Just War Today

Religions and cultures have both similarities and differences as to what constitutes just grounds for or conduct of war. Most address the problems of legitimate authority, just cause, right intention, right conduct, the treatment of civilians, and the manner in which wars should be resolved.

Just War theory encourages alternatives to war and tries to limit the violence if it does occur. There is general agreement that aggression is unjust, although this does not so much prevent as lead to disguising it. Aggression includes attacks not just against one’s own or an ally’s sovereign territory, but also against embassies and consulates, ships at sea, airplanes in flight, satellites in space, overseas citizens and their property, or even “national interests,” a slippery concept that can include abstractions such as credibility.

Aggressors can be punished but must not be humiliated. Deterrence, reform, restraint, and retribution are possible purposes for punishment. It is unclear whether to punish responsible individuals or the state itself, and if the latter, how to do so. Some have argued that Just War Theory gives insufficient thought to jus post bellum, justice after war. The righteous nation does not win every war, and overdoing punishment can cause a subsequent war.

Self-defense is just and preemptive defense can be. When attacked or threatened, a nation does not have to await UN approval but can defend itself.¹⁸ Aggressors trying to appear just in their actions sometimes claim to be acting defensively, provoke others into attacking them, or even fake an enemy attack to justify their aggression.

War should be the “last resort,” but there is no objective way to determine when that point is reached, leaving it to the judgment and experience of national leaders.

The UN extrapolated a right of rebellion against colonial powers from the requirement for Just War that denies the sovereignty of a tyrannical government, incorporating into the Charter the statement that:

Nothing…can prejudice the right to self-determination, freedom, and independence, as derived from the charter…particularly of peoples under colonial and racist regimes or other forms of alien domination; nor the right of these peoples to struggle to that end and to seek and receive support…

The right to “seek and receive support” effectively allows other nations to intervene wherever their strategic interests dictate and to ignore cases where the right of rebellion is exercised against a power too dangerous to confront or too distant from resources and trade routes to be a national interest.¹⁹ That a nation has the right but not the obligation to go to the aid of a nation under attack creates a third type of war. That is, just wars should be fought, unjust wars should never be fought, but some wars are optional—wars, for example, that one could rightfully fight but that might be imprudent to fight.

With respect to how wars are fought, the Geneva Protocol of 1925 and subsequent conventions (e.g., 1972, 1997) banned biological, chemical, then nuclear weapons, although the first two have been used since the prohibitions by terrorists and rogue states, and many fear the third might be.

The anti-colonial period following World War II, the more-or-less simultaneous Cold War period, and more recently the emergence of terrorism and attacks from non-state actors provide the complex context in which the Just War tradition continues to evolve. Unfortunately, as the Chinese curse has it, we live in interesting times.