Morality and Contemporary Warfare

Christian Century, Jan 17, 2001 by Martin L. Cook

Morality and Contemporary Warfare. By James Turner Johnson. Yale University Press, 256 pp., $25.00.

IT IS A TRUISM that generals always prepare to fight the previous war. The memory of the past so shapes military thinking that the new challenges of future conflicts are frequently obscured. In a similar way, thinking about war is to a large degree focused not on the shape of future conflicts, but on the moral questions of previous eras.

James Turner Johnson wants to bring ethical reflection to bear on the conflicts most typical of the present and the foreseeable future. Ours is a post-cold-war world of small-scale ethnic and religious conflict amid the ruins of collapsed empires. The analyses applied to the Vietnam war or the problems of nuclear deterrence are ill suited to illuminate the contemporary scene.

A professor of religion at Rutgers University, Johnson is a leading authority on just-war thinking, especially on its historical development. Among his earlier works are The Holy War Idea in Western and Islamic Traditions and Can Modern War Be Just? Johnson's thesis is that much of American literature and thought about war in the 20th century is of limited relevance to the typical forms of contemporary armed conflict and the changing shape of the international order.

Johnson discerns three stages in the post-World War II development of thought about war. The issue of nuclear weapons dominated the 1950s and a good part of the '60s. During the Vietnam war Americans were preoccupied with the morality of intervention and the assessment of the means of fighting that war--all, of course, still under the nuclear umbrella of the cold war. In the '80s, the focus returned to nuclear weapons issues, but opposition to all war also became an important factor in the debate.

Although all those issues remain alive, none is directly relevant to current problems:

   Contemporary warfare has in fact taken the form of local conflicts, more
   often than not civil wars, in which no great alliances of nations are
   involved; these have been wars fought for reasons based in local rivalries,

typically inflamed by historical animosities, ethnic disparity, or religious difference, rather than for reasons of global Realpolitik; they have been fought not with nuclear weapons (or, indeed, other types of weapons of mass-destructive capability) or the latest in military technology, but instead with conventional weaponry, often of old design, and often limited to rifles, knives, grenades, and light, crew-served weapons which individual soldiers can carry on their persons. A further feature of empirical contemporary warfare is that it involves face-to-face uses of military power by the participants against one another, not the remote destruction of distant, unseen, and often abstract targets.

This is the kind of armed conflict that has erupted in the former Yugoslavia, in many places in Africa and in the former Soviet republics.

Johnson graphically illustrates the moral schizophrenia of much contemporary moral and religious-ethical thought, including that of the U.S. Catholic bishops and other official religious bodies. On the one hand, there is a strong resistance to the use of military power, rising in some Roman Catholic documents and papal statements to a "presumption against war" and the suggestion that recourse to military power is always bad. Counterbalancing this trend is the frequent advocacy (often by the same groups and individuals) of using military power in humanitarian causes.

To those wrestling with this dilemma, Johnson offers an historical review of the fundamental principles of the justified use of force and their application to this new environment. Neither the political tradition of realism, with its sharp focus on narrowly conceived national interest, nor a utopian universalism uninformed by the hard practicalities of military capability offers significant conceptual help. The former would counsel undue isolationism on the grounds that very few humanitarian causes genuinely engage vital national interests. The latter would advocate impossibly grandiose involvements in humanitarian interventions, involvements far beyond the nation's military and diplomatic capabilities and resources.

Johnson draws on the whole history of just-war thinking to find the appropriate moral framework to guide us. With caution and even-handedness he shows the limitations of so-called "just-war pacifism" (the thesis that modern weapons are so inherently destructive and indiscriminate that no war fought using them could be just). He also cautions against an overenthusiastic embrace of the United Nations as the sole guarantor of international peace and security.

THE END of the cold war makes it politically more likely that the UN will want to exercise the powers granted it in its charter. For example, in principle the UN has "the right to intervene, by force if necessary, in conflicts where no peace has been established, in order to set right conditions deemed to pose a threat to international peace and security." But Johnson notes that the presently constituted UN "lacks in itself the attributes necessary to make it capable of effectively acting out this role stipulated in the Charter."