Jean Bethke Elshtain Responds

The basics of Walzer's argument are straightforward: is regime change a just cause for war? (Presumably this means can regime change as such ever be a just cause.) My answer to this question is, No, not in and of itself as an abstract proposition. However, in a given case and in light of other factors and additional information, regime change may well be one feature of the deployment of justifiable force. This is not equivocation but a recognition that the just war tradition does not present a series of boxes to check, and, should you get more than a given number, then war it is. Just war doesn't function like that, as Walzer points out in his classic work, Just and Unjust Wars, a text that has played a central role in the revival of just war thinking in our time. The just war tradition is thick with the soot of history and cannot be wrenched free from particular cases, as Walzer insists.