Just War Tradition

American audiences are still hungry for cinematic portrayals of the old virtues: patriotism, heroism, courage, and self-sacrifice

Ukraine’s actions have been broadly reflective of the desire to protect innocents and to stop the military aggressor that is killing innocents through indiscriminate strikes.

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

Providence editors Mark Tooley and Marc LiVecche discuss Abigail Lindner and Eric Patterson’s article on G.K. Chesterton and war memorials, Lubomir Ondrasek’s piece on Czech leader Vaclav Havel’s warning against hatred, and Lee Trepanier’s counsel for how Russian Orthodoxy, lacking the Just War tradition, can oppose injustice with church teaching on personhood.

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.

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.

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.