War and Foreign Policy

We live in times of hyper-nationalism, war, and all-intrusive statism that the Church is called to resist in favor of truth, beauty, and true salvation.

Jeff McMahan has written a genuinely revolutionary book. He has uncovered a flaw in standard just-war theory. The standard view sharply separates the morality of going to war, jus ad bellum, from the morality of warfare,

Paul Rahe's outstanding book can be considered an extended commentary on a famous passage in Tocqueville's Democracy in America:

Recorded 26 June 2009.

The State is the group within society that claims for itself the exclusive right to rule everyone under a special set of laws that permit it to do to others what everyone else is rightly prohibited from doing, namely aggressing against person and property.

Unjust combatants who feared punishment at the end of the war might be more reluctant to surrender, preferring to continue to fight with a low probability of victory than to surrender with a high probability of being punished.

Tom Woods discusses his blockbuster book Meltdown.

"The work of remaking [the world] will be long and hard, and will require some sacrifice."

Conscription was an unjust, capricious, and immoral disaster then. We don't have any reason to think things will be different now.

Bacevich concludes with several suggestions for changes in American foreign policy, and among these is one that is especially excellent: For the United States, abolishing nuclear weapons ought to be an urgent national security priority…