decades-long rivalry, I think it’s important that we begin by laying down a marker. And I need to let you know that I think it’s actually sinful to root for the New York Yankees. So, thank you to any LA fans out there for bringing the Dodgers across the line.

Ty Cobb famously said that baseball was a kind of war, and, of course, he was being metaphorical. We are here to talk about other kinds of war—more literal war. You heard my bio. I served in the United States Army and am a veteran of the war in Afghanistan. My family background, however, is—if you go back far enough—in the Amish and Mennonite tradition, and they are pacifists. So, as I joined the military and spent a decade of my life working on the war in Afghanistan, I was confronted quite regularly with this question: When is war just, and what does justice require?

When is war just, and what does justice require? That animated a lot of my thinking and scholarship over the past decade. As I looked and read in the just war literature that we’ll talk about this morning, I found it a little unsatisfying because there’s such a diversity of views, and there’s not a coherent single answer within the just war traditions about when war is just and what justice requires. You have to dig a bit deeper to understand the original Christian just war tradition to get a handle on the Christian answer to these questions: When is war just, and what does justice require?

That’s what I’m going to try to give you briefly in the first half of my talk—just an overview of the just war, the Christian just war tradition. Then I’ll spend the second half of my talk trying to apply those principles to Ukraine and to Israel.

The just war tradition, the Christian just war tradition, is an alternative to three wrong answers. There are, I think, three wrong answers to the question: When is war just, and what does justice require? The three wrong answers are pacifism, realism, and holy war. Pacifism, realism, and holy war.

The pacifist tradition says that war is never justified under any conditions. The realist—the academic secular realist—says that war essentially needs no justification other than political necessity. The holy war tradition says that war must be fought for the interests of the Church to forcibly spread the gospel and defeat its enemies. I think these are all wrong answers to the question.

Realism asserts that politics is autonomous from morality and that we are allowed—even we must—ignore moral aspiration in politics, that it would be ruinous to do so. Against that view, I simply observe the prophets in the Old Testament regularly denouncing the pagan nations for their oppression, their violence, and their tyranny. It’s very clear in the biblical text that God holds all nations accountable for their conduct, and God expects all nations to govern with wisdom and with righteousness.

The holy war tradition, I think, is pretty easily refuted. Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” He told the disciples to put their swords away. There is simply no hint in Scripture that, in the New Testament age, we should ever use force or compulsion to spread the gospel. So a thousand years of Christendom got that wrong. I think it’s fairly easy to see from the Bible that the Church should not use the sword for its purposes.

I think pacifism may be a harder conversation. In my experience talking with student groups over the years, I have found that many students are gut-level pacifists—instinctive pacifists—for lack of teaching to the contrary. We have absorbed the King James translation of the Sixth Commandment. It says, “Thou shalt not kill,” and we know that Jesus said, “Turn the other cheek; do not resist an evildoer.” And so we think, “Well, maybe what Jesus is saying is we shouldn’t kill other people, even if they’re trying to kill us.”

I want you to know that that is a mistranslation of the Sixth Commandment. The Sixth Commandment does not say, “Thou shalt not kill.” In Hebrew, it says, “Thou shalt not ratsach.” Ratsach is the Hebrew word for murder and for manslaughter—not for all forms of killing. The same God who spoke the Sixth Commandment also commanded Israel to have the death penalty and to embark on wars on occasion. And so that God would not command and prohibit the same thing. Retsach prohibits murder—unlawful killing.

In the New Testament, when Jesus and John the Baptist interact with Roman centurions and soldiers, they never condemn their service. They never tell them to leave the army. When Jesus tells the centurion with saving faith in Matthew, chapter 8, he doesn’t tell him to leave the army. He doesn’t say that a condition of his faith is leaving Roman imperial service. John the Baptist similarly seems to imply the legitimacy of their service when he interacts with them.

The just war tradition understands that God made government, gave it a sword, and gave it permission to use it. God made government, gave it a sword, and permission to use it. We see this clearly in Romans, chapter 13, where the Apostle Paul writes: “There is no authority except from God. Rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. For he, the ruler, is God’s servant for your good. If you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. He is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”

The just war tradition takes this as its cornerstone. We understand that God made government, gave it a sword, and permission to use it. In the just war tradition, war is a legitimate tool of statecraft, in contrast to pacifism. It must be fought for a public purpose—for justice and peace for everyone—not for the private glory or enrichment of the ruler, in contrast to secular realism. And it must not be fought either for the parochial interests of the Church, in contrast to the holy war tradition.

In the Christian just war tradition, we understand that sovereignty is a commission from God that carries with it responsibility. Secular realists look at sovereignty, and they see ultimate power. But Christians should look at sovereignty and see ultimate responsibility. God alone has ultimate power, and he gives a grant of authority to earthly governments and gives them a charge, a commission, a responsibility to uphold earthly order in this life insofar as possible—to execute order and justice. It is just to defend and uphold the common good, including with force when necessary.

If that’s the basic groundwork for the just war tradition, the tradition then goes on and asks a series of questions about warfare: the justice of war, in war, and after war. The justice of war, in war, and after war. These have fancy Latin titles because it was medieval scholastics who coined it all: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, jus post bellum—justice of war, justice in war, justice after war. Let’s briefly talk about each one.

The justice of war simply commands the ruler that you must fight only for a just cause. You must only fight for a just cause—not merely self-defense but rather use war as an act of responsibility and even charity, even an act of love to defend justice, peace, and the common good, to defend the innocent, and, yes, even to punish the wicked. That is not the kind of language you often hear today out of the mouth of statesmen, but in the just war—the Christian just war tradition—we understand it is a legitimate purpose of war to punish the wicked.

Think about the Nazis. Think about war criminals. Think about using weapons of mass destruction on your own people. We want to punish the wicked; it is a loving act to do so. Jus ad bellum also tells statesmen and stateswomen to use war with the right intention. It’s not enough that you have a just cause; you must also truly intend that just cause in your heart. Again, this might sound strange in our public conversation today—to talk about the intentions of your heart. The just war tradition is a tradition of pastoral care within the Church, not just a tradition of writing op-eds for public consumption. It is a tradition of pastoral care. We care about the state of your heart as you’re making decisions of life and death.

The just war tradition insists that only a legitimate authority—a right authority—can wage war, meaning a duly constituted government. Let me just pause and note that if you think of war in these terms—as an act of love to uphold justice, order, and peace for all people—you absolutely will understand the legitimacy of some kind of humanitarian intervention. Humanitarian intervention. 

I was surprised when I did my research and read theologians 500 years ago explicitly raising the issue of humanitarian intervention. It’s not a recent thing, and they all endorsed it. The Christian theologians, philosophers, and jurists who looked at this carefully said, “Yes, the state has a responsibility to fight a preemptive war.” In their time, this was against pirates, against cannibals, against those who practiced human sacrifice, and against those who—in their language—committed crimes against nature. That included tyrants of unusual barbarity and cruelty. 

So again, in the Christian just war tradition, for 500 years there has been explicit endorsement for humanitarian intervention against what we today call war crimes, crimes against nature, genocide, and so forth, as well as totalitarianism. That was all under the first heading: the justice of war.

The justice in war is pretty simple and straightforward. It says: don’t use war as an excuse for murder. If you’re going to fight a war, the way you fight matters. Be very careful. Use only the amount of force necessary to win your war. Target only soldiers, not civilians. You’re not allowed to use war as a pretext to just kill a lot of people because you want to. Death is not the point of war. The death of the enemy is a lamentable, sorrowful, sad necessity to achieve the justice and peace that you must achieve through your war. And so, you should kill as few people as possible—particularly not civilians if you can avoid it.

For my money, the last category—the justice after war (jus post bellum)—is the most important one to emphasize today because it’s what we so often get wrong. You see, you could have a just cause and you could fight the war justly, and if you don’t accomplish justice in the aftermath, what was it worth? And sadly, to me, I think that is the right verdict on the war in Iraq. I think that there probably were permissible grounds for that intervention. I think we fought it the best we could, and I think it didn’t accomplish very much in the end—partly because of how we left too early. And so, that war was imperfectly just. It did not accomplish much justice or peace in its aftermath.

I think Eric Patterson, whom you’ll hear from later today, has written the best book on this subject—on justice after war—and he’s offered the idea that we should seek order, justice, and conciliation. Order, justice, and conciliation as the main principles to guide our jus post bellum efforts—our justice after war efforts. War is worthless unless, in its aftermath, you work to uphold public order, which we didn’t do very well in Iraq, work to accomplish justice to hold the bad guys accountable, and to rebuild and provide restitution to those who’ve been wronged. And then, in the long term, foster conciliation between yourself and your enemy. Conciliation—try to solve the underlying problems that led to war in the first place. And again, if you don’t do that, what was it all worth?

That was all very abstract. What does this look like today? Is it possible at all to pursue these lofty principles of justice, order, and love for your enemy? I think actually we do have the seeds of something like this in contemporary international law. Remember, we had the Nuremberg Trials, we had the Tokyo Trials, and we have the Genocide Convention. These things state that there is a law higher than the state and that state officials—the Nazi leaders—can be criminally liable individually for acts of their government when they themselves, as a government, do criminal things like genocide and aggressive warfare. They can be put on trial and hung from the gallows. We do that today. And this is not a 16th-century thing; this is a 21st-century thing—or at least a 20th-century thing.

So today, concepts like human rights and accountable governance are the way that we acknowledge there’s an authority higher than the state. That states themselves aren’t the supreme authority. They have power—they have supreme power within their realm—but they will be held accountable for what they do with that power. And that means war is just when it vindicates rights: the rights of states that have been invaded and the rights of the people who are affected by the war. War is just when it vindicates rights. 

And that answers our questions: When is war just? The violent disruption of ordered liberty is the injury in response to which just war may be waged. War may be justly waged. The violent disruption of ordered liberty is the injury in response to which we may wage war justly. 

And what does justice require? Justice requires the vindication and the restoration of ordered liberty in, through, and after warfare. Justice requires the vindication and restoration of ordered liberty in, through, and after warfare. Again, this obviously covers cases of defense against invasion, but it also covers humanitarian intervention. War is an extension of sovereign responsibility to defend the common good, and under extreme conditions, love demands intervention to punish the wicked and to defend the innocent, even when that involves crossing international boundaries. War requires us to make right the wrongs of war, make right the wrongs that caused the war, and prevent the recurrence of such war in the future.

What about Ukraine? What about Israel? How do we apply these principles in concrete cases? This is all abstract philosophy and theology, which is important, and you should all write it down. You should all learn about this, but learning how to think through particular cases and apply this kind of reasoning to real history that’s the real task of statecraft. That’s where you, if you are future leaders of international affairs, will be tested, because it’s extremely easy to lose your grip on this for the sake of political necessity. In whatever job and whatever party you’re in, you’ll find the temptation to kind of loosen your grip on the principles when you feel the pull of your daily inbox, the next promotion, or approval from your superior, who may not believe in this stuff.

So, what does it look like to walk through real cases holding on to these principles? Let’s think through Ukraine and Israel together. I think these principles help us understand what justice looks like in the Russo-Ukrainian War and the Israel-Hamas War. 

I think very easily we can start by saying that both Ukraine and Israel have a right of self-defense. That’s morally unproblematic—I hope nobody here disagrees. They are fighting just wars to defend their sovereignty and their right to live in security. 

I think it’s also important to say that there is way more at stake in both of these wars than simply Ukrainian independence or the fate of 100 Israeli hostages. I think we can see that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Hamas’s attack on Israel are also the most blatant challenges to what I’ll call the Free World—or the Free World Order—that we all live in. They are the most blatant attacks on the Free World Order that we’ve seen since World War II. 

The fight, therefore—the fight in Ukraine and in Israel—is the fight for their particular rights but also for the principles of the Free World that we live in today and that we have benefited from for almost a century. They are fighting to defend and uphold the system of ordered liberty among nations that has characterized world order for the last 80 years.

That’s a really big statement. Let me try to unpack what I mean by the Free World, because that’s doing a lot of work in my argument. A Free World Order is a kind of world order, right? Any kind of group of humans has a culture that obtains among us—at your tables, in your colleges, in your social groups. Cultures emerge from your interactions and by what you believe, what you hold dear, what is important to you, by your identities and values. And the same is true on the international stage.

We might have lived in a fascist world order if the Nazis had won. We might have lived in a communist world order if the Soviets had won the Cold War. We might live in an Islamist or jihadist world order if ISIS conquered the world. We might live in an authoritarian world order if Russia and/or China come to predominate in the world. 

But today we live, thankfully, in a Free World Order. A Free World Order is defined mostly by freedom, equality, democracy, human rights, independent sovereign nations, capitalism, free enterprise, cooperative security, the rule of law, limited government, and so on and so forth. There’s no single universal empire that tells everybody how to live their lives. We let a thousand flowers bloom. 

And I think that this Free World Order is just. It is intrinsically just. It is just because it’s a tool of security, prosperity, and influence for all free nations in the world. The principle of fairness that undergirds this makes it attractive for all states not bent on world domination. That’s why we’ve seen, over the past 80 years, an unprecedented era of peace among the great powers—so far—and a high point of human freedom in all of history. 

And you may not realize that, because the fish does not understand what the ocean is, right? We don’t see the water in which we swim. We take it for granted. It’s too big to even see. If you’re standing right next to Mount Everest, you don’t see the mountain—it’s too big. It dominates your vision. In the same way, we don’t even see the Free World Order anymore because it is right there; it fills our vision. You’ll notice it when it’s gone, I promise you that. 

And so, defending this Free World Order is, I think, a just cause. Take what I just said about the just war principles and having a just cause to fight war, and I’m saying that the defense of ordered liberty among nations is a just cause. In fact, I think free nations have a responsibility to wield the sword in defense of this culture of world order—of Free World Order. 

The defense of the Free World is a just cause. It is just to defend a system designed to prevent universal empire, to guard against ideological totalism of any kind, and to enforce limits on government’s jurisdiction. That’s what we call the Free World Order. 

It does have opponents. I think we take this for granted. The Free World does have well-armed enemies. Back in the ’90s, nobody liked to talk about things that way. “We don’t have enemies anymore; we might have rivals but no enemies.” We have enemies with really big guns who don’t like this vision that I have sketched out. Russia and China, yes, but Iran and North Korea as well do not want liberal order. They want what I would call imperial order—or maybe authoritarian order. 

In an imperial order, nations are not equal. Bigger, stronger nations get to run the world and tell smaller nations what to do. There aren’t any rules that apply to everyone. There’s only one set of rules that apply to the big dogs and one set of rules that applies to everyone else. As the Athenians say in the Melian Dialogue: “The strong do what they will, and the weak suffer as they must.” That is the world order that China and Russia want to build and inhabit. And that is not a just world order for anyone. It would be as if bullies were in charge of your schools.

Christian realism and the just war tradition recognize that fighting the bully is an important and just responsibility—not just because they are bullies, but also because it’s an act of love for everyone else on the playground. We exercise love when we face down the bully. It is a love for everyone else; it is a love for ourselves and our people. 

It’s also an act of love for the bully to draw a line and to hold him accountable for what he is doing. Every parent knows—and you’re all too young to be parents—that loving discipline of your children is love. To abandon discipline is child abuse. And I fear that oftentimes, on the international stage, we are guilty of that kind of child abuse by not enforcing plain rules against abuse, aggression, terrorism, and tyranny.

And so, that means that the war in Ukraine and the war in Israel is a war over what kind of world we’re going to live in: a Free World Order in which every nation can determine its own future, or an imperial world order in which great powers dominate neighboring states. 

Russia invaded Ukraine to take its territory, but more than that, Russia invaded Ukraine to alter world order—to impose its vision of imperial order, to challenge the principles of the Free World. Russia invaded Ukraine to challenge NATO, our alliance, to stop NATO from expanding and shrinking the sphere within which Russia might act as an imperial power. Russia invaded Ukraine, to say it another way, to stop Ukraine from being a free and equal member of the world, and by doing so, to send a message to every other nation that their freedom is subject to Russia’s veto.

Look, if Russia gets away with this, they don’t just get a slice of Ukrainian territory—they get a heckler’s veto over everyone. Everyone in their near abroad, and perhaps further than that. What do I mean by a heckler’s veto? They get to say, “Well, you better act the way we want you to, or else.” That threat—that Damocles’ sword—can act as a veto against all other nations’ foreign policies so long as Russia gets away with this.

And similarly, Iran, I believe, has sponsored decades of attacks on Israel and now, through Hamas, has again done the same thing. They aim to establish themselves as the regional hegemon and to show that every other nation in that region—that their freedom, security, and independence—are subject to Iran’s veto. 

I’ve just characterized the war against Hamas as essentially a war against Iran, which it is. And I would want you to understand that the Israel-Hamas war is right now a proxy war of Israel against Iran that may become an overt war any day now. If Russia and Iran get away with it, the world will look very different than it has since 1945.

We should care because the invasion of Ukraine and the attack on Israel are attacks on the principles that undergird the Free World Order. And so, the question is: What kind of world do we want to live in? What kind of world do you want to live in? What kind of world do you want to help build and construct? Any IR majors out there? I’m a constructivist. We all construct the world with every act and decision. And so, the decision to stand by Ukraine or abandon Ukraine is a decision about what kind of world we’re going to consciously construct and build. Same thing with Israel.

I could leave it there, but as I conclude, let me try to briefly walk through just a couple of things on jus in bello and jus post bellum with Israel and Ukraine: justice in war and justice after war. Ukraine and Israel have a just cause to fight. They’re fighting for themselves, they’re fighting for all of us, and they’re fighting to uphold the Free World. But it matters how they fight. It matters how they fight. We must always hold ourselves and our allies to the highest standards of justice in war, even though our enemies do not hold themselves to those standards.

You’ve likely heard some troubling reports about Israel and its bombing in Gaza. Now, I’ve looked into this, and I want you to understand, first, that no matter what mistakes Israel has made, Hamas is clearly worse. They deliberately target civilians for kidnapping and murder. They hide in hospitals and schools. They wear no uniforms. All those are war crimes.

Second, let’s be careful not to give too much credence to uncritical reporting from international media with a decades-long track record of hostility to Israel. They’re not terribly reliable when it comes to reporting on Israel. 

Third, I am a bit bothered by some of the reports that I’ve looked into about Israel’s conduct in the war, and it’s okay to say so. They are our allies. We are giving them weapons. We want them to win this war. It’s important that they win it justly. In the early days of the war, some Israeli officials said some pretty troubling things—comparing Hamas to animals and vowing to impose a total blockade on food and water on all of Gaza—and that would be wrong. Now, they’ve backed off on some of that. There are other reports that they’ve loosened their targeting to allow up to 20 civilian deaths so long as they kill just one militant. Again, in my view, I think that might be irresponsibly lax.

Again, I think maybe that was characteristic of the first few months of the war. As it’s gone on, I’ve seen less of that. But it should not just be okay for us to say these things—we should feel the responsibility to say these things. They are our allies. We want them to win. We are helping them. We’re giving them arms, weapons, and intelligence. Let’s be loving towards them and towards our enemies by insisting on fighting with justice.

This is important because the last criterion of just war—justice after war—must result in peace. We seek order, justice, and conciliation, and how you fight affects your chances of accomplishing peace and justice in the aftermath. If you are too negligent in how you fight, you’re directly harming your opportunities to accomplish justice and conciliation in the aftermath.

In Ukraine, I think justice after war clearly means a recovery of lost territory, a very expensive reconstruction operation, and membership in NATO. Someday, I think it means rapprochement with Russia—probably in a post-Putin Russia—but I think we need to hold that on the table as the ultimate vision of justice here. There’s got to be normalcy with Russia someday again—probably not with Putin still in power, but that is what conciliation would mean. It would mean bringing Russia back into the family of responsible nations in the world. 

That is the ultimate vision of justice and peace that the Russo-Ukrainian War should achieve. Yes, defend Ukrainian sovereignty. Yes, recover what was lost. But ultimately, let’s have a diplomatic strategy for bringing Russia back in and not demonize them as an irredeemable enemy that can never be dealt with. That may be true, again, of Putin and his inner circle, but not of Russia as a whole.

For Israel, peace and justice mean a sovereign, secure, independent Israel that does not live under constant threat of imminent violence. And it also means a sovereign, secure, independent Palestine at peace with itself and its neighbors. I think it’s pretty obvious that the two-state solution is the only possible outline of peace and justice in the Middle East. 

And sadly, I think the Netanyahu government of Israel has essentially disavowed the two-state solution, which means they’ve given up hope, and they are not actually fighting for a proper vision of postwar justice and peace. Again, I affirm that they have a just cause. I want them to fight with justice in the war. But I don’t see them fighting with a vision toward postwar peace and justice right now, and it breaks my heart. It seems that they have stopped trying to achieve any vision of postwar peace or justice. And I fear that their wartime targeting decisions reflect that hopelessness, that despair.

Resurrecting the hope of a possible peace and justice is the essential condition for ensuring the Israel-Hamas war remains on the path toward a just outcome. Now, some of you may be offended by that. You might be thinking it would be a victory for the terrorists if this war results in an independent Palestine. How could Hamas’s attack on Israel and Israel’s response—how could the just outcome be an independent Palestine?

Let me remind you that an independent Palestine is not Hamas’s goal. Hamas’s goal is the destruction of Israel. They only want to see an independent Palestine that occupies the entirety of the land of the former British Mandate of Palestine. They don’t want an independent Palestine alongside a co-equal independent Israel. They want Palestine alone—from the river to the sea, as they say. Defeating that vision—that is what justice requires. And the two-state solution defeats the terrorists’ vision.

Just war demands the restoration and vindication of ordered liberty in, through, and after war. I believe and pray for Israel and Ukraine to win their wars, and they must win them justly, by fighting with love for their enemies. They must use their wars to advance order, justice, and conciliation.

You may hear people say that this is unrealistic and impossible. And that is why you should stop listening to realists. It may seem unrealistic today to move toward rapprochement with Russia and a two-state solution in Palestine, but when has anything worth accomplishing ever felt realistic in an imminent time horizon? We Christians are salt and light to the world precisely when we aim at the impossible vision. That is what we should do in all areas of life, including in international politics. 

The realist will tell you to avoid all moral aspiration in politics and counsel you to accept the world as it is. But the world as it is is full of privation, misery, injustice, and evil—and I don’t accept that. Christian realism, the Christian just war tradition, understands the evils of this world and does not use that as an excuse for moral passivity, paralysis, or complicity with the evils of this age. 

You, we, have a responsibility to do justice, to love mercy, and sometimes that means to fight and win a war—and to work for peace and justice in the aftermath. Thank you very much.

I believe we have about 15 minutes for Q&A.

Q&A

Question: As we’ve seen just recently with the North Korean troops amassing and seemingly preparing to enter combat in Ukraine, what do you believe is the just responsibility of the Free World Order to have a proportional response to that in defending Ukraine, given the topics you’ve spoken about today?

Answer: We should not send our troops in response. I have plenty of criticisms about the Biden Administration—ask me about Afghanistan sometime—but one thing I think they’ve gotten right is putting a red line and saying, “We will not turn this into World War III unless Putin forces it on us by using a nuclear weapon or invading a NATO country.” I think Biden has gotten that right. We should not directly send troops to Ukraine or start shooting down Russian airplanes. That would escalate this war into a global nuclear war. 

If anything, we can stand by and let our enemies defeat themselves. If the Ukrainians want to waste their material and their military power on a faraway conflict, that’s great for South Korea—that’s great for the Indo-Pacific. It is a way of draining off their resources. Sometimes you can just stand back and let the other side defeat itself, which is exactly what the Dodgers did to the Yankees in Game Five. 

So, I’m not sure there’s any particular response required of us. Maybe somebody might say we should counsel the Ukrainians to avoid targeting the North Koreans on the battlefield. I totally disagree. If they’re on the battlefield, they’re fair game. Target them absolutely. And if anything, the more, the merrier. It’s a great way of trying to split these allies apart by humiliating North Korea in Ukraine. That would be a silver lining here.

Question: Thank you so much. I have two questions. They’re kind of critical questions. Do you think the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq is also recognized as a just war? I believe that it is reasonable for the U.S. to respond to terrorism such as al-Qaeda or the Taliban, but I don’t recognize that it was the right decision. From my friends’ testimony from Iraq, they expressed tremendous instability and massive killing of civilians. I have a critical impression that U.S. behavior absolutely changed the situation of the Middle East.

I also have a question about the decision of President Biden about delaying U.S. troops from Afghanistan. Was the U.S. decision honoring U.S. soldiers’ efforts in establishing Afghanistan and protecting the humanitarian situation there? From this insight, I also have a second question related to Israel and Hamas or Ukraine wars: How do you recognize that just war can also protect the human rights of civilians?

Answer: There’s a lot there. I think you’re asking, basically, can I comment on the justice of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars? 

We’re almost out of time, so briefly: I think the war in Afghanistan plainly had just cause. I think that Iraq is a harder case, but I still come down and say it was permissible, though imprudent—permissible, though imprudent—to initiate that war. I think in both wars, the United States did a fairly good job of trying to fight with justice in war and how we targeted. I think the counterinsurgency strategy that we pioneered around 2006 and 2007 was a great improvement, and I think the counterinsurgency strategies were just and defensible tactics or an approach to the war.

Both wars failed and did not achieve justice and peace in the aftermath. There’s no way of avoiding that conclusion. That means that those wars, though just in their initiation and mostly just in how they were prosecuted, were unjust in their outcome. I put a lot of blame on the way those wars were ended, with President Obama withdrawing from Iraq in 2011 and President Biden withdrawing from Afghanistan in 2021.

Many mistakes along the way shrank the range of possible outcomes in Afghanistan. By the time you got to 2021, there wasn’t a lot more we could have accomplished, but I think at least staying would have kept the door open for us to fix some of our past mistakes, to reinvest in the Afghan government and army, and to try to keep the door open for political progress in Afghanistan. Above all, if you’re going to try to negotiate the end of a war—any war—don’t negotiate while you withdraw. 

I’ve read lots of military manuals and strategists—none of them counsel doing that. It’s pretty obvious logic: if you’re going to negotiate, keep your army in the field as negotiating leverage. President Trump did the opposite—he negotiated with the Taliban while withdrawing from Afghanistan. That’s a very dumb thing to do and was directly responsible for the unjust outcome in Afghanistan. That makes it all the more inexplicable that Biden followed Trump’s policy by withdrawing. I never understood that.

So, that’s my very brief comment on Iraq and Afghanistan. Last thought on that: I would counsel you to beware of recency bias. It’s a cognitive error. Recency bias is when the most recent data point sticks in your head as if it were the most important data point. So, we all know about Iraq and Afghanistan because they happened recently. I need you to zoom out and look at the 250-year history of American foreign policy and recognize that, over a quarter of a millennium, the United States has been a force for good—with many mistakes along the way—but a force for good, with a lot of success. Success both in establishing our own power and security but also success in fostering a culture of ordered liberty around the world. We screwed it up in Iraq and Afghanistan, but zoom out, and you’ll see a broader pattern of success there. 

Question: Sean from Wyoming Catholic College. When you talked about jus in bellum, you mentioned primarily fighting soldiers and minimizing civilian casualties. I was wondering if you could comment on the use of nuclear weapons and how that would apply to just war theory.

Answer: Yeah. So, the U.S. Catholic Bishops did their encyclical a couple of decades ago, arguing that nuclear weapons are intrinsically immoral because they are so big, they’re impossible to use with discrimination and proportionality. That’s a pretty common view among thinkers and scholars who look at this stuff. 

I think it’s about 70% right because it does depend upon which nuclear weapon you’re talking about and what your target is. The biggest nuclear weapons are city-busters—counter-population warfare where you’re targeting enemy cities. That’s just genocide, and it’s wrong. So, I think strategic nuclear weapons are essentially immoral weapons of genocide, and we shouldn’t have them—especially if we’re targeting cities. 

I do think there are limited use cases where you’re using a smaller nuclear weapon at a military target removed from civilian population centers. I’m talking about a command bunker underground, an armored formation away from a city, or an aircraft carrier at sea. If you’re targeting one of those with a nuclear weapon, you can use it in a way that does not affect civilians and minimizes radioactive fallout by doing an airburst, not a ground burst. I think you can use nuclear weapons in a morally defensible way. 

It also depends upon the proportionality—what you are hoping to achieve. If, for example, you’re using a nuclear weapon to end the most catastrophic war in all of human history, then maybe using the atomic bomb against Japan was justified. I have some criticisms about how they chose their targets and a whole range of things they did in 1945 before they got to that point, but once you get to August of 1945, I think it’s probably the necessary way to bring that war to a swift conclusion. With all the criticisms that I don’t have time to get to, there we go. 

And I think that’s about our time, isn’t it?

Tooley: I think you have time for a minute-and-a-half question.

Response: All right. Shorter question. Let’s try to go down here in the front, right here.

Question: My question would be: How would you respond to people who advocate for a one-state solution for Israel and Palestine? They would say that the two-state solution hasn’t been working and that Israel has integrated their Arab citizens—that’s been working. So, why shouldn’t they just take over Palestine as well? How would you respond to that perspective?

Answer: Yeah. So, the one-state solution—there are two versions of it. One is all Palestine, and one is all Israel. It sounds like you’re asking about the “all Israel” option.

The United Nations voted in 1947 to create Israel and Palestine. It’s a foundation of international law that there shall be two states. The principle of self-determination says the people’s aspirations matter, and Palestinians themselves would not accept that. Israel occupied Gaza and the West Bank from 1967 all the way through 2005 for Gaza, and portions of the West Bank until about the same time, and it didn’t work very well. 

I see no practical solution in a one-state model. It would be an imperial occupation and a denial of what the Palestinians want. I just defended a free world order against an imperial world order, and I fear that a unilateral Israeli military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank would be a form of imperial occupation. 

I do think we need a transitional administration in Palestine—not made up of Israel, but perhaps made up of Egypt, the Gulf States, the GCC, the UN, or maybe NATO. We need some form of transitional administration to move away from Hamas and toward eventual Palestinian statehood, but not a unilateral Israeli military occupation. That just won’t work. 

Yeah. Thank you very much. I’m happy to continue talking during the break.