The Proportionality of War

As the stakes rise in the various conflicts around the world, not least in Russia, Ukraine and the Middle east, we should remind ourselves of the Church’s theory of a ‘just war’, which should be our guide – not jingoism or dreams of unconditional surrender. Like most theories, it’s more difficult in practice. Still, we strive for the ideal, even if we fall short.

Here they be, drawn from Saints Augustine and Thomas, as summarized in their current form in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: (par. 2309)

The strict conditions for legitimate defense by military force require rigorous consideration. The gravity of such a decision makes it subject to rigorous conditions of moral legitimacy. At one and the same time:
– the damage inflicted by the aggressor on the nation or community of nations must be lasting, grave, and certain;
– all other means of putting an end to it must have been shown to be impractical or ineffective;
– there must be serious prospects of success;
– the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated. The power of modem means of destruction weighs very heavily in evaluating this condition.

And as the text continues:

These are the traditional elements enumerated in what is called the “just war” doctrine.
The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

These are strict conditions for a just war, and we will focus on the most pertinent for what faces us now, namely, proportionality, the last of those aforementioned requirements.

Even in the most just of wars, we cannot bring about evils that dwarf the evil of what began the war itself. A nation may want to preserve its autonomy, but at what cost? And what does ‘success’ mean? National ruin, even suicide would be but a pyrrhic victory.

Such balancing of good and evil would also apply to the ‘annihilation of whole nations’ by the threat of nuclear war. Escalating any conflict to this level would be, to put it mildly, counter-productive, and more realistically, insane. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bad enough. The destruction of these cities with all their inhabitants – following upon the firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden, and other cities – was a truly monumental and intrinsic evil, regardless of the twisted knots commentators, even Catholics, tie themselves into in their apologias for Truman’s deed. For besides the dis-proportionality of destroying ‘whole cities along with their inhabitants’ (condemned by the Second Vatican Council), there is also the evil of deliberately and willfully killing non-combatants, for which weapons of mass destruction are designed.

It’s no longer 1945, and the nuclear monopoly is over. At least nine nations now have ‘the bomb’, with stockpiles of thousands of thermonuclear devices, each of them hundreds or even thousands of times more powerful than those early primitive atomic ones, ready, armed and aimed.

What use is any disputed territory if turned into a radioactive slag, with whatever few survivors there be forced to eke out what subsistence they might, until they die a slow death of poisoning or starvation?

And if the war goes global, we could quite literally see the end of civilization, if not humanity itself. Perhaps that may be God’s permissive will to bring about the end of time, the ‘final unleashing of evil’ and all that entails. We may  hope not, and strive at least not to be part of bringing about that evil, whose prospect is the basis of ‘mutually assured destruction’. This is morally fraught, but what we’ve got at present.

War was generally a more controlled, even gentlemanly, affair in the Middle Ages, with conflicts solved with swords, bows, arrows, in a fighting match, the victor declared after a limited skirmish, which did not involve civilians, women and children. But the concept of ‘total war’ that arose in the wars of religion is the modus belli of our modern era, unhinged from any objective moral order.

We should work towards a deeper and more lasting peace, which is not the absence of war, nor even the absence of arms, but, as Augustine says, the work of justice.

The ideal is diplomacy, to reach the best compromise we might this side of heaven, where perfect justice is impossible. Neither side will get everything we want, still less what they deserve. As the economist Thomas Sowell put it, there are no solutions in this life, only trade-offs. At the end of the day, we must face reality. Scripture is replete with examples of injustice – or at least imperfect justice – that must be suffered as the will of God, for expiation for our sins, or those of others.

In the end, war is always a scourge for our sins, in a mysterious and complex way. As Our Lady of Fatima emphasized, repentance, conversion and prayer are the most effective means of minimizing its evil effects, and achieving what peace we might.

May the grace of the Holy Spirit enlighten and inform, even unwittingly, our world leaders. May good counsel, humility and wisdom prevail over the force of arms too destructive to contemplate. +