Unjust War: The Christian Case Against Ukraine

The Ukrainian War cannot pass Augustine's test of a Just War. Here's why.

The longest-lasting, second most deadly (when taking into account our proxy wars), and most costly war in American history ended on December 3, 1989. In Malta, President George H.W. Bush and Russia’s Mikhail Gorbachev announced the end of the Cold War. A year later, the details were ironed out, and the Soviet Union dissolved its band of 15 nation states and consented to the reunification of Germany. The crux of agreement between the two super powers, which promised world peace, was made on February 9, 1990.

BACKGROUND

U.S. Secretary of State, James Baker, promised Russia that NATO would not expand past its then-current border of East Germany. Baker’s promise was repeated on May 17, 1990, in a speech coronating the agreement by NATO Secretary General, Manfred Wörner.

Wörner explained the agreement, “The very fact that we are ready not to deploy NATO troops beyond the territory of the Federal Republic gives the Soviet Union firm security guarantees.” You can read the address at the NATO website archives here.

In no uncertain terms, Baker, Wörner, and NATO acknowledged that moving NATO any closer to Russia was an act of aggression they had no intention of breaching. Both sides recognized that, short of an outbreak of hostilities, NATO would not encroach closer upon Russia’s boundaries and that Russia was entitled to the assurance of security by not surrounding it with NATO forces.

We have left behind us the old friend/foe mind-set and the confrontational outlook. We do not need enemies nor threat perceptions. We do not look upon the Soviet Union as the enemy. We want that nation to become our partner in ensuring security. On the other hand, we expect the Soviet Union not to see us as a military pact directed against it or even threatening it. Instead we wish the Soviet Union to see our Alliance as an open and cooperative instrument of stability in an over-arching European security system. We are not proposing something to the Soviet Union which is against its interests. What we have to offer can only be to its advantage.

The post-war consensus following WWII has often changed, a fact I’ll explain later today at Protestia. That consensus, immediately following the horrors of WWII, is that the mistreatment of Germany on the part of Great Britain (although never explicitly admitted to by Churchill) after the first world war, is what fueled the Nazi ascent to power. The 1946 Marshall Plan, an agreement between the United States and Great Britain to rebuild Germany, took into account the national pride and security needs of Germany, wanting to not remake the mistakes that led to World War I.

This was still the post-war consensus in 1990. If Russia was to be brought into the world community on good terms with the rest of Europe, its right to security and national dignity had to be maintained. Without that, almost everyone agreed, a hot war could unite that would promise the end of civilization.

However, the Military Industrial Complex and America’s foreign policy wonks never got the memo. NATO, which was created to deal with the problem of the Soviet Union, only grew stronger. NATO, and the United States in particular, never left the arms race. We continued to build our arsenals, preparing to fight an enemy that didn’t exist. Of course, we found - or made - plenty of enemies nonetheless, continuing to overthrow regimes and employ more than 170,000 soldiers in 178 nations around the world.

The war machine has to eat, after all.

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Ultimately, NATO repeated the same mistake with Russia that Churchill made with Germany after WWI. We could not let go of a war that we won. And over time, the war would return, much to the pleasure of war profiteers and bankers financing both sides of global conflict.

Moving NATO into Ukraine has always been the clear, red line for Putin and Russia. By comparison, it would be like Russia employing its weaponry to Canada, or better yet, Cuba. The latter is a perfect example, because it happened when Nikita Kruschchev indeed put missiles in Cuba, and Kennedy invaded the island nation in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs. So, we have a clear comparison that has already been born-out historically for how the United States would respond.

On February 19, 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris announced in Munich, her goal of expanding NATO to Ukraine. Five days later, Russia invaded Ukraine. The rest, as they say, is history. The speech was the last in a long line of actions taken since Biden’s inauguration, inching the region closer and closer to war. The hurried Afghanistan withdrawal was clearly done so as to allow America to get to its next appointed war.

AUGUSTINE’S JUS AD BELLUM, OR JUST WAR

St. Augustine, who is claimed by both Protestants and Romanists (Protestants deny the Roman Catholic church existed in any meaningful way during Augustine’s life, and was then devoid of most of its current heresies), was the bishop of Hippo in North Africa.

Baptized a Christian in 386, Augustine contributed greatly to the systemization of Christian theology. His contemporaries claimed Augustine “established anew the ancient faith.” What that meant, is not that Augustine invented any Christian doctrines, but that he systematized, or explained and extrapolated, Christian doctrines from the Bible. Today, Protestants like Lutherans, Anglicans, and Calvinists of all stripes consider him a proto-Reformer, crediting his work on divine election, the Holy Trinity, or Christian ethics with influence over the Reformer’s coming thoughts.

Arguably, outside of the Apostolic age, no Christian theologian has more influenced western Christian thought, and no Christian theologian has almost universally established endearment and avoided claims of heresy like Augustine.

Although far from a pacifist, Augustine loathed war on Biblical grounds. He did, however, concede that war was exactly as the Scripture says, occasionally necessary (Ecclesiastes 3:8). However, not every war was just, Augustine argued, and certain requirements are necessary for a war to be both ethical and justified.

These conditions of Jus ad Belum include:

(1) Wars must be fought with legitimate authority. In other words, only rightful governing authorities can declare war.

(2) Wars must be for a noble reason. In other words, wars cannot be fought for purposes of vain glory, material enrichment, or national vendetta. In addition, wars cannot be fought to punish nations for past wrong-doings, but only to stop current wrong-doings that outweigh the consequences of war.

(3) Wars must have the right intention. That said, there must be an intention, or goal, which is morally justified. Aimless or pointless wars must be avoided.

(4) War must be the last resort. All other efforts to avoid war should have first been taken.

(5) War must have a reasonable chance of success. Wars that are lost causes, or wars that cannot reasonably expect success, are inherently unjust.

There are some other characteristics of just war in terms of how a war is engaged, or Jus in Bello:

These include not intentionally attacking civilians (like Churchill’s bombing of Dresden), or that damage must be proportional (total war, like Sherman’s March to the Sea, is always unjust).

I’m inventing nothing new, in claiming that these are the established requirements of just war for Western Christianity. To this end, I’ll quote notable evangelical ethicist (and Ukrainian war supporter), Russell Moore…

“Most Christians, however, both today and in the broader history of the church, are not pacifists but hold to some version of ‘just war theory,’ as classically articulated by Augustine” [source link]

Or consider, for example, that Christianity Today ran an article in 2002 explaining that 350 Christian ethicists who were members of the Society of Christian Ethics, signed a statement asserting that the war in Afghanistan met the requires of just war according to Augustine.

In fact, Christianity Today ran a number of articles after the terror attacks on 9-11, explaining that Augustine’s Just War was the benchmark of Christian ethics on the subject of war’s morality or immorality. My only point I’m belaboring is that Augustine’s theory truly is the gold standard for Western Christianity and has been since Augustine.

THE UKRAINIAN CONFLICT DOES NOT PASS THE MUSTER

The conflict in Ukraine is unjust for the following three infractions of Augustine’s Just War Theory.

MORAL AUTHORITY

I certainly don’t intend to defend Russia’s actions. I will, however, strongly suggest that the United States has not an ounce of moral authority to engage in a proxy war on the grounds of one nation invading another. On this point, Augustine’s first requirement for a Just War is negated.

If it is true that a nation has the right of self-determination and autonomy, then the United States has erred against our principles by invading Iraq and overthrowing its democratically elected government. When one takes into account that the war was (1) instigated under false pretenses, (2) killed more than a million innocent civilians, and (3) left the nation significantly worse, more chaotic, and a must greater incubator for terror than how we found it, virtually no serious person should consider the war to have been justified.

Meanwhile, the United States has consistently engaged in so-called “regime change.” We attempted this at least 72 times during the Cold War, all for the alleged purpose of stopping the spread of Communism, but our foreign policy didn’t pull back on the regime change throttle one iota after the collapse of the Soviet Union. We have continued attempting regime change - and in some cases, like Iraq - carrying out, and often for reasons that are vague or altogether unrelated with any moral purpose. In fact, we engaged in regime change in Ukraine and successfully carried out a coup, installing the current Zelensky regime. Heck, just this weekend, Mike Huckabee, the new ambassador to Israel, suggested we engage in regime change in Iran as “the world’s new goal (as opposed to world peace, I guess).

The precise number of attempts at regime change on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces are unknown, because American foreign policy operates independently of any congressional oversight. We do know that there have been at least a dozen attempts to overthrow the governments of other nations since 1991, irrespective of whether or not those leaders are democratically elected. It would appear that the only criterion for regime change is that the regime is uncooperative with the stated goals of United States foreign policy.

And none of this includes foreign election interference, which is perhaps the single greatest goal of the Central Intelligence Agency around the world.

Meanwhile, substantiated claims of Russians killing Ukrainian civilians, pale in comparison to the volume of civilians the American military has killed in other theaters throughout the world. As previously stated, the number of civilians killed in Iraq alone are over a million, and the Obama Administration’s drone strikes killed civilians over 90% of the time. In fact, not only did Obama regularly kill foreign civilians, he targeted American citizens without impediment of the Constitution or rule of law. While reports of Putin assassinating his enemies in unlikely ‘accidents’ (like Yevgeniy Prigozhin) are credible, the CIA has routinely assassinated people around the world, bypassing Executive Order 11905, forbidding the practice, by “helping” foreign groups conduct them or by assigning the assassination to military contractors.

Human rights abuses by Russia are no secret (neither are Ukraine’s, which has imprisoned journalists and banned the Russian Orthodox church, the nation’s largest denomination), but the Central Intelligence Agency also famously and regularly commits human rights abuses, ranging from torture to rendition and disappearance, from indefinite detainment to targeted killings.

We should remember, after all, that Edward Snowden is in Russia for a reason, chiefly that the United States would seek the death penalty for him whistleblowing on the NSA’s violation of Americans’ civil liberties and their warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. Glen Greenwald, for the same reason, has been the target of the U.S. government, merely for being the journalist who helped Snowden publicize the U.S. government’s violation of Americans’ rights.

There is no single action, on the part of Russia, that the United States can morally condemn without a significant degree of hypocrisy.

LAST RESORT

During the Cold War, phone lines were open between American and Russian officials, and not only diplomats or ambassadors. Government officials, ranging from legislators to bureaucrats, all regularly could call and communicate with their Russian counterparts without fear of being accused of espionage or treason.

Although Tucker Carlson interviewing Putin was received with audible gasps of horror, it’s only an indication of how American relations with Russia have been intentionally sabotaged by American foreign policy leaders in the Biden Administration. It was not uncommon, for example, for Mikhail Gorbachev to be interviewed by the BBC or American news outlets. But why is it so verboten today?

Keep in mind, that all Tulsi Gabbard had to do to be labeled a national security threat was meet with Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad (something completely acceptable in years past, for a member of Congress). What’s changed is that America has adopted a policy of demonizing diplomacy that could derail the Industrial Military Complex’s next war on the schedule.

By all accounts, the Biden Administration has done everything possible not to prevent war, but to cause it. Expanding NATO, in violation of an agreement between Baker and Russia, was unjust, regardless of whether or not it was “only verbal” (and repeated as factual by NATO). Aggressively provoking Russia by announcing the intention to militarize its border is not trying to avoid war, but trying to cause it.

A REASONABLE CHANCE AT SUCCESS

No one legitimately thinks that Ukraine can successfully remove Russia from within its borders, or that Russia could possibly lose. The only thing possible, that could remotely look like a military victory, is if the entire world would lose in a nuclear holocaust.

Please have no misunderstanding about this; many war mongers from within both Ukraine and the United States are perfectly happy with an indeterminate amount of deaths (or infinite deaths) so long as Russia gets its comeuppance. So long as Russia suffers, some would call the war - no matter its other consequences - justified.

Augustine could not disagree more strongly.

Although certain attempts at propaganda by mainstream media earlier in the conflict reported grossly exaggerated claims of Russia being close to losing, it has steamrolled into Ukraine. The amount of deaths inflicted upon Russian troops means little, when there are so many more troops in Russia (and in their vast, untapped foreign legions) to lose. North Korea troops are only the beginning of the iceberg of what Russia could easily bring to Ukraine.

Virtually no military expert, on either side, is seriously suggesting that Ukraine will gain back the territory that it has lost. The only question is how much more territory it will lose, and how long the war will continue until it begins a world war that will end human civilization.

SERIOUS CHRISTIAN ETHICS

I’ve seen no attempt on the part of “public theologians” who dabble in ethics make a serious effort to defend the Ukrainian conflict by utilization of Augustine’s Just War Theory. Perhaps, that’s because it can’t be done.

Wanting an end to human carnage is the very heart of the pro-life movement. Wanting to continue a war to save national face, or a few parcels of land, is not a Christian position.

Evangelicals should demand that the Biden Administration stop escalating war with Russia, and plead with incoming President Donald Trump to end hostilities, post haste, in the name of Jesus.