Phil Klay on Morality and War

Greetings dear listeners. Today's episode is about war. Can a war ever be just? Does talk about morality and the conduct of war make any sense? Joining us to discuss this is Phil Klay, a novelist and essayist whose first book, The Short Story Collection, Re-Deployment, won the National Book Award in 2014. A Neuroch War veteran, his fiction and nonfiction is focused on themes surrounding war and the responsibility that a country has towards

its soldiers. His latest novel, Missionaries, came out in 2020 and in 2022 he published a collection of essays and articles titled, Uncertain Ground, Citizens in an Age of Endless Invisible War. Phil also co-hosts his own podcast, Manifesto, with Journalist Jake Segal. It's an excellent conversation. I'm sure you'll really enjoy it. Before we get started, a reminder to head on over to WisdomofCrowds.live and consider becoming a paying subscriber if

you're not one yet. And don't forget to give us a review and like on your favorite podcast app with all that out of the way onto the show. Okay, well let's get right to it and let's start with a very fundamental question. Is there such a thing as morality in war? I don't want to mess around. I just want to get to fundamental issues. Sure. I mean, that's a cold open. Done. Next question. I mean, look, I think that war is inherently tragic, right? Which means that there's no clear

untroubled morality in war, right? I mean, I'm fascinated by in the early medieval period if you look at penitentials, right? They would recommend penances if you killed somebody in war and they're actually like really detailed. So, you know, if you killed somebody and you know that you killed them, you killed them face to face, this is the penance. If you're an archer and you're like, maybe you killed somebody. Here's what your penance is. If you,

know, maimed somebody, et cetera. And these were even if you were in what was judged to be a just war, right? Which from like a kind of modern, more utilitarian perspective seems insane, right? So, it's like there's a just war. We need people to fight. It's an unbelievably terrifying and brutal thing that we're asking of you. And then on top of it, we're going

to say that you have sinned in doing the thing that was necessary. And yet it feels as though that approach makes a lot more human sense than any kind of sort of utilitarian approach. There's an interesting bit where Jonathan Shea worked with Vietnam veterans, talked about how like the Catholic sacrament of reconciliation could be useful for veterans who were suffering post-traumatic stress disorder and also sort of sense of moral injury. But

you had to be careful, you know, he was working in Boston. A lot of these were like, I wish Catholic guys. You had to be careful about which priest you sent them to because, you know, if you sent them to the wrong priest, they might go, oh, well, you know, you're serving your country and war. So there's no sin there. And that would be like the most enraging and infuriating thing you could possibly say. And so I think that, you know, yeah, morality

is absolutely operative in war. But maybe it is a muddier thing than we're accustomed to talking about, particularly in the modern era. Phil, I mean, you know, actually, I was completely ignorant of that, of that, that these penances that were that needed to be paid. Do you know, do you know, basically, do you know, do you have any more details and texture on that? Basically, I guess the, you know, just hearing you describe the modern equivalent, my first thought even before you said that

was that, you know, war has always been incredibly traumatic on the warriors. And that there's clearly a, you know, a psychological need and that this was being met through this kind of stuff. You know, do you know, do you know the politics of these, these, these practices

back then? And in the sense, I imagine even then you would still have priests who would say, you know, would counsel one thing and, you know, priests who would counsel this other more, more universal, but also more psychologically useful, I guess, version of it, right?

Yeah, I mean, just to add, go for it. I mean, just to add to that, I mean, I think that, you know, in the pre-modern period war was both better and worse in the sense, it was worse because as we're saying, you had to look the person you were killing in the eye. Sometimes, if you were a medieval peasant, like loading a rotting corpse onto a trebuchet,

you could fling it over to, you know, inflict plague on the city. Oh, yeah, true. But I guess it was more common to be face to face, where in the modern era war is depersonalized. And that makes it a lot easier to go into war because you don't really have to contend with the moral implications of the close quarters of seeing it with, you know, with your very eyes. But feel free to push back on that if you don't think that's, that's fair.

But I, I do think there is something fundamentally different about, and I think this is also central to the arguments of someone like Sam Moyne, who we've had on the podcast, that it's just easier for Americans to go into war. We have all this, all this technological prowess that gives us the illusion that we can control war and make it more humane, make it more digestible. Well, this is a political question, not a question for people actually going to war, right?

I mean, we're talking about the decision makers who are, you know, it's more antiseptic to them. But anyway, go on, Phil, we can pull out the song too many winners. But, but, but, but I think that does matter actually for, for people going to war as well, right? Like if you feel that the homeland is not at, at, at risk, right? In the same way, that's different. There's a very interesting document from World War II, this private

Frank Sargent put together a training document for intelligence troops. And the first bit of it is more specific to his unit. And this document was later like distributed widely, like it went up to Eisenhower and Eisenhower, like didn't have everybody see it. And, and, and the reason is the, the, the bit that's about the psychological preparation for war. And it's really about the necessity of hatred, right? And there's this great line, he says,

hate is like gin, it takes a while and then it hits you, right? And he's like the American soldiers, they're not like the French, they're not like the British, they have not dragged the body of their relatives, their friends, their kidsmen, their fellow, you know, countrymen out of ruined buildings. And so they go into combat with the sense that, you know, the guy that I'm against is another guy just like me, you know, this sort of Thomas Hardy

had he and I, but met by some old ancient in, right? Kind of, you know, we would have sat down and, and, you know, had to drink together. But you actually need them to just be primitive and full of hatred. And it's a training major, many people about getting, getting soldiers to that state so that they don't get, get killed. And so yeah, I think that a certain degree

of security that we feel changes, changes the way that we think about war. And then, you know, of course, there's like the, the technology of war, which enables more discrimination and targeting. And so, you know, I like Moin's book quite a lot. And I thought a lot of people misread it. But the, you know, the notion that we kind of sort of wage an antiseptic war, which I think deludes us about the true brutal cost of war, even if it's waged in a kind of more humane way.

Well, I think I might have been one of the people who misread his book as it turns out, because I actually came out of that book feeling proud of America that we do wage war in a more humane fashion. And that's something, maybe pride isn't the right word. You don't take pride in being able, you know, that we're still talking about war here, of course. But

America has fashion something that is distinctive. Really, I don't want to say in human history, but at least in the contemporary, contemporary period, considerable care in avoiding civilian casualties. And even, you know, you've, you've referred to this in some of your own writing fill. Yeah. In your, in your wonderful piece, which I remember everyone was talking about it when it came out, where you talk about how the war and got American support for the war and

Gaza is indefensible. And you, you note that the US military would have to go into extensive approval processes. If any more than 10 civilians were going to be killed, even if you were targeting in al-Qaeda or ISIS senior commander, once you start getting to really any number of civilians, the US would take that very seriously. And, you know, in reading that, this morning, just being reminded of that, I'm like, wow, we've done terrible wars. I

mean, Iraq in particular, we've done some really bad stuff. But at least we didn't go into the Iraq war with the kind of blood lust where we were ever like, we want to kill Iraqis. We never saw Iraqi civilians as enemies. So we actually wanted to bring them to our side. We always saw them as potential allies. Yeah, no, I felt the same way. And I was, but was also sort of responsive to Moin's caution about that, right? That we can dilute ourselves

to a certain extent about the cost of war or what a humane war might be. And the kind of moral stakes of that, right? That they're brought up questions that are important. But nonetheless, you know, the fact that war is hell doesn't mean that they're not, you know, different circles of hell, right? It can get a lot worse and pushing for more humane war as a standard that we hold ourselves to. But also that we feel is an issue if our

allies don't hold themselves to that standard. I think is obviously a good thing, right? If you don't want lots of civilians to unnecessarily die. But Phil, is it, I mean, as an aspirational goal, it's all to the good. I don't think there's much to quibble with there. But I think in reading you, I feel like there's always attention between a certain kind of appreciation of the tragic and an aspiration for the moral.

And I'm not, you know, I'm not going to ask you to untangle that for us right now. But you know, I mean, I would just say, and this is something that I came away with, you know, because Shady and I went back and forth on this with Sam when he was on, which is

that, you know, I guess, you know, these aspirations are good. But it's, and especially lately as the world gets more and more consumed by war, they seem to me to be luxuries rather than how to put it real concrete things like laws, which is what I think that the move has been, you know, since, since World War II to, to try and codify this stuff as don'ts and oughts. And it feels like those are just, you know, withering away because in fact, they are nothing more than, than aspirations.

What's wrong with aspirations though? Nothing, but they're not, but they're not the tragedy of any aspiration is that like you can, you can certainly aspire to it, but the exigencies of the world will take us in a different direction. I mean, we can get into the specifics of what we're doing. Yeah, but let's just ask the big questions to Phil right now before we get into the.

I mean, that's the case of laws, even inside of a state, right? You know, there's a, in the siege of Leningrad, there was a special unit that was specifically devoted to trying to stop cannibalism, right? Things get bad enough, you know, laws, customs, you know, everything can, can fall beside, you know, the kind of brutal logic that the war imposes upon people at times, or most things can fall. Well, I mean, just to jump in those principles.

I totally agree, right? But the, you know, where I come from is that like, you know, the state in so far as it exists is the guarantor of law. Sure. We can then argue about, you know, higher, you know, questions of natural law or higher, higher moral questions, but ultimately in this world, you have the state which, which can guarantee law, and then you have everything else where, you know, you have basically aspiration and or treaties, which are all easy to

abrogate. So, you know, yeah, there's, there's, there's not really much of an enforcement mechanism. I mean, some of the sort of early proponents of natural, of, of international law were pretty explicit about that, right? Like Quincy Wright said the law is a term to conjure with, you know, that, you know, like there's, there's no objective validity, but, you know, many people will prove of a decision rationalized in legal terminology simply because it represents

that holy symbol of law, right? Which is true. That doesn't mean that it's useless, right? It just, it just means that it has limitations on the questions whether, whether it can be, you know, whether it can be useful to have, you know, something like the ICJ, right? Whether it can be useful to have a body that is making these determinations and some,

you know, some of these international bodies are better than others, right? You know, I mean, I certainly agree, but, you know, the, the, the question for us, us, us, us, scribblers, you know, arguers, podcasters is, is to, in a sense, you know, probe that. And the, the, the, the, while I think international law can certainly is a very useful political tool, tool for mobilization of building consent. That's the nicest thing I've ever heard you say

about international law. No, but I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a properly cynical way to say it is that, you know, of course, politicians are going to talk about it to mobilize consent for a certain set of policies, but we're still left with the question of what, what, what the policy is going to be. And I just caught myself saying what the policy should be, but really what the policy is going to be.

So, so, you know, I think that that's really where, where I think, you know, Shady and I grind gears a lot on this sort of stuff. But, you know, I, so maybe let's, that's a, a prod to you, maybe along the lines of, you know, in your, in your Atlantic piece, there's, there, and of course, we'll link to this in the, in the show notes for those that haven't read it. There are, there are several sheds in there. I don't have it in front of me, but there's several

passages that have sheds and auts. And I'm talking to me about the shud and aught in, in, in the context, and really the pieces in the context of the Gaza war and US support for Israel. So, I don't know, let's open that can of worms and start talking about it. I just should an aunts in general. I mean, yeah, I, I, I try to balance the fact that I, I've sort of strong moral beliefs about these things, right? But, I am a little bit, not quite a bit skeptical of some of the ways in which

American officials will talk about our, our presence abroad, right? So, give an example, I, I went to a talk where the former, former ambassador to Ukraine was talking about American support for, for Ukraine. And I support, I mean, favor of American support for Ukraine. But he was describing it as this, you know, democracy versus autocracy. And this is where we show our values. And even though,

in some sense, I agree with a lot of those things. And I agree with the policy that he was arguing for. I felt like I was being sold something, right? And that my instinct when I hear a diplomat talking in that language is that he's obscuring things, right? Or not speaking as forthrightly about where America's actual harder-edged interests lie. And I do think that's really important.

And, you know, one of the things that was important for me in writing that, that, that article was, you know, I, I didn't want to make an overall, I wasn't trying to write an argument about like what Israel should be doing is a state so much as I'm an American, I'm an American citizen that means we are wrapped up in this war in terms of the implications that it has

geopolitically and also morally, right? And, and so, that's the place where I stand and where I make the argument from about what we should be doing, right? And where the kind of moral breakdown is for me, right? You know, Israel is an ally and I think that there are, there are costs to our support for Israel. And if I thought Israel was, was doing the right thing, you know, it would be one thing to say that, you know, it's worth it

nonetheless, but I don't. Yeah, so isn't one of the issues here though is we're trying to hold Israel to a standard which makes no real sense for Israel as an ethno state or Israel as a state that is governed by far right, illiberal, you know, let's just say it outright. I mean, Israeli government and to some extent, the Israeli population don't like Palestinians and that's

me putting it gently. I would say many of them hate Palestinians and this is where I think the contrast between America's way of war and Israel's way of war is actually quite profound that generally when we go into war, we don't want to kill the enemy population. We don't have any desire as I said to massacre them. We see them as people that we can make common cause with

Iraqis, Afghans, Kuwaitis, so on and so forth. But the problem with Israel's war in Gaza is that there's no conceivable circumstance in which they could view Palestinians as potential allies or even as equal human beings. That is not how Israel views Palestinians. They view them as basically people who can be killed, that their blood is somehow illicit. And this is actually, you know, in fairness, how war has been conducted throughout most of human history, that you don't actually

want to save the lives of the enemy population, at best you're indifferent to killing them. So I think there really is, and I think this isn't stated forthrightly enough, we sort of pretend that Israel shares our values. We pretend that Israel is a liberal democracy. We pretend that Israelis are effectively Westerners. We pretend that Israelis are moral in the way that Americans are moral. And I think we just have to say they're not. Phil, take that. I have plenty to say on that.

Well, one I would say that's a very flattering description of us. Right. And one of the tricky things here is that the modern way that America wages wars so much done through proxy forces, right, that we can use air power, aid allies, special operations troops and so on and have a relatively light footprint on the ground with forces that we're operating with who have a range of approaches to the civilian population where they're operating.

Israel is far from the worst actor that we're involved with, right, though this war is particularly brutal, right? And I think brings up a lot of those questions. And as far as I think your point about the long-term situation between Israel and Palestine, I mean, that does seem very relevant, right, to how we judge this war in terms of what the likely outcome is going to be because I don't know if you saw the Mark Mazzetti in Run and Bergman piece in the New York Times.

It was published a couple of weeks ago, which focused mostly on the West Bank and what's happening there. But there doesn't seem to be any kind of outcome in the offering where you're going to achieve some degree of reconciliation, right? And so that, yeah, that needs to be factored into what exactly we're supporting when we're supporting this war because I think it's very easy to say, well, we'd like to destroy Hamas and Hamas is absolutely horrific. And this is going to be like

the campaign against ISIS. But I think the primary difference is that when we went through Mosul, the people didn't want ISIS back. Whereas my presumption is that whenever major operations end for the Israeli military in Gaza, the people will still very much feel like armed resistance is justified against the Israeli state, not just because of what it's done, but what is ongoing. And there are sort of international actors around the world, most notably Iran, who are happy to,

you know, to fund that. And yeah, look, I mean, I just want to underline my support for the first thing you said is that like how kind shot he is to us as post-conquered civilized people

who would never, never. I mean, and the other thing that I would state that is different, and I mean, I stand by it, and I'm sort of curious what you'd say to it, Phil, is, you know, the big difference between 9-11 and October 7th, at least, you know, while psychologically, I think there are plenty of parallels, and all the, you know, errors of that we committed, we see the Israelis committing, you know, the kind of the reaction, the belligerence,

the desire to strike back, it's all there. But the reality is, is that the special tragedy of 9-11, if you will, is that we weren't under direct threat, no matter what Dick Cheney thought the day of, and no matter how much he was running around, you know, fretting about when the next attack is going to come, whereas we're talking about a special kind of, like, intimate violence of fighting a neighbor, and a very certain kind of, and that actually leads to different things.

And so, you know, I mean, I do want to, you know, mediate all this through Phil, Shady, rather than me and you going at it, but it's like, you know, I do think that the, when you say something along the lines of, you know, we strive to win populations over, and, you know, we never, you know, we don't do this kind of war. It's partly because it's a luxury of being, you know, this, this island nation, basically, on the other side of the world.

I mean, is that really true though? I mean, if there was a war against Mexico, like, in the contemporary period, let's just imagine, you know, whatever set of circumstances might lead to that.

It seems, it seems plausible to me that we wouldn't want to kill a lot of Mexicans and that we would, we would, we would have a kind of moral sense that we can bring the Mexicans to, I mean, obviously, it would depend, we would have to think through the circumstances of this hypothetical war, but I don't want to just concede that point out of hand and just assume that if we were fighting our southern neighbor that we would just act like Israel, I think that's contestable.

Leave that to Phil though. I mean, I'm curious. What do you say to that Phil? Yeah, and maybe just to put a finer point for Phil and take this where you will is, why should we, and maybe this is, obviously, I'm very critical of Israel in this regard, but I'm, I'm also trying to understand where Israelis are coming from. And so I would pose a question as this, why should we expect Israelis to wage war morally? And I wonder how that case would

be made to them. Like, why should they, why should they care about Palestinians? Well, why should they wage the war morally sort of, well, look, I mean, if you believe in morals, then the question kind of answers itself. I mean, the question is basically like, why should they wage a war in a more humane way in the US mold when they're probably, look, I, because I don't think and answer that with a Mexico question as well, because I think they're very automated, right?

Right. So this is the thing. I think that there is a expectation and a kind of cultural norm, right? That is both, you know, a norm from the US public and also something ingrained within the military about the way that you wage war and what isn't is not acceptable. And to Damiar's point like, yeah, under enough threat, with enough rage, those things can break down. And I think that it's notable that after 9-11, we torture a lot of people, right? And not just, you know, not just

the CIA. And that was, you know, you know, always justified according to existential threat. But, you know, for me, I'm quite certain that it is related to a sense of revenge, right? Yeah. And so, you know, those norms can fall away and they can fall away, particularly if you have bad moral leadership, right? Which is what we had at the time. And, you know, that's why when the war in Israel broke out, you know, I said something along the lines of, you know, like in some ways,

this is a pretty clear, like, just cause for a war. But kind of saying that in the, you know, for Israel to wage war in Gaza, but saying that in the abstract is very different from saying, like, I trust the current Israeli government headed by Benjamin Netanyahu to wage war in a just manner with just strategic ends and the foresight to carry them through, right? And, you know, those are very, very different questions. And I think that any society under enough pressure,

those customs, uh, and wars and kind of moral principles, yeah, they start to bend. Uh, but it's, it's good to have a fairly high bar to start out from, right? Uh, so that hopefully don't bend too low and hopefully that you can actually pull yourself back. Yeah. And then as far as the question about Israel, right? Like, why should they wage war morally? I mean, like, look, as I said, you know, I, I, I went into that one piece that I wrote from the perspective,

like, what is an American? Do I think that we should be enabling, right? And, um, and as far as like, you know, why should they wage war more morally because it's more likely that Americans would support the war is like a sort of straightforward, uh, you know, I guess,

maybe more demeer line, right? That like, if, if it's not obvious that you're, you know, causing unbelievable hardship, and if it seemed like you were actually really trying to get humanitarian aid to the people who desperately need it, um, then maybe it would be less politically contentious to support you. So that's like the sort of just straightforward, you know, you're

horribly losing in a PR battle. And I know that, you know, Israelis have this sense of everybody is against them and that they are held to unfair standards, which is, you know, you know, like there's truths in that, right? But Phil, you know, for sure, there's another less, but don't play into my hands so much. But Phil, don't play into my hands so much. I mean, I think what, what I, what I'd love to talk to you about what, you know, is, is, I want to push you

on the, the ought. Because there's a lot of ought in there. And even as you're talking about this, what is just war? You know, you said there's a just cause, but this is, it's not being prosecuted justly. I think, I think, you know, what's, what's interesting to me, there's a quick little, little, little thing. I, you know, as, as listeners know, as, and, uh, you told me earlier, you, you listen to the pod, like, I mean, you know, this as well, I'm not a religious person. Um, and,

I've never fought in a war. I've never been in a war. Um, but, but contemplating, uh, these, these sorts of things, uh, looking at them, studying them, uh, to the extent to which, you know, I'm a scholar of anything. Um, it's, it, it, it, it, it, it brings you to these questions. These questions, uh, that ultimately, um, are huge. I, even as a, as a, as a, you know, completely, thoroughly secular person, these are huge and profound questions. And, uh, you know, I mean,

there was an interview you gave, um, I think it was to the times as well. Uh, and the last question is, you know, uh, you talk about your faith and, uh, you know, where, where that comes from. Um, and I mean, I just like to push you a little bit on, on, on that question, basically, on what are we grounding these judgments of this war on? Because you've, you've put it, put them in, in, in ways that are, you know, that I'm more than happy to concede, which is to say,

they're social constructs. We are conditioned to, uh, expect certain things. I would go further and say we're conditioned, uh, to expect certain things of war because we haven't had to face this kind of war that we have the luxury to be conditioned to these sorts of things. And that in fact, as Sam Moin argued in his book that, you know, our military has learned to fight these sorts of wars because of yet, and because almost like a large PR ploy, you know, and we've,

then let me give you the religious answer. So give me the religious answer on, which is that a democracy should not ask its soldiers to gauge in war in a way that will destroy their souls. Okay. Good. Say more. Okay. That's, that's what I wanted to hear. Tell me more. You know, as we mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, war is already morally, and I would say spiritually bruising, right? Um, and of course, we took, you know,

we can talk about the psychological and physical effects, right? As well. And it is close exposure to evil, right? The act of killing. And the added dehumanization and brutality in waging war in an unjust way is ace sin. And you are sending usually young men who believe, tend to believe very much in the, in what they're told, right? So look, if, if, um, if you gear up a bunch of like young 20 year olds to like, go ahead and just destroy, they will and they'll be excited to do it,

right? But I remember, um, oh God, in 2009, right? Uh, as sort of Obama's surge in Afghanistan, his ill-fated surge in Afghanistan was going on. And, um, I remember talking to some young Lance corporal, I was like, how are you going to be, you know, how are you going to be successful in Afghanistan? And he said to me through cultural effectiveness, right? And he really believed it, you know, and then he went to Helm and province, right? And, um, which was an incredibly violent place.

Um, and so the moral understanding of soldiers and their sense of themselves and what they're doing is something that a society will help form something that a society's a whole will help give those soldiers. And it's also what their political leaders and then their military leaders will give them. And, uh, it just seems if you, if you believe in the human soul in any kind of real way that the kind of acts that are done in, you know, wars that tend toward the more unjust,

right? Uh, our soul killing. But isn't this the issue, Phil? You said if you believe in a soul, that's a big if. So any, you sort of resorted to a number of religious friends. I do when I'm right, Shady. So that's, that's, yeah. Oh, look, I agree with you. The soul is a big difference

if you're right. Right. Yes. The soul is objectively true. I'm with you. But the problem is, if you let's imagine here, an Israeli secular Zionist who may not even believe in God or believe in afterlife, um, it just unclear to me what the case would be for them to respect Palestinian life. And I just don't know how you could make that argument to them in a persuasive way without an appeal to Christiani or not to bring up another kind of warms or even to Islam. I mean,

there's some differences there. I think, I think most people believe in a sort of general, I mean, there are obviously extremists, uh, the general value of human life, right? I don't think. Well, where does that come from though? Look, why? You know, you know, why should they believe me? Right? I know, but why should they believe? You can only appeal to what people will sort of already ascend to, right? Like, if, if, if you don't believe that human life has value,

you, we can, we can maybe have a beer and talk about the sad world view that you have. But, uh, I, you think you think life has value to me. I read your weepy article about Buka, um, and, like, you wouldn't be doing this if you, this is, this is the funny thing, right? Because when,

like, I listened to the podcast, so I know I've heard these debates. And when Santiago brought me on, I kind of had the sense that like, when you say, I want you to talk to Demir about this, like, I was supposed to, you know, come up with a map and be like, Demir, show me where the bad metaphysics touched you. Yeah, but you see we're not doing that. Like, I mean, I do think, I do think it's, I, look, I, I, let me, let me, let me, I don't think you can. I don't know. No, no, well, but it's

important though, right? Because I think, you know, one of the things that we do, I just, I think it's something we plumb frequently, almost obsessively on the podcast, at least that's where I end up pushing a lot, is that, you know, a lot of, a lot of the things that we've secularized, ultimately,

have to be grounded in, in senses of justice, which are not explicable in secular terms. And, you know, I, one, just the question I'd ask you, which I think is maybe would even like, dry out this secular versus spiritual thing, the middle, middle-age penance, do you know, did that apply when Christian armies were fighting Muslims in the crusades? Were you doing penance? Were you doing penance?

That is an interesting question. The one that I was referencing specifically was imposed on Norman Knight's, who fought for William the Conqueron, Senlac Hill at the Battle of Hastings in 1066. Yeah. Right? I don't know. So recognizable humanity fellow Christians in the sense, as opposed to, you know, heathens, which, you know, don't share in the community of humanity.

But that's not a Christian, I mean, but- I'm just, so I'm just secularizing this, I'm even secularizing the penance tradition in war. But the Christian position, the Christian position, at least, my understanding would be that even heathens have inherent worth and dignity as creations of God, that there is a kind of common grace. But my only argument is that faith is often, and especially when secularized, is brought to bear for,

you know, is circumscribed and brought to bear down for political reasons. You know, politics, human beings really are ultimately political. Yeah, no, for sure. I've never heard of that.

No, never, right? No, but seriously Phil, I think it's interesting because I think Shoddy's point is, is, is this, is one about, and I think this maybe is where, where, where he and I do diverge on a lot of, on a lot of this stuff since October 7th and, and war in general, that, that while I don't in, like, really, I don't, I don't go in on the just war stuff, so I don't feel like I get caught up in this question of whether Israel's fighting a just war or not. It's, it's not a question that,

that preoccupies me. And I think like a lot of the fights that end up happening is one group saying, of course, is real justified doing. So why did you write that we shouldn't harden our hearts to the kind of atrocities that we see in Shoddy wrote that I think, right? No, I'm trying to remember, I don't remember what I remember. I don't know what I'm about to put up. You've claimed that much. That's, yeah, this is, this was, you've, you've cared about,

I could be wrong. Maybe Phil is thinking about like another. No, this is, yeah, this is Demir. This is the lesson for me from this latest outrage. We must keep helping the Ukrainians fight their war. We must be ready to help them rebuild their country whenever the shooting finally stops. But above all, we mustn't become numb to the reality of this war. Well, it's all too easy to

let that happen. Certainly, certainly shouldn't be numb to it. Yeah, no, I absolutely agree. But, you know, the part of it is, no, no, no, but listen, listen guys, I mean, on Ukraine, I've also, certainly like you caring. Like it's okay. Listen, Phil, like, like, like you, though, it's, it's, you know, my ultimate argument for helping the Ukrainians is at least on the political level,

has nothing to do with fellow democracies. And now, you know, since you jostled my memory of that one, it's, it really was me sort of trying to explicate why on a very emotional level, um, looking at the Ukraine war and seeing all of this, um, I have actually a very emotional response because of the echoes of the Balkan thing. I'll, I'll, of course, that, that was the essay. The essay was there's a very personal level and a personal judgment. But, you know, it,

that doesn't really transcend to say that, you know, Ukraine is in a position of justice. And quite frankly, I'm, I'm, I'm staring at this thing and I'm staring at it so long by my eyes are bleeding. But the fact is we're, we're headed to a negotiated settlement that very likely, unless, you know, like, basically Putin dies in Russia and bloats, we're looking at territorial

concessions here and some sort of partition of this. So basically, all the violence and all the stuff will lead to basically an abrogation of all that we claim to hold dear on, on, uh, you know, the liberal world order. And my conclusion is, is that liberal world order is not a thing. It's an aspiration. And, you know, like, power is going to actually like, it'll lead to a settlement where we're weighing our commitment to that with lots and lots of human lives. I mean, I don't think

that's like a giant hypocrisy in any way. It's just saying that there are various different things that we value and find that sort of that we have moral attachments to or, or strategic

attachments to. But, but again, you know what I'm saying is, is ultimately on, um, the, the, uh, these questions and is where I do think I, I do have a consistent point is that, um, whatever I may sort of emotionally feel when I see the Ukrainians getting overrun by the Russians, whatever historical memory is that, that brings up for me, that's no real guide to policy.

I'd, I'd definitely put it that way. What I, my pre-elections don't mean shit. Um, and, and, and ultimately, you know, uh, I, it's the sort of approach I try to take to, to all of these sort of conflicts is, is, you know, what are we doing and why? Now, again, I'm perfectly open to, uh, you know, the, the, the argument you're making here, um, about, you know, why democracies shouldn't commit themselves and commit their soldiers, uh, to, uh, wars fought in an unjust way, even if they

are have like a just cause at the root of them, I think that's very compelling. That's an interesting

argument. Um, but that still doesn't get us to some of the stuff that Shoddy's pushing at here, which is, you know, um, prosecuting war, uh, with respect to some kind of universal human dignity, at the core of it and respecting one's enemy and therefore, uh, really keeping, you know, in the sort of, class of its spectrum of, you know, uh, heading towards total war that like these, these considerations for fellow humans on the other side will keep us from prosecuting anything

approaching a total war, but will make us pull back for humanitarian reasons. I find none of that really plausible, um, and I throw it out to both of you that these limits, uh, you know, exist or will it, or really mean it is plausible. Not really to me, but Phil, go ahead. No, it's plausible in so far as that it happens in real life. I don't believe it does, but Phil, go ahead. No, I'm well, okay. With that, that, that, um, our moral sensibilities change how we wage war is

obviously true. So I'm not, I'm not 100% sure what you're even, you're alleging. I'm alleging that, that like in peacetime, I think many, like we would agree with this. We would agree with us. We're radically differently now than nations did, you know, hundreds of years ago and part of it and there's a whole host of reasons for that. Um, and, and as I mentioned earlier, like one of the reasons that we're able to be more discriminating, is we have better technology. So there's like a kind

of, correct, straightforward technological relationship. But I don't believe in moral progress, do you? Like have we, have we, have we gotten to a, uh, moral progress? Ultimately is what it comes down to. Do we wage war more humanly because we understand things that our forefathers didn't? I think that the changes in the ways that nations like the United States wage war is the result of in part activism and moral swation, right? And, and changing attitudes towards, you know,

uh, uh, the humanity of others, right? And so that just is, you know, like, humans care about a lot of things, they care about their sort of hard security interests and they also care to a certain extent about their always flexible principles, right? And those just part of the mix, right? And, you know, if you, if you, uh, if you're attached very deeply to those principles, and it's, you know, incumbent upon you to argue that your nation live up to the more,

and that does, you know, that can affect how we wage war. And I mean, and it very clearly does in the case, you know, and also, we support, right? I mean, like moral disgust at Russia is related to support for Ukraine, right? Which, you know, can result in also fairly straightforward, you know, hard military assets. And moral disgust of what Israel is doing leads to growing, you know, quote unquote, pro-Palestine sentiment, to me, that there hadn't been previously.

But I would also just say that Phil mentioned earlier the case of dissolidure who talked about cultural effectiveness in Afghanistan. And, and Phil, you know, you obviously also served in war, you served in the Iraq war. Um, right? By the way, I bring that, that particular story up as like, I mean, there's something tragically idealistic about it,

if you're familiar with what happened in Hellman, right? Yeah. But, but I would say that kid going in with the notion of cultural effectiveness is still better than that same kid going in with the notion that he's going to kill every brown person he sees, right? Like, um, neither one of them would have ultimately been led to a successful outcome in Afghanistan.

But one is morally better. You know, the only thing this reminds me of the other thing I wanted to push back on Shadi earlier, um, you know, before October 7th, Shadi, you know, just painted Israel as as being, you know, outside of the, the, the moral ambit of the broad west, the sanctified moral, you know, morally progressive west, which is learned lessons through history and is much more

civilized than the rest of the world. But, but, but the reality is like, before October 7th, I think you would have found so many Israelis that would have been exactly in the in the, in the world, uh, the moral world that that that you're describing and as describing so generously to us, Shadi, and they're gone. And something happened. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait. Which is really is really talking about pre-October 7, I mean, there was a left in that country.

There was a left. There was a two states. I don't know. Left that was, that was, that was, they've barely existed as you well know, Demir, well before October 7th, the left had been decimated. Just saying, to me, to me, what that story points to is that our own set of values that we're patting ourselves on the back on are just as contingent. Again, this is motivated reasoning on my part for all sorts of reasons, but that's where I'm coming from.

It seems to me kind of obvious that these are the sorts of things that happen. Sorry, what are the sorts of things that happen? That morality you think is progress is actually just our luxury, our luxury for all sorts of reasons, and technology which we discussed and all the other stuff gives us the luxury to quote unquote be moral. Wait for it. No, but Israel has comparable technology. I don't think that you can make the technology argument here.

I'm saying, but if they're in a very different situation, we have not been threatened. Just set of threats. I do think if this goes back to that point of private Frank Sargent was making in World War II about the different relationship that the French and the German and British had to the Germans, if you're an Israeli citizen in terror bombings and being surrounded by

a lot of people who hate you and having a large state that wants to destroy you and is funding people who will gleefully murder and rape your citizens, that affects how you think about your own security and your relationship to the people around you who are much more sympathetic to that.

I wasn't making a point that the arc of history abends towards justice and progress and war shows that just that changes in how we wage war can happen and can be related to moral arguments and that seems just straightforwardly true. It's not that backsliding is impossible as I think 9-11 and what we did in the immediate wake of that show.

Just to build on what you're just saying now, I think it is a pretty simple claim and I think that it's not about a broader claim about moral progress because then we're getting into a broader philosophical debate that's a bit of a distraction and then Demir can just say, of course, moral progress isn't real because whatever.

But I think that if you just look in a much more narrow sense, not only is America better than other countries in its way of warfare, it's better than itself six or seven decades ago. So you look at how the US conducted warfare in Korea and Vietnam compared to how we conducted now. There's a very clear straight line. Of course we're not perfect. Of course we still do terrible things but we are significantly different now in how we conduct warfare than we did in Korea.

Well have we fought a war comparable to Vietnam since Vietnam? Would you say in your assessment? Well, I mean look the major wars of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They feel very different in many ways and the initial phase of the Iraq war. Versus the counterinsurgency versus the counter-ISIS campaign are distinctly different. I don't know if they're perfect analogs but I don't think that we would have...

Look there were areas in Afghanistan where certainly we could have had bombing campaigns or wage war the way we did in places like Vietnam, like we didn't Vietnam. And we didn't. That's not to sort of look. It's sort of funny talking about it this way because most of my career has been spent criticizing the way we've waged these wars. But yeah, they're clear changes, right? And clear differences in what we seem to think was morally permissible. I guess my inherent belief is that...

And by the way if you're a cynic you can say maybe that just made the war worse or made us weaker or whatever. I mean this is an argument that you see on the right some time. That's a political argument to me. It's working back to 17th century wars which supposedly were clean and less bloody or whatever courtesy arboned things. Yeah, I'm having cracked a history book. No, no, that's not it. But I think those are political claims. So I just sort of observe, again it's not a theory.

It's a hypothesis rather than some sort of logical proof. But I could imagine a not a terror attack on the contiguous United States but an actual attack on the United States. And then you have, it simply elevates leaders like we're already elevating a leader like Donald Trump. It elevates leaders like Tom Cotton. And I would argue to you that if you had someone like Donald Trump or Tom Cotton, the elevation of Donald Trump is a strong argument against moral progress, I agree.

And but you know like Tom Cotton is also very belligerent and I think he would prosecute the war. Oh yeah, he brought up at the beginning of the war. He brought up the fire bombing of Dresden. Exactly. No, but it's also a strong argument for the importance of moral leadership because the problem with Tom Cotton and Donald Trump is they have fundamentally a fundamentally different moral universe. Yes. Then someone like Barack Obama for all of his faults and Joe Biden.

So that seems to support an argument for the relevance of morality. Can I give you say, there's a, I think Damiro might like this. Is it story that I like to bring up when I'm like at like a literary party and I'm surrounded by people who are like very progressive because it makes them uncomfortable? And so 2016, this is before the election of Donald Trump. I went to wedding of a marine I don't know. I was going to be the best man. And it's in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, it's coal country, right?

And we passed like the 19th Trump digs coal sign and my wife who's Colombian American turns to me and she's like, am I going to be the only Hispanic person at this wedding? And I'm like, nah, he's in the military. It's going to be super diverse, which it was.

But I get there and I meet the other groom's men and I text my wife and I'm like, hey, not only are you not the only Hispanic person at this wedding, you know, even the only Colombian and she texts back really and I'm like, yeah, and he already early voted for Trump. And this was his rationale. He was like, look, you and I were both in the marine corps. We both know guys have been blown up in here. We know people have been killed over in Iraq and Afghanistan, right?

I'm like, yeah, he's like, and what we have overseas as a result of all that, right? Just devastation, right? And who are the two candidates? On the one hand, there's Donald Trump. Does he know much about the military? No. Our resistance isolationist, yeah, he like supported the Iraq war for like a minute and then already by 2004 was saying we should pull troops back. I don't think he's going to make huge changes, but I don't think he's going to radically expand American wars.

Who's the other candidate? Hillary Clinton, right? Hillary Clinton is like liberal hawk that we should have, you know, been much more involved in Libya like Shadi. And that, you know, he had John John Allen speak at her convention. That guy wants to put a combatant command in Syria, right? And he was like, look, I'm looking at the two candidates. One of them, you know, sort of tends to resist military escalation.

The other one, competent speaks with like all this great moral rhetoric about America's place in the world. And I'm pretty sure that she will competently working with the generals who she has a good relationship, expand military, American military footprint overseas. And if the past is like any evidence, what we're going to have in the future is more death, more destruction, more waste of human life. So I'm going to vote for the guy who's not going to do that.

Hmm. Yeah, it's a problem for Shadi who's, you know, believes that American power should be used. I mean, I think that's changing, but like, you know, should be used aggressively like Hillary Clinton would have. No, I stopped comparing. Look, I believe there's a place for the American military in the world.

And I think it's fairly obvious that like, you know, I think this is sometimes a sort of naive idea that like when America withdraws from from someplace that like, all right, like in, you know, Imperial action is done instead of just like this, a vacuum that opens up that can be filled by more malign actors, right? And I mean, I've, I've like spoken to like Syrian refugees for whom that literally happened, right?

Or, you know, America pulled troops out from their little section of Syria and Turkish back militias moved in and cland, ethnically clandest, all the Kurds from the region, right? So, you know, like, I think it's complicated, but, and obviously I was not a fan of Donald Trump, but like that, that rationale that he offered, that was not crazy, right? Totally. It's actually perfectly, I mean, I, it's a perfectly understandable argument.

And I, I think there are legitimate reasons to vote for Donald Trump more broadly. I don't think there's anything particularly like crazy or irrational, especially about minorities voting for Donald Trump. And, you know, if I was, I'm trying to think, if I was maybe a different kind of minority than the one that I am now, and maybe, I just like to, since this is being recorded, I just like to say for the record that unlike Shadi, I don't think you should vote for Donald Trump.

Well, I don't think you should, but I think there's perfectly like legitimate reasons to vote for him. Those are, I just wanted, those are two different things, right? The reason that I like bringing up that story is because, especially among like progressives, is because it just scrambles their sense of, of the moral contempt that they would have for Trump voter, right? Usually because they don't know enough about foreign policy to argue back, right?

Or if they do, they probably find that they actually kind of agree with that topic. Well, so I mean, it just, it complicates the, what Shadi was saying, that, you know, the importance of moral leadership then, I mean, again, there's the, the, the, the, the cursored Edward again. What is moral leadership? Well, I just, I want to, I want to push back on this like assumption though that Trump wouldn't, I mean, that happened to be the case in the four years that he was president. I don't know.

That seems to me to be potentially an accident of history. I can imagine different circumstances in which Trump would have brought us into wars if things had been different during that. I was deeply grateful that he was not president when the Ukraine war started. I, no, I agree. Look, the, the main point is, is that like, I think two things can be true, that, that Trump has instincts to avoid commitment overseas because in his mind, he doesn't want America to get into wars.

But if we got into a war, we would be fighting a war, you know, call it in a more traditional way rather than this postmodern moral progress sort of way. And I, to me, it just seems sort of obvious that this is the case for all societies. And that, that what we're, you know, so much of our debate is, is taken up right now over this kind of moral stuff over the, the, the Gaza war and what Israel's doing there and what Hamas is doing.

And we're just sort of the two sides are just like scoring points on each other. Now, like, I, I do think all this said, I do think, that we should be thinking very hard about how to end this war. And I would make the case that we should be doing that because, not just because of the lives lost in it right now, but because it's going to become very likely, much, much worse if it spreads and metastasizes. That's my argument for trying to think about it.

And I would go even further is to say that a lot of this moral stuff gets in the way morally bad. If it metastasized. However, you want to put it, but it would be, it would be a, a, a, a real problem. And why would it be a real problem? Because we, we, we, we, we get, well, Shaddu, you and I talked about this like ultimately, you know, it's, it's about America's, we could, we could probably stand aside.

But it's, it's just a bad problem over there if you don't believe in any kind of moral foundation to me. Otherwise, why are you over there? Why are you, Phil? Phil, we are. I'm a girlfriend, a cut off her toe to trick the big Lebowski. I'm not, I'm not like, I'm not a, you know, unsympathetic to the argument that, that we should be a lot less involved in the Middle East, in which case, you know, apart from sort of hard questions of, of energy supply and the rest of it, you know, ma.

But it's, it's, it is this question of, you know, what is our empire for? You put it, you, you mentioned empire at some point when you were talking about withdrawals and vacuums and things like that. Like it or not, we are an empire. We've got this sort of stuff. Now, look, I, I'm, and I'm open to the argument that we can't sustain the empire as is and Middle East should be part of the, it goes. I'm open to that argument fully.

But given what we are right now, the arguments for stopping this war, I think are that it's very dangerous and like can suck us into it, given every all of our pre-existing commitments. That's really the biggest problem.

And, and, and, and I would, I would go further and say that like watching Biden and, and Blinken right now moralize their way to another failed peace attempt here, all of it is tied to the fact that they are, they are completely consumed by like a complete misapprehension of what's going on on the ground, what this war is, what motivated it, what fuels it, and are, are being completely feckless about it. You know, we're running out of time, but I just like throw that towards the end.

Okay, you're, I think that I, I don't, I just have to push back on this idea that what Biden, Blinken are doing vis-a-vis the Gaza war is moralizing. I just think that's a bit of a stretch. I think they've been, there's been a profound absence of morality in their conception of this war and what they've actually done about it. I just don't want you to give these words a bad name. Okay, fair, fair.

But there's two, there's two reads of what Biden's doing is like, you know, a deep cynicism or, or, you know, just like a deep fecklessness. I think those are the only two ways you can, you can look at this sort of stuff right now is at least, as far as- Yeah, fecklessness is what I would lean towards and I think that it just worth noting that morality can lead to the opposite of whatever fecklessness is. It can give you a commitment, it can make you more serious about seeing things through.

It can, it can make you put pressure on your allies to change their behavior. It can be hard-headed just because something is moral or, or moralizing doesn't mean it's feckless. A strong commitment to morality, it to me is about seriousness. It is about man's image. It can take a hard look at the reality that you're dealing with. Right. It's actually available to you. Phil, let's give you the last word because I know we're running up on time and we all have different commitments.

But you know, thoughts on the conversation and morality. Have you achieved what Santi said to you? Morality is good. Excellent, excellent. Oh, that was it. I guess that's it. I was like, how could I, what am I supposed to sum up this conversation? No, I agree with that. Yeah. It's a strong agreement. It's a strong agreement. It's, it can't be an abstract morality totally untethered from a very hard-nosed look at what the realities are, what the various interests of the involved parties are.

And what they stand again and what they stand to lose, right? Like morality demands that you look at the world in a somewhat hard-headed way without sort of falling into the sort of easy comfort of cynicism. Fair. Well said. Amen. Amen to all that. All right. I'm going to go get donuts. Excellent. Excellent. Excellent. And I'll continue this conversation with him. Fantastic. That sounds great. Thanks so much, Bill. Thank you.