Ep. 373: Michael Walzer on Just Wars (Part Two)

0:12 Mark: The Partially Examined Life Episode 373 Part 2. We've been talking about Michael Walzer's just and unjust wars and we had pretty thoroughly talked about chapter four. Let's go to chapter five, Anticipations.

0:27 Wes: He'll start us off with the idea which is already there in the legalist paradigm, which is that states can defend themselves against imminent violence. And then he's going to say, well, what do you mean by imminent? Right. So we got into this a little bit already, but is it just about responding at the last minute in real life? That's not actually very useful because war can seem unavoidable for protracted periods of time. So the word imminent is too restrictive. And then he's going to say, let's look at this whole spectrum of, from imminent responding at the last minute to the farthest point on the spectrum in anticipation of war, and let's see where we ought to draw the line.

1:13 Mark: Yeah, he does not believe in this, again, 18th, 19th century idea. Well, he thinks it's still very important today the balance of power, which seems to be like, if you want to give a reason why Russia attacked Ukraine, which I've heard Walzer talking just two years ago on a podcast and saying, it's just so easy to condemn Russia based on this book. Like, Russia is just wrong in many, many ways. In both the way it's conducting the war, but even just the excuse for having it. And here, I think, is where we would. Right. It's the balance of power that Russia was like, ah, you know, if Ukraine joins NATO, if it gets too Western, then the balance of power is going to be screwed up.

We need to have dominance in our area of the world. And this is just, you know, that's at least one of the reasons that would be the primary motivators. And Walzer thinks that is illegitimate, that you might think that, oh, the balance of power, that's what it keeps the peace. Because there's this very fragile. But the power. Power is always shifting. And if you say we're going to go to war every time there's a shift in the balance of power that, you know, scares you and makes you think, well, eventually they're going to come for me. If they're more powerful than me, then they're going to eventually come for me.

There's going to be war all the time. So on utilitarian grounds, even, you know, though you might be defending the idea of balance and power on utilitarian grounds, like, oh, you know, we're, we're trying to keep somebody from becoming a giant, you know, world tyrant or something like that, there's a better utilitarian argument to say, let's just not have all these needless wars in defense of this abstraction, balance of power.

2:42 Dylan: Does Walzer take up the legalist paradigm, just outright prohibits just conventionally imperial activities where you just wanted somebody's resources? Right.

2:54 Mark: Yes. That would be aggressive.

2:56 Dylan: Or whole societies that were pirating or Pillaging societies like a whole Viking society. Right. You would just say that all of those involvement interactions that are aggressive. So the, the question about resources and stuff like that would become more interesting as resources become more scarce. Right. You know, for different groups and whether or not, you know, a Roman imperialist notion where we're just going to take it over and then we'll let you do your sort of thing, but under our roof, sort of the assimilation structure.

3:26 Mark: Just bend the knee. You can keep doing what you're doing. Just bend the knee.

3:31 Dylan: Yes. And so I guess I'm only raising this because I don't know that Walzer. The question of rights ends up being a lot. He doesn't engage very much what the form of the contravening of those rights is. And maybe I don't recall that we got very much and he got into the question of. You did talk about secession and the question of secession, but then there'd be the defending against secession. So the whole business of, you know, part of the business of, say, the American Civil War or other civil wars where you have individual communities wanting to separate themselves and that's the resistance part of the case of assimilation. I guess in all those cases under Walzer's analysis, all of those would be aggressive acts.

4:19 Seth: Are you posing a question, Dylan, that you're asking this? I'm sorry, I didn't quite. I can see you need some.

4:26 Wes: Aggression is the legalist paradigm, and we're trying to get beyond that right now. And he's going to start us off with, well, maybe we should think about it from a realist perspective and think about the balance of power. Right. That balance of power preserves liberty and happiness for people, for states and the individuals within the states. It's worth defending at some cost. And fighting early reduces the cost and increases your odds of winning, which is not entirely an implausible argument. But he says we could also make a utilitarian argument that this would lead to innumerable wars.

This is a point Burke makes because power relations are always shifting. So this idea of a perfect equilibrium is really just utopian. There is no perfect equilibrium in balance of power. So the, the uncertainties of that mean there really isn't a practical way of deciding to when to fight. On utilitarian principles, we can't just assume everyone has malign intent. We have to be able to infer it. And to do that we have to say, well, what counts as threatening? We got to stipulate what acts count as threatening, which is to say, when is someone really declaring their intent to injure me.

And that's where he's going to get into the example of the war of Spanish secession. But that has now become the goal. We've moved beyond aggression and we want to say what are the true signs of a real threat? Threat is a new concept here.

6:00 Mark: Did you guys know that Francis Bacon wrote in this area that he was one of the people writing in favor of the balance of power theory, which I guess is right. If we want to say states are comparable to people, the domestic analogy, but yet there is no police that you could call. Well, then the best way is just to make sure that every person, you know, every group in this has approximately the same amount of power, or at least that there are like multiple equal powers that can then sort of act as policemen toward each other. That if you get one gang, I think gang warfare is a better.

If you've got the Hatfields and the McCoys that are about equal, well, they can keep the peace. But if one of them gets too big, then, yeah, the others are going to get exploited in a way. So Francis Bacon says that all nations should keep due sentinel, that none of their neighbors do overgrow as they become more able to annoy them than they were.

6:52 Wes: The example with the war of Spanish secession. And now he's using another theorist here named Vattel.

7:00 Mark: Actually, this is succession, not secession. We do talk a lot about secession, but this is about one king succeeding another.

7:08 Wes: Well, I'm just. I mean, I think I can pronounce it that way. I don't think.

7:11 Mark: No, no, that's.

7:12 Wes: They're different words, secession.

7:14 Mark: No, the word the TV show succession is never called secession. It's a different thing.

7:21 Wes: Did you look this up?

7:22 Dylan: Yes.

7:23 Wes: Am I going to look this up and find out that you can pronounce it both ways? Yes. We're not talking about secession as in someone seceding. We're talking about succession as in France is going to become part of Spain or Spain is going to become part of France because of some marriage, you know.

7:39 Mark: Yeah.

7:39 Wes: So anyway, in this case we get two new criteria which Walzer is ultimately going to reject. So the criteria for going to war in this case, according to Vattel. Did you look up this pronunciation, Mark?

7:53 Mark: No, I don't look up all pronunciations.

7:56 Wes: I thought it was Vadl.

7:58 Mark: Vattel.

7:59 Wes: All right, we'll just say Vattel. What did you say?

8:01 Dylan: I said Vattel.

8:03 Mark: Oh, can I. Can I just say on the audiobook, maybe it was this one, but there's one sentence with a Name of somebody like this, where the guy simply says twice with two different pronunciations, clearly not remembering to delete one of them. But I love when errors creep into the other.

8:21 Wes: Anyway, this guy, I'm just going to home this guy. This guy's theory is that a neighbor constitutes a threat, right? So we got away from balance of power. We don't just assume they're a threat. We say, okay, what makes them a threat? Here are the criteria. They show signs of injustice, rapacity, pride, ambition, imperious thirst for rule, and then they're augmenting their power, they're arming up, they're doing whatever, such that they're increasing their power enough where they'd be a real threat. And you can apply that to this case of a succession, the Spanish War, to say, well, yeah, France had an expansionist foreign policy and this, you know, getting basically a unified French Spanish state would be an enormous power augmentation. And therefore the Allies were justified in doing a preventive war against France. But this is something Walzer is going to say is too loose, right?

9:14 Mark: That they were actually too hasty about that, that you should wait longer and see if something is really not just like, well, this could be a threat. They could, you know, if you say, I don't like how you guys are allying together, that gives you guys too much power. Well, make your own alliance. England should have gotten together with Austria and formed a counter alliance, not just preemptively attack.

9:34 Wes: Well, and that's because intent is important. So you're looking for indications of intent. So is France actually planning on attacking is really the question. And then it becomes, right. He says he wants to take this out of the utilitarian domain. We're not just looking at these balance of power considerations because we kind of still are in that domain here. We want to look at indications of intent because unless we get that, we don't really have a right of response. Which is also another way of saying we want moral security. We don't want to have to tell our citizens you're going to fight and risk your life because of this general hunch we have that France might be getting too strong. Preventive attack has to find indications of intent. Specific intent, which is part of qualifying as aggression.

10:21 Dylan: And that's what it amounts to, is that you can go to war over aggression. And because there has not been any explicit act of violence in this case, and you are going to go to war to prevent a war, intent matters because it is the through line to making it an act of aggression.

10:43 Wes: I don't think he would call it an act of aggression because I think under the legalist paradigm, that just means crossing a. I would say he would call it a threat or a clear and present danger. So we're expanding. I mean, Dylan, you're right in the sense that this is what justifies war. But now, more than aggression justifies war, threat justifies war.

11:01 Dylan: Yeah, fair enough.

11:02 Seth: So he, before he talks specifically about the balance of power, he says, look, there's lots of levels. There's a spectrum of provocation. You have troops massed at the border, like literally about to cross the border and invade. And then you have presumably political, economic moves to strengthen. You know, he's like, there's a big spectrum. It's very difficult to say, here's the criteria set in stone, and when you meet this criteria, it counts as an imminent threat and justifies a preventative act. But what he says, and again, this kind of goes back to the domestic analogy in some respect, is we have to think about what criteria would need to be in place for us to say post hoc, they were justified in a preventative or an anticipatory attack.

One is, could you say the intent was clear from the actions of the potential aggressor? Yes. Another criteria is, does the state that does the anticipatory attack, were they justified in thinking they were imminently under a kind of existential threat? And I don't know if there's more criteria than that, but if you can satisfy those two criteria, he's like, we're going to have to always judge this on a case by case basis. I'm not going to be able to give you hard and fast rules because they don't exist. But in the sense in which we look at any individual case, if it satisfies, if we are able to adjudicate and say, yes, these two things were the case, then we can say that, you know, an anticipatory attack was justified in this situation or it wasn't justified in this situation.

12:37 Wes: He gives us actually three criteria, and this is on page 81. So the overall idea is that they must already be engaged in harming us, where harm is very broadly construed. So they're not just a potential enemy. But it doesn't mean that there's an imminent attack. So the first criterion is the manifest intent to injure. Right? And this is each of these three criteria replaces the previous balance of power or looser criteria that we talked about above. Right? So instead of signs of rapacity, ambition, we get Manifest intent to injure. Instead of augmentation of power, we get a degree of active preparation that makes that intent into a positive danger.

So it's the second criterion. And the third is that waiting would greatly magnify our risk. So these are the three criteria that he's going to apply to the case of the Six Day War. And he wants to talk about the present. Right. We're not talking about imminence, we're talking about the present. And the present is this fuzzy idea, but it's the span in which one can still make choices. This is why I've used the phrase, even though he doesn't use it, a clear and present danger in a way, as a way of summing up this philosophy.

13:50 Dylan: Yeah.

13:50 Seth: Is it after that west that he brings in the Israel example with Egypt?

13:55 Dylan: Exactly, yeah.

13:56 Mark: That's the Six Day War, 1967, where he says, yes, Israel fired the first shot, but was not the aggressor. Because he gives this, you know, the whole situation of, well, he actually blames Russia. Right. The Russia said Israel was gathering all these forces, but that was actually not true. But it was obviously not true. But Egypt decided that they would gather their forces on the border. And just the fact that they had the resources to keep their forces on the border and be an imminent, you know, that we could just invade Israel at any time and Israel has to pull up reserves, which can only do on a very temporary basis.

So either, you know, they would not be able to sustain, so their shipping was being cut off. It would be, you know, even though as aggressor, Egypt would have been very happy to not be attacked and not have to actually roll into Israel, that they would have, you know, by cutting off, by isolating Israel. Just the fact that, yes, it's the blockade, it's Star Wars Episode 1, you know, starting the blockade, that is the act of war, even if you don't fire the first shot. And so that was sufficient to allow Israel to. Preeminently, this is an unsustainable situation.

We need to have the shipping lanes open. We need to have this threat not on our borders forever. So we're just going to attack first.

15:15 Wes: That's one of the criteria. Right. So manifest intent to injure. Egypt was making threats. It did the blockade, the degree of active preparation, massing the troops on the border, but also forming all these alliances where, you know, Jordan says you, well, we're going to put our army under your command as well. And then Iraq and Syria, I think. So that meets the degree of active Preparation criterion and then waiting greatly magnifies the risk. And then he describes the situation where the Israelis were really freaked out because they, you know, reasonably thought there was no way they could beat all of these armies if they invaded, they would just be quickly wiped out.

And leaders were under nervous exhaustion. The people were in general feeling like a great catastrophe was about to happen. So the day after Iraq joined the alliance, then Israel struck. So it's a weird case because Egypt probably did not want to go to war, they just wanted to leave. They just wanted to put Israel into this chronic state of fear. Right. And the strain of Egypt's army on their borders, when Israel can only use reserves that it rotates in, it just doesn't have a big army. And the other thing that happened was there Israel tried to do diplomatic resolutions and were rebuffed and not just by Egypt, but by the international community.

So he seems to make, I don't know the history well enough to know if he's distorting it in any way, but given the way he describes the history, it seems a reasonable preventive attack.

16:44 Mark: Yes. So that's going to be his overall, even present day position on Israel, which is very nuanced. And I found again in that article, the four wars of Israel, Palestine, each one, there's one, there's a just war and an unjust war being fought by each side simultaneously. So the one at issue here is Israel's right to defend itself from being obliterated. That is a completely just war defending yourself against. But as I previously referred to, it's also insofar as the conservatives in Israel want to expand into other territory, well, that's illegitimate.

Then they're being the aggressors. And on the other side, yes, Palestine wants to become its own state, they have a legitimate population. But this is very much mixed with the no, no, we want to wipe Israel completely off the map. A very aggressive action. And he comes down in this 2002 paper just saying they cannot be granted their own state until they just denounce the first goal of wiping Israel off the map. If they can say, you know, Israel, you're our welcome neighbor and we're, then they will sort of deserve to have their own state and, you know, international effort could be put forward.

But insofar as well, once you give them that, then they're going to go ahead with the unjust war part of it and try to keep being belligerent toward Israel, you know, then that's going to be a no, no. So we should let Them sort it out. It seems to be the overall, I mean we haven't gotten into interventionists yet, but that, you know, you, you err on the side of not interfering, at least with direct military assistance, you could root for them. But yeah, as long as there's sort of internal stuff going on in the state, even if there's injustice, if it's not, I don't know, I'm jumping ahead here.

Yeah. What else do we have to say about the Six Day War?

18:28 Wes: Well, he's going to ultimately give us a new principle. States may use military force in the face of threats of war when the failure to do so would seriously risk their territorial integrity or political independence. And the word risk there is key because before that, and I'm going to vindicate Dylan here because he does use this word aggression. Now in this context he'll say one can make out aggression not only in the absence of an actual attack, actual invasion, but even in the absence of an imminent intention to do so. Like Egypt wasn't actually about to do it. And yet what was going on was still aggressive in the broader sense, not the legalist paradigm sense.

19:07 Seth: The question of do you remember the six principles? One of them is the last one is about not just going to war with, but punitive, being able to post hoc punitively. And he mentions that, he talks about the limits of that when it comes to interventions. I don't think he mentions it here, but if you were to do an anticipatory attack in order to prevent an aggressor and there's kind of like, let's say there's a line where it's like, okay, this will prevent the aggression. You'll do something that will neutralize their ability to further harm you or set them back. Are you then justified in being punitive? It kind of feels like not, but I'm not sure.

19:50 Wes: Yeah, I would say not. He doesn't say. But maybe he covers it elsewhere in the book. I don't know. But that would seem. No, you can't punish a crime that didn't happen, hasn't yet happened, even if you're allowed to.

20:01 Seth: You can't see me, but I'm doing that Tom Cruise in Minority Report thing, working with my pre cog here.

20:10 Wes: We can, in the domestic scene, we can punish conspiracy to commit murder or attempted murder. Like I think conspiracy would be more applicable to this case. But it seems in the international scene that would be right. You can't really punish it unless you yourself invade and occupy. Maybe you could do Limited strikes or something like that. But if punishment means something like the Nuremberg trials or the complete revamping of a society like Post World War II Germany, I don't know.

20:36 Dylan: Yeah.

20:36 Mark: So there is a practical issue of how you distinguish between threats and insults. Because he says insults are not sufficient. That actually back in, you know, Bacon's time or whatever, it was considered an insult between kings or whatever was grounds to go to war. And now we think that. No, that is not, you know, insult all you want. You can talk smack all you want. That's not an actual provocation. But yeah, so I was reading an article recently on like. Yeah. Did you know that in Iran there's like a standard part of their prayer that says death to Israel, death to America.

And somebody was saying, oh, no, no. The actual literal translation is like, down with America, down with Israel. And what it is is a complaint that Westernization has, you know, is a threat to their way of life. And so culturally they don't. They want to literally kill us. They just want our influence to be gone. So the fact that like, that would be part of their cheer, you know, like America first. There's like Iran first or Arabic. World first means no Western influence. Get rid of Western influence. That's just talking smack. That's not a threat.

Whereas death to that sounds like a threat. So, you know, just the linguistic things. I wasn't aware that this was an issue.

21:48 Wes: Yeah, he gives a nice list on 80 to 80. One of the things that don't count as threats. Boastful ranting, even military preparation, hostile act short of war, and then provocations, which are often really about honor and insults and things like that. And I think this is a key point, which is that war, the realist accounts of war, often in terms of, well, they wanted these territories, they wanted these resources. But if you look on underneath, you often see this is about glory and honor and just having fun. Right. Just being personal insult, wanting to have something to do. Yeah. And Putin himself. Right. Wrote an 80 page essay which was all about how Ukraine really belongs to Russia and Russia should be a great empire. Still no mention of NATO and all the other excuses. And he. And he rarely actually uses those rationales, even in speeches.

22:42 Seth: Yeah. It wasn't part of the. I mean, we probably shouldn't get into talking about that too much. But there were. Wasn't there supposed to be ethnic one of them. One justification was there ethnic Russians, that

22:54 Wes: they're Russian, at least in part Russians.

22:59 Seth: And then I remember I read a really good book a while Back called, I think eight maps or 10 maps that explain the world, something like that. And they talk about the geography of where Russia sits and why that part where Poland and the Ukraine and all that is so they consider to be so critical to their national defense and sovereignty is because that's where the Nazis came through and other invaders have come through. And so they feel like they need a buffer between Europe and themselves for protective. So, but like you said, there's probably lots of justifications that have been tried, but it seems like it was relatively unprovoked.

23:38 Wes: Well, the Nazis. Yeah, that's not discussed a lot, but the Nazis. There's a good book called Bloodlands by Timothy Snyder, which we'll talk about how the. Both Nazis and Russia did so much damage to Ukraine. So they, like Stalin killed millions and millions of people.

23:52 Seth: Yes, he did.

23:52 Wes: But anyway, and the Russian speakers, that's bogus. Right. Just in the. Just as it was bogus with Hitler, the president of Ukraine did not speak Ukrainian. He learned it after the war started. But he was a Russian speaker and that had nothing to do with his allegiance. Like it has nothing to do with his allegiance with many Ukrainians. So. And even many of the people who are principally Russian speakers have now learned Ukrainian and refused to speak Russian. But anyway, I think the more you know about that, the more you know that these are bogus excuses and that. And bringing it back to the text. Yeah, this is often the case, and this is what makes intervention, which we're about to get into, so tricky because this can often be used as an excuse for intervention.

24:33 Dylan: Before we move to intervention, I just, I wanted to comment that the anticipation we got at the end of aggression, the six. The six sort of framework rules for the legalist paradigm, and we are getting in anticipation the sort of explication, refinement of some of those rules. But it struck me that we're still adding those qualifications like the understanding of when preemptive strikes are allowed and what would mean to have a preventative war. And the understanding of what aggression means is still through, it feels like fundamentally a lens of the domestic analogy.

It's still a refinement of. Through that lens of what it would mean to be aggressive, such that I would understand a threat to fundamentally turn on what the intent was and whether that intent made that threat actually an act of aggression. And it seems to me the way we're understanding it, even if it's in terms of territory or in terms of violations of sovereignty, is still along the same lines as you would interpret that exact criteria for an individual, for your home, or for a threat against you personally.

25:53 Wes: Yeah, I don't think we discard the legalist paradigm or the domestic analogy. We revise it. So we add these caveats. It's like you start with an idealized equation for a falling body, and then you add in factors for wind resistance. But the legalist paradigm is the ideal situation. And then we're adding all the other factors here.

26:14 Dylan: Yeah, and I guess that was my point, was that it doesn't feel like inexpensive exception. Even pursuing your analogy of having the projectile motion without resistance and adding in wind resistance, I'm still factoring in Newton's second law. And for every force, there's an equal but opposite force. That kind of thinking is still going into analyzing the problem. And I just have another dimension that I need to account for, but I'm still analyzing it in terms of those fundamental characteristics. And so it feels more like less like an exception than a refinement.

And that was my point, is I don't feel like I have an exception here of what was laid out in the legalist paradigm. I have a refinement to clarify what is a complicated situation like, well, what does it mean to have a preemptive strike? Does aggression really require an armed conflict across my borders or not? And the answer is, no, it doesn't. But it isn't always the case that just because you have an armed conflict across the borders that you were justified in that action.

27:23 Seth: I think he would agree with you, Dylan, or at least be happy to hear you say that it's a refinement, because I think that's his intent. But it's funny because I thought you were going somewhere completely different with that comment, because the approach that he takes in anticipation, if you just take all the criteria and all that sort of thing and then you try to backtrack it down. The domestic analogy lens wouldn't work because there's at least as far as the legal system goes with respect to individuals, until somebody does something, they're just not guilty.

So if somebody is like, threatening me and buying guns and making plans and all this stuff, and I went to the police and I was like. And they'd be like, well, they haven't done anything yet. If I preemptively went and killed somebody who was threatening to kill me, the legal system would not exonerate me. And that's what I thought you were kind of pointing out, But I thought that was interesting.

28:23 Wes: The legalist paradigm stipulates that aggression is actual attack. Crossing with the boundary or imminent. And then whether or not you call right, Mill wanted to say that all these revisions are logical extensions of that idea actually. And it sounds like that Dylan's on Mill's side here. And Walzer would say, I think he wants to treat them as exceptions to the rule. And there's a practical reason to do that, which is just that in many cases there's a lot of unjust interventions and a lot of unjust preventive strikes. And we want to kind of encourage people to think in terms of a very strict legalist paradigm and only in rare cases to come to these other solutions.

29:07 Seth: Sure.

29:08 Mark: All right, chapter six on interventions. We're finally here and he gives this John Stuart Mill paper a few words on non intervention, which was apparently 1859, same time as on liberty. But it's a little bit of a. He's kind of a hard ass in that we do not have the right, nobody has the right to just go in and say, you know what? This place is a monarchy. This place is a tyranny. They've never gotten a chance to choose their own government. Let's just topple their government in the name of democracy and then give them the real chance to vote for themselves and have a truly representative government, the first one that's actually represented.

Because historically places are sort of by default tyrannies or monarchies. You know, somebody just comes in and takes power and we as America should set the world right. You know, Bill was of course writing this far before we had the America with those sorts of ambitions. But Britain was doing things like that at the time. And all that according to is a no, no, you should just not intervene in other, you know, sort of following with this legalist paradigm. You should not intervene in other states affairs if they are having internal strife. Right.

Or they have a repressive government, at least to certain limits. You know, if they're actually engaged in genocide against their own people, that's this is, you know, an exception that proves the rule. But for the most part you just, you need to leave them to work it out for themselves. And he gives this analogy of individuals like you can't make other individuals virtuous. They have to put forth their own effort. So you know, we hear this in like when we left Afghanistan and the Taliban immediately took over. Well, you know, if they couldn't put forth the effort to sustain their own country, then I guess they don't deserve a country.

According to this. You know, Mill, people get the countries that they deserve, that they are prepared for and there's really nothing we can do about that. Sort of hands off, let them work it out themselves.

31:06 Wes: Yeah. Someone might think, well if it's a tyranny then it sacrifices sovereignty. And we are going to get to the cases where I think Walter thinks that's true. But it really has to be a humanitarian intervention where a state is massacring their own people or has enslaved, you know, a significant portion of their own people. But in most cases, yeah, it can be a very oppressive regime and we still don't have the right to interfere. And this argument that Mill gives is somewhat utilitarian, I think, and it's just to say it doesn't really work. You can't make people free by external force.

So self determination doesn't mean it's not an equivalent of political freedom. People don't cease to be self determining if they live in an oppressive regime. And to some extent, unfortunately, they've failed in their self determination in a sense they've gone through a flawed process. But on self determination just means that it comes from the inside as opposed to the outside. And if you intervene then you, you are interfering with self determination. Right. The freedom that's imposed, imposed is not won by the community members. And because they haven't engaged in that struggle and developed the virtues involved in that struggle, it's probably not the case that they're going to be able to sustain it.

So it just, I mean ultimately the argument is just, it just doesn't work.

32:36 Dylan: Yeah, There's a nuance here about what intervention is that seems similar to the question of what aggression is. Right. So the intervention that is a straightforward crossing of borders. So you are going to go and intervene, you're going to send your troops into that country. That's one form of intervention. There is the. I think in most cases people would consider sending lots of arms or advisors or other kinds of material help is short of crossing a border with your own troops, but is a form of intervention. I guess it wasn't clear to me on the Mill as presented, but it seems to me that that part is.

There's more fuzziness but a certain kind of allowedness there. Right. When you're say you're presenting enough resources to one side or the other to enable them to work it out. Though Walter refers to a kind of weird hypothetical situation where your goal was to make sure both sides had some kind of equivalence that then they could fight it out amongst themselves. The domestic analogy would be standing around while the two people are fighting one another and you know, tossing both of them Rifles. So they both had rifles.

33:56 Seth: Keeping the crowd out of it.

33:58 Wes: There's intervention in the sense of the people are oppressed, they live in under an oppressive government and we go in to give them freedom. And that's ruled out here. Yes, but if there's already a dissident community engaged in a struggle and they need certain tests, including what he calls a self help test, then we can come to their aid.

34:16 Dylan: Yes.

34:17 Wes: And so yeah, we get cases for intervention where there's significant enough internal division within that society. Pre existing.

34:27 Dylan: Yeah.

34:27 Mark: I think he was driven to write this book by Vietnam and that's sort of where he. One of the examples that he wraps up this chapter with is a pretty exhaustive account which I am in no historical position. I haven't like read whole books on the conflict to second guess. But his claim was yes, there was a government in South Vietnam, but it was basically a puppet government that we were. It could not exist without our support. That was exactly like Afghanistan, that the second we got out of there it was just going to dissolve because there was no groundswell. It did not meet the test for self determination.

35:02 Dylan: In particular, it didn't have the support of the people.

35:04 Mark: Yeah.

35:05 Dylan: And I don't know exactly about the comparison, how far the comparison with Afghanistan and Vietnam would work in this case, but in this one he characterizes the puppet government that the United States is supporting as being. One of the fatal flaws is it's not considered legitimate or effective by the people that they're ruling.

35:26 Wes: If you have to prop up the government, then it's not a legitimate intervention. There's got to be some local support for the government. I mean that's one of the criteria of intervention. And there was a time when that may have developed. Right. He says that the south kind of squandered a certain period before elections were supposed to happen and then it rejected elections.

35:47 Dylan: Rejected the elections. Yeah.

35:48 Wes: Yeah. There's significant grassroots support for the north even in South Vietnam and not enough support for the American propped up government. And that makes it an illegitimate government essentially if it's just there by American imposition. So in that case we're not actually intervening on behalf of a substantial enough dissident community. We're just intervening on behalf of ourselves essentially. There's lots of other examples and stuff that happens before he gets to Vietnam,

36:17 Mark: but yes, one of which is succession. Not. Or sorry, secession. I said the wrong one.

36:24 Wes: So secession, yes, succession is the way I would say succession when there's that sex session.

36:32 Mark: Also Austria, Hungary and Hungary wanted to Become its own country again. Yes, they're distinct ethnically. And what does he actually say about. I mean, I think he thinks that this was a legitimate thing, but should I think it sort of. This ends up being an example about counter interference that there was already who was acting on behalf of Russia.

36:55 Wes: Well, Russia was helping to help.

36:57 Seth: He said, okay. He says first off, this is a rare example because he's like, it's rare that there's clearly a people who are a part of a community that are self identifying and want to self determine and that there's this pre existing sort of political entity, blah blah, blah. So he's like, this is a simple example, but there's two aspects. One is that the Austrians ask the Russians for help and so the Russians intervene, which kind of anytime there's already an intervention, it justifies further intervention by other people. But he talks about the British could have intervened and they chose not to, I guess the British and the French maybe or whoever the other allied forces were and that that was a moral failure or a political failure on their part because ultimately then the Hungarians get suppressed and shoved back into the Austrian Empire until it dissolves.

So he says, you know, usually this is 1848 incidentally.

37:57 Mark: Go ahead.

37:58 Seth: Yeah, and it's early in the Austrian Empire kind of falls apart probably about what's that 20 years later. But he says most examples aren't quite this clear. And you know, you wouldn't because in a sense like the Hungarians were a unified group within that particular geography. But when you talk about groups trying to self determine, oftentimes you're talking about revolution or you're talking about warring factions within there. And I think that's when you think about it in those terms where it's unclear and you have two or more factions that are vying for power, then Mill's seemingly harsh dictum is not quite so harsh because you're kind of like, well if a state intervenes when you have all these various factions that tips the hand in favor of one.

It's very clearly acting more in its own interest than it is in the interest of those. You know, we could say like, oh well, you know, these are the democrats and those are the communists. So we're going to go in and support the Democratic faction. And of course we all know that that's a lie. Right? I mean for the, I don't know how many times the United States intervened in elections and things in south and Central America. And it was never because they were helping put democrats in power. Right. So the Idea that you should let things play out and kind of try to create a level playing field.

I think in some sense when you think about the Messier cases actually makes some sense. I'm not saying it makes total sense, but I understand the justification for it. But then that also puts you in a position where you're talking about established states and first world, third world and maybe there's all kinds of problems that come along with that.

39:39 Wes: Right. So he said even Mill thought that Britain should intervene in this case because there's already another intervening power. The Hungarians were doing pretty well with their revolution and they were of course a distinct community and it's, you know, should they have to be under Austria? I mean it doesn't really make much sense. So but once Russia intervenes then it makes the case much easier. The British Mill says should have counter intervened and they didn't. So yeah, Russia got to help Austria crush the Hungarians.

40:12 Mark: But what a Pandora's box this seems to open that like oh, you know, we're helping Ukraine, so now China should help Russia and now we should do more direct things against, you know, and then they're like, okay, this is how you get world war.

40:29 Seth: You're absolutely right.

40:31 Mark: So you can see why you would have restraint on the part of, you know, and this should be the kind of thing. I think again we were giving Mills view, not necessarily Walzer's view that Walzer. I think this would be the kind of thing that he should say, well, it's sort of up to you, do you want to get involved or not? You have to just, you know, there are humanitarian concerns to address. There are legitimate like it's, it's morally permissible for you to get involved, but it's certainly not morally obligatory because there are, you know, you're putting yourself at risk and things could escalate.

41:00 Wes: Right. There are dangers to Britain for to intervening and you know, it might have even endangered the peace of Europe. I mean that this is a right world war. It might have led to a wider war and those are legitimate considerations. So he'll say the argument for justice must accommodate prudence, which is to say even if we're going to look at, in things in these rights based or moralistic or legalist paradigm terms, we still have to accommodate some utilitarian considerations. We can say it's permissible to go in, but it doesn't mean we have to go in given all the other, our own safety and the other potential consequences.

I just want to back up and say, you know, he starts out this by saying the ban on boundary crossings is, can be suspended in these three different cases and this one we've been discussing where there's different multiple political communities already engaged in struggle. And then the second is when there's already a foreign power intervening. And then the third is the human rights violations, which we'll eventually get to. This Hungarian example really illustrated principles 1 and 2. There are multiple communities and there's a counter intervention makes it a much easier case.

But now we're going to get into the problem of civil war a little bit, which is much harder and will give us the Vietnam case.

42:21 Mark: Right. I feel like we've said most of what we would say about civil war is it's very messy and you probably, as an external party should not get involved is that seems like Walzer agrees with Mill on this point.

42:33 Wes: It creates big problems for your utilitarian calculus, which again, you do have to accommodate. It's hard to calculate what the effects are going to be, not only on the people you're trying to help, because you may end up just making them worse off, you may end up harming them, but also on third parties. And I think from a consequentialist or utilitarian standpoint, yeah, Vietnam is a disaster.

42:56 Seth: I did not know. I mean, I've not studied Vietnam, so I don't know. But you know, he says there was a convention, a Geneva Convention that established the 38th parallel and the two governments and said that there were to be elections, I guess, a year following or something like that. And the south, which the United States was supporting, refused to hold the elections, which Right. There is like, okay, violation of the whole self determination, you know, and it kind of, in a weird way, kind of invalidates the entirety of the legitimacy claims by the government in Hanoi and all that. And if it's a red flag, big time, big time.

43:37 Wes: Well, you do have to think about the influence of China and. Right, let's just stipulate that this would have been very influenced by China and it would not have been a good government. This communist government would not be necessarily good. But even then we have to say, yeah, the south has to go ahead with the elections because self determination here is more important than, yes, freedom.

44:00 Seth: You have a right to make terrible decisions and have a shitty government.

44:03 Wes: And if it were the case that you could impose freedom on people, just go in and here's your freedom and then we're going to leave and now you're good, then you might have a case for doing that. But the point that he's Made above, in line with Mill is that you're not going to transform a society. Like they have to have the mechanisms and the character and the institutions to continue doing that. So if you just, if you have to do this prolonged occupation or to force them to have liberal institutions, then you've robbed them of self determination and there's no, you know, and if you leave and give them self determination, then they very might well revert back.

There are exceptions to this case. He says after conquest, right. Germany and Japan radically transformed those societies and gave them liberal institutions, which, I mean, Germany already largely had them and then threw them away for a while, but. Or had them briefly with the Weimar Republic, let's just put it that way, had them very briefly. So they never really, really took hold. Before that it was a monarchy and that was the kind of ethos. But anyway, post World War II, those are examples where, yeah, you turn societies into liberal democracies, but that's after complete conquest.

Intervention is not a good way to do that.

45:15 Mark: So then our final section is just about humanitarian interventions and of course any sort of civil war that we might get, want to get involved in or any sort of repressive government that we might want to topple, there are probably substantial populations that really are right. What is Afghanistan doing to women? Was Rwanda just a civil war? Like.

45:38 Wes: No, no.

45:39 Mark: But there's some sort of judgment call in there and he, he wants to say, like when it goes back to this foundational principle of what gives a territory, you know, a population, the right of self determination is that they have a way of life. And when one group is committing genocide on another group within that territory, well, they don't say, oh well, that's their way of life. Like you're making. This is just a mockery of the whole idea. You have societal breakdown. And in that case it would be nice if, you know, the world policeman, preferably not one country, but the UN or something, were to come in and stop the violence at the very least.

46:18 Wes: In the case of Bangladesh, it was, it was genocide. Right. Anywhere from 300,000 to 3 million people were killed by Pakistan.

46:25 Seth: Yeah.

46:26 Wes: And in that case, like the whole concept of self determination goes out and sovereignty just go out the window. Though, in a sense there is no sovereignty anymore if you're killing that larger number of your own population.

46:39 Seth: Yeah, it's not, I mean you can think of it in more abstract and philosophical terms in terms of numerical. It's basically like ultimately we still have kind of inviolable individual human rights. And if the Way in which your sovereign state is acting essentially is negating or violating these inviolable human rights, whether it be based on ethnicity or religion or what have you. Then you lose the legitimacy of your sovereignty, essentially is what the argument is.

47:11 Wes: But it can't just be violation of rights because then tyrannies would warrant intervention. It has to be massacre or enslavement. It has to be crimes that shock our conscience. And limited tyranny. Of course there's lots of violence, so there's lots of that still doesn't warrant intervention. So we do need a kind of numerical criterion, I think.

47:32 Seth: Well, I don't know about the numerical criteria, but you're right, Wes, to call out that it's, you know, something that shocks our, what's the phrase shocks the, our sense of, our moral, sense of conscience of what have you. I wouldn't want to pin that on a minimum number, but I would say when I talk about violating human rights, I don't mean any human right. I mean like taking a stance with respect to human rights in such a way that it shocks us. Like just because you can imagine the state, a state executing, you know, like when somebody, you have an opposition leader who's just, you know, tortured and killed in public simply for being an opposition leader, that counts as something that shocks us because we don't. But of course, genocide is a whole nother thing or elimination or massacre or something.

48:22 Wes: Yeah, I don't think you can intervene in this scenario because of opposition leaders imprisoned.

48:28 Dylan: Yeah, this is where I think even if you wouldn't want to get down, it would be just too much of a distraction to try to get too particular about where the number is. Is it 1,000 people that you massacred? That is. Okay, so that 1,100 is the line that you cross. That's not really what's going on, but there is something quantitative going on. So the example of one opposition leader being brutally murdered in the public square is not going to be big enough of a crime, honestly, for that to happen.

49:04 Wes: Yeah, you have to be affecting a real community within this. So not just one person. And specifically affecting, in terms of massacre, enslavement. Those aren't just throw off words. Those are the two things that have to be happening. Mass murder or mass enslavement.

49:21 Mark: I mean, enslavement. So all women in some populations are basically being enslaved. But. Yes, but we think probably that doesn't qualify. Maybe massacre every trans person that we find in this society. We're going to, you know, publicly execute. These are Judgment calls. It seems like that the million thing of oh, just let them work it out is not enough. But. But yet we don't have effective ways of going in and rescuing all the women or all the trans people or whoever is being oppressed in that community. So it does come down to, you know, practical considerations even more so than moral considerations.

It would be good if someone. It would be good if an international community had standards and said you have to have basic human rights for everybody in your society. And if you don't do that, then we will remove you as the leader and they need to put somebody else in power. But we just don't have that and it would be unworkable.

50:15 Wes: Well, that would violate self determination though. We can't do that.

50:19 Mark: So I forgot about this footnote by Mill, which is on page 89. The domestic analogy suggests the most obvious way of not qualifying for non intervention is to be incompetent, childish, imbecilic and so on. Mill believed that there were incompetent peoples, barbarians in whose interest it was to be conquered and held in subjection by foreigners. So it's just, you know, we have a sliding scale of barbarism that if you don't allow basic human rights to people, then basically you are not as a society grown up enough to have self determination. I think this would be the argument from the international coalition.

50:54 Wes: Yeah, the idea that there's, I think is that there's nothing to determine. There's like the self is disintegrated in certain cases. But again, I don't think it can just be an oppressive regime or a tyranny. Tyrannies are safe, he says, mere tyrannies are safe. It has to be these. I think it really does have to be mass. These mass events, mass murder.

51:13 Seth: And I think you're right, Wes. It says what is at stake is the bare survival or the minimal liberty of some substantial number of its members against the enslavement or massacre of political opponents, national minorities and religious sects. There may well be no help unless help comes from the outside. And when a government turns savagely upon its own people, we must doubt the existence of a political community to which the idea of self determination might apply. Examples are not hard to find. It is their plenitude that is embarrassing. And he says even though events like the Nazi Holocaust is without precedent in human history, murder on a small scale is so common as to almost be ordinary.

On the other hand, or perhaps for this very reason, clear examples of what is called humanitarian intervention are very Rare indeed. I have not found any, but only mixed cases where the humanitarian motive is one among several. So it's interesting that he brings. Well, it's interesting that he brings it up as a use case or a lending case if it has never if he can't, if he doesn't know any examples of it.

52:20 Wes: Cuba is an example of mixed motives. And the mixed motives are fine humanitarian but also economic and strategic motives. But what's wrong with the Cuban case is that we went in and occupied. We displaced the Spanish and then just occupied and robbed them of self determination and foreclosed on the whole goal of the rebellion.

52:41 Mark: Well, I think we've reaching the end of our time here. We should give some sort of closings. I felt like, of course, this is a, this is a wonderful book. I had a little bit of impatience with the practical cases in the same way that I do in our philosophy of science episodes. But really the history is fascinating and I just feel like to get a better take on Vietnam, he even says himself, look, if you disagree with my presentation of one of these things, just consider them as hypotheticals. If a thing happened the way I'm describing it, this would be the moral judgment upon it according to the principles that I've been enumerating here.

So I think that's a nice sort of workaround. But in terms of my note taking, like I didn't take a lot of notes on the specific cases. I found the theoretical stuff much more interesting but quite underdeveloped. Right. This whole issue again of why do populations have standing in the first place? And I just think this really matters because when you are considering civil wars, when wars of secession, then it actually makes a big difference. And even if he says like it's okay to have a counter interference, well, how much does another country interfering invite a counter interference?

Like is it. Dylan raised this like is giving training, is sending money. Like according to Mill, it's just like you can morally approve of them. You can say we're rooting for you and that's all that you can do. But you know, the world is of course very messy. You know, I just, I really admire this effort that this book in trying to take on these very messy things and at least giving you some moral clarity by let's like, let's kind of get some a priori principles about this and then see how well they work on individual cases.

54:22 Wes: And he's building off of, you know, traditional just war theory and I think he's sometimes called a traditionalist. But it. Right. So we could have read Aquinas or Grotius and it would probably been much more boring and much more at a general level without all these rich examples and without all this elaboration of the theory. So I'm glad we get got to read this really well written, fascinating portion of this book.

54:50 Seth: Agree.

54:51 Dylan: I really enjoyed it. I had not been familiar with it at all. And I think that the examples for something so nuanced and messy most of the time, it actually matters a lot to have examples to act as illustrations because most often what you're trying to think through is, well, what about this example? Well, what about this example? I mean, that just is an unavoidable feature of the way in which this would go. I think at least as much as your conventional discussion of moral choices.

55:26 Wes: We would have been struggling to produce our own lame examples if we had just read the theoretical part.

55:33 Dylan: Yeah, no, I agree, Seth.

55:35 Seth: Yeah, like I said, it was funny. I was kind of like, why are we doing this after we've just done all these other moral things and seemed just sort of like a diversion. And when I first started reading it, I was a little, like I said, it took me a minute to try to figure out the flow and get into it. But I liked it a lot. I definitely think it's even as problematic as some of the theoretical aspects are, it's a really helpful and robust framework to think about these military, the wars and the types of military engagements and help framing kind of, you know, but the, the, the problem is the rubber only hits, you know, hits the road when you start to understand all the details of what's going on, which are very complicated.

And so there's a kind of historical analysis, or at least a factual based, factual analysis that is required for you to really make a good solid judgment about any existing or former situation and determine. But just thinking about those things in moral terms, thinking about how states interact with each other in a kind of a moral framework as opposed to just individuals is really interesting.

56:41 Mark: All right, next episode, J. Walter Sterling, the new president of St. John's College, will be joining us. Not me, I'll be at Gen Con, but to discuss Abraham Lincoln's Lyceum speech on the perpetuation of our political institutions and selections from Steven Pinker's Enlightenment now and Patrick Deneen's why Liberalism Failed. So should be an interesting one. Please come back. Please support us marshallexaminelife.com of course you can learn about the podcast. You can contact us through there. You can suggest topics. We also have Twitter and Facebook and Instagram. Follow us in all those places if you like. Thanks, everybody. Good night.

57:19 Seth: Good night.

57:20 Dylan: Good night.