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No Wars of Necessity

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Of course there’s no such thing as a war of necessity, and of course the term should be banished from our lexicon. There are wars that are necessary to defend specific values that we hold, but these values are almost invariably contingent; territorial integrity gets sacrificed all the time, and even national independence is a value that can be balanced against others (survival, prosperity, etc.). Let’s turn this over to Thucydides:

Melians. As we think, at any rate, it is expedient- we speak as we are obliged, since you enjoin us to let right alone and talk only of interest- that you should not destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right, and even to profit by arguments not strictly valid if they can be got to pass current. And you are as much interested in this as any, as your fall would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and an example for the world to meditate upon.
Athenians. The end of our empire, if end it should, does not frighten us: a rival empire like Lacedaemon, even if Lacedaemon was our real antagonist, is not so terrible to the vanquished as subjects who by themselves attack and overpower their rulers. This, however, is a risk that we are content to take. We will now proceed to show you that we are come here in the interest of our empire, and that we shall say what we are now going to say, for the preservation of your country; as we would fain exercise that empire over you withouttrouble, and see you preserved for the good of us both.
Melians. And how, pray, could it turn out as good for us to serve as for you to rule?
Athenians. Because you would have the advantage of submitting before suffering the worst, and we should gain by not destroying you.

The Athenian point is clear; war is not strictly necessary, and the Melians will gain advantage from surrendering rather than fighting. The Athenians understood this quite clearly, and realized that the subjugation of Melos was necessary only insofar as they wished to preserve the empire. In the case of Haas, the examples he invokes (Korea, WWII, and Persian Gulf) are clearly absurd; the United States faced nothing approaching national annihilation in any of these situations. In the Persian Gulf War, at the very worst we faced the possibility of a dominant Iraq in a region on the other side of the globe and a somewhat higher price of gas; if that entails “necessity,” then the term is fundamentally meaningless. Even most wars that more closely approach “wars of annihilation” typically aren’t, on balance, strictly necessary. There are indeed a (very) few cases in which wars are waged by one people or state in pursuit of the utter annihilation of another people, but these are so rare that including the term “war of necessity” in the lexicon of national security isn’t strictly justified.

…there is invariably confusion when I make this argument. The question isn’t whether war is sometimes necessary in order to preserve certain values; it obviously is. A war may even, in some (rare) cases, be necessary to preserve a people from annihilation. This isn’t how the term is regularly used, however. The term is tossed around without specific invocation of the particular value that is at stake, and accordingly without any debate over whether the value in question is truly worth fighting for. War of necessity, accordingly, is worse than a useless term when it is used in the absence of invocation of, and debate over, the value which it is necessary to defend.

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