Obama Misunderstands Just-War Tradition

In November, the president of the United States ordered a surge of U.S. forces into Afghanistan and called on other countries to do their duty in bringing that war to a successful conclusion. A few weeks later, the same president traveled to Oslo to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. The notion that the juxtaposition of these two events involves a “contradiction” (as the Washington Post subhead put it, and as the president’s speech tacitly acknowledged) is, in fact, a neat illustration of just how badly the just-war way of thinking has deteriorated in our culture, and just how attenuated the idea of the pursuit of peace has become. In the just-war tradition, as rightly interpreted, the justified use of proportionate and discriminate armed force was always understood to be in the pursuit of peace, which was the fruit of justice, security, and freedom.

By the same token, the defense and advance of the peace of political order of which the president spoke — a notion of peace that can be traced back as least as far as St. Augustine — was always, until recent decades, understood to necessitate the use of proportionate and discriminate armed force under certain circumstances. The pursuit of peace and the rigors of the just-war way of thinking were not thought to be antinomies or contradictions; they weren’t even thought to be in serious tension. Rather, they were understood to be part of the same intellectual and moral problem: How are we to build the peace of order in a world in which men are prepared to advance their aims by the use of mass violence, by the massive violation of human rights, or by both?