 Okay, I decided to talk about this year because last year I was asked to go to a conference at the Naval Academy and the question that was posed to me was, how do you teach the just war tradition at your war college? And this was a conference of people from many different professional military education institutions around the United States. And the answer when I was asked is I actually don't know. So I went around and I asked and it turned out that we don't. That kind of came as a surprise to me. What there is is a few lessons on the law of armed conflict in the JMO course. And I'm told that maybe next year S&P plans to put one lecture on just war into the curriculum. But it really hasn't been there and that seems kind of odd if you think about it. Because insofar as you think about what you do in your profession as having an ethical foundation and since what you do is in the end killing people and breaking things, it might be important to offer you a moral framework to think about why that is in fact a morally legitimate thing to do under appropriate circumstances. So for today what I want to do is lay the historical foundation of this. Where does this come from and what are its central tenets? I will only bring us up basically to the creation of the United Nations Charter because Dr. Ren, who's in the diplomatic school at Georgetown, is much more involved in the day to day practical application of this in the contemporary world. So basically think of this as a two-part presentation. My historical baseline and Dr. Ren bringing you up to the contemporary situation. So let's begin where does this come from? The short answer is on the one hand almost all traditions have some idea of appropriate conduct in work, some kind of restraint. I just came back two days ago from a conference in Scotland on Chinese ways of thinking about this, which is a really a fascinating conference with four scholars from the People's Republic talking about that subject and a few scholars from the People's Liberation Army. So everybody's got some version of this, but we have a specific one. And bottom line up front, because of the historical dominance of the West over most of the world in the 18th and 19th century, what we think of as international law comes from this route. So although we talk about general international law, historically this is where it comes from. So it's important to get that long sweep of history to understand where that goes. And as you might imagine, that raises certain kind of multicultural challenges about the viability of this as the world becomes more multicultural and so forth. But I'll talk a little about that at the end. Dr. Oren will talk about it quite a bit tomorrow. The specific origins of this tradition, however, are Christian. There are some basic tenets of it found in pagan Roman stuff, in particular in Cicero. If you've read your Thucydides, you know there's a lot of rich ethical stuff under the surface in Thucydides, like the discussion at the island of Milos, about whether the strong do what they want and the weak suffer what they have to or whether there are any other more general moral rules that it pertain. But it's specifically the Christian church that brooded a lot about this. And it really emerges as a just war tradition after the fourth century. So let's remind ourselves that the earliest period of Christianity, Christianity is a very marginal religion in the Roman Empire. It doesn't participate much in the Roman state. It's not particularly interested in serving in the military. It generally expects the end of the world is coming relatively soon. So there's not a lot of reason to be deeply involved with the world around you. And so for example, there's a letter in the second century from written to a soldier in the Roman army to a bishop named Tertullian, asking whether it would be okay to accept this military decoration, which is a laurel crown to be given to him for valorous service in his unit. And Tertullian writes him back this scathing letter saying, don't ask me about this decoration, why are you in the military at all? Just get out. I mean, there's just no reason for you to be there. But after the fourth century, something big changes. The emperor Constantine converts to Christianity in the year 312, sort of. It's kind of a complicated story. But in any case, he makes Christianity a legal religion for the first time. And remember, this is the year 312. The biggest persecutions, the only empire-wide persecutions of Christianity, happened in the 280s under the emperor Diocletian. So this is very recent, right? Within living memory, the Christian church was being systematically persecuted by the Roman state. And now in 312, the emperor is tolerating and indeed encouraging Christianity. Those of you who have been to Jerusalem, remember the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, that great big church in Jerusalem? That site was scouted out by Constantine's mom, who was sent on this mission to go find these Christian sites and giving them imperial money to build up these Christian sites. And the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is only one of many things like that that were these new creations. So here's the question. If you didn't particularly love the Roman Empire when you were on the outs, what do you make of it now that you're in? How do you think about it? It's still the same old Roman Empire it always was. It's built on a foundation of use of military force, sometimes rather brutal use of military force. Can you make your peace with that? And so that was the fourth century challenge for Christian thinkers. And of course, many didn't want to accept this deal. That's the beginning of the monastic movement of people who had gotten into the desert to get away from this, to drop out of the society who aren't comfortable with this reconciliation. But some are and some start to think about it. And so the beginning of really trying to make your peace with how do you remain both committed to an ethical standard of Christianity, but also at peace with not only supporting but actually working for the Roman Empire and its military becomes a very important question in the fourth century and beyond. So you've got a problem. Those of you who know the New Testament know if you read, for example, the Sermon on them out on the face of it. It seems very clear that the ethic there is to not resist evil. If someone takes your coat, give them your cloak. If someone forces you to go one mile, go two. Someone hits you on one cheek, turn the other, right? And that is pretty consistent through the New Testament. So the baseline is that. And so you've got to somehow square what appears to be, if not pacifism, at least non-resistance, to an idea of the legitimate use of military force. And that's what sets the intellectual problem for fourth century thinkers. So the first one who really does this is this guy, Augustine of Hippo. Hippo is a town in North Africa. You may have, if you've, one of the more interesting ancient biographies, autobiographies, is his confessions. Has anybody ever read that? It's a good read. He talks about how he initially had no use for Christianity. His mom was Christian, but he was a teacher of rhetoric, and he thought the Bible was badly written and not very interesting. And then he has this dramatic conversion experience, partly facilitated bodily enough by his reading of Plato and Platonists. And he starts to read these biblical texts through philosophical lenses. And he starts to make some sense of them if you read them philosophically. But anyway, he wrote this little book, The Confessions. He wrote this great big book called The City of God, which is an attempt to explain why the Roman Empire has fallen, because he lives through the fall of the Western part of the empire. The Western part of the empire falls to the barbarians, so-called, although they're actually a certain kind of Christian, in 410. And so he lives through that. He's watching from North Africa as Rome is taken over. And the response of the pagans is, this is all the Christians fall. Rome has existed for nearly 1,000 years when it had civic virtue, founded and a fairly robust pagan understanding of the state. In fact, most religion in the ancient world was about loyalty to the state. It was the right line, as we have it, between religion and your loyalty to your society. And so Augustine writes this long book, trying to say, how should Christians think about the fact that Rome has fallen? And it's a very complex argument. It's a really interesting argument. He says, look, first of all, you would be an idiot to be happy that Rome fell. Rome was certainly not perfect, certainly not morally pure. But what it provided was what he called a tranquility of order, which is better than the chaos we have now. So tranquility of order is always better than chaos. That's the first argument. The second argument was, as Christians, in the end, I'm speaking as him now, ultimately care about the city of God, in which it's all peace and love and justice and forgiveness. And that's wonderful. And the time will come in the future when that will happen. But it ain't now. There's the city of God and there's the city of human beings. And for right now, you live in the city of human beings. And the city of human beings, the closest approximation you're going to see to perfect justice is very, very imperfect justice enforced by force. And if you don't think that that's a good thing, then you're just stupid, right? He says at one point, could a conscientious person, conscientious Christian be a judge, he asks in the city of God. He says, well, look, I have to say to myself, and I'm thinking about that, if I'm a judge, using the standards of Roman times, I'm going to torture people, I'm going to arrange for people to be tortured, I'm going to convict people who are innocent to horrible punishments, possibly even capital punishments. Would a conscientious person be willing to do this job? And he says, yes, because you recognize that you need in the human city, you need this approximation of justice and you need people to do it. And by the way, better people do it who worry about this. Then people who don't worry about this. And so he says, I've got a prayer for you, buddy. If you're going to be a judge, here's the prayer. From my sad necessities, oh, Lord, deliver me. From my sad necessities, deliver me. I'm going to have to do this, but it's necessary, but it's tragic, it's unfortunate. And so you have to live with this ambiguity of living in the earthly city, in the human city, while yearning for the heavenly city, which will come at the end of time. Okay, now, this is a very interesting letter. He has a relationship with this guy named Boniface. Boniface is a Roman army officer. He's in fact a general. And there is a series of letters back and forth between them, Augustine has functioned as his spiritual advisor of sorts for quite a long time on various topics. So it appears that Boniface has written a letter to him saying, you know, I'm thinking about giving up on the army life. I don't think the army life is really inappropriate, our highest form of moral life. I'm thinking about resigning my commission in our terms and coming to live with you in a monastery. The problem is, Boniface commands the last Roman legion between Augustine's hippo and the barbarian army, which has now crossed over the Mediterranean as advancing on hippo, right? So you get the scenario, right? This is the commander of the sole remaining defense of the city where Augustine lives, thinking about resigning in the name of moral purity. We got the scenario? Okay, so we don't have, we don't have Boniface's letter, but we have Augustine's letter back to him. And I've highlighted the really important bits. Let me just give you a minute to read it and then I'll talk about it. Okay, two major points in this passage. Augustine says, look, I grant you that military life is not the highest form of moral life. That's true, right? There is a higher form of life, which is the religious life. This is the beginning, by the way, of that Catholic distinction between lay people and clergy who have different rules for how they should behave. And so there are rules for the clergy, there are rules for lay people. And the rules for the clergy are higher calling. So all those sayings in the Sermon on the Mount, according to Catholic teaching, are not really commandments because if they were, they would apply to everybody. What they are instead is councils of perfection. They're advices for people who want to lead this higher form of the moral life, right? They don't apply literally to lay people. They only apply it to clergy. But on the other hand, the other red thing, don't try before the appointed time to pretend you live with a lot of holy people. You don't, you live in this earthly city, which has got all kinds of corruption and abuse and requires the firm hand, even the firm hand of violence, to keep it under control so that you have at least a degree of tranquility of order in the world. That's what it's for, okay? So you, Boniface, what you're doing is maybe not the highest form of life. I'm giving you that, but some, we need people to do that, right? That's a legitimate calling from God and some people are called to it. And I think you, buddy, are one of them and by the way, please defend my city. And by the way, he loses. Oh, so we don't know what happened to Augustine in the end of all this because the city goes down and that's the end of it. And begins what we used to call the Dark Ages in the West, right? So if you don't think Rome going down the drain is gonna be bad for civilization, I'm here to tell you, Augustine says looking forward, it's gonna be really bad. And by the way, how bad was it? Really bad. I mean, what's the next flicker of interesting civilization in the West after 400? A little bit with Charlemagne in 800, then it goes dark again until really the 13th century, right? So 1,000 years more or less at a recover from all this. So yeah, if you don't think civilization going down the drain is a bad thing, read a little history, it goes badly when this happens. Here's more, let me let you read that too. Same letter. Okay, so major points here. You're fighting war in the name of peace. So Augustine kind of breathtakingly takes that Bible passage of blessed are the peacemakers. Says, who are the peacemakers? Well, in some circumstances, you Boniface, right? You're fighting to establish an earthly peace. It's not the heavenly peace. It's not the peace of the kingdom of God. Everybody got that, but it's a real peace and it's the best you're gonna see this side of the kingdom of God, right? So you can sincerely say to yourself as a soldier, I am a peacemaker if I fight in a certain way. And the certain way is I should cherish even in war the spirit of a peacemaker. He says, look, you know, what's really bad about war is not killing. What's really bad about war is hatred and enmity and so forth. So as you go to war, go to war, not hating your enemy, but recognizing the sad necessity of fighting him or her. By the way, this is a big theme in Christian ethics all the way through. If you go back to the New Testament again, you think about those passages in the Sermon on the Mount. You know, you've heard it said you should not commit adultery, but I say you don't look lustfully at a woman. You've heard it said that I should not kill, but I tell you, you shouldn't even hate. All of this kind of relocates ethics into the interior state of the agent, right? So it's less important what you do than how you feel and think about what you do. The Germans have a term for this. They call it a Gesinnungsetik, which is an ethic of your inner intentional state, right? So that's what matters. And of course, this is all in a religious context where what matters is the salvation of your soul. So what matters is in what mental frame do you do these things? All of this stuff, by the way, is written by clergy, most of whom never saw a battlefield. So I did write a paper once about whether that all of this counsel coming from Christian ethics about doing this in a certain mental frame is psychologically plausible or not? I think that's a very interesting question. Can real soldiers in actual combat maintain the kind of intentional states that Augustine counsels? I leave it to those of you who have combat experience to advise me on this matter, but I'm skeptical. But anyway, that's what they say. And then this last bit, once you've conquered someone, you should show mercy to them. Because once there were to combat, as we would put it in modern law of armed conflict, they're no longer your enemy. They were only your enemy when they were fighting you. As soon as they are surrendered, what are they? They're human beings like you, entitled to the same treatment and respect that you would give any human being. So notice, here we have the foundation of the Geneva Convention in the 5th century, right? In the 5th century, that's where ultimately Geneva comes from, from that advice about how to think about your enemy. They're not evil, they're not intrinsically bad. There are people who doing bad things who need to be stopped and that's all to be said about them. Okay, so let me quickly tick off Augustine's major points. This comes not just from this letter but from other places in Augustine, but it's important. First, think critically about your place in the world. On the one hand, you aspire to a higher ethical and spiritual life and you wish and hope that you could be there and you hope someday you indeed will be there, but it's a future state. It's not where you are now. Where you are now is all shades of gray. Augustine was in a big fight actually in the church. This is perhaps a little bit something. During those persecutions I mentioned of Diocletian in the 280s, a lot of Christians, including bishops and priests, gave up copies of the scriptures to the Roman army or they were willing under threat of persecution to square a religious oath to the image of the emperor. And the question was after the Diocletian persecutions, what do you say about these people? These people who collaborated with the enemy, as you will. One group said, anybody who did that is out. They're never to be readmitted to the church. They're certainly never to be allowed to be clergy. They have permanently tainted themselves by their capitulation in the face of threat. They had the option which they should have exercised of being holy martyrs and the fact that they chose not to be martyrs means that they are out. Augustine fought this tooth and nail. He said, that cannot possibly be right because if the church is only holy by virtue of the actual holiness of the people who run it, you'll never know whether it's holy or not because it'll always be compromised. If the sacraments only work because the priest who gives them to you is an upright and righteous person, then how will you ever know whether the sacrament you receive has any validity or not? So all of the things the church does are holy by virtue of what we do, not by virtue of who doesn't. Because otherwise it just creates this hopeless mental confusion and by the way, in a sense the church is no more holy than anything else in the earthly city, right? It's composed of fallible human beings who make mistakes and are in many cases just as morally corrupt as anybody else. So don't expect the church itself to be morally pure. It won't be, you'll be constantly disappointed if that's the standard, right? So it's holy only by virtue of what it promises and what it teaches, not by what it is, right? So there's no sharp line between the holy church and the shades of gray world. It's all shades of gray. Secondly, wars should only be waged when they're necessary. And by necessary the idea is the Romans have established a kind of peace, at least in Rome, the Pax Romana. We all know where the Pax Romana came from. It came from not particularly pretty sources. It came from the Roman army conquering a whole lot of people and suppressing them and continuing to suppress them by all kinds of violent means and by threats and coercion, okay? So that's the true story. That's how order is maintained in the world. Get over it, right? But on the other hand, when people show up and start disturbing it, like these barbarians who come in to Rome and start making trouble, then it's real clear who the problem is, right? The problem is the people who are disrupting that existing order. Now, of course, if they disrupt the existing order and after a while the dust all settles and there's a new existing order, then you care about that too, right? For the same reasons you cared about the last one. But the point is you're basically engaged in a continual process of whack-a-mole, trying to keep the order that you got in place as much as possible and recognizing it for what it is. We've talked a little already about this psychological or spiritual claim that what really matters is not what you do with your body and your weapons, but in what state or mental frame you do it. We've talked about the fact that when you conquer them, they then become the vanquished and they become human beings just like you who are entitled to respect, especially if you don't think they're gonna go off and rearm and come back at you. I mean, that's what he says at the end of that letter. As long as you're sure they're really out of the combat. At that point, there are no threat to you and there's no reason to continue to do anything bad to them. They're controlled. And then lastly, I've hit this pretty hard already. Look, if you don't think you like the Roman Empire, what would you like instead? Would you like the next thousand years that's over the horizon? You're gonna like that better? How long did it take Europe to get back culturally, civilizationally to where Rome was when it went down? At least a thousand years. At least a thousand years. If you wanna play what if history, it's always great to imagine. The Athenians hadn't lost the Peloponnesian War and the Romans hadn't gone down. Where would civilization be if that had just kept on the linear path it was on? It's mind-boggling how far we would have gone had those two things not gone badly. They'd not gone the way they did. Or, by the way, if the Athenians had lost the Battle of Salamis, we'd all be speaking Farsi and ancient Greece never would have happened. Okay, the next big leap in this is a thousand years ahead, Thomas Aquinas. Those of you who are Catholic know that until the Second Vatican Council, Thomas Aquinas eventually became the theologian of the Roman Catholic Church. Where I used to live in California was all settled by Franciscans and then Jesuits. So I drove to work every morning on the San Tomas Aquino Highway. The St. Thomas Aquinas Highway, right? And every other thing was named after him. Thomas is a really interesting transitional figure. As you probably know, if you know anything about your history, early Christianity didn't like Aristotle very much because Aristotle was so this worldly. He was kind of a scientist, a biologist, a little too rational and practical for the Christian Church. They liked Plato, because Plato was mystical and otherworldly and spiritual. So really, Aristotle got lost in the West. They literally didn't have copies of it. And then in the 13th century, the Christian armies retook Spain from the Muslim, from the Muslims in Spain. They got into Toledo, the city of Toledo, and they went to one library and they found there were more books in this library in Toledo than existed in all of Northern Europe. Think about that, more books in one library in Toledo, than existed in all of Northern Europe. And they didn't know what these books were. They're all in Arabic, of course. So they start translating them. And they quickly realized how dumb, this is the Europeans, are, because we don't have words for these ideas. So we got all these Arabic words in modern European languages because as they're translating, they come across words they don't have, like zero and azimuth and algebra. Thing like that, because the Muslim science and math was so far ahead of Europe, they had no idea. But among the things they found were the works of Aristotle, some of them. So they bring all this stuff across the Pyrenees and they take it to the first university, the University of Paris, which is really created as a think tank to try to figure out this stuff. It's like a science fiction story where you find an ancient civilization that's got all this stuff you don't understand, right? So you start translating this stuff. So they translated it to Aristotle and Thomas reads this and says, wow, this is really weird. Those of you who took the Stockton character, remember when you read Aristotle, Thomas' problem is, how can this guy be right about almost everything when he's a pagan? I mean, he's not, he knows nothing about the Bible or Christianity or God as understood by the West, nothing. And yet Thomas says, he's like 95% right about ethics. It's spot on. So how can that be? This of course terrifies the church and the Pope issues a ban saying nobody at the University of Paris will read Aristotle. Which has, guess what effect? Everybody gets their copy of Aristotle and they have a little bootleg Aristotle sessions down at the cafe, right? So everybody's reading this stuff. And it turns out that this provides a rational framework for ethics where it doesn't matter whether you have revelation. It doesn't matter if you have the Bible. Thomas says there are a few things that God had to tell you that Aristotle didn't know. He didn't know that the world was created by God, for example. But why would he? He looks out there and just looks like there it is. He didn't know that you have an afterlife. But why would he know that either if God didn't reveal it to you? But for the rest of it, Aristotle basically has it right. So we can do this in a rational way. We don't need to do Christian ethics by reading Bible passages. We can do it by thinking about this. And so Thomas applies this. By the way, his work is condemned by the church for about a century because he's so rational, right? He's so thisworldly. He's so interested in applying philosophical reason and not mystical thought. But after a century or so, they decide, you know, this is really pretty good. And it becomes the official theology of the Catholic Church for the next 500 years or so. And it's still heavily used in any Catholic institution. I used to teach at a Jesuit university, although I'm neither Catholic nor Jesuit. And the old Jesuits always say, I'm an unreconstructed Thomist, really. You know, I'm still a Thomas guy. So Thomas has a little treatise. He wrote an enormous book called The Summa Theological, the modestly named sum of everything you ever wanted to know about theology, right? In four books. And he has an article on war and he says, look, when is war legitimate? He says, you need three things. There must be a sovereign who's in command here. There must be this, you can't just have private armies running around bashing people. There's gotta be some kind of organized state or kingdom that is responsible for deciding the legitimate use of this army. So in the medieval context, obviously, what you're trying to put down are the ideas that every local baron and lord has his bunch of knights that just go around doing stuff, right? You're trying to centralize legitimate use of violence in a single commander so that you get this under control. In fact, one of the reasons for the crusades, which began a couple of centuries before Thomas, is to get warriors out of Europe by sending them to the Middle East. So they cannot continue to do mayhem inside Europe. The first crusade, that Pope Urban's crusade in 1099 is announced explicitly for that reason. Let's get the warriors out of Europe and send them somewhere else or they can make trouble elsewhere. Secondly, you need a just cause. If you're gonna attack somebody, they must deserve it somehow. They must have done something to make themselves worthy of being attacked. And by the way, there's a long discussion over the next several hundred years continuing today is what are the range of some things they have to do to make themselves worthy to be attacked, right? So for example, they've offended the honor of the monarch, is that good enough? They've stolen property, is that good enough? They've invaded your territory, is that good enough? And the short version of the next long story is a tendency to reduce the number of legitimate things they've done wrong. That's the movement of the tradition is to say to get more and more picky about what are the deserving requirements? And we'll talk a little more about that in a few minutes. And then lastly, the belligerent should have a rightful intention. Why am I fighting this war? Because I'm trying to restore peace. I'm trying to bring back order to the society that I'm invading. I'm trying in some way to make a better peace than what was here before. So gratuitous or pointless uses of force is not justified. And notice who we have here in Thomas also, the echo of that same Gazinung Zatik I was talking about in the Bible in Augustine, right? That the ethic of the intentional state of the agent is what in the end matters the most. Okay, fast forward. Another few hundred years. We just, it was just a Reformation Day last October 31st that a Marty Luther posted his theses on the door of Wittenberg Chapel and Europe blew up, right? And Europe blew up because, not because Martin Luther was there, but because Martin Luther had a match in a room full of gasoline, right? I mean, the whole place was ready to blow anyway. People were quite ready to be re-built. So basically within less than a generation, all of Northern Europe is not Catholic anymore. And it never is again, right? But of course it becomes different kinds of Protestants, right? So Germany becomes Lutheran, so does Scandinavia. Switzerland and then eventually Scotland become Calvinist or Reformed. The Church of England becomes its own weird little combination of a whole bunch of things, right? And then there are all these little guys, the so-called left-wing or radical reformers, the Mennonites, the Hutterites, eventually in England, the Quakers. The one thing all the other guys agree about is killing them is a good idea. Because what makes them distinct from all the others is they think this whole Constantine deal was a bad idea in the first place. So what makes the radicals interesting is they say, you know, the Church should have never gotten in bed with the government in the first place. That was a really, really bad move. The Church ought to stay withdrawn, separated, trying to be as pure as possible, you know, while granting Augustine's point that it's not gonna be as pure as the Kingdom of Heaven, but, you know, we're trying to maintain our own standards. So I used to teach at the Army War College and I'd drive five miles down there, and there are Amish people doing the roofing on the War College, right? Because that's who they are, these Amish folks, the Mennonites, the Hutterites, who are mostly in Canada, in Western Canada, a few of them in Northern United States. Those are all folks who said, we don't want anything to do with the government. We want the government to leave us alone. We want to run our own communities according to our own standards. We certainly don't want to participate in military things or in the government. We just want to have nothing to do with that. They're also called the historic peace churches. So for example, when we had a selective service system, well, we still do, but it doesn't really exercise, one of the easy ways, the one recognized way to not be drafted was to prove that I've been a Mennonite all my life. Because the government realized after trying to persecute these people in World War I, because they wouldn't be drafted, that this was just a waste of time. These guys were not gonna come in and serve. They were gonna, they'd go to jail before they'd come into the military. They're just not gonna do it. So, you have these four major Protestant groups. Now, I told you, Thomas grounds almost everything he does in what he calls natural law, which is this Aristotelian rationality. That's not really available to the Protestants, because there's one of their slogans is scripture alone. And so in his commentary on the Sermon of the Mount, Martin Luther attacks this Catholic way of treating these things as counsels of perfection. Says they're not counsels of perfection, they are commandments. But then he says, well, if they're commandments, if somebody is gonna take my coat, should I literally give them my coat too? He said, well, if it's just you, yeah. But on the other hand, if I say to myself, look, I'm walking home, I have my pay in my pocket, a robber wants to take my money, and I say to myself, well, if it were just me, I'd give it to him. But I'm a husband, I'm a parent, I have a mortgage to pay, so I have all these other roles in the society that trump this. So because I have that if I can call the police or if I can resist, it's okay to do it. So they really are commandments, but they only apply strictly to unemployed single people, both of whose parents are dead. For everybody else, there's a way around this, okay? These are called your place in life. So Luther wrote these two treatises that are pretty interesting. He had another problem because the Protestants taught that everybody's free and equal, yeah. So the peasants in Germany said, great, everybody's free and equal, let's redistribute the property. So these big peasant revolts take place, and Luther's got this problem. You said that everybody is free and equal, Luther. So the leaders, the political leaders say, well, aren't you supporting these peasant guys? Don't you support their revolt? And so he has to write these essays saying, no, these are robbing, murdering hordes of peasants. They should be suppressed violently. And his language, if you know Marty Luther, he's a pretty violent guy sometimes, he says stab, mutilate, burn, whatever you need to do to put down this rebellion. And he writes this rather interesting essay, can soldiers too be saved? He says, well, yeah, I mean, guess what his move is, the one we already seen. It's your intentional state that matters. It's not what you actually do, which is the standard Christian move on this. John Calvin in book four of his great big book, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, has a whole section on civil government. And he's even more positive on civil government than Luther is. And for the first time actually in Christian writing, John Calvin even includes what looks like the right of revolt against unjust government. He says, you know, the old question in the tradition was, if you have a tyrant, could you ever resist them? And the standard answer, Thomas's answer was no, because even though they may be tyrannical, they are providing something, a trend, quality of order, does that sound familiar? That you don't want to disturb. Calvin says, well, generally that's true. But the Spartans, he said, had this institution at Sparta. They had guys called Ephors. And the Ephors were responsible if the Spartan kings were misbehaving to take them out of office. So in a good government, you would have Ephors. You want Ephors who can depose tyrants. And then that paragraph ends with, let tyrants read this and tremble, okay? So if you think about where Calvinism goes over the next few centuries, pretty much everywhere it goes, you get a revolt, right? Scotland, United States, you know, you get moves toward more democratic or more representative kinds of government. And the Calvinist churches themselves are organized that way, right? The main Calvinist body in the United States is called Presbyterian, which means the elders, because it's named after what? It's mode of governance, right? The most important thing it says about itself is this, we govern ourselves by elders. But of course what happened after the Reformation was a long series of really brutal religious wars that go on for a very long time. What motivates these wars? Well, all kinds of things like every war, but one of them was religious because one of the assumptions since Constantine, and this was actually one of his slogans, it's the way to get unity in the empire was, and this is from him, one God, one church, one emperor. So you need those three things, one God, one church, one emperor. So after you have four kinds of Protestant Christianity, plus the radicals, and you're up, the question is how do you get back one church? And each of the players thinks that there should be one church and it should be ours, right? So this goes on for an incredibly long time, really brutal wars, but the motive is trying to put the Humpty Dumpty of Christendom as one God, one church, one emperor back together. And finally, in 1648, they give up. You'll recognize that date is the date of the peace of Westphalia, in which the players all said, we're gonna stop killing each other over religion. Now if you think about Westphalia, this was the triumph of nobody's ideals. Think about this, what everybody really wanted was one God, one church, one emperor. But they give up an exhaustion and say we are gonna accept a new international system in which each state is allowed to have two basic rights. It will have territorial integrity, which means its borders should be respected by all the other states. And it will have political sovereignty, which means inside that border, it can do whatever it wants. Now think about this for a minute. Think about the issues that are already on the table. So if this means if I'm the Catholic King of France and I wanna persecute and or kill Protestants in France, I'm now given carte blanche to do it. If I'm the Protestant King of England and I wanna do the same thing to Catholics or to Jews, that's cool too, right? Because nobody's allowed to peek inside the internal affairs of each other's states. The preface to John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religions is a letter to the King of France. Why is a Protestant guy sitting in Switzerland writing a letter to the King of France at the front of his book? Because he's trying to persuade the King of France, we're not so bad. Read this book, maybe you could decide not to persecute us. But of course, nobody buys it. But they do agree to the system. So you're trying to get, in other words, political stability, stop the interstate warfare over religion and other things. But you're buying at a price of, to speak a little bit anachronistically, human rights. Because you realize that human rights isn't an idea that's invented for another century or so. But you're realizing that we're specifically turning away, turning a blind eye to how states treat their own people. They can do whatever they want. And we don't even have a right to criticize them. It's have a nice day, do what you like to your own citizens. Everybody clear on that? So that's the Westphalian state system. Okay, and it's the one largely we still have. Now think about that. It's an artifact of a very specific place and a very specific set of cultural circumstances. It was a solution to a specific European problem of the 17th century. But it is now, in principle, the system stamped all over the world, right? There's a very good book about the lack of fit between the system and the actual reality of much of the world called tribes with flags. So you notionally have this border and you notionally have citizens of this state and you notionally have a flag and you have a capital and you have a president. But you all know that that story is less and less plausible depending on where you look, right? It doesn't always fit very well. I think Tony will talk about this at some length tomorrow. But how does this model that was developed in the 17th century in Europe translate to other things? Okay, so this guy Hugo Grosius comes along and he begins to write what he calls international law. He says, we need to think about a new way of doing this just war stuff because the church-based thing is not gonna work, right? Because there are four kinds of Christianity that wanna play. So it can't be grounded in a specific theological tradition. It just won't work to have it grounded in a specific theological tradition. So we gotta figure something else out. So he said, look, there is this concept of natural law. Thomas had already developed this. Remember, Thomas was trying to figure the smart Aristotle problem? How does Aristotle know all this stuff? So his answer was, well, look, God created the world. Aristotle didn't know that, not his fault, but anyway, God did that. And so when God created the world, God made decisions about how the natural world and the moral world would be ordered, right? That's where natural laws like the laws of science and math come from. God imprinted those on the world. Again, Aristotle didn't know that, but it doesn't matter because if you're smart, you can figure out those laws anyway, right? Because they're rational. So Thomas defines the natural law is the, God's eternal law is the divine blueprint for how the world would be. That was what was in God's mind when God made the world. We're not, we don't have access to that. But what we do have is through our reason we have access to the bits of it we can figure out. And that we call natural law. So Grosje says, look, all of us have access to the natural law. I can be a Calvinist as he was. You could be a Catholic. You could be a Lutheran. Done, Matt. We all can figure out the natural law if we use our reason correctly. So there's a basis for thinking out common international law about warfare that doesn't rest on the church, that doesn't rest on theologians, that doesn't rest on the divine. Secondly, there's what he calls the use gentium, which means the law of peoples. Even if there are things that aren't necessarily discernible from natural law, but they become what we would call in these days, customary international law. It's just what people have decided as a matter of practice we will do. You couldn't necessarily derive them from a standing start from the natural law. Okay, so this is different than that. This is just, we've kind of all done it this way for a while. And so we will, there's no good reason to change it if we've all been happy with this way of doing it. So we can appeal to this looser thing, use gentium, that is common because it becomes the, as the modern international law is to say, the pattern of practice or the pattern of state practice is what we do. And by the way, this is cool because this law is valid et sidaeus non dorator, even if God doesn't exist. It doesn't matter whether God exists or not. This understanding of law will work anyway. And we're gonna need that because otherwise, what are we gonna do? We're gonna argue about religion until the cows come home and we will get nowhere in terms of international peace and stability. So that's where we're gonna go. So he's, Grosius is usually called the father of international law because of these crucial moves that he makes. Notice right in the period where Westphalia is coming to fruition. Okay, let me stop there just for a minute. Are there any questions about what I've said so far? This is kind of a break in the action here. Yeah, did I hear Mike somewhere? No, okay. All right. So what happens from this point is just war goes down two tracks. There's a specifically moral track and that is mostly the property of the Roman Catholic Church, mostly Roman Catholic. A few Protestants do this but not very many. So the, and remember Catholicism continues to be wedded to Thomas Aquinas until the middle of the 20th century. So you can do this through Thomistic theology forever. So for example, in World War II, there was a Jesuit named John Ford who wrote a famous essay called The Morality of Obliteration Bombing in which he argues that obliteration bombing is a violation of natural law and says no Catholic ought to be willing to be a bomber pilot or bombardier in the Eighth Air Force. And he was ordered to shut up. But the logic was perfectly straightforward. Does everybody see that from the natural argument? It was perfectly straightforward that he would say such a thing. Is that clock right? Yeah, it is. In parallel to that, begins a long tradition of legal evolution. So now this is not philosophers and theologians doing this. This is lawyers doing this, right? So when most of you think, if you think at all about morality of war, you probably think that this is what your Oplah Jag tells you about, right? Because that's what they own is the Oplah stuff. And this comes from them. So you start to get a series of actual treaties, conventions that lay this out. 1864, the Geneva Convention deals with the status of wounded and captured prisoners which you're all familiar with. And anybody who's a signatory, any country that's a signatory to the Geneva Convention is required by the treaty to do an annual training for all of its soldiers and sailors and airmen on this treaty, right? So you should all have memories of being shepherded into halls like this and having lawyers with PowerPoint walk you through this. It's a treaty requirement. It was interesting, I was asking the Chinese last week, do they actually do this? And it was, wow, I can say this. It was kind of a non-attribution environment, this type of thing. There was a young lady there who said, I grew up on a PLA military camp. She said, I know the answer to your question, but I can't tell you. So, in the American Civil War, President Lincoln asked a guy named Lieber, a lawyer named Lieber to write the so-called Lieber Code, which was the first attempt to codify basically a code of conduct for the Union Army. So the first time a military actually tried to write down for its own folks, what are the rules that govern what you do? Interestingly, that the US was the first to actually do that. In 1907, the Hague, these are restrictions more dealing with civilians and weapons, what's legitimate and what's not legitimate for civilians and for weapons. Okay, now just going to the US. Most people, we read the Constitution in my elective and I discover to no great surprise, I suppose, that most people, if they've read it at all, haven't read it lately. Certainly haven't committed it to memory. So this is a relatively obscure clause of the United States Constitution, but I always like to point it out because it's kind of important. Notice all treaties made or shall be made are on par with the US Constitution as the supreme law of the land. So that means if someone gives you a direct order to violate the Geneva Convention, what is that? That's an unlawful order. Just as much as it would be an unlawful order if somebody ordered you to violate a US law or to violate the United States Constitution. It's on a par with that. It's easy to forget that, but it's not just something, oh yeah, yeah, the Congress ratified. I mean that if it's a ratified treaty, which means two thirds of the Senate, right? Oh, and by the way, when you talk to the Chinese about the size of China Sea, what's the first thing they want to point out to you? That we never ratified uncloss? And I'm trying to explain them well, yeah, but we consider it customary international, we intend to follow it anyway. So, well, but why didn't you ratify it? I said, well, you really want to talk about the Congress? I mean, no, I don't. We could do that if you want, but, you know, there's no chance it's gonna get through the Senate and the foreseeable future, so just forget about it. Every US service has a military manual, I assume you've all seen it, that kind of tries to instrumentalize their neck down, these broad Geneva and Hague laws to practical things that would affect how you do. And then I know in JMO, they have you do rules of engagement exercise, right? So what are ROE? ROE are the attempt to get even more specific about what is the application of the law in this particular tactical or theater situation, right? So, and those change over time, right? So is there a rule that says you can't shoot at people in civilian clothes? Generally, yes, but if you're in an environment where consistently people in civilian clothes pop up and shoot at you, then the ROE are probably going to change, right? Are you supposed to not shoot at religious sites? Absolutely, but what if you find that the enemy's occupying religious sites and firing at you? Then it becomes at least acceptable collateral damage to shoot at and destroy the religious site, right? So it has to be applied in that way. We already talked about the mandatory law of armed conflict briefing that you all got. Now, oh, interesting. There are a couple of works that if you're interested in reading anything about this are very important. First, Michael Walzer wrote this book Just and Unjust Wars in 1977. He wrote it kind of as a liberal intellectual who opposed the Vietnam War but thought, okay, I'm opposed to this particular war, but I need to really think through the overall framework by which I would approve or disapprove wars generally. And so he wrote this book, which has become kind of the Bible for anybody doing Just War in the sense that even wherever you wanna go, you usually start with Walzer. Because outside the Catholic world, Walzer's book became the book Everybody Knows and that is the basis everybody operates out of, right? So unfortunately, he wrote it in 77. He's never revised it. After every major war, he slaps a new preface on it. That's all that happens, the covers change. But the argument itself is looking a little dated, to be honest with you. The world of 1977 wasn't the world of today. And so a few years ago, he wrote this second book, Arguing about War. I forgot to put the date on it. It was about early 90s, which is not a systematic book, but it's a kind of collection of essays on how things have changed since I wrote the first one. And it's an interesting read, so for example, I didn't think about non-state actors at all. That wasn't even on the radar then. I didn't think much about humanitarian intervention. I certainly didn't think about R2P or something like that, which wasn't even on the radar. So it's obviously shifted. But again, if you want a good, basic, grounding and just-war thinking of a philosophical sort, Walter's still the place to start. And if you ever talk to anybody who knows even a little about this topic, you'll find yourself conversing in Walter's language for a while. He's still around, he's at Princeton. He's not that interested in thinking about war anymore. He's got more interested in Jewish and Israeli topics. So the last few times I've seen him, he was actively disinterested in discussing this. A Canadian fellow, Brian Orand, who has written a book, I think I wrote a blurb on the back of it, in what I said, this is kind of Walter for the next generation. He's a young fellow, we had him speak in an ethics symposium here a few years ago. He's up on our YouTube channel, you remember I mentioned our YouTube channel has all of the last eight years worth of ethics stuff. So Brian, I think we were in a snowstorm or something. So he came in by VTC rather than coming in person because he couldn't fly. But it's a good discussion. He's famous in particular for arguing for the importance of a third category, use post-development. What are the requirements after the war is over? What are the requirements for the belligerents to reconstruct the state that you attacked and so forth? And that turned into a really good dialogue because he's a philosopher, not around the military much. And your equivalents, your predecessors, sitting there peppering him with practical questions about how would a military actually do that? You know, he really had no good responses to that. So it was a philosopher talking to military people, theory practice, nice little mismatch of a sort. And then James Turner Johnson is a very good friend of mine. He's been around forever. He just retired from Rutgers. Jim is the premier historian of the Just War tradition. I'd like to say about Jim. There's no 14th century question that Jim couldn't clarify with an 11th century point. So, you know, with Jim, everything is a stroll back in history, but he knows it like nobody knows it. So if you want a really deep dive on anything, I put up a few of the ones that are more generally relevant than his more obscure historical studies. Probably the Just War tradition and the restraint of war is the single best one. He also wrote a book which he now, which I like to tease him about, Defending the Iraq War, because I didn't think that was a very good idea, and I think he's now willing to admit maybe he got a little ahead of himself in that book, but that's what he wrote at the time. Okay, another pause. Any comments, questions? This is a lot of material I know, so please, okay. Now we're gonna go on to what is this Just War theory in particular? What are the central points of it? First of all, it's divided into two big halves, and the terms are all Latin because this has been done, this was done in the Middle Ages, and so, and lawyers like to speak in Latin anyway, so it's in Latin, okay. So, these are two distinct sets of ethical questions that get asked, and they're questions that are generally answered by different groups of people, okay. So as Walter puts it in his book, wars get judged twice. We get judged on two different sets of criteria. First, use odd vellum. So if you remember your Latin prepositions from painful Latin classes, this is odd is going toward war, right? Justice going toward war. So these are the questions you ask before you start a war. So you got a political problem, you've got a state doing something you don't like, you're having a dispute about something. This is the set of questions you ask about, is this worth thinking about going to war over or not? Would it be justified to use military force because of this particular problem that's confronting us? And then, once you've gotten over that, you've decided to fight your war, then there are set of questions about how do you fight it? What are the rules about how you conduct yourself when you're in the war? What kind of restrictions on weapons, on targets, on people who can legitimately be attacked? How do those play out? How do they pertain? Okay, first, for your war to be justified odd vellum, remember going to war, there has to be a just cause. I talked about the fact that in the Middle Ages, there are a lot of just causes. The offended honor of the monarch, restoring property that's been stolen, perhaps even religious difference, so forth. Up through the 19th century, Europeans said they can go to war for raison d'etat, which means reasons of state, which means, as we used to say about the invasion of Panama, not just cause, but just because, right? Just because we want to, okay? So raison d'etat was good up till the 19th century. But the moral weight of this tradition is, in the end, what are we trying to do with this whole tradition? We're trying to reduce war, right? Trying to figure out ways to restrain the frequency and duration and breadth of war. So there was a move, starting with the League of Nations after World War I, to restrict the legitimate causes. And I think I have that on a slide in a minute, so I'll hold it down and remind me if I don't, but I think I do. There should be a legitimate authority to authorize it. So for example, in the United States Constitution, it's very clear who the legitimate authority is, right? Who is it? The Congress, right? Perfectly clear. With what authority is President Obama doing what we're doing in Syria today? Using the authorization for the use of military force against al-Qaeda and affiliated groups passed in 2001. Seems a bit of a stretch, huh? So why doesn't the Congress come back and address the particular situation of what's happening now? Because the Congress doesn't want anyone near this, right? They don't want to touch it. So just from an American point of view, we have a very serious problem about legitimate authority right now. If you read the Constitution very carefully, and in particular, if you know American history, you know the founders were pretty clear about this. Trick question, what military forces are allowed under the Constitution on the average day in peace? Navy? Well, the Marine Corps is part of the Navy, right? And the militias working for the state governors. The militias working for what we now call the National Guard, but in their Title 32 status, as we would say, right? Not in their Title 10 state. So what about the U.S. Army? Yank got one. If you want one, Congress could authorize it, and they can authorize it for only two years, after which, if they don't reauthorize it, it goes away, right? So what do they have in mind? Are they crazy? Well, they thought, first of all, we got nice oceans and relatively friendly neighbors, so we're not that worried about it. Secondly, they thought our study of history is every republic that tried to survive as a republic in the end lost it to a military that took it over. So we don't want a standing army, because it's a, well, and we'll take the hit. Well, we realize trying to create armies like this is gonna mean there'll be initially hard to train, they'll probably get pretty bloodied the first couple of times they get out, but they'll get their act together eventually, but it's a trade-off worth making in the name of democracy. A really good book about this is Rick Atkins' book, The Army of Dawn, about the American Army in North Africa in World War II, I don't know if anybody's read this, you probably know we did very badly for a while, it took a while to figure this out, but the founders weren't stupid. I mean, I knew that that was what was gonna happen, but it was worth it to them for these democratic reasons. So, I just note, legitimate authorities are big wrong. Under the UN Charter, by the way, what are the legitimate authorities? Self-defense of an individual state that's already been attacked, which may defend itself, but in the charter you're supposed to call New York and the Security Council's supposed to meet and get on it right away, and an authorization under Chapter 7 for a collective security action under the charter. That's it. Those are the legitimate uses of military force under the Charter of the UN. There should be a public declaration. The purpose of this is much debated. Presumably it is a way of trying to restrain war, to say to the possible adversary, you know, we're really serious about this. We're putting you on notice that if this doesn't get fixed politically, we're seriously thinking about going to war with you over this. So it's a matter of giving one last out, basically. You should have a just intent, back to that intentional state thing, right? So what's a legitimate intent? Your legitimate intent in the Westphalian system is get the other guys' army back over the border. So remember President Bush, the elder, called off the first Iraq war once the Iraqi army is pushed back into Iraq because he said, that's the limit of my authorization, right? I had authority to put the Iraqi army over the border. It wasn't my authority to go to Baghdad. It wasn't my authority to reform the Iraqi government. That was the limit of my authority. So that was a kind of classic Westphalian thing, right? I mean, following that to the letter of law. Whereas you could say the unjust intent would be due to the opposite. Decided, well, while we're at it, why don't we just redraw the borders and maybe grab some oil fields and do various other things. So as we're here already, why not? That would be an unjust intent. There should be a proportionality calculation. That is to say, and this is gonna appear in two places. On the odd-bellum side, the proportionality calculation is how much do you think this is gonna cost in blood and treasure? And is it worth it? You remember before the recent Iraq war, things out of the administration said, well, if we go to Iraq, it won't cost us any money. Iraqi oil will pay for it all, said Secretary Wolfowitz, right? We'll be home by Christmas, said Dick Cheney. We'll be welcomed as liberators, said Dick Cheney, right? Now, assuming they really believe that, you might make the argument of proportionality, right? But it didn't exactly turn out that way, did it? And I guess the question would be, ethically, should they and could they have known better? It should be a last resort. That is, you've tried everything short of this, because again, the point of the exercise is to restrain war, right? So have you done everything you can to try to solve the problem before taking recourse to military force? You may recall, although you were probably children then, I'm an old man at this point, before the first Iraq war, that was the sticking point. The Russians were saying, no, we can still talk to them some more. There's still a diplomatic room to maneuver. And finally, the coalition said for a variety of reasons, no, we don't think there's any point in talking to them anymore. So notice last resort can't mean have you done everything you could possibly do? It's a kind of good faith judgment. Have we done everything we think plausibly might work? Are we really done talking now, right now? And do you have a reasonable hope of success? Because if you don't have that, then notice whatever you do, whatever killing you do, whatever dying you do, is completely gratuitous, right? And that's precisely what you're trying to avoid. And then the end of this should be the end of peace. And this applies on the operational side because one of the things that the writers talk about is, try to remember even when you're fighting a war against your worst enemy, at some point we'll be at peace with these people. And at some point, we don't want this hatred to be deeply ingrained in the cultures. So try to conduct yourself in a way that, obviously people are gonna love that you're bombing them and love that you're attacking them, but can you avoid the most egregious kinds of practices that will breed permanent hatred and make it possible to return to any kind of peace in the end? Okay, so that's the use oddbell inside, the decision to go to war in the first place. On the other side, right conduct in war. The most important principle is what philosophers like to call discrimination and what the lawyers like to call distinction. It's the same thing. That means that you may legitimately fire at military targets and may never deliberately at fire on or attack civilians or civilian objects or civilian targets. You should always make the effort to decide what's a military target, what's a legitimate military target and what's a civilian object or person. You remember in the treaties, a combatant is defined as someone who carries their weapon openly wears a uniform cap patch or some other distinctive sign visible at a distance, right? And that's a way to try to say that both parties have an obligation to make clear who the fighters are. And you do that for a couple of reasons. On the one hand, they lose something. They're liable to be attacked at any time, unlike including a sleep, by the way, in the barracks. On the other hand, they gain something which they gain the status of Geneva prisoners if they're captured, which they don't get if they're unlawful combatants. And you remember that all the thrashing around we did about people who weren't wearing caps, patches and uniforms, when we captured them called them unlawful combatants, trying to figure out the legal parameters of what you can and should do with them. That becomes a big problem. Proportionality appears here too, but at a tactical or operational level. So I'm thinking about attacking this target. I recognize if I do attack it with the weapons I have available, I will probably collapse some houses around it. And some of those houses may have civilians in them. Is it legitimate to do that? And the argument is, well, you have to make a good faith calculation of the military value at the time of the target. How much severe collateral damage and it has to be a fair proportion of it. The Air Force, and I guess probably the other air units have actually software packages that let them model blast effect depending on the size of the weapon, the angle of the attack, where's the scatter gonna go and can kind of model alternative ways of targeting a particular target to try to meet this goal of minimizing the damage. And the trend for US weaponry is to actually make the warheads smaller and smaller, including some that are not explosive at all. If you're accurate enough with your targeting then the kinetic effect can be sufficient and you don't need the explosion and so forth. Now, one very important principle, and this comes from back to Thomas Aquinas again, is the principle of double effect. Principle of double effect was thought through to ask yourself this question. I'm going to do something. I foresee that what I'm gonna do is gonna have a good effect and a bad effect. Is it legitimate for me to do this thing? You understand the problem? I can't do the good thing without doing the bad thing. I know they're gonna come together. Double effect says yes if you can meet these tests. First, the thing you're trying to do must itself be good or at least indifferent. So back to my targeting case, I'm trying to attack this military target. That's a perfectly legitimate thing to do from a military point of view. No question about that. The evil effect is foreseen, but I don't intend it. So I foresee that I may kill some civilians, but I don't intend it. How do I measure the sincerity of my intention? Well, if I could attack it at a time of day when there are less or no civilians around, I'll pick that if there's no operation or reason why I can't. If I can drop warning leaflets and tell people to get out of the way before I attack it, I'll consider doing that. So this is a kind of sincerity test, right? Again, I foresee it, but I don't intend it. Indeed, I don't want it. If there are a way to do it without the bad effect, I would happily choose it. I just don't see in the snare how I can get it. This is the critical one. The good effect is not produced by means of the evil effect. What's an example of the good effect being produced by means of the evil effect? In World War II, believe it or not, one of the justifications for bombing housing areas was we are trying to take down German industrial production. How are we doing that? We are de-housing the workers. And we said to ourselves, well, look, the weapons aren't accurate enough to be sure of hitting the factory anyway, but we sure can bomb an entire housing area. And that will cut off industrial production too if that's where the workers live. But notice, in this case, the evil effect is the means to the good effect, right? But you did that work. You did, in fact, shut off industrial production. But the way you did it was by killing innocent civilian workers in their homes, right? So that would be an example of violating that rule. And then lastly, there should be a proportionally grave reason back to our friend, Proportionality again. It's really worth it to accomplish this. Okay, now, Walter, back to him, codifies all of this in what he calls the legalist paradigm of just work. And when I used to teach this to cadets at the Air Force Academy, he said, think of this like this. If you learn a language, you learn the regular verbs first, and then you learn how to conjugate the irregular verbs, right? So this is the regular verb. This is the way it normally goes, I'm oh, I'm out, I'm us, right now. This is the regular verb. Okay, so, first, there exists an international society of independent states. So Walter's baseline right away is Westphalia, right? So when Arend talks to you about this on tomorrow, one of the big challenges I've already indicated about applying this to the contemporary situation is our problems are not necessarily state-on-state any longer, or many of them are not. And so insofar as this model only works for states, everybody can see we're gonna have a problem here, right? And Tony will talk about that more tomorrow. This international society has a law, every state has two rights, territorial integrity and political sovereignty. Our Westphalian buddies, right? That means their borders should be respected and not encroached upon by anybody else. And they are free to do in their internal affairs whatever they like. So for example, at the beginning of the UN Charter, there's a clause that says nothing in this charter is meant to interfere with matters which are essentially internal to member states. Leaving a door as wide as a truck to dispute what are matters that are essentially internal in what aren't, right? Are gross violations of human rights essentially internal matters, right? Is genocide essentially an internal matter? If the Nazis had stayed home and just gassed people under the current state of law at the time, there would have been no international basis to intervene against them, think about that. If they had not committed any aggression against any other state, this was entirely an internal matter, there would have been no legal basis to try to stop them. Take that on board because that explains a lot of what happens in international after World War II, okay? Any use of force or imminent use of force against the political sovereignty or the territorial integrity of another state constitutes aggression and that is a cause of war. In fact, Walter says there's really only one crime in this international society and that's the crime of aggression. Everything else is non-criminal. Notice the weasel phrase there, imminent threat. This became, the standard definition of imminent threat was actually spoken by our secretary, say Daniel Webster in the 19th century, who says imminent threat is like somebody's throwing a blow at you and you throw up your hands at the last minute to block it. So imminent's gotta be really, really imminent, like really, really close, okay? So saying my neighbor is a gun nut, has an AK-47 and I don't like him very much and someday he might decide to attack me so I think I'll go take him out now. That would be a fairly expansive definition of imminent threat and probably not an acceptable one, right? If you read the Bush 2002 national security strategy of the United States, a document which I commend you whether you disagree with it or agree with it, to its credit it goes to great lengths to try to say we have this concept of imminent threat, what the lawyers call anticipatory self-defense. We're gonna need to broaden it considerably after the attacks of 9-11 and to their credit they make a fairly extensive legal argument about how broad it should get, right? And the answer is pretty broad. Now I'll tell you, almost nobody in the world thought that you could take the definition of the 2002 NSS and as Emmanuel Lecont would say universalize the maximum. I mean if this became the rule for everybody in the world it would basically be the end of international law as we know it because then every state on its own authority could make its own decisions and go do whatever it wanted and even if it turns out in retrospect to have been a mistake, it could respond like a governor period and say oops, you know. So it can't really be that but what is an imminent threat is a very hot topic in the modern world, right? The Israelis started doing targeted killing of individuals about 25 years ago and at the time everybody was very critical of them including us. I added a journal called the Journal of Military Ethics and we published an article by an Israeli general and an Israeli philosopher defending this. It was one of the most controversial things we ever ran but that was 20 years ago. We now do this every day, right? I mean so this has become accepted practice at least by us and by other people. So but it's a hot topic, right? How broad does this imminence get? Fourth point, remember regular verb here? Aggression justifies two kinds of violent response, self-defense by the state that's been attacked and law enforcement by any other member of the international community that wants to help them out. And of course the design of the original UN Charter was the five musketeers, right? The five permanent members of the Security Council which were the big military powers at the end of the war would ensure by ganging up on anybody who committed aggression anywhere in the world that aggression would be resisted in the language of the Charter by mutual defense. And here's the critical one. Nothing but aggression can justify a war. Nothing but aggression. And remember aggression is here defined quite narrowly, right? Somebody's crossed your border, somebody's attacked you directly. If that hasn't happened, if they're just saber rattling, they're saying bad things about you in the media, they're doing things that you don't like internally, none of that counts. Now as you can imagine, if I told you this is the regular verb, then what comes are some irregular verbs and that's the way Walter's book is structured, right? So after this comes some irregular verbs like anticipatory self-defense, like humanitarian intervention, like other things. But again, every time you depart from this basic model, this regular verb, then the burden of proof is on you as the state to explain why what you did was legitimate. Nobody questions it if this is what you're doing, right? This is the gold standard case of legitimate use of military force. Everything else you got some explaining to do, right? And then once the aggressor state has been repulsed, it can be punished. Although to a large, what does punishment mean? Well, everybody knows about the severe regime put in place in Germany after World War I. Everybody thinks that was a mistake. But things like you can't fly your airplanes or you can't move into this particular part of your territory or you have to dismantle certain kind of weapon systems, things like that are the kinds of punishments that we might have in mind. So again, this is the regular verb, okay? So if you only know one thing about just war, know that. I used to tell cadets, memorize that. Now if you got that, you got the basics and then you know that any, you got to think critically and creatively once you're departing from this in any way. Because that's what, that's the agreed standard. Okay. All right. First, as I said at the beginning, landing flash of the obvious. Everything I've said is a product of Western civilization. And in particular, Christian Western civilization, primarily, right? So even in its secular form, after Grotius, it's still a product of Western Christian civilization. So if you're an outsider looking at this, you may say this doesn't really represent our tradition. There's a very good scholar at Florida State, John Kelsey, who's an expert on Islamic thought about just war. He has two good books about this. The best one is called Arguing about War in Islam, in which he points out that although some of the categories are similar, they don't perfectly line up with Western just war categories. And so on the other hand, most predominantly Muslim states are signatory to most of these treaties and are members of these organizations. So there are two levels of response to that observation. One is a kind of legalist answer, which is, well, you signed all this stuff, so you're in, right? But of course, the deeper answer culturally is, well, not so fast, right? So for example, when I was talking to these Chinese folks a couple of days ago, I said, look, here's the law of the sea. It says, no matter what you do to what objects it's underwater at high tide, it doesn't become an island and therefore it doesn't get entitled to be a part of your territorial sea and it doesn't get to be part of your EZ. And it doesn't matter, perfect looking on law. They said, well, yeah, but Emperor Zhang sailed through here in the 14th century and it's the law of first discovery. And so, and by the way, there's this nine dash line we have in our passports that says this is all Chinese territory and in their minds if we sail past them, we are provoking them. This is their sovereign territory, says they. Now, I learned a lot about how they think. It does me no good how to solve the problem except to realize it's worse than I thought. They really, really do think about this differently than we do and I finally said to them, look, I think I know where I'm not getting this. What I'm doing is I'm stating a universal rule that I think should apply in all cases. So by your argument, the United States should own the moon in perpetuity, right? Clearly that would be silly, right? They said, but I think what I was missing in, and this took me three days to get this, I think I'm realizing that Chinese don't think like I do, which is about a universal rule and its applicability in all cases. They think very much about a specific historical narrative about a specific place and there's no need to generalize it. And then I was thinking about this on the way home, this helps explain why a Western philosopher has trouble even understanding how Confucius is philosophy because if you've ever read Confucius, you know, there are little, these aphoristic one-liners usually about a specific situation where Confucius gives out a judgment and unlike, say, Judaism, whether what the rabbis would do it say, okay, this specific case is a kind of precedent so we will use this as a legal precedent to argue analogically for the applicability of that example to some other examples, they really don't. It's this one thing, I'd say, it's this one thing and it's not a generalizable rule at all. So I realize I'm stuck in this kind of Western Kantian universal rule thing but that's about me, that's not about them and if I'm gonna understand them I gotta realize they think about it differently, okay? So it's tempting to say, look, we've got international law, hey, by the way, unlike you, United States, China, you actually signed this law of the sea, right? You're a signatory party to it and it says in the treaty that if there's a dispute, you're supposed to get it adjudicated by the tribunal at the UN and by the way, the adjudication of the tribunal at the UN is binding and the Philippines have already brought you up and there's a case before the tribunal which the tribunal has accepted so we'll find out real soon whether your claims are legitimate, right? China's response is, we don't plan to obey that. We have no intention of obeying that, whatever they say. And you say, well, but it says in the treaty that you, well, not interested, I don't know. So, but also China would say, well, we were a much weaker power when we signed that, that was nearly 30 years ago and we felt kind of coerced and by the way, at the time, it kind of looked good for us because it gave us this 200 mile exclusive economic zone which we didn't have before so we kind of wanted that, right? But we certainly didn't intend to give away what we consider our sovereign territory in the South China Sea while we were at it. So, I don't know what to make of the multicultural argument. It's just really important to know about it and I think Tony will probably speak about this somewhat tomorrow. I've already talked about, the Chinese have this concept of active defense. They actually published a Chinese military strategy in English, you can find it on the web and it's all, and this term active defense is all over their document. But you read it, what they mean by active defense looks like aggression to me. It's using military force to defend our interests, whether or not we have been attacked yet, right? So, in no way does it conform to the legalist paradigm. But it's their central defense concept, right? Active and notice they try to make it sound like it conforms to the paradigm by calling it defense but it's defense in which, in our view, we didn't fire the first shot. So, for example, I was talking to this wonderful Chinese political scientist on it. She said, well, look, we're not hurting anybody by building on these islands. I mean, there's nobody there, we're not killing anybody, I said. Well, yeah, but if you get your maximum slaves you plan to shut down the South China Sea to all international trade unless it has your permission to go through it. That's gonna hurt people, Jim. I hadn't thought of that. So, these are the conversations you can have. Okay, let's see. Okay, a few examples, the attempt to restrain war. My students are really amazed when they read this document by Kant. First of all, because they just read Kant's ethics the previous week and think Kant is incomprehensible. So, by the time they read this little essay they're surprised how clear he is. But in this essay he says, here's what we need to do to put it into peace. Nobody should have standing armies. All Republican governments ought to agree to become part of a League of Nations that agrees to adjudicate their disputes through legal means. And we are capable of this because we are rational beings and we can rationally figure out this is what we really have to do. And so, the first time the word League of Nations ever appeared in print, 1775. That's the solution. And Kant, by the way, was a big fan of democracy which is kind of weird for oppression in the 18th century. He was a big fan of human rights. In fact, if you're a human rights person the philosopher you wanna embrace is Immanuel Kant who's gonna give you this ringing endorsement of the equal rights of everybody. Creation of the League of Nations. I've mentioned the Kellogg-Briand pack of 1928 which was the formal title which is a general treaty for renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy. By the way, there were three categories of war crimes at Nuremberg. Most people are familiar with two but not the third one. The first one was the ordinary violations of laws of armed conflict. Second was crimes against humanity. But the third one is crimes against peace which is defined as planning and executing aggressive war. And the law under which people were prosecuted for that war crime was this. Said all aggressive war is illegal. And so the German and Japanese high command were tried under that treaty. So if anybody's asking you to help plan the invasion of a country that hasn't attacked you you might wanna remind yourself there is this legal problem here. In fact, the British commanders before they went to Iraq said required the government to actually write out a legal justification. What they're gonna do is say we're not willing to take a verbal order. Write it down. Show me what the legal justification is for what we're gonna do. The charter says all nations will settle their disputes peacefully. And I'm done. Thank you.