104 - Can Modern War Be Just?

Can Modern War Be Just?
By James Turner Johnson
New Haven, Yale University Press, 1984. 215 pp. $17.95.

Few issues dominate our consciousness as does war. We have become almost obsessed with questions and fears about modern war and the possibility of nuclear destruction. The presence and danger of nuclear weapons has been the focus of political elections in America, an important influence on the U.S. Roman Catholic Bishops' Pastoral on War and Peace, and the target of frequent media analyses. Indeed, it appears that in the face of nuclear weapons we are not sure it is any longer possible to speak about war as a moral possibility.

Johnson, a professor of religion at Rutgers University, wants to recover the significance of a moral discussion about war. In a cogently written book that is accessible to the general reader and the scholar alike, Johnson argues for a moral analysis of war on two levels. On one level, he is attempting to describe and discuss the just war tradition as a guide to practical moral reasoning. On a second level, Johnson is addressing the concerns of the immediate debate about weapons and strategies. The essays range from treatments of the just war tradition itself to analyses of contemporary weapons, from strategic and tactical planning to such "special problems" as conscientious objection and obeying unjust orders.

In the book, Johnson takes up the moral task of showing that the "just war" tradition is not irrelevant in a nuclear age, that it can form strategy. The thrust of the book is an attempt to show that the history of the movement toward total war is not inevitable and can be counteracted by the just war focus on strategies rather than weapons. As Johnson puts it, "it is not the weapons of war in our time but the assumptions about war that are most morally questionable. Weapons are but tools of human intentions, and the reason we now live in a world where entire populations are threatened by nuclear missiles is that we have come to regard such threats as appropriate."

Thus, Johnson's analysis shows that the primary issue is not weapons in and of themselves, but the policies and strategies that weapons serve. For example, Johnson defends the neutron bomb and argues for building larger conventional forces so that we will not be entrapped by nuclear strategy. Moreover, Johnson thinks the cruise missile is important, because it is a weapon not aimed at destroying large numbers of civilians, but at neutralizing enemies' military power. Hence, the crucial significance of Johnson's argument is his contention that the just war tradition is fundamentally part of a wider political ethic that makes politics serve human values.

One such value that the just war tradition draws upon is the wisdom that in life as we know it, it is necessary to oppose evil by force as otherwise evil may triumph. Thus, Johnson repeatedly emphasizes that

106 - Can Modern War Be Just?

the aim of war is not to kill the enemy soldier, but to preserve the values that cannot be otherwise served than by use of force.

Unfortunately, Johnson is not clear about the content of those values that war is to serve. This lack of clarity is relevant in three respects. First, how do we know when evil is being encountered such that it ought to be countered by force? The presence of universally recognizable radical evil in Hitler and the Nazis is relatively rare. More frequently, the description of evil is relative to a communal ethos that Johnson does not adequately describe. It is not possible to presume that all societies share a similar ethos; to talk about evil and questions of just war in an Islamic culture is different from talking about them in America. The moral possibility of the just war tradition is crucially dependent on the adequacy of a communal ethos that defines evil morally and sustains values genuinely worth defending.

Second, there seems to be an ambiguity in Johnson's position. Does just war have intrinsic values that are necessary to sustain through war, or does just war serve values extrinsic to its aims that war is required to maintain? In other words, how are the values to be defended related to the just war tradition? Third, an account of the values is important for Johnson's argument that when the just war tradition moved from its Christian presuppositions (as part of the Holy Roman Empire) to its modern day secular form (as part of the nation-state), it did not lose its fundamental intelligibility.

The success of Johnson's argument hinges on the credibility of his contention that the form of war, especially in the modern world that tends toward total war, is not inevitable. It is Johnson's denial of the historical inevitability of the forms of war that enables him to argue that the just war tradition has the resources to alter the threat of nuclear weapons in more positive and moral directions.

Yet, if the form of war is not an historical inevitability, then why does Johnson argue that war itself is? Johnson seems committed to arguing that the historical inevitability of war is written into the fabric of the human condition, while contending that the forms of war can vary. The real issue is not just the form of war, but war itself. Johnson's general focus on strategic questions is important and humane as a way of lessening the all-encompassing nature of modern war, but it does not appear that Johnson has really challenged democratic polities (much less non-democratic ones) sufficiently to know what it would mean to fight war in a more limited fashion.

Still, Johnson's book is welcome. It moves the focus of discussion away from nuclear weapons to more fundamental questions of strategy and, ultimately, the morality of war itself.

Stanley Hauerwas and L. Gregory Jones
Duke University Divinity School
Durham, North Carolina