Forty-one years ago, in the shadow of the Vietnam War, Michael Walzer published Just and Unjust Wars, an exploration of the morality of going to war and of war-fighting—a 20th-century update on the old problems of jus ad bellum and jus in bello. A professor at Harvard and Princeton University and long a member of the idiosyncratic left-wing intellectual crowd around Dissent magazine, Walzer established himself as an original thinker and laid the predicate for his lifelong willingness to call out fellow leftists as necessary for the sloppiness or shoddiness of their often abstract moral reasoning on matters of war and peace.

Vietnam was an unjust war, in Walzer’s view, one that should never have been fought. But for him, it hardly followed that all wars are unjust. At a time when a kind of nihilist pacifism was taking hold among many on the left, Walzer insisted on reminding his comrades of the moral necessity of World War II and the struggle to defeat fascism. Similarly, at a time when many of his contemporaries were apologizing for, if not celebrating, brutal regimes emerging in postcolonial states where liberation movements had thrown off an imperial yoke, Walzer insisted on holding these governments accountable for their misdeeds. Continue reading →

On NATO

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump was unsparing in his disparagement of U.S. alliances. In a word, allies were freeloaders—complacent in their reliance on the United States to provide them security, contributing nothing like their “fair share” of the cost of their defense, and lavishing the dividend on their domestic needs. Maybe that was acceptable when they were flat on their backs after a war that left the United States on top, but now that they are prospering and the United States has pressing needs of its own, it’s time for the allies to pay up. He also mused about NATO being “obsolete.”

This was alarming (to put it mildly) to most American foreign-policy specialists—to say nothing of the reaction of U.S. allies. The postwar alliance structure in Europe has been the backbone of security on a continent where the United States fought two wars. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization underpinned the postwar revival of Western Europe and subsequently, after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the demise of the Soviet Union, of Central and Eastern Europe. The relevance of the alliance has gained renewed salience with Russia’s aggression against its neighbors, first in Georgia in 2008, then in Ukraine in 2014. Continue reading →

Steven F. Hayward’s Patriotism Is Not Enough is a loose intellectual portrait of the life and thought of Harry V. Jaffa and his circle of close friends and even closer enemies. Jaffa, who died two years ago at the age of 96, was a prominent student of Leo Strauss’s who held forth and shaped a generation of students of his own at Claremont McKenna College and its associated graduate school and institute in California. Jaffa was the author, most famously, of the classic study of Abraham Lincoln, Crisis of the House Divided, a book that sought to establish Lincoln not only as a statesman of the first rank but also as a profound political thinker in his own right.

Jaffa was also among the most quarrelsome men of letters ever to reside in the groves of academe, and it is this fact that gave Hayward’s book its impetus and provides its propulsion throughout. Hayward begins with a juxtaposition of Jaffa and Walter Berns, another prominent student of Strauss’s, with whom Jaffa quarreled incessantly throughout their adult lives. Jaffa and Berns, born six months apart, died on the very same day in 2015. This quirk of mortality set Hayward, a tremendous admirer of both men, on his way, and it informs the book’s personal style, which will painlessly acquaint newcomers with some pivotal moments and issues in recent intellectual history, even as it keeps those who already know the subject entertained. Continue reading →