Telos 205 (Winter 2023): Forms of War is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
One of the most challenging aspects of the wars in Ukraine and Israel is the way in which the conflicts have been constantly shifting in form. In the first place, there is a conventional ground war between Russia and Ukraine, in which the identity and will of the two peoples are at stake. Yet Russia has used weapons supplied by Iran and North Korea, and Ukraine relies on NATO for its own supplies, indicating that this war depends on the maintenance and expansion of alliances. The stability of these alliances in turn depends on a combination of Realpolitik and shared values as the glue that holds them together. This logic of alliances motivates the energy war that Russia is waging with Europe, revealing that, unbeknownst to Europe, Russian energy policy over the last decade was an early form of the war. Similarly, the threat of nuclear war also tests the resolve of NATO, forcing it to consider the values at stake in the conflict. Is the war about Ukraine’s sovereignty or the principle of nation-state sovereignty itself? Is it about human rights for Ukrainians or the entire human rights project? For Russia, is it about self-defense or a pan-Slavic identity? Is it about the protection of Russian minorities in Ukraine or the threat of Western secularization? The answers to these questions will determine the will to fight on each side and thus the length and ferocity of the war.
Similarly, the war between Israel and Hamas began with Hamas’s use of terror and rape as instruments of war. The idea was to provoke Israel into attacking Hamas and causing civilian casualties. Because the terrain of war extends to public opinion in the West, Hamas’s use of Israeli hostages and Palestinian human shields becomes part of its strategy of increasing civilian casualties in the war. Even though Hamas is the ultimate cause of such casualties, Hamas is able to pressure Israel by placing civilians in the path of Israel’s war effort. The conflict on the ground in Gaza is thus overshadowed by the struggle for hearts and minds across the globe.
It is also clear, though, that Hamas is a proxy for Iran in its attempt to expand its authoritarian political order across the Middle East. In this broader conflict, the appeals to public opinion have been part of a long-term ideological struggle to establish a Marxist-inspired division of the world into colonialist oppressors and oppressed victims in order to counter the understanding of the conflict as one between terrorists and defenders of human rights. In the end, it will be this ideological conflict that will be decisive for the ability of the West to face challenges in both Ukraine and the Middle East.
The material form of the war—economic, conventional, nuclear—will depend on the way in which the participants on all sides and in all parts of the world come to an understanding about these questions concerning the moral and spiritual stakes in the war. If it is just a matter of giving up Ukraine, then the economic costs for Europe may not be worth the fight, and Russia’s victory in the energy war could lead to a general NATO capitulation. But if the freedom and security of central and western Europe are also at stake, then even a severe economic recession would be a small price to pay for the re-establishment of a NATO-dominated security order. Is freedom worth the risk of annihilation? Is peace worth the indignities and repression of authoritarianism? As the most serious global conflict since World War II, the war in Ukraine risks going beyond the bounds of all other forms of war before it. Similarly, the conflict between Israel and Hamas risks turning into a broader Middle East war due to the ideological stakes involved.
These considerations are not specific to the wars in Ukraine and Gaza but arise in any situation of war. Every war forces us to reconsider the character of war and the forms that it can take. In the first place, the insight that leads to a war is one about the nature of a conflict. War only begins once the parties determine that there is an otherwise irresolvable conflict about the basis of order. The course of a war also results in a practical insight into the form of a postwar order. Peace and stability cannot arrive until all come to an agreement about the new understanding of order.
This intertwining of practical and theoretical gains means that the time of war is also a time of shifting manifestations of the forms by which war is fought, as well as the forms of order to be established by the outcome of the war. The course of a war will be decided by our understanding of the kind of world we want to live in, the risks we are willing to take to establish such a world, and our belief in its practical possibility. A war will necessarily change in form depending upon where we are in the movement from the conflict of competing ideas to the victory of a particular conception of order. Since the result of the conflict would be an establishment of sovereignty based on some understanding of order, the conflict is not just a material one but also a theoretical and spiritual one about the metaphysical basis of order. In the drama of war, insight leads to conflict, and conflict leads to insight.
In this process, the experience of war, both on the battlefield and on the home front, affects the strategy of the war as well as the outcome. The strategizing begins already at the nascent stages of conflict, before any actual fighting begins, but in which the possibility of conflict can already lead to the development of forms of deterrence or to concessions by one side or the other that lead to a transformation of the basis of order. Similarly, fears and hopes for the future also determine the course of a war, helping the participants to end a war by offering them a mutually acceptable vision of the terms of peace.
The essays in this issue are based on papers presented at the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute conference on “Forms of War,” held in New York in the spring of 2023. The participants considered different ways of understanding the relationship between conflict and insight in war as well as examples of how the conceptualization of conflict affects the outbreak, progress, and outcome of wars.
Tim Luke’s essay traces the different forms of war that have dominated the world since the early twentieth century, when the two world wars constituted the extreme examples of a kind of “great war” in which the parties sought the total subjugation of their opponents. After World War II, the atomic age prevented the return of such absolute wars and shifted war into different limited contests fought with conventional weapons under the shadow of nuclear destruction. The current war in Ukraine, as well as the increasing rivalry between the United States and China, raises the specter of a great war once again, a form of war that had seemingly become obsolete since the end of World War II.
Mark Maguire and David A. Westbrook reflect on how this return of a large-scale European land war in Ukraine is affecting our narratives about a future war. With the end of the Cold War, the military establishment organized itself increasingly around an idea of unconventional warfare fought with special forces, cyber tools, counterinsurgency tactics, and a focus on using knowledge of the enemy’s politics and culture to undermine its will to fight. While Russia’s invasion of Crimea has been cited as the most successful example of such unconventional warfare, this form of war has a mixed tracked record. Since this idea of war has shaped the structure of our present-day military, we may be unprepared for the return of the great war model from World War II.
Perhaps unconventional warfare was appropriate only for the post–Cold War context of ideological fluidity in international relations, when there was no longer a clear ideological divide that defined frontiers and enemies. The return of great war may be the consequence of a firming up of the ideological differences between liberal democratic and authoritarian forms of sovereignty.
China, in particular, has been attempting to establish a new discourse of world order in order to buttress its notion of sovereignty, and Chia-Yu Liang describes the ideological reasons for China’s willingness to pursue an invasion of Taiwan. He focuses on the idea of tianxia (all under heaven), which scholars in China have promoted as an alternative to the Western idea of global order based on nation-states. Though this tianxia discourse seeks to emphasize harmony over conflict within a world-unifying framework, Liang indicates that the underlying political theology in fact promotes a strategy of subjugating neighboring peoples, creating continuities with the mode of politics of imperial China. Because the discourse of tianxia in the People’s Republic of China imagines the world as China-centric, sovereignty is not held in this theory to be distributed across separate nation-states based on the principle of popular sovereignty. Instead, within this tianxia discourse all sovereignty emanates not from the Chinese people but from the Chinese Communist Party, and then radiates from there out to the rest of the world. From this perspective, Taiwan must be integrated into China as part of the grand unity that emanates from the Chinese Communist Party. By contrast, both Hong Kong protesters and Taiwan have tried to develop an alternative vision of tianxia that would emphasize popular sovereignty as opposed to the sovereignty of the Chinese Communist Party.
Russell Berman discusses how the losers in war deal with defeat in his analysis of the Syrian Marxist Sadik al-Azm. In contrast to the general Arab attempt to blame Israel, the West, or fate for their defeat in the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, al-Azm turns a critical eye toward the social problems in the Arab world. In increasing opposition to Edward Said’s blaming of the East’s problems on the West, al-Azm insists that Arabs must first come to terms with their own failings. While implacably opposed to both Israel and the United States, he is still able to recognize that the Arabs must look to themselves in order to discover the reasons for their defeat. As Berman points out, though, al-Azm’s self-critical eye thereby contrasts with the current U.S. inability to reflect on the reasons for its recent defeat in Afghanistan.
Mark G. E. Kelly argues that the U.S. intelligence community, including agencies such as the FBI, CIA, and NSA, is the basis of a national security state that has an inordinate influence over U.S. politics. Its importance stems from the U.S. role after World War II in guaranteeing the current structure of global order. Though the military establishment has been meticulous in staying out of politics, the intelligence community has used its national security role to actively intervene in elections. By promoting a narrative of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign ahead of the 2016 election and discrediting the Hunter Biden laptop revelations as Russian disinformation in the 2020 election cycle, the intelligence community has used national security concerns as an excuse to influence elections. While Kelly stops short of arguing that the intelligence community constitutes a “deep state” that maintains surreptitious control of U.S. politics, he indicates that, given the overriding importance of national security for U.S. interests, it would be difficult to devise proper checks on the ability of the intelligence community to undermine democratic politics.
Matthew J. Dal Santo retrieves the work of Russian philosopher Vladimir Ern to argue that the underlying cause of the modern form of total war has not been nationalism or imperialism but the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Because this philosophy affirms that we cannot know anything about the essence of nature and the external world, this world can no longer exist as a true object for us and dissolves into a projection out of ourselves. We are left only with subjective reasoning and desires as the basis for our engagement with the world, and there is no possibility for a rational faith in God. By contrast, the Christian-Platonic perspective insists on a rationally ordered cosmos to which humans must adapt themselves. Without such a principle of truth that transcends the mind, the world becomes simply raw material for human manipulation. War becomes a way of imposing human will upon an outside world that is not considered to have any objective truth separate from what this will demands of it. Dal Santo links Kantian epistemology to Germany and then to the United States, as the inheritors of a secular modern perspective that sees reality as manipulable rather than fixed and the world as an object to be colonized rather than a partner with which one should engage. By contrast, the Russian perspective remains grounded in a Christian-Platonic truth according to which Ukraine has a fixed and essential meaning in itself that belongs with Russia.
Aryeh Botwinick presents an opposing perspective on Kant’s understanding of the human relationship to God and the world. Rather than seeing Kant’s skepticism as an abandonment of truth, he argues for a negative theological perspective in which God can only be a possibility and not a certainty because any certainty would contravene God’s unknowable infinity. This unbridgeable distance between God’s infinity and our finite status means that we can only relate to God metaphorically. God’s characteristics and God’s existence itself must be treated as metaphorical possibility rather than in any literal way. This mystical and metaphorical relationship to God and the world puts the focus in religion on the human relationships that develop in the ways we live our lives. Our choices and commitments to live religiously in the future create the meaning of religions in the present and the past. Without theological certainties, wars cannot be justified, since the truth of God is never assured but only possible. This attitude of possibilism undermines the certainties about religion that Russia has used to justify its invasion of Ukraine. While Botwinick’s negative theology might seem like a surrender to secularization from Dal Santo’s perspective, Botwinick might respond that Dal Santo’s approach is in fact a form of idolatry because it presumes to pin down God’s infinity in a finite way.
Any war will come to an end at the moment that one side submits to the will of the other party. Consequently, all wars come about and continue because both sides decide that they want to fight. As the contributions to this issue indicate, this decision always involves a weighing of the practical demands of war against the moral, ideological, and theological commitments that are most dear to us. It is this play of practical and moral considerations that determines the forms and outcomes in this most serious of human endeavors.
David Pan is Professor of European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine, and has previously held positions at Washington University in St. Louis, Stanford University, Penn State University, and McKinsey and Company. He is the author of Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism (2001) and Sacrifice in the Modern World: On the Particularity and Generality of Nazi Myth (2012). He has also published on J. G. Herder, Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Nietzsche, Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Jünger, Bertolt Brecht, Carl Schmitt, and Theodor Adorno. He is the Editor of Telos.
