Comes in two parts and did not really do much for me. I was aware that he was a big name in this field and was curious if anyone - Lizard_King, RSharp? - had read this and had any thoughts. It struck me as naggingly ahistorical (or "synchronic") throughout in its treatment of the concepts as divorced from the particularities and practicalities of military history. I'm not going to say the concept of just wars hasn't been significant to the development of constraints upon war in a certain vague and abstract sense, but it seems implicit to his article that it's somehow been a wellspring to them. Which again seems like a weird and ahistorical theory, as to me constraints on (and in) war have flowed from practical problems and the cumulative experience of those concerned with war.
Thanks for the link. I found it an interesting read and the revisionist approach pretty much encompasses my own thought on the subject, which is that individuals fighting an unjust war are not absolved of moral culpability for their part in the overarching unjust action even if their individual conduct is just.
I think your ( Jason T ) reaction is accurate. It's particularly slippery because he keeps representing the views of others or a vaguely defined broader corpus of thought without ever taking responsibility for the perspective or citing its tenets authoritatively. His standard where a reference to justice or justice-like language comprises an effective limit or a useful lens by which to assess choices in war is pretty much the definition of cherry-picking, as he then goes down the line basically doing a greatest hits of popular myths about moral clarity at the strategic level in the wars of history. He says things that are overtly ridiculous and offers definitions that are incredibly unhelpful in providing a clear argument, like and then walks them back with his 1939 Wehrmacht enlistment example, which again presents the idea that coherent images of justice transcend both time and social contracts. Yes, why 1939? Start with that, McMahan, and then tell me precisely why no soldier ever has done this and why that doesn't mean something. I'm not even going to get into the absurdity of the role of noncombatants in his framework. I think there's a lot of productive analysis to be done once you accept that a notion like rules of engagement, regardless of its relatively recent origin, does a lot more to describe what nations and groups enforce in war as compared to a moral-ethical-tradition driven sense of justice within a society. That philosophers and generals freely conflate the language of the two is not an argument for the latter's relevance in war; the degree to which they do is much more likely to tell you to what extent a strategy has included a sense of public relations in its objectives.
There's something to the idea - at least in as far as saying that retail morality in the midst of wholesale immorality doesn't give moral carte blanche, any more than one would think the reverse, but I'm not convinced he's really being subtle enough to present that in a compelling way (at least in this short piece, but the broader "who cares about military history" sense I'm getting from him bodes ill.) Was not a fan either, at least not compared to more thoughtful/particularist versions of the whole "right to resist (in circumstances where participation in a military force is impractical)" problem. Maybe it'd be more like that if articulated at length, but the short version felt... curious. I guess my judgement would depend on whether or not he was aiming at another absolute "soldiers = blanket immunity, insurgents = pirates/bandits liable for execution" straw man or something.
It's not a "might", that's literally how it's worked since forever and will continue to do so absent his dream of world courts and a global social contract. That this creates a philosophical quandary is tangential to what is actually happening when people do these things and what permits them to come back home afterwards. If the moral judgment is purely an abstract one devoid of consequences, then it's simply an intracultural otherization ritual for pacifists or a purification ritual akin to confession for veterans. Nothing particularly wrong with that, but it's not reflective of anything that guides wars or the conduct of those within them.
Consider it an aspirational goal. It took a long time for heads of state to consider themselves bound, in however limited a sense, by the laws of war and even longer before there was some kind of process in place to try those who broke them. Even now that it exists it is in the abstract sense of justice, most people who could be tried for their role in unjust wars are never brought to court. But nevertheless, it had to start somewhere and now there is the threat, however vague and abstract, of legal consequences for launching unjust wars. If people start recognising individual moral culpability then that can in turn work towards providing consequences and guiding the conduct of wars. Long-term, yes, but I don't see it outside of the realm of possibility.
There is a threat, for people who lose wars or, in a group's self-assessment, for people that compromise the strategic mission with embarrassing misbehavior that can be pinned on them as individual bad actors. Heads of state consider themselves bound by what they can get away with relative to their domestic pressures, their personal ethics, and international power dynamics. A legal fiction about what's permissible in war shapes rhetoric and popular narratives, but it's infinitely malleable in terms of what strategy demands and what team loyalty will let you get away with. It's really more comparable to fashion than it is to a legal system. I just don't see how the fundamental issue of power is going to stop being the key variable. Groups with power are always going to be immune to prosecution outside of symbolic gestures, and those without it are always going to be liable to everything from targeted assassination to becoming war criminals in whatever court decides to put on the show trial. It's not significantly worse than other ways that relatively powerful entities have punished relatively weaker entities when they cross a line that's deemed important at the time, but I don't see where anything other than a science fiction caliber "other" generates a shared social contract of large enough scope to bring the revisionist model into the realm of the practical.
This sort of historical preface is pretty conventional in discussions of international constraints on war, and I don't mean to subject it to disproportionate scrutiny, but the whole "It took centuries for us to..." formulation bugs me, because it didn't. Philosophers and theologians didn't drain the swamp of war with a teaspoon in the 1500 years between Boethius and Nuremberg. Really, there's not much you can point to* in terms of rules/power circumscribing states' freedom (as opposing to rules internal to war) prior to the partial exception of the post-Napoleonic Congress of Europe and then skipping ahead to the 20th century efforts following the two world wars. Presenting that as a centuries-long fabian process (and lumping the internal rules of war in with it**) is part of the stylistic gripe I have with McMahan. That might sound like some tiresome "realist" quibbling, and it really isn't - I'm in favour of the ICC and don't look down my nose at the history of efforts at collective security and justice, even when they fell short. I just don't think bad history helps anyone have an informed opinion on war or the laws surrounding it. *Excluding a few fairly minor exceptions of efforts to circumscribe wars against coreligionists etc. **This subordination of the subject of the "internal" laws of war to the wider subject of laws and philosophy encompassing wars also bugged me. McMahan clearly sees something odd about the "rules of the game" type morality of the laws of war - he has his little cartoons with referees dramatizing the point. But, ask an historian: Why are the rules of war analagous to the rules of a game? I feel like he didn't.
I have no idea how he thinks there wasn't a state controlling the opponent of South Vietnam and the US in the Vietnam war. Otherwise, his descriptions are so strange that if I couldn't look up his CV I'd think he had never read what he is talking about. For example: Yes, uh, because the theory has little to say about illegitimate governments? The Nazis were horrible people, the just thing to do was rebel; if people couldn't or wouldn't do that for whatever reason, the just thing to do is to fall back to fighting the war justly. I'm not sure how this is a problem; I thought this (which Kalle mentions above kind of) was a known corrolary. My extremely unfair quick take: he's trying to have his cake and eat it too but finding a way to shove "but they had it coming" into theory to justify "ethical" intervensions like Bosnia, which are on the rise now that there's now countervailing force to stop the US from squashing whoever it feels like.
I read a paper by him on this not that long ago called Just Cause For War. The article is familiar enough that I suspect it's a shortened version of the paper. He's not the clearest writer by any means. Since I had to think about it at the time, here are a few clarifications that hopefully clarify something or other, maybe: What he means, and this is a perfect case of communicating badly, is that deciding whether an action is just requires a particular actor responsible for the action. If we say "World War II is just" it's not clear what that means, given that there were opposing forces engaged in the conflict. We have to instead ask whether Britain's decision to fight and subsequent military actions were just, and the same for Germany and the other actors involved. It's incredibly annoying that he chooses to use the term "war" for both. I quite agree that McMahan is wildly overstating the importance of the long-running debate over the ethics of war to actual wars that actually take place in actuality. (Sorry, just finished my exams, thinking is for suckers.) There is a sense, though, in which rules of engagement have to be talked about in moral/justice terms, otherwise what are they even for? Just a mutually beneficial ruleset? Some of the latter, I should think, but not all. I believe here he's using "permissible" in a purely moral sense, not descriptively. The solder could be given a medal or hanged, and it wouldn't change the ethical permissibility of his action. At least that's the idea.
I don't think that's his intent. He's trying to draw the line between traditional nation-state actors and non-traditional. The NVA was surely traditional in this sense but the Viet Cong were not; that their logistics were largely handled by traditional nation-states is immaterial to their placement on the scale of moral responsibility. Each individual Viet Cong combatant was still "governed" by the acts-in-war sense of morality but it's not hand wavingly clear what nation-state held moral culpability for their entry into the war. He might be trying to do so, but he at least acknowledges the difficulties in resolving the dilemna between how one becomes a legitimate combatant: through the unethical direction of a state, the invasion by another state, etc., and how one combatant can attack another "innocent" who then, by virtue of being attacked becomes a legitimate combatant. I think he at least clearly acknowledges this circular reasoning and admits it is nowhere near resolution.
People on both sides have claimed both yes and no. It's my very armchair amateur view that their structure can be thought of in similar terms to the political structure of the USSR (which makes sense given their origins) in which the North Vietnamese politburo and Ho Chi Mihn essentially said: "this is what we want to happen in the South" and then the otherwise largely independent but trained-and-resettled-by-the-north southern communists were all "that sounds like a good idea, let's do it". To make it more difficult, the Viet Cong did establish a kind of government-in-exile (located in Cambodia) which was recognized by other communist nation-states, adding compexity to the first question by asking a new one: what even defines a legitimate nation-state for the purpose of McMahan's notion of jus ad bellum? So was the Viet Cong "run by" the NVA or by the North? Hard to be definitive, just like it's hard to be simplistic in thinking about if the Ukrainian SSR was run by Moscow vs. if/how the Russian SSR was vs. if/how the East German nation-state was vs. if/how Chechnya is/was. They (North Vietnam and the southern VC) were absolutely bed-buddies though and both had eyes towards eventual unification. I view their relationship similar to East Germany and Soviet Moscow in the late 70 and early 80s. In any case, "an indiginous population of a recently-divided (by imperialistic foreigners) nation-state that wants to reunite with its former other half nation-state so creating a provisional government while engaging in civil war against itself, while both have external nation-states acting as deeply interested parties" isn't so simple as a recognized nation-state engaging in war with another; this is why McMahan points it out.
Eh. You're giving him credit for caring about history, which isn't what I'm getting from the rest of the writeup.
Oh, I didn't realize it was somewhat controversial. I thought it was straightforward that they wouldn't have existed without the North sending the money, supplies, manpower, and leadership down.
D Support your conclusions! If you need proofreading assistance book an appointment with the writing lab.
