Just War Tradition

Biden fears escalation; this plays into the hands of Putin, the former KGB operative, who exploits the West’s moral weakness with both cunning and barbarism.

The Catholic tradition reminds us that just war thinking is critical to peacemaking.

Top Gun: Maverick reminds us that war continues to require physically and morally courageous human beings to fight them. Killer machines are not yet here.

While Orthodox Christianity lacks the historical tradition of just war theory to criticize war, it does have a theological resource it could draw upon to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: personhood.

The BBC should bring back the skepticism of pacifism that Doctor Who used to have.

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.

In this episode the editors discuss Rebeccah Heinrichs’ article about John Kirby’s emotional statement about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Mark Tooley’s editorial about Poland and Ukraine as martyr nations, and Christian realist articles from 1947 debating whether the Chinese communists could exist and thrive in a democracy.

With a seemingly genuine response, John Kirby reflects well on Americans and illuminates something of the Western way of war, which follows the Just War Tradition.

This week the editors discussed a Providence event where Yoram Hazony talked about his forthcoming new book “Conservatism: A Rediscovery,” how Christian realists disagreed over US foreign policy as the Cold War began, Mark Tooley’s article about democracy and decadence, and J. Daryl Charles’ article about deterring nuclear blackmail.