Is Santiago Ramos right about war?

Why there is merit in his case but I'm not so sure about the outcome of his project.

‘War, what is it good for?’ is the song which always rings through my head when questioning the utility of war. Not only because of its catchy tune, or because my friends and I danced to it during a university presentation many years ago, but also because it poses a fundamental question. War is inherently inimical to human relations, but it has also been a way of life since our species first learned to use tools. War, on the face of it, appears to be the great paradox of our species.

Many argue that we should be ashamed that, in our enlightened 21st century, we remain prone to war. Despite a significant downturn in the number of wars fought in the 1990s and early 2000s, the number is now on the rise. The increasing irrelevance of international law and norms, such as R2P, which face an existential crisis, has helped facilitate increasing numbers of countries deciding to take that ultimate step. Yet, there are those, such as Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes, who argue that it is the arrival of an overly muscular form of liberalism in the form of R2P which gave countries the rhetorical power and pretext to initiate more wars.

So, what is war good for? This is the question that Santiago Ramos takes up in his thoughtful essay on the subject. Santiago does not deny the necessity for war per se. Instead, he is critical of those who believe war has a purpose beyond the necessity for self-defence. It is perhaps a less philosophically ambitious case than pacifism, and there may be an area of tension to be explored in his critiques of the ‘pro-war’ position, which does not extend towards a pacifist stance, but it remains a thoroughly interesting claim.

Santiago builds his case by rebutting those who believe that war is necessary to defend ‘The West’. Santiago sums up what he considers to be the ‘pro-war’ stance, which is that the West has used its soft and hard power to shape the political world around us, including institutions such as the ICC, the World Bank, the United Nations, and the concept of international law. The West’s power also owes a lot to the virtue of its values, which its international competitors do not share. Although such values are ‘universal’, they remain somewhat under contestation by competing powers.

However, as a result of our success, almost universal success, it must be said, the West has become complacent and open to challenges from those who do not share such values. In doing so, we have emboldened our competition to take ever more risks, and we should prepare for war to defend our values and ourselves. Santiago argues that with the arrival of war between Israel and the Palestinian territories, and the attacks on Iran launched by both Israel and the United States, this ‘pro-war’ side is cheering. Finally, the West is reacting to the challenges it faces and is defending the principles that define it.

Santiago challenges these claims on four key fronts. First, Santiago takes a Fukuyama-esque turn by arguing it is not military achievement which should take credit for the West’s promotion and even survival of ideals. Instead, ideas survive by their weight. Authors whose works have been burned by fire will still be read by future generations. It is not a question of armed victory, which assures ideas their place in the world, but something much deeper in our culture and consciousness.

Second, Santiago argues that non-Western countries and systems can sustain, promote, and incorporate Western ideals just as well as the West itself. We have seen this with the Islamic Empire during its golden age preserving texts from Ancient Greece from which all of us now benefit. Far from being intrinsically different, there are connections across ideas and space which retain our inherent humanity. Trying to pretend differently is simply a route to destruction.

Third, Santiago argues that the defenders of conflict forget just how much war degrades our domestic values. Using the War on Terror as an example, Santiago argues that far from reinforcing the values that it seeks to defend, war goes after our fundamental rights. Guantanamo Bay, torture, mass surveillance, kidnapping, and illegal drone strikes all challenge fundamental Western principles of the rule of law, human rights, and international law, which are supposedly so precious.

Fourth and finally, Santiago thinks the pro-war crew underestimates how destructive war is physically. It is remarkable that during the Second World War, more was not destroyed. In Germany, the fire bombing in the closing stages of the war reduced much of the country to ash, including historic centres such as Dresden, Hamburg, Cologne, and Berlin. It is only by luck that cities like Paris and Oxford, renowned for their culture, did not suffer the same fate.

Some wars do need to be fought. It is good that the Allies beat the Nazis. But war is a necessary evil; it is not what preserves the great achievements of the human race. War threatens those achievements, and we are lucky that more has not been destroyed already. In general, we should be skeptical of war, and of those who fan the flames of war, no matter how noble-sounding their arguments might seem.

Santiago’s final statement on war

War Will Not Save "the West."

I do not argue that Santiago is entirely wrong about his claims of war. Indeed, he is in good company with some of his critiques. Hannah Arendt, in her book On Violence, is equally cautious about the role of violence in annihilating value. Once given pride of place, violence for Arendt fails to cement value but corrodes it until there is nothing but violence and realpolitik left. This is why Arendt found the invention of the nuclear threat to be so destructive, as questions of value when the reality of ultimate destruction was laid bare. Indeed, even Franz Fanon was cautious of violence in the latter sections of The Wretched of the Earth as he felt it would lead to the destruction of a political movement if left untethered.

Violence has the potential not only to silence values but also to reduce law to an empty vessel. The controversial theorist Giorgio Agamben in The State of Exception and Homosacer lays out the potential for people to be thoroughly excluded from the community where anything can happen to them in times of warfare. The example of Guantanamo Bay, where accused terrorists lived outside the protection of any legal framework, is a dire example of such a theory coming into reality.

Yet, as Robert Kaplan argues in The Tragic Mind, the only way to limit the excesses of violence is to reconcile ourselves to the fact that violence is common in our history. Rather than pretending we can politic our way out of violence via mere values, we must acknowledge the dreaded reality. That man tends to lurch towards violence at specific times, and disorder is the norm, not the exception.

On the face of it, this would seem to undermine at least parts of Santiago’s argument. If we are to defend our values, we can not seek refuge inside them but must recognise the reality that there will be challenges to them, and sometimes those challenges will be violent. This requires an acknowledgement that war is not only necessary but perhaps somewhat vital to the continuation of some form of value. Without conflict, value becomes somewhat meaningless.

Necessarily, this leads us to question how ideas survive in the long run? Is it merely because they are better ideas, or is it something else? Some ideas are so bad that the natural course of history weeds them out. Stalinism and Nazism are two of the most obvious culprits where once such values were acted out it became evident to almost everyone these were a terrible set of ideas.

However, bad ideas can survive from generation to generation. Slavery as a practice is a good example of how a hideous idea somehow retains its value for century after century and is only relatively recently in the grand scheme of things being rooted out. But slavery did not simply die of its own accord. It required significant military efforts by multiple countries to exorcise the practice of slavery. Even after military defeat in the American Civil War, generations of southerners were hateful of the ‘Yankee North’ for daring to infringe upon their ‘states’ rights’ to own human beings.

There is a strong case to be made that had the North followed through with reconstruction, America would not be in its current state today. The premature withdrawal of forces, precisely because of a lack of enthusiasm for sustaining military control over the south, enabled extremism to grow and set back the progress of civil rights for almost 100 years. If there had been greater enthusiasm to stay the course and to continue the fight, that could have been avoided.

Perhaps the ‘right’ ideas do outlast those who try to repress them, but I am a little more doubtful of this case than Santiago. It appears to me we live in an age where even the worst ideas are seeing a resurgence, even if they are packaged up differently than in the past. Liberalism may well bury whatever deformed idea Trumpism turns into, but I’m not sure I’d want to bet my life on it. It strikes me that sooner or later, a violent confrontation may be required to settle that debate.

War can act as a degrader of value of that there is no doubt. But it can also be a beneficial exercise in exporting value, much stronger than the dubious role that so-called ‘soft power’ truly plays. The development of R2P, an international norm, was a symbol of recognising the value of human life over the abstract concept of national sovereignty. When the principle was exercised, it not only saved lives but also promoted the idea that states should not be bandits at home because they have acquired immunity abroad.

Today, our lack of confidence has enabled states to ride roughshod over said values. China is committing a genocide that the world is silent about, and Israel brutally bombs Gaza with apparently no end in sight, even when there is nothing left to bomb. North Korea still operates a system more brutal than any other on the planet. The West’s reticence to use its military might to confront such threats stems from previous failures in Afghanistan and Iraq. Two wars fought incompetently and with insufficient funds to prosecute them adequately should not undermine the entire doctrine on the utility of force in projecting universal values.

If there are no cheerleaders for war, this raises the question of how one can be prosecuted. War requires enthusiasm if it is to be fought well. Albert Speer acknowledged this in Inside the Third Reich, where, amongst many fictions, he did say one true thing. The West won the war because unlike the Nazis we were committed to prosecuting a total war. There was no quarter given to the Nazi menace, not even in 1940 when they appeared to be invincible. It required substantial enthusiasm from the United Kingdom, the United States and the Soviet Union to face down the Nazi machine. In the end, the war helped build the US’s industrial might, setting the stage for the next 70 years of economic and political dominance. It also spelt the beginning of the end for the European Empires, which could no longer economically or morally uphold their claims to their overseas territories.

There is considerable doubt in my mind regarding this most complex of subjects. It strikes me that over-enthusiastic calls for war are reckless and dangerous. Yet, neither can we shy away from challenges, nor can we enter wars without a willingness and, yes, enthusiasm to win them. Good ideas can bury terrible regimes, but the propensity for large numbers of people of all abilities to believe in terrible ideas remains startling. Necessarily, it strikes me, that force must be used, even in a somewhat restrained way, to try and defeat ideas so bad they threaten our continued survival. Their cost may be terrible, but the cost of not doing is even worse. Indeed, even though Western values are universal, they are under threat, both at home and abroad. Denying that with a search back in time is not particularly helpful in the end. Rather, we need to acknowledge and act on the threats that we see today with the caution and knowledge that we could always be mistaken.

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all of the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.

(Reinhold Niebuhr quoted in RealPolitik by John Bew)