Abstract
This introduction to the special themed issue on likelihood of success in the just war tradition introduces the problems associated with this prudential jus ad bellum principle, and summarizes the key findings and arguments of the articles in the issue. It concludes that the likelihood of success must be understood organically and cohesively, within the larger tradition, with a special emphasis on the practical applications for justice to which the just war is dedicated.
On October 7, 2023, along with millions of others around the world, I watched a pogrom livestreamed on social media. For someone like myself, the son of Dutch immigrants, resistors, survivors, a surname found on the Wall of the Righteous Gentiles, even I was surprised by the intensity of my emotional response. I have studied international relations for over 20 years, and I have worked in the field of politics nearly as long. The field is not one that is often happy, I find. It reels from crisis to crisis, it is breathless and ferocious. It is—and that day very much was—an overwhelming, disorienting, savage thing.
My father, a January baby in the Dutch–Netherlands under Nazi-occupation in 1943, got his first taste of chocolate from Canadian soldiers. It was the Canadian army that liberated the Netherlands. They called it “Operation Market Garden.” I grew up in the shadow of the Peace Tower, the capital of those same Canadians, and in the spring visited their “Tulip Festival”—an annual gift from those same Dutch boys and girls, grateful, remembering.
“Just War” is the framework people the world over—not just people of faith, but especially people of faith—have used to understand the organized violence sometimes needed to resist evil. It is not a framework all people of faith share. Pacifist traditions, for example, persist in meaningful minorities in Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, and more. But the broad majority, as Ian DeJong's review of The Origins of Just War shows in this issue, have a kind of moral, cosmic framework that not only justifies but directs and restrains the use of organized political violence—war—to achieve the ends of proximate justice. That framework, probably most famously and influentially (not exclusively however) articulated in the Christian tradition, through figures like Augustine and Aquinas, has found its way into the doctrine of states, international law, and moral and legal covenants. In this issue, Isaac Van Pelt gives us a wonderful introduction to Eric Patterson's newest, A Basic Guide to the Just War Tradition, which lays out that very story. Every time a commentator utters a word on “military necessity” or “proportionate use of force” they are referring, knowingly or not, to this great tradition.
It is only a piece of that tradition to which this special issue is dedicated: likelihood of success. This is usually parcel to the first of three now common, if somewhat modern, distinctions in Just War: jus ad bellum (right cause for war). The other two, jus in bello (right conduct in war) and jus post-bellum (right restoration of peace and reconciliation), factor in and may even be fundamental to how to understand jus ad bellum, but in this special issue, they are implied backdrop, not the main discussion.
The likelihood of success has always stood out to me, given my family history, as puzzling. What likelihood of success, after all, did these Dutch resistors have blowing up German logistics or hiding Jews? I grew up hearing stories of Dutch pride that through clever maneuvering and superior geo/hydrographic defense their army held the German advance far longer than anticipated, but “far longer” in that context is measured in days, not months, and certainly not years. The blitzkrieg stumbled briefly in the boggy lowlands and flooded dykes of the Netherlands, but awfully briefly at that. The Dutch army never stood much of a chance.
The likelihood of their success was, in other words, basically nonexistent. The likelihood of success of the resistance was almost zero, unless major aid arrived from overseas, as it eventually did in those Canadian soldiers, sweeping up to the north as the Americans pressed straight to the heart of Germany. But that is all hindsight. The truth is, without a major allied counteroffensive, one of almost staggering logistical scale, with a loss of men and material that one can hardly fathom, the Dutch resistance stood little chance of success. What would be called D-Day, the landings on Normandy, was for much of the war a fantasy, a prayer.
Was Dutch resistance unjust? The mere suggestion, at least around my family dinner table, would be a memorable incident.
I thought of this problem again when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the Israeli response to the terror of Hamas on October 7. The Israelis, Netanyahu argued, would accept nothing short of the total destruction of Hamas. My heart was sick with the images and savagery, it agreed entirely, but my head had questions: was this a likely outcome? Was such a strategic goal a reasonable definition of success? The total destruction of Hamas—the total destruction—was a road that, so far as I understood it, only began in Gaza. It ran through Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Qatar, Shia militias in Syria and Iraq, leadership in Turkey, through the so-called Shia Crescent that ultimately led right to Tehran. It meant not a tactical operation in Gaza, but regional conflict. It meant war. What was the likelihood of success of such an aim? Did that make it unjust?
Ukraine must also come to mind. Few analysts predicted the extraordinary and spirited defense that Ukrainian forces made of the country. Kiev, many imagined, would fall in days. The Black Sea coast would be cut off almost immediately, the country would be starved economically and encircled geographically and finally swallowed by the far larger, better equipped, and better trained Russian forces. If any of Ukraine survived at all, it would be a rump state in the West, a buffer, a token polity permitted at the pleasure of Putin. Would such a defense be just, a slaughter in defense of an indefensible position? Would it not be better to negotiate a surrender, with such unlikely conditions of success, and such overwhelming odds?
This is to name only contemporary examples. Were the Byzantines wrong to defend Constantinople in 1453? Should Baghdad have surrendered to the Mongols in 1258? The Jewish revolts seem especially foolhardy, at almost every moment of history. Or what about those famous Spartans—as Eric Patterson reminds us in his essay—that held the advance of the Persians at the Battle of Thermopylae, killed to a man? Success under secular terms—a special concern for this Review—is a further problem. Without a special revelation from his master Elisha, I daresay his servant was correct in the long odds of the Lord's defense against the Syrians (2 Kings 6). Read through secular, material eyes, “success” starts to rhyme with disbelief or mistrust in the Torah. Some, after all, trust in chariots, and some in horses, but “we trust in name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7).
This is the puzzle to which this special issue of The Review of Faith & International Affairs is dedicated. I was grateful, when organizing this special issue and its discussions, to find that I was far from alone in my confusion. In fact, I would organize the responses from our experts in this issue into two broad categories: reformers and rejectors. I did not find a single defender of the principle of likelihood of success on its own, apart from a robust interaction with the larger Just War tradition. Our sample size may not be quite significant enough to prove the point, but it is an auspicious sample, nonetheless.
Eric Patterson, who arranged the International Studies Association (ISA) roundtable on the question from which this special issue draws, opens our argument by wondering whether the likelihood of success is made practically complicated by changes in geopolitics. Drawing our attention to Israel/Gaza, to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and to tensions between Taiwan and China, Patterson argues that questions of success and its likelihood have taken on fresh urgency. Does this question favor, as he suggests, the powerful and established? What advice does it offer us in the many important counterinsurgency operations around the world? If we are to retain the category, he argues, we must not divorce the prudential consideration of tactical success from larger, strategic questions of success. It may and does sometimes mean that a tactical loss could produce a larger strategic win. Henrik Syse echoes this in his own opening, recalling the evacuation of Dunkirk.
Valerie Morkevičius offers her own serious and substantive introduction to the question, but with less appetite for reform: is it time to abandon the criteria of likelihood of success? By setting out a brief history of the principle, Morkevičius finds it both a recent and unconvincing addition. The problems are two-fold, but quite fundamental. What strategists imagine as likely turns out, the recent Ukrainian conflict being only one good example, to be poorly predictive. Success, further, seems to sustain what Morkevičius calls a power disparity in the tradition, one which seems to slide into a kind of might make right, where the powerful, who are more likely to succeed, draw greater moral confirmation of the righteousness of their cause than the weak, for whom any definition of success may be modest indeed. This is among our first essays in the series because it lays out with such theoretical and practical clarity the problem to which this issue is dedicated. Would it not be better, Morkevičius ultimately wonders, to jettison this prudential principle entirely?
Christian Braun isn't quite convinced to upend the principle, but his caveats are quite substantial. Braun introduces a critical distinction between wars of necessity and wars of choice, as it relates to the principle of likelihood of success. Grounded in what he calls a neoclassical reading of just war, Braun argues that likelihood of success should be considered a principle of secondary importance, one that is less relevant to wars of necessity, and more relevant to wars of choice. Braun's applications to the Iraq war (2003) and the Russian invasion of Ukraine make this a convincing and constructive distinction for this issue.
Like Braun, Henrik Syse is reticent to jettison the term, but he also notes that the devil is in the details. A great deal rides on the definition of success, and that definition cannot—an argument we will see repeated throughout this issue—be divorced from other ad bellum, in bello, and post-bellum criteria. Of particular interest are the practical historical cases that Syse draws our attention to, of Norway, Greece, even of the Cuban Missile Crisis. His opening argument that what seems like a failure, the evacuation of Dunkirk for example, may in fact—as Churchill argued—be a resounding success. If we are to retain this ad bellum criteria, greater care and attention must be placed on putting it into direct and integrated discussion with the full suite of principles of the just war tradition.
Bryan McGraw is our consummate reformer: could we, he wonders, change the principle of likelihood of success, and reform it as likely consequences? Success, as McGraw rightly points out, depends on its definition of both jus in bello and jus post-bellum. What it means to succeed is not merely victory, in whatever form, but what kind of victory, aim at what kind of peace. A ceasefire is not peace, nor is all victory justice. Likely consequences, argues McGraw, also suggests a consideration of what is likely to happen if no action is taken, not simply the consequences if action is taken. This connects meaningfully to Munson's arguments, where it is difficult to know how statecraft would apply likelihood of success to, for example, humanitarian intervention, an application that could be meaningfully clarified by likelihood of consequences.
Becky Munson agrees with Braun that too much emphasis on prudential categories, like likelihood of success, can end up producing a kind of practical pacifism. And she agrees, and extends, McGraw's argument that likelihood of success makes humanitarian intervention unlikely. What statesman, after all, could imagine an armed, humanitarian intervention in Yemen, or Sudan, or Myanmar, or in the genocide in Rwanda, and imagine themselves confident in likelihood of success? Munson argues, drawing us back to the tradition, that jus post-bellum is an essential companion to any discussion of success, and that the aims of humanitarian intervention must be more akin to the tranquilitas ordinas definition of peace, than tactical success on the battlefield.
The application of likelihood of success to cyberwar, especially amidst our borderline mania about “artificial intelligence,” has to be one of the most fascinating interventions in this issue. Adam Knight draws out the tension between two principles is cyberwar—likelihood of success, which seems to demand maximum effect from cyberattacks, and discrimination and proportionality, which restrains that very premise. Cyberwar complicates an already very complicated moral and tactical set of calculations, since there is a significant degree of ambiguity around effectiveness in cyberwar, and collateral containment can be nearly impossible to restrict. Stuxnet provides the famous case, where the worm ended up infecting a wide range of ancillary, untargeted systems, ultimately prompting its discovery. Knight reminds us that many of our systems of war are less discrete, less targeted, and less easily controlled once released than popular strategy imagines. Such arguments relate in a meaningful way to the increasing likelihood of conflict in Earth orbit, where kinetic strikes could produce collateral disaster for a huge range of untargeted assets. If we retain likelihood of success, Knight argues, its definition and means must be found in other, related, just war criteria.
Jonathan Arkonas and Josh Hastey's essay caused me to order not one but two separate histories of the Asia-Pacific War. Arkonas and Hastey show how an application of the principles of likelihood of success and military necessity offers a just war defense of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. These two prudential considerations interrelate in a fundamental way, they argue, to show that if the atomic bombings could not meet these criteria, it is not clear what kind of battlefield activity could, precisely because “it was the dropping of these bombs alone that raised the likelihood of allied success sufficiently to make the reality clear to the emperor of Japan and trigger a surrender offer that fulfilled the legitimate war aims of the American side.” It is a bracing argument, one which I commend to the reader as morally serious, and strategically sophisticated. It also shows how a creative application of other prudential principles in the just war tradition alongside the likelihood of success might not make it the morally crippling hazard that some of our other authors suggest.
Pauletta Otis finally offers enormously helpful practical considerations when it comes to the doctrines of just war, including the likelihood of success. Success, she argues, has two dimensions: success in war, and success on the battlefield. Too often these definitions are left ambiguous, not only in the minds of the strategists and politicians, but crucially in the minds of soldiers. Her essay smartly echoes many others, including whether likelihood of success privileges the powerful, and how and why it would apply to revolutions—including the American Revolution. She calls for a reintegration of “success” into just war practice and calls for a major effort to close the gap between the public, the politician, and the soldier. No matter how sophisticated the theory or the goal, war can never achieve its aims, and it can certainly never achieve justice, where its methods, metrics, and meanings float ambiguously between branches of government, the public, and the armed forces.
The reader would be pressed to find a general consensus here, but a few principles do stand out. First, the Just War tradition is a tradition of cohesive philosophical reflection which can be easily distorted through compartmentalization. The modern, scientific prejudice toward legibility often predisposes today's academics toward a kind of mechanical method, in which we learn about something complicated by disassembling and studying its constituent components, and then reassembling it. This kind of social scientific shorthand is what James C. Scott calls the “high modernism” of the modern state, but it is especially badly suited for organic, complex systems, which depend upon their interrelationships for their integrity and definition. The Just War tradition is a system of ethical thought like that, very easily distorted by the mechanical systematization and categorization that is endemic in much modern social theory. It is for that reason exactly that many of our authors, in order to assess what has gone wrong, or even what is intended by likelihood of success, return us ad fontes, to the premodern sources of the tradition, where just cause, just means, and just peace were never imagined as conceptually separable.
Second, our authors remind us that the Just War tradition is not well suited for abstraction and academic study by scholars and theologians. It is a tradition of practical ethics, intended more for soldiers than scholars, for battlefields than boardrooms. This hardly means we should not study it seriously, or wonder about decisions, or judge actions in history—as Askonas and Hastey clearly show. That would be moral nonsense. It does, however, mean that if the tradition of just war is to serve the moral cause for which it is intended—a guide and steward of active-neighbor love, as Eric Patterson puts it—then we must fiercely resist the academic compartmentalization and philosophical specialization that would rob its intended audience, lawmakers and soldiers, from making use of it. Do not underestimate our soldiers, Otis reminds us, and certainly do not overlook them. Such abstraction could, as Munson, McGraw, Patterson, and others argue, revert the practice of war back to a kind of realpolitik, on the one hand, or a practical pacifism on the other. If this special issue can contribute to anything, it must be to resist such an ethical wasteland. The tradition of just war exists specifically to challenge this tragic binary. And, as Patterson writes, that is a tradition we need especially now as powers rise, sabers rattle, and ordinance drop, more and more, in a world buckling under overlapping crises.
This is, as Isaac Van Pelt writes in his review of Patterson's new book on just war, hardly the last word. But it is a concrete intervention on a principle—the likelihood of success—abused, misunderstood, perhaps in need of reform or even removal, for which international affairs, its laws, and powers, badly need such words of clarity and conviction.
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Notes on contributors
Robert J. Joustra
Robert J. Joustra (PhD, University of Bath) is a professor of politics & international studies at Redeemer University. He is a Senior Editor at The Review of Faith & International Affairs, and the author of many books on religion and politics, including most recently Power Politics & Moral Order—Three Generations of Christian Realism (Cascade, 2022).