Defining a just peace in Ukraine

Robert Skidelsky: "We should think of a just peace not in legal terms but as a peace which would last as long as it could in a wicked world"

Guest post by Lord Robert Skidelsky.

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“Defining a just peace in Ukraine”

by Lord Robert Skidelsky

There are many reasons for regretting the resurrection of Donald Trump, but one overwhelming reason for welcoming it is that he is a peacemaker not a war maker, and will actively lever America’s power to pacify an increasingly dangerous world.

Western leaders do not actively seek war with Russia, China, or Iran. But they do not actively seek peace. Ukraine is a case in point.

Our leaders have repeatedly stated that it is up to Ukraine to define the terms on which it will make peace. Meanwhile they will continue to supply it with “all it takes” for victory. Given that the big demographic and military imbalance between Ukraine and Russia precludes a Ukrainian victory at the present level of support, this stance leaves only two options: Ukraine’s defeat or a dangerous escalation with unpredictable consequences. 

Recent escalatory moves have not been sufficient to affect basic calculus. Biden’s permission for Ukraine to use US-made ATCAMS is sufficiently limited to avert a direct conflict between NATO and Russia, while being too limited to prevent a Ukrainian defeat. In any case, it holds for only another two months. Trump’s team has indicated that the new president will bring a simultaneous pressure on both Putin and Zelenskyy to end the war quickly.

Any successful peace initiative will have to accept that this conflict has no single bad guy. We do not recognise Putin’s view of NATO as a beast with encircling claws. At the same time Russians can be forgiven for thinking that the Western narrative is not quite as defensive as it seems. “The spread of our values makes us safer”, declared Tony Blair in Chicago in 1999, justifying NATO’s bombing of Yugoslavia. This sets out the ground for forcible regime change when the opportunity offers. The underlying message is that democracy is the peaceful, dictatorship the warlike form of the state, so a war for democracy is necessarily a war for peace. Many Western analysts view the war in Ukraine as a war for regime change in Russia, which is why they cannot contemplate anything less than a Ukrainian victory.

Christian teaching offers securer grounds for negotiating an end to the Ukraine conflict. Augustine of Hippo held the claims of peace to be paramount. A perfectly just peace is unattainable in this world, but humanity may be brought closer to it. War may be a means of doing so, so that absolute pacifism is untenable. But since right and wrong are rarely unambiguous, justice is always relative, and war, therefore, must be waged with restraint and limitation (Some analysts prefer the term “justifiable” war to capture the essence of the thought that no war can be perfectly just).

What is a justifiable war? Chapter 7, Article 51 of the UN Charter recognises the “inherent right of self-defense” if a member is subject to armed attack. In UN terms, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was both unjust and illegal; Ukraine is fighting a just war in self-defence; the Security Council is powerless to stop Russian aggression in face of Russia’s veto; and Ukraine deserves all the support we can give it.

This seems straightforward enough. However there are two weakness in just war theory: first, in the extension of the idea of “defence” to defence of values rather than territory; second, in recourse to “preventive” war even when there is no attack or immediate danger of one. In such formulations defence and attack lose their commonsense referents. Was the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 defensive or aggressive? The US claimed it was fighting a defensive war against Saddam Hussein to prevent him using “weapons of mass destruction” (which he turned out not to have) at some time in the future. This elasticity of reasoning invites an indefinite inflation of the meaning of defence. Russia might, and did, justify its invasion of Ukraine as a preventive move to counter NATO expansion.

No less formidable is the difficulty of defining a just peace. Augustine thought of a just peace not in legal terms but as a peace which would last as long as it could in a wicked world. He rejected the imperial (Roman) model of peace secured by obliteration of the enemy as too costly in terms of carnage and bloodletting — “they made a desert and called it peace”, said Tacitus of Roman imperial methods. Rather he adopted the Aristotelian idea of peace as orderly proportion. “Order”, wrote Augustine, “is the adjustment of the like and unlike each to its own place”. This was partly realised by the Westphalian system of the “balance of power”, though balance of powers would give a better idea of it, with each part contributing to the harmony of the whole.

Any peace project based on the idea that freedom is indivisible, and that an attack on a single person’s freedom is an attack on everyone’s is bound to break down in face of the diversity of cultures and powers. Yet this remains the official Western view. The second coming of Trump with his isolationist instincts promises to break this mould. For it is not the universalisation of our values that foreign policy should aim for, but the harmonisation of the like with the unlike.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope 

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