It is not hard to see why President Donald Trump’s war with Iran is incredibly controversial. There is plenty to criticize in the freewheeling execution of Operation Epic Fury or in the multiple rationales proffered to justify the war to the American public. Whatever battlefield successes have been achieved so far, frankly, the administration has not done a very good job reassuring the American people that it is approaching this crisis with all due seriousness.
And yet some critics of the war have gone beyond arguments about prudence and into what my Law & Liberty colleague Daniel J. Mahoney described in a recent essay as “functional pacifism.” The stridency of their opposition to the conflict bleeds, intentionally or not, into a moralistic condemnation of almost any use of military force. This tendency is especially concerning among self-proclaimed advocates of “just war theory.” The reduction of the tenets of just war into a rigid, overly theoretical, almost-Kantian formula undermines the very rationale behind them.
One recent example of this “just war pacifism” that appeared last week in the pages of Providence is my friend Henry Long’s “Catholic Case Against War with Iran.” While I applaud the ethical seriousness with which he approaches questions of life and death, I fear the rigidity of the moral standards he outlines ultimately fail to account for the responsibilities of states to their citizens. Rather than clarifying when uses of military force can help secure justice, Mr. Long’s humanitarian impulse obscure what statesmanship requires in periods of international crisis.
In the first place, Mr. Long underestimates the particular threat posed by the Islamic Republic to the United States. Although he acknowledges that the Iranian regime has funded proxies that have caused hundreds of American casualties, he fails to recognize how this aggression does in fact constitute a decades-long war between the Islamic Republic and the United States. Far more aggressively than even Russia and China, Tehran has been working since 1979 through concerted, strategic effort to cause “grave damage” (Mr. Long’s words citing the Roman Catholic Catechism) to Americans and our allies. How else could we define the costs of a decades-long, shadowy war? We may never have a full accounting of how many of our countrymen have been lost to the regime’s fanatic jihad, but the number has certainly climbed to well over a thousand. The Iranian regime has proven, for decades, that it is intent on killing Americans however it can. We underestimate this threat at our own peril.
The terror state shows no sign of slowing these attacks either—and that is not even counting brutalities committed against Israelis, Arabs, and the domestic Iranian population. The Islamic Revolution has been nothing short of a total catastrophe for the entire Middle East and represents the greatest source of instability in the region and indeed around the globe. Beyond its use of proxy forces to build an empire of terror in pursuit of regional hegemony, Tehran has effectively become an “arsenal of autocracy” and formed a new axis with China and Russia to challenge American interests. Thankfully, Operation Epic Fury has demolished many of the weapons factories enabling the invasion of Ukraine and aggression against Taiwan. But so long as the regime remains in power, it will continue to support America’s enemies as it seeks to cause “grave damage” to us.
Mr. Long’s argument against war with Iran rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of the Islamic Republic. Tehran is not simply another regional power jockeying for position amongst its neighbors; it has an eschatological vision of global revolution. The mullahs—or at least those still left alive—may not have, at present, the ability to develop a nuclear weapon. Nor do they necessarily intend to immediately strike the United States. But that was never really the point of a nuclear breakout. What the regime’s leaders have always hoped is that through accumulating regional hegemony and embarrassing America they would inspire Muslims around the world to take up their cause and foment revolution on their own shores. In this sense, it is not unlike the revolutionary ideology of the French Jacobins. As Edmund Burke may have put it, “It is with an armed doctrine that we are at war.”
Given these stakes, I cannot understand Mr. Long’s conclusion that “this war is neither a proportionate nor appropriate response to Iran’s crimes.” Counter-revolution is necessary to American security and regional peace. If anything, the Trump administration has been far too restrained and cautious about actually achieving the regime change that will once and for all put a stop to the madness of the Islamic Republic. In other words, Operation Epic Fury is not the commencement of a new war with Iran but rather, we should hope, the conclusion of a war that has been raging for decades.
The great danger with “just war” arguments against the Iran war is that they reduce just war theory to a kind of Kantian absolutism that, by relying too heavily on theoretical precepts, fails to account for unique exigencies of the moment. However easy it is to theorize, the problems of statecraft cannot be solved by the rigid application of ethical formulae. Mr. Long, for example, demands certainty in order to justify war; he argues that only if we know without doubt that Iran will use a nuclear weapon against the United States specifically can we engage in military action to prevent an attack. Under such strict principles, it is difficult to see when almost any conflict could be justified.
As C.S. Lewis warned in his 1940 essay “Why I Am Not A Pacifist,” later collected in The Weight of Glory, “moral decisions do not admit of mathematical certainty.” He saw that too many pacifists, even in the atmosphere of World War II, were seeking out platitudes about violence instead of a serious moral vision. The Oxford don dismantled various arguments in favor of the position, including strict readings of biblical texts and religious traditions that seek to sanctify it. Toward the end, he warned that pacifism can be the expression of a “warping passion” that distorts our sense of responsibility. War is certainly an evil, but most Christians throughout history have acknowledged it is not the worst of all evils.
Mr. Long tends toward the kind of pacifism Lewis critiqued when he declares that bloodshed can be averted and American interests secured merely “through sanctions and other non-violent means.” Indeed, he insists that a kind of “nonviolence” is commanded by the just war tradition and the Christian religion itself. It seems to me, though, that this is where the argument descends into Mahoney’s “functional pacifism.” With regard to Pope Leo XIV’s various anti-war statements, he writes in the aforementioned essay that “his tendency to conflate Christianity with a kind of functional pacifism marks a departure from older Christian wisdom. In thinking about war and peace, one must remember that the prudence of citizens and statesmen—guided by right reason and the moral law—remains the proper locus of judgment in political life.”
Our Lord teaches Christians to turn the other cheek. He also commands us to render unto Caesar what is his. The individual Christian and the state have very different responsibilities, and just war theory has historically sought to navigate the uncertainty that arises from those differences. But the most zealous religious opponents of the war in Iran threaten to discredit this noble tradition by reducing it to a pacifistic ideology. Rather than treating the war as a question of faith, then, it would be wiser to view it as a matter of prudence.