A Terrible Love of Hope

1. A Suitable Peace

"All nations want peace," Admiral Sir John Fisher said, "but they want a peace that suits them." Most people—including maybe you and me—and most nations—perhaps all nations and surely the United States—are not pacifists. It is not simply that they sometimes or often fail in practice to live up to their pacifist commitments. It is rather that they are not committed in principle to pacifism. They are not pacifists in theory. They do not oppose war, all war, categorically and without exception. At the same time, of course, it is not that they do not value peace at all. It is rather that they hold other values to be more important than peace, to be ethically higher than peace, to be ethically more fundamental than peace. They are not fundamentally pacifists. They are fundamentalists for something else. This something else could be anything else at all—for example, democracy, freedom, equality, rights, prosperity, livelihood, territory, homeland security, children, family, clan, class, nation, tradition, doctrine, sect, religion, revelation, revenge, or justice. At most, fundamentalists for something other than peace support peace when, but only when, it serves their more fundamental value or values. They support peace when it seems instrumental to do so, support peace when, and only when, it suits them. And these supporters of pacifism-when-it-suits have a simple strategy recommendation for all supporters of pacifism-in-principle: If the sheer absence or end of war really is your highest value, then just surrender unconditionally.

To support peace only when it suits is to support war whenever it suits. It is to support war when it seems to serve, or seems to be instrumental for, one's fundamental value or values. It is, further, to recognize and sanction the need, if one is reflectively to realize those fundamental values, for ongoing complex calculations to determine if and when and where and against whom this in-principle instrumental justification for war may be, or may become, realized in fact. It is to make every perceived change in circumstances an opportunity, or perhaps an obligation, to retotal the pluses and minuses for going to war. Moreover, it is to experience all places as in-principle possible battlefields for justified war, all times as in-principle possible justified wartimes, and all others (including perhaps one's self ) as in-principle justified allies or enemies. For the suitable pacifist who believes that reality changes, the call of justified war may come at any time because for the suitable pacifist justified war is a permanent possibility. Aristotle observed that we make war so that we can live in peace. John Stuart Mill captured well the spirit of pacifism-when-it-suits and its disdain for pacifism-in-principle. Claiming that war is ugly but definitely not the ugliest of things, Mill wrote: "The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight . . . is a miserable creature." In this same spirit, Woodrow Wilson counseled: "The right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments . . . for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free."¹

Now, the practice of suitable pacifism, pacifism only when it suits, does not entail the practice of war. It is logically possible, of course, that suitable pacifists might never find that their fundamental values are best served or advanced at all by engaging in war. The United States, for example, might reject pacifism in principle but still find no compelling reason to engage in war against, say, Australia, Bermuda, Canada, or Denmark. Although it is logically possible for suitable pacifists not to engage in war, history proves that often, very often, suitable pacifists do engage in...