War is here. And we’re struggling with the sort of things that people have always struggled with in times of war. We may be doing it in a third decade of the 21st century sort of way; out in the open to the masses with broad sweeping hot takes and declarative tweets. But the question we’re struggling with is not new: In times of crisis and war, what do we do with the voice and the agency we have to support a just outcome?
It’s a question that I’ve spent more time than most thinking about for no other reason than I spent the 20s and 30s in the service of arms. My experience anchored some core principles into me. The one that applies to the seemingly intractable question is that I am on the side that limits human suffering and promotes long term liberty and prosperity. If that sounds somewhat cliche, it’s because it is. It’s really just a different way to organize the words in the Preamble to our Constitution.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
It’s the document I once swore an oath to defend, with my life if necessary. Unjustly limited in its original form but since amended to include all people, race, gender, religion and origin etc. What I swore to defend was not a piece of paper of course, but a principle. And more than anything what that principle grounded in me is to refuse my course of taking sides on behalf of “a people”, even my own. Which is what so many are struggling with right now. And unpacking it briefly is my contribution to this debate.
First, a disclaimer. Applying the core principle of promoting human prosperity and liberty to all people is not the same as believing the world should live under a Jeffersonian Democracy. The world will not eventually travel towards a future where everything looks like Europe and the West. Failed attempts to force it over the last fifty years have proven that. But we can still hope that whatever way people live, they live in relative freedom and prosperity; devoid of tyranny and suffering. That endures.
In that hope we find clarity. But it’s not so simple to apply in advocacy. We think about the plight of the Palestinian people over the last 75 years and find in the injustice a disturbing violation of our principles. In Israel we find a liberal democracy, founded by a historically persecuted people, surrounded by autocrats that swear publicly and openly their aims to destroy them. And in their need to defend themselves we find alignment with our principles. And in both cases we find the sorts of extreme circumstances that flow all too easily towards “by any means necessary” arguments. And when we get there it’s a good time to pause, take a breath and remember what it is that we stand for. It’s not who. It’s what. And how matters.
Much of the world is struggling with the principled reality that we can invalidate the cause fought for by the means chosen to fight for it. And siding blindly with a people allows us to visit the sins of fathers on sons and governments on people. If we choose to be uncompromising on anything, it’s that we should insist on limited suffering of all people. And the promise of a future that’s better than the present for all involved.