Arnold Beichman’s Washington Times story Politics of Vengence sets forth the case. Foreign policy was based on a particular view of warfare among nations. The situation is different now. Here is an extract from Beichman:
We find ourselves confronting a new actor on the world scene, one who influences -- not determines -- the foreign policies of leading nation-states, and who cannot be appeased because his objective is total annihilation of the enemy and himself at the same time. As Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad put it from his home in England, "It is foolish to fight people who want death; that is what they are looking for."
Today, as we try to foresee the foreign policy challenges of the next several decades, it is with the realization we live in an era that was best described under far different circumstances by Otto von Bismarck in words even truer today than in 1890. Said the Iron Chancellor: "We live in a wondrous time in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity."
Foreign policy in Bismarck's good old days was based on nation-states negotiating with or confronting each other on the field of battle. In all cases. there was a foreseeable end to hostilities. The armies were professional or conscript, and when the battle was over, everybody still standing went home after the inevitable rectification of borders, as the phrase had it. Whatever the casus belli, it was not a clash of civilizations.
Today there are no borders to be rectified because, as far as al Qaeda and its freelance terrorists are concerned, there are no national borders any more than there are nation-states. There is no foreseeable end to hostilities because the war waged against the West is not by nation-states against each another but by an enemy who, speaking in the name of Islam, has declared war on our civilization.
To its credit,the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy recognizes the changing realities. However, for the most part, Just War thinking has not. As this blog has observed before it has not confronted to the changing situation. Give Beichman’s article a careful reading.
The tragic part of all this is that, even though warfare has been declining over the past twenty years , armed violence is still with us. Foreign policy officials and church leaders will fail to understand the change. Soldiers will put their own lives on the line, hoping that their sacrifices will bring about greater justice.
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