Harry van der Linden

This presentation explores the significance of just military preparedness, or jus ante bellum as a new category of just war theory, for just war thinking, especially with regard to irregular warfare. It articulates six just military preparedness principles. It further discusses how America’s military preparation fails the JMP principles and how this negatively impacts its capability to justly initiate, execute, and conclude war. This critical analysis takes as its point of departure Defense Secretary Robert Gates’s view that the Pentagon needs to be “reprogrammed” toward a “balanced strategy” of preparing for both conventional and irregular warfare.

Justice requires that high consumption in affluent societies be slowed down for the sake of eradicating extreme poverty in the developing world and improving the condition of its very moderate consumers. A slowdown of high consumption for the sake of ending worldwide poverty can be realized through a social regulation of the global economy. This social regulation should include labor standards, environmental measures, rules for global capital investments, and a distributive schema that shifts some of the wealth obtained from globalization from the rich countries to the developing world. To avoid that the social regulation of the global economy would have a regressive impact on lower-income groups in the affluent societies, a progressive consumption tax should be adopted with a standard deduction large enough so that these groups would not have to pay any tax at all. Attempts to slow down high consumption through a social regulation of the global economy will meet two institutional limits, the sovereign state and capitalism. In the final instance, justice and joyful simplicity for all humans may require cosmopolitan democracy and socialism.

In studying the history of the ethics of war, the just war tradition may be interpreted as a historically evolving body of tenets about just war principles. Instead of a single just war theory, there have been many just war theories—for example, those of Augustine, Aquinas, Vitoria, and Grotius—theories that have various commonalities and differences. A comprehensive history of the evolving just war tradition should feature a thorough study of how these just war theories were rethought. For example, in his landmark work Just and Unjust Wars, written during the Cold War, Michael Walzer exclaimed: “Nuclear weapons explode the theory of just war.” 1 In his rethinking of the just war tradition in light of the superpower practice of nuclear deterrence, he contributed his influential conception of supreme emergency exceptions. Now that the Cold War is over, the authors of the articles in this book are primarily concerned with the question of how the just war tradition—which is understood somewhat differently by the different authors—should be rethought today. Echoing Walzer’s exclamation, among the particular post–Cold War questions that can be raised are these: Is just war theory exploded by terrorism? Is it annihilated by genocide? In their various rethinkings of the just war tradition, our authors state their own particular post–Cold War questions, and answer them from their diverse viewpoints...

Should the U.N. Security Council use its coercive powers to bring about effective climate change mitigation? This question remains relevant considering the inadequate mitigation goals set by the signatories of the Paris Climate Accord and the ramifications of U.S. withdrawal from the Accord. This paper argues that the option of the unsc coercing climate change mitigation through military action, or the threat thereof, is morally flawed and ultimately antithetical to effectively addressing climate change. This assessment is based significantly on the application of jus ad bellum principles of just war theory, incorporating some feminist critiques of this theory.

This review essay discusses three recent books on the Green New Deal, written, respectively, by Naomi Klein, Jeremy Rifkin, and Kate Aronoff and a few other democratic socialists. It argues that the New Deal offers a better model of how to envision the change required for deep carbonization than the vision of war mobilization after Pearl Harbor since it emphasizes not only the need for massive introduction of green technology but also the importance of broad social change constituting a just transition. The essay argues that the GND should be placed in a global context so that the adoption of the GND in the Global North would lead to much greater funding of green developments in the less industrialized countries of the Global South.

Kant argues that it is the duty of humanity to strive for an enduring peace between the nations. For Kant, political progress within each nation is essential to realizing lasting peace, and so one would expect him to view political intervention- defined as coercive interference by one nation, or some of its citizens, with the affairs of another nation in order to bring about political improvements in that nation-as justified in some cases.! Kant, however, explicitly rejects all intervention by force, and some aspects of his work support an unqualified prohibition of political intervention. In this paper I will examine on which grounds, stated or inferred, Kant's practical philosophy upholds the absolute prohibition of political intervention, and conclude that, although these grounds are inadequate, they have the merit of pointing to important restrictions on justified political intervention

In this paper I question the morality of U.S. military supremacy or hegemony in terms of what constitute the legitimate use of military force and the proper preparation for using such force. I first discuss in a somewhat synoptic fashion how American hegemonic military force has been justified in dishonest ways and wrongly executed. Next, I show that Just War Theory needs to be revised in order to come to a convincing assessment of U.S. military hegemony and its use of military force. This leads me to propose “just military preparedness,” consisting of five principles of just military preparedness, as a new category of JWT. The failure of the United States to satisfy the principles puts into question its very capability of justly resorting to military force, of lawfully executing force, and of establishing a just peace after war. The principles also point to a more humane alternative of how the United States could meet security threats and sustain a peaceful international order