Being against violence does not make
for a beautiful soul (Aristotle)
If we consider war as a continuation of political activity (by other means), then it never arises out of nothing. The war has a story that led to him. Dealing with the subject of war is delicate and complicated. Even more complicated is the assessment of its justification and probable inevitability in specific cases.
The general public sees war as the worst of all evils. Accordingly, the opinion prevails among the masses that the side that starts a war is in the wrong and evil, while the party that is directed against it is right and good. But as history and dispassionate, rational reflection show us, this is not necessarily true. If it were so easy to distinguish between right and wrong in war, the United States and its many Western allies would have been the bad guys in many cases. If questions about war could be answered emotionally and almost from the gut, we would never have to discuss the topic of the "Just War", which has occupied philosophers from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas to Michael Walzer and also the author of this blog article, who devoted his entire doctoral thesis (and the book based on it) to the topic of morality and immorality of violence (and non-violence) on an individual, collective and politico-military level.
War and its political-ethical evaluation are to be judged from two essential points of view. On the one hand, and above all, what triggered the war and prompted political leaders and government collectives to go to war? What is the causa iusta, the just reason – as the primary consideration of the principle of ius ad bellum (right to war) – that justifies or seems to justify waging war?
The main challenge in assessing this crucial aspect is that the justification for the use of weapons – no matter how early or late – is always subjective and depends on the intention of a political leader or a political decision-making body. In order to adequately assess this, the observer – individuals, political administrations, or international bodies – must rise to a meta-level of thought from which the causalities and steps that led to the dispute should be judged as objectively and impartially as possible. It is obvious that this rarely happens since pacifist and political-ideological emotions prevail and cloud judgment. Above all, the United Nations, which should ideally perform this role, does not do justice to this elevation to a factual, objective, and impartial level, or only very rarely.
Two essential criteria of the transcendental moral philosophy (independent of experience and comprehensible by reason alone) for the ius ad bellum are necessity and inevitability. War must always be a last resort, necessary and inevitable as the last resort to resolve a conflict. While it is seemingly obvious in cases of clear defense, it is more difficult in preemption/prevention. A pre-emptive war represents a proactive violent breach of the peace in order to pre-empt an imminent threat or to gain a strategic advantage over the inevitable armed conflict. The waging of a pre-emptive war could be justified if all alternatives to the use of force had been exhausted or if only immediate military intervention could prevent the emergence of a major and far bigger threat. Examples of such pre-emptive military strikes include Israel's 1967 Six-Day War or the 2003 US-Iraq war. As the latter showed, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) bring a crucial element to the equation. The mere assumption that Saddam Hussein had a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction – which proved inaccurate after the war – was used as a just justification for the war.
The ius in bello, or law in war, is the second component of warfare to be evaluated in the assessment. Do the warring parties and their military formations abide by the laws of war, the Geneva Convention? Do they wage wars on the basis of universal human demands, which must not be endangered or abandoned, even in armed conflicts? Do the warring parties respect the distinction between combatants and non-combatants in combat operations? Will only military targets be fought, and collateral damage kept to a minimum? Is the treatment of prisoners of war and wounded enemy troops carried out in accordance with the Geneva Protocols and are cruel attacks and war crimes avoided?
While both sides are apparently violating the "ius in bello" in the current Ukraine war, only alleged Russian war crimes are being made public in the West. For example, there is no mention of Ukrainian troops using civilians as human shields, choosing defensive positions in residential areas, or breaking martial law by arming non-combatants, which organized crime uses to wreak havoc and loot, for which the blame is propagandistically placed on the regular Russian armed forces. Likewise, there is no mention of the fact that Putin has imposed restraint on his armed forces and pretended to focus on military objectives. This approach is wrongly interpreted in the propaganda of the West and misjudges the realities as the incompetence of the Russian troops.
For our goal here – to grasp the causalities that led to the war and to give criteria for its possible end – we need to focus on the question of ius ad bellum, the question of the reasons and possible motives for starting a war that are in the hands of politics.
As mentioned in the previous blog article, the situation of the ultima ratio for Russia to let the power of arms speak arose from the uncompromising attitude in the political decision-making centers of the West. Aside from the Ukrainian regime's years of encroachments on the Russia-friendly regions of Donbas and Lugansk in the east, the continued disregard for genuine Russian security interests and the untenable stance of sticking to Ukraine's decision to become a full NATO member led to war. Again, the realization of the just reason for Mr. Putin subjectively rests with him and the Russian Duma, which authorized the military invasion of Ukraine. Whether the politicians and the public in the West like it or not, and they consider it unjustified, for Putin it was the right decision – from his point of view to protect Russia's security interests. And he didn't take it lightly.
As also noted, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky behaved particularly amateurishly in the warmongering maneuvers that led to the war. In complete ignorance of security policy contexts, he pushed his country's national self-determination far beyond the limits of a sensible security strategy. Instead of seriously considering the geopolitical circumstances, history, cultural genesis of the country, proximity to Russia and Putin's legitimate security interests, he pushed for rapid NATO membership.
Zelensky neglected the timeless guiding principles for defining political goals and national security interests that a leader must establish according to the geopolitical situation and strategic conditions of his country – and never negating the security interests of his neighbors. He disregarded NATO's vehement eastward expansion, which in the three decades since the end of the Cold War had brought the Western military alliance ever closer to the borders of the Russian Federation, and even suggested that Ukraine, as a NATO member, should become nuclear.
From the Russian point of view, the whole situation met the circumstance of the above-mentioned criterion of inevitability. Putin had exhausted all non-violent means of conflict resolution. He never intended to go to war, but the Russophobe political elites of the West denied him any chance to escape the impasse through diplomacy. Could he have waited with his military action or not triggered it at all? Of course. But it is not only the political leaders in the West who bear responsibility for their countries. So does Mr. Putin. In the misguided hope that he would give in to pressure and withdraw, he was basically prompted by Washington, Berlin, Brussels, and Kiev to strike militarily. For Russia, the circumstances fulfilled the criterion of necessity and inevitability.
The reasons and direct causalities of recent history that led to the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, including Mr. Zelensky's pathetic attitude, I have addressed in previous blog posts such as the one above. On the day of the start of the Russian military operation, I once again made it clear in writing how easily the political elites of the West could have avoided this war and that and why they bear responsibility for it.
From the perspective of future generations, it will be a shameful reality of contemporary political history that all the highly paid security experts, national security advisers and warmongering politicians have been unable – especially unwilling – to prevent Russia's armed invasion of Ukraine. It is astonishing how politicians and media commentators are virtually unanimous in condemning Russian President Vladimir Putin, ignoring their own inability to acknowledge the actual causal link and their guilt for the conflict.
Now that the war is raging, they are even intensifying their pre-war propaganda. The political elites of the West are doubling down on their absurd stupidities and making matters worse. And the few voices here in the U.S. and overseas that bring a degree of objectivity and self-criticism to the East-West stalemate, such as Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard or Fox News prime-time host Tucker Carlson, are seen as treacherous by the establishment. As expected, the same applies to Europe. The thought police are prevalent in the Euro-Atlantic arena, and a deviation from the orderly scheme of thought can get you into serious trouble. The much-vaunted democracies in our supposedly open societies have begun to make a mockery of themselves.
Summing up, the war is completely pointless and could easily have been avoided. Instead, the Ukrainians and their naïve and megalomaniac President Zelensky, whose heroic jubilation reflects the terrible state of judgment of Western politicians and peoples, are waging an unnecessary war. Through their arrogance and subservience to Western constraints, they have devastated their own country. More than three weeks after the start of the war, and in order to end it, Washington, Berlin and, indeed, Kiev must give Putin exactly what they should have given him before the fighting began.
It is now easy to understand how some people felt in August 1914, when an isolated dispute between Austria and Serbia, which the local authorities could and should have resolved quickly, escalated into World War I. We must not allow our political elites to escalate the Russian-Ukrainian war into World War III.
