Michael Walzer responds to my war theory

When one of the world's leading just war theorists engages your work, you answer carefully.

I like to swing for the fences.

In March, at the beginning of the US/Israeli war on Iran, I published a four-part series arguing that Western war theory rests on a category error — treating war as a discrete episode rather than a continuous relationship — and that revolutionary movements have spent decades exploiting that error. Therefore, I proposed an entirely new theory of war that I think aligns more with how reality works than with how international law has evolved. I freely admit that I have no academic expertise in this or many other topics I write about but I will come up with an idea, research it and write about it fairly quickly.

Marcia Kupfer, an independent scholar, was impressed enough with my argument that she invited Michael Walzer — author of Just and Unjust Wars, the book that shaped modern just war theory and long formed part of the West Point curriculum — to comment on my series. Walzer is one of the world’s most distinguished intellectuals.

Whoa.

Walzer took my arguments seriously, in detail. He agreed with some of what I argued, pushed back on other parts, and raised challenges.

Here I will try to respond to some of his well reasoned points. Kupfer gave an excellent summary of my series that is worth reading in her Substack.

The series made five interconnected claims. Western international law treats war as episodic — a discrete event with a legal trigger, a period of hostilities, and an end. Revolutionary movements, from Lenin through Mao through Islamism, treat war as continuous — a permanent state aimed at total transformation. The imminence doctrine at the heart of international law cannot address threats that are real, building, and existential but not yet “imminent” in any legally recognizable sense. The right diagnostic question before committing to any military response is: if this episodic war is won, does that actually neutralize the threat? The answer determines not just whether to fight, but what victory requires. And the existing international legal framework cannot be reformed from within — any rule flexible enough to address these problems is flexible enough to be claimed by Russia against Ukraine, by Iran against Israel.

The series drew on John Locke’s definition of the state of war — declared hostile intent combined with the capacity to act on it, not active hostilities — and argued that this understanding is war as a relationship is what modern international law quietly abandoned in favor of looking at war as an episode. I claim that looking at war as an event has been systematically weaponized by revolutionary actors.

Walzer has a much more comprehensive view of history than I do. He brings up excellent counterarguments to my assertion that revolutionary movements never end until victory or total annihilation; it is a stretch to say the Korean War is still being waged and he notes that the communists won the Vietnam War but now the US has close to normal relations with them which is inconsistent with perpetual war.

Perhaps I can sharpen the distinction - as he notes, often the revolutionaries become statists when they reach power so the ideology becomes secondary to control. Identifying their own incentives and trajectory is critical in deciding on how to respond to aggression from a self-defined revolutionary state. Walzer argues that China is more statist than revolutionary today, but I think my argument that the US is in a war-relationship with China is still accurate; China is acting in a way consistent with long-term victory over the US, currently using its expertise in surveillance, stealing technology, making other nations dependent on it for infrastructure and using social media to divide Western societies.

So rather than fixate on Marx and Islamism as revolutionary movements - and Walzer is correct that original Marxism did not support war as the means of revolution - my argument needs to lean more on my idea of war as relationship. Relationships can change over time, as his Vietnam example proves.

The question is, I think, when an ideology is regarded a more important than statism. My quote of Mao saying that he would gladly sacrifice hundreds of millions of Chinese to win over the West is true but Walzer is also accurate in saying that China is acting more statist than strictly revolutionary. The important thing is whether a nation would change its strategy in response to external events or only its tactics. That is where Western responses to anti-Western states and movements need to concentrate.

Iran appears to still prioritize ideology over all. Saudi Arabia, also a state that officially follows Islam as its constitution, has shown far more pragmatism in dealing with the West.

Israel’s major error with Hamas was being lulled into thinking that the group was acting pragmatically to help its people and not recognizing that its desire to destroy Israel had not abated - and its pragmatism was a well planned deception. The idea that they would willingly sacrifice tens of thousands of its citizens just to gain public relations points was not seriously considered, let alone that this would be its guiding (and largely successful) military strategy.

Which brings us to the difference between dealing with Islamist ideologies and The Cold War.

Walzer notes that there were repeated calls for preventive war against the Soviet Union — “strike now before we are struck” — and that it was wise to reject them. The Marshall Plan, NATO, the Voice of America, diplomatic contacts throughout: these ultimately prevailed. If communism ever inspired eternal war against Western capitalism, “the inspiration had a beginning and an end. It was smart to wait it out.”

The implication is clear. If it was smart to wait out Soviet communism despite its universalist ambitions and nuclear arsenal, the same patience might apply to Iranian revolutionary Islamism.

I would argue that The Cold War worked because the Soviet Union had a survival interest. Mutual Assured Destruction was a credible deterrent precisely because Soviet leadership — whatever its ideological commitments — valued the survival of the Soviet state and Soviet society. Khrushchev blinked during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Brezhnev pursued détente. The ideological commitment to world revolution consistently yielded to the instinct for national self-preservation. That instinct is what made waiting viable.

Hamas didn’t care about its leaders’ survival. It cares about Islam’s ultimate victory. And so does Iran.

Khomeini stated explicitly: “We do not worship Iran. We worship Allah. Let this land burn, let it go up in smoke as long as Islam wins in the end.” This is the constitutional doctrine of the Islamic Republic, institutionalized in its schools, its Friday prayers, its Revolutionary Guard theology, its proxy network. The regime was founded on the explicit subordination of national survival to revolutionary purpose.

Deterrence requires a rational actor who values survival at a rate sufficient to be deterred. The Soviet deterrence calculation was: launch and be annihilated, or don’t launch and survive. Iranian revolutionary doctrine has institutionalized martyrdom as a religious virtue, constructed proxy forces specifically designed to absorb losses while Iran maintains deniability, and for forty years demonstrated consistent willingness to accept enormous costs — including economic devastation from sanctions — rather than abandon the revolutionary project. Shame culture reinforces this at every level — even tiny concessions are read as weakness, and symbolism consistently trumps reality.

There is also a technical asymmetry between Iran and the Cold War. The Cold War “wait it out” strategy was applied to a nuclear-armed adversary — the Soviet Union already had the weapons. The deterrence logic that made waiting viable depended on both sides having the capability and dreading its use. An Iran approaching the nuclear threshold is a categorically different problem. Once that threshold is crossed, the deterrence calculation inverts: instead of waiting being viable, waiting forecloses the option entirely. The Begin Doctrine — applied at Osirak in 1981, at Deir ez-Zor in 2007, against Iran in 2026 — is precisely the recognition that the window for the “wait it out” strategy closes as capability approaches threshold, and that the closing is irreversible. Walzer defended Israel’s 1967 preemptive strike on the grounds of imminent threat. The Iranian nuclear program was a threat played out over decades rather than days, without a clear casus belli but where waiting is suicidal. No one can doubt that Iran would deploy a nuclear weapon against Israel and willingly sacrifice a couple of million Palestinians if they thought they could.

Waiting Iran out might result in a successful popular uprising, or it might result in a nuclear weapon and delivery system. The latter is unfortunately more likely than the former.

The other major challenge he makes is to my idea that each nation should prioritize their own people over their enemies.

Walzer defends the position he and Avishai Margalit argued in Haaretz: that innocent men and women on both sides of a conflict have equal value. He reads my framework as relaxing that principle, making it “a little easier to fight against insurgents hiding among civilians” by valuing Israeli civilians at a higher rate than Gazan civilians.

I am not arguing that enemy civilians have less inherent worth as human beings. I’m saying that states have concentric circles of responsibility — to their own citizens first, to enemy civilians second — and that these circles reflect the source of a state’s moral and political legitimacy, not a ranking of human worth. A government’s primary claim on its citizens’ obedience and sacrifice derives from its commitment to protect them. A government that sacrifices its citizens to protect enemy civilians has not demonstrated superior morality. It has inverted the moral basis of its own authority. And current international law supports this: no army is expected to endanger its own soldiers to reduce casualties of the enemy, and the laws of proportionality as adjudicated are far more favorable to the military than the standards applied to Israel. This is not a description of the value of lives but of reality: just as a parent would save her own child over another’s, a state must prioritize their own citizens and an army must prioritize its own members. This is the social contract we all live under.

If armies are expected to weigh all lives equally, that means that Hamas’ human shield strategy is impossible to defeat. I would be interested to know how the equal-value principle generates operational guidance in a situation where Hamas has deliberately structured the battlefield to make Israeli restraint a Hamas strategic asset.

I deeply appreciate the discussion. Walzer could have dismissed this series. A pseudonymous blogger arguing that the experts got it wrong, published on Substack, is not an obvious target for serious engagement. He chose to engage seriously, carefully, and generously — identifying where I was right, identifying where he disagrees, and raising the hardest available challenge to my central argument. That is what intellectual discourse is supposed to look like, and it happens far less often than it should.

My theory of war is part of my larger philosophical work. If the framework I have been developing holds up under serious scrutiny from the field’s most important living thinker in this domain — not unscathed, but standing — then it may be worth developing further.

That is what I intend to do.