War Will Not Save "the West."

Thoughts for wartime.

Few people would admit to being “pro-war” in the same, broad sense that other people claim to be pacifists. Pacifists are against all wars on principle. People who are not pacifists, on the other hand, tend to be pro-this or pro-that specific war. They believe some wars — especially defensive wars — are necessary and justified. But those same people would probably add that war is always a horrible affair, and we should generally avoid starting one.

Nevertheless, it seems to me that some people really are pro-war in a broad, general sense. They are not only pro-this or pro-that war; they are biased in favor of war as a general idea, as a tactic or strategy. They are pro-war in a philosophical sense: they believe that war — or the threat of war through the projection of force and the accumulation of arms — is necessary for the protection and cultivation of order and culture and justice and freedom. The best things in human existence — our most noble institutions, ideas and achievements — are made possible by war and the threat of force.

A memorable expression of this philosophical pro-war view can be found in the 1992 film, A Few Good Men. The movie’s villain, Colonel Jessep, is on trial for secretly ordering the violent punishment of an underperforming Marine named Santiago. Fed up with being cross-examined by a polished liberal lawyer (played by Tom Cruise), Jessep (played by Jack Nicholson) cries out: “Son, we live in a world that has walls, and those walls have to be guarded by men with guns. Who’s gonna do it? You? … I have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Santiago, and you curse the Marines. … my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives.” In other words, the orderly and tidy world of polished liberal lawyers is made possible by the warriors who patrol its perimeter.

During the happy 1990s, it’s possible that a majority of Americans perceived the polished liberal lawyer to be the hero of A Few Good Men. But increasingly, the political center — including many self-described liberals — would call Colonel Jessep the hero. Consider this recent video posted by media influencer and comedian

Konstantin Kisin

, where he argues that “weakness invites war.” After Israel launched missiles at Iran last week, Kisin elaborated: “The West’s success can be summarized in the simple observation that millions who live in it are unable to understand what it is like to deal with hostile enemies who want to invade your country and kill you because all they’ve ever known is freedom, safety and plenty.” “Western values” — freedom, safety and plenty — survive this dangerous world only because the West has fought wars, has won wars, and has prevented future wars.

In his recent book, The Technological Republic: Soft Power, Hard Belief, and the Future of the West, Palantir CEO Alex Karp makes a similar claim: “The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.” Palantir is a data company that converts data into actionable intelligence. This intelligence is used on the battlefield and helps armies win wars.

I can sum up the pro-war view in five points:

• The West has been for a long time the top global power, imposing a quasi-world government upon the world through a combination of soft power and hard power.¹

• The West’s power owes a lot to the universal appeal of its values, which can be traced to the Enlightenment and Ancient Greece, as well as (not all agree on this last part) its Jewish and Christian spiritual inheritance;

• China, Russia and Iran are enemies of the West because they disagree with its values;

• The West is a victim of its own success. It is becoming complacent and weak. This invites its global rivals to encroach upon it, in an attempt to overthrow its status as the top global power.

• The West must prepare for war.

With the outbreak of war between Israel, Iran and the United States, the pro-war side loudly celebrated what seemed to them to be a pivotal moment. The West was finally waking up and flexing its muscles, fighting for its freedom and safety.

This is where I think the pro-war ideology is wrong:

• First, the pro-war side is wrong to think that, empirically speaking, the great ideas of the West have survived thanks to military triumphs. Most of the great Western works of philosophy and art have survived wars, the rise and fall of empires, totalitarian frenzies, the destruction of libraries, the closing of schools, and other conflagrations. Socrates’ influence survived even though the man himself was defenseless before the democratic regime that unjustly put him to death. Aquinas’ ideas survived being condemned by the bishop of Paris, as well as the burning of his books. Luther’s ideas survived Papal condemnation. Galileo’s discoveries survived the Inquisition. The Declaration of the Rights of Man survived the revanchist monarchies that sought to undo the legacy of the French Revolution. Anna Akhmatova’s poetry survived Stalin — in fact, buried Stalin. How many tyrants have risen and fallen in Greece since the birth of Plato? One could make the argument that a stable society, with a strong army to protect it, was needed in order to give Plato or Aquinas or Rousseau or Akhmatova the place and time to write. But one cannot say with certainty that their ideas have reached us today only by the grace of victorious armies. On the contrary, their work has outlasted the regimes they were born under.

• Second, the pro-war side is wrong to believe that non-Western powers are always the enemies of Western ideas. In fact, in some cases they are the preservers of Western culture. The Islamic Golden Age preserved and translated the works of Aristotle. During the “Dark Ages” Ireland (which was never conquered by Rome) preserved the texts of the ancient world. Human beings have enough in common that you will always find at least a few people in every society willing to protect and cultivate the greatest things that have been written or said.

• Third, the pro-war side underestimates how much war degrades the very ideas and institutions that it supposedly is defending. Anyone who was alive during the War on Terror can see how this is true: how government mass surveillance has become an accepted fact of life, along with drone warfare and undeclared war; and how the Bill of Rights was violated.

• Four, the pro-war side in general underestimates how brutally destructive war is. Consider the fact that the greatest cultural artifacts of Europe — the cities of Rome, Venice, Paris and Oxford — survived World War II not because the Allies won, but because of an act of God, the bad conscience of military commanders, or sheer luck (take your pick). As historian Tony Judt puts it, the destruction was absolute, and what didn’t get destroyed survived because we got lucky:

By informal consent or good fortune the ancient and early-modern centers of a few celebrated European cities-Rome, Venice, Prague, Paris, Oxford—were never targeted. But in the first year of the war German bombers had flattened Rotterdam and gone on to destroy the industrial English city of Coventry. The Wehrmacht obliterated many smaller towns in their invasion routes through Poland and, later, Yugoslavia and the USSR. Whole districts of central London, notably in the poorer quarters around the docklands in the East End, had fallen victim to the Luftwaffe's blitzkrieg in the course of the war.

But the greatest material damage was done by the unprecedented bombing campaigns of the Western Allies in 1944 and 1945, and the relentless advance of the Red Army from Stalingrad to Prague. The French coastal towns of Royan, Le Havre and Caen were eviscerated by the US air force. Hamburg, Cologne, Dusseldorf, Dresden and dozens of other German cities were laid waste by carpet-bombing from British and American planes. In the east, 8o percent of the Byelorussian city of Minsk was destroyed by the end of the war; Kiev in the Ukraine was a smouldering ruin; while the Polish capital Warsaw was systematically torched and dynamited, house by house, street by street, by the retreating German army in the autumn of 1944.

In other words, while its true that World War II was necessary to save the West from the Nazis, it’s also true that the West barely survived the war itself.

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.

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1. “The West” is roughly defined as those nations, allied with the United States, who have liberal democratic governments, and/or are members of NATO. I don’t know if I agree with this concept, “the West.” But I will use it in this article.