The Nobel speech: Obama on “just war” — VOICES for REASON

When accepting his Nobel Peace Prize — a ludicrous, debased award also bestowed on murderers like Yasser Arafat — President Obama spoke about his foreign policy. Pervading his Nobel speech there was a peculiar undertone of contrition. If translated into words, it would go something like this: “Ideally, we would behave like Gandhi, never resorting to the use of force in asserting our rights . . . but alas, as commander-in-chief of the United States, I’m duty-bound to protect the lives of Americans, and that now means having to fight. Sorry about that.”

This apologetic drift flows naturally from the substance of Obama’s foreign policy.

A key point in the speech is that America must uphold — but has lately fallen short of — the standards set by “just war” doctrine. Summarizing this widely held view of morality in war, he explains that a war is justified only “when it meets certain preconditions: if it is waged as a last resort or in self-defense; if the force used is proportional, and if, whenever possible, civilians are spared from violence.”

Where force is necessary, we have a moral and strategic interest in binding ourselves to certain rules of conduct. And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe that the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions. We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not just when it is easy, but when it is hard.

The implication  is that Bush’s policy was too assertive, it was callous, and thus it undermined our interests and security. For these failings, Obama and many others believe, America owes the world an apology and a promise (delivered yet again in the Nobel speech) to change its ways.

But this is wrong. Massively wrong.

True: American foreign policy since 9/11 has been a disaster for our security; that’s a driving point of my book, Winning the Unwinnable War. But the reason lies not in a failure to abide by “just war” doctrine; a significant part of the problem was Washington’s devotion to that doctrine. My colleagues Alex Epstein and Yaron Brook demonstrate that point in chapter 4, where they bring to light the inherent incompatibility between “just war” and a victim nation’s right of self-defense.

The “just war” doctrine, in modern form, dovetails with what I’ve characterized as Bush’s “compassionate war.” On this approach, Washington subordinated the military goal of defeating the enemy, to the imperative of protecting civilians and nation-building Afghanistan and Iraq. The argument we present in the book is that this approach — now embraced, with greater dedication, by Obama — is destructive of U.S. interests. Of course warfare should be shaped by moral principles; the problem is that the dominant moral ideas of our culture, reflected in “just war” doctrine, subvert the self-defense of victims and work to the advantage of aggressors.

Obama’s rededication to this way of thinking about war is like the logic of an alcoholic who works to solve his drinking problem by going on a binge.