“We will be safer after we conquer every potential enemy.”
There are limits on our physical and moral capacity for making war. My post was simply pointing out that failing to respond to someone who actually attacks you can have increasingly dangerous results over time. That enemy leeches at your resources and learns how to become better at attacking you, while you gain nothing. There are plenty of potential enemies out there who aren’t attacking us and may never attack us. They aren’t gaining actual experience at attacking us. Their knowledge is only academic. As long as they don’t attack us and we don’t attack them, we may find our mutual interests transforming us into allies.
So while we could launch a crusade against the world, it doesn’t seem to make sense if it has no chance of succeeding and would likely cost us everything we value. At the same time, though, we have to defend ourselves from the potential of an attack and plan for potential responses. Once one of those enemies actively attacks us, we have to defend ourselves (obviously) and then respond by counter-attacking, if capable, to discourage future attacks.
Arguing that responding, violently, to an attack is not an argument for pre-emptively attacking all potential enemies. There are many lines in the sand: resource limitations, economic limitations, moral limitations, etc.
You do hit on the core question: when is it right to preemptively attack another state? Also: what do we mean by ‘right’? Strategically correct? Morally acceptable? It seems to me that popular wars will be morally acceptable wars and those will be wars of defense and wars against aggressors. Wars of aggression against non-aggressors would rarely be popular, except in cases of “revanchism” or by non-liberal states that control their population through nationalism. You would expect liberal states to generally not pursue wars of aggression.
If we follow that we cast a bit of light on why the “spreading democracy” meme has been popular among some. “Democracy” as a system has been conflated with classical liberalism. The idea being: conquer non-liberal states and institute democracies. The world then becomes safer, because liberal states prefer to resolve differences in ways that aren’t physically violent. The flaw being that simply creating a democracy doesn’t guarantee that the values of classical liberalism will be … ah … valued.
So yeah. I don’t support knocking down the walls of potential enemies “just because.”
“We will be safer after we conquer every potential enemy.”
There are limits on our physical and moral capacity for making war. My post was simply pointing out that failing to respond to someone who actually attacks you can have increasingly dangerous results over time. That enemy leeches at your resources and learns how to become better at attacking you, while you gain nothing. There are plenty of potential enemies out there who aren’t attacking us and may never attack us. They aren’t gaining actual experience at attacking us. Their knowledge is only academic. As long as they don’t attack us and we don’t attack them, we may find our mutual interests transforming us into allies.
So while we could launch a crusade against the world, it doesn’t seem to make sense if it has no chance of succeeding and would likely cost us everything we value. At the same time, though, we have to defend ourselves from the potential of an attack and plan for potential responses. Once one of those enemies actively attacks us, we have to defend ourselves (obviously) and then respond by counter-attacking, if capable, to discourage future attacks.
Arguing that responding, violently, to an attack is not an argument for pre-emptively attacking all potential enemies. There are many lines in the sand: resource limitations, economic limitations, moral limitations, etc.
You do hit on the core question: when is it right to preemptively attack another state? Also: what do we mean by ‘right’? Strategically correct? Morally acceptable? It seems to me that popular wars will be morally acceptable wars and those will be wars of defense and wars against aggressors. Wars of aggression against non-aggressors would rarely be popular, except in cases of “revanchism” or by non-liberal states that control their population through nationalism. You would expect liberal states to generally not pursue wars of aggression.
If we follow that we cast a bit of light on why the “spreading democracy” meme has been popular among some. “Democracy” as a system has been conflated with classical liberalism. The idea being: conquer non-liberal states and institute democracies. The world then becomes safer, because liberal states prefer to resolve differences in ways that aren’t physically violent. The flaw being that simply creating a democracy doesn’t guarantee that the values of classical liberalism will be … ah … valued.
So yeah. I don’t support knocking down the walls of potential enemies “just because.”