J. Daryl Charles serves as an affiliate scholar of the John Jay Institute and is a contributing editor of Providence. He is co-author of The Just War Tradition: An Introduction (ISI Books, 2012) and co-editor of America and the Just War Tradition: A History of U.S. Conflicts (University of Notre Dame Press, 2019).
In our day it is difficult for some, perhaps many, to recall that the West’s Cold War policy of nuclear deterrence—anchored in traditional just war moral principles of just cause, right intention, proportionality, and discrimination—helped avert war rather than increase the prospects of nuclear conflagration.
J. Daryl CharlesMay 17, 2022
Either we deter Russian aggression, which means that we convince Putin that we will not tolerate his first-strike nuclear threats and be intimidated, or we passively acquiesce to nuclear blackmail and Russian butchery of a nation that was promised its integrity and sovereignty five years after the Cold War ended.
J. Daryl CharlesApril 29, 2022
The war in Ukraine, with its indiscriminate slaughter and mass murder of thousands, forces us to admit the reality of evil.
J. Daryl CharlesApril 20, 2022
Mass moral atrocities and genocidal tendencies have not lessened with the supposed end of the Cold War. If anything, they have increased.
J. Daryl CharlesMarch 30, 2022
Shame on us if we do not act to deter what amount to escalating war crimes by Russia in Ukraine.
J. Daryl CharlesMarch 22, 2022
Vladimir Putin’s recent announcement to place his nation’s nuclear deterrent forces on a state of heightened alert invites those of us in the free world—and surely the United States—to revisit the just war assumptions that served as a deterrence during the Cold War.
J. Daryl CharlesMarch 4, 2022
The present need is to deter China and Russia. This is why a “cold war” and a “just war” response is necessary.
J. Daryl CharlesFebruary 25, 2022
In this volume, Nathan Scot Hosler looks to Stanley Hauerwas, one of the most outspoken pacifist theologians of our time, as inspiration for contemporary “peacemaking” and “peacebuilding” efforts.
J. Daryl CharlesNovember 2, 2020
Gregory Boyd’s Crucifixion of the Warrior God attempts to argue that the Old Testament accounts of God’s “violence” are not true portraits of the character of God. In another era, this 1,445-page project would have been called heresy.
J. Daryl CharlesSeptember 19, 2019
Raymond Ibrahim was scheduled to lecture on June 19 at the War College’s Carlisle, PA, barracks as part of its 2019 Perspectives in Military History Lecture Series. But the college disinvited him after the Council on American Islamic Relations protested.
J. Daryl CharlesJuly 25, 2019