A lot of people believe that politics is war. We gain ground, lose ground, attack other positions, undermine the opposition. While it might be nice if we could engage in political disagreements without aggression, that’s probably unreasonable. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s harmless or inevitable that people treat politics as war. The question is: what kind of war?[1]
The kind of war matters for two main reasons. First, we argue for different kinds of war in different ways, and the rhetorical strategies we use, if effective, create an imagined world that constrains our policy options. For instance, if I give a speech that effectively persuades large numbers of people that climate change is an urgent issue that must be dealt with immediately, then those people will advocate for policies that at least purport to ameliorate the problem. As will be explained, how we argue for war establishes expectations about what it would mean to win or lose the war. If we argue that we have to go to war in order to regain this territory because we are entitled to it, then the war can end when we’ve regained that territory. We might be able to avoid the war entirely if our threatening military action enables us to gain that territory in negotiations. Some ways of arguing for war give us a broad range of outcomes that could be considered victory (or at least acceptable), and some give us a very narrow range.
Second, different kinds of wars have different associated practices of engagement. Some kinds of war can involve very limited engagement, with very few troops, and little impact on civilians, whereas others are wars of elimination, in which the win condition is the extermination of another people (not just their military or leaders). Seeing politics as a battle between political figures to achieve certain specific policies might be problematic, but seeing politics as a war in which we must exterminate all and any opponents exterminates democracy.
It’s useful to think of wars as lying on a continuum of pure necessity (the Athenians have declared war and are at the city-state borders, a war of self-defense) to pure choice (let’s go attack Syracuse, although they’ve done nothing to threaten us, because they’re weak and have resources we’d like, a war of conquest). There are two kinds of war that lie between those extremes (or at least that are rhetorically presented as between them) that I want to talk about: preemptive and preventive wars.
The Encyclopedia of United States National Security defines preemptive war as:
waging war in an attempt to avoid an imminent attack or to gain a strategic advantage over an impending threat. The main aim of a preemptive attack is to gain the advantage of initiative by using military force before the opponent does. A typical example of a preemptive strike is an attack against enemy troops massed at a state’s border ready to invade. (592)
The entry gives the example of Sir Francis Drake attacking the Spanish Armada while it was still in harbor; scholars frequently cite Israel’s actions in the Six-Day War of 1967.
An especially troubling example is WWI. Many people argue that France, Russia, and Germany—that is, opposing forces– all believed that the situation necessitated preemptive war.[2] Russia mobilized, believing that Germany was about to attack; so did France; Germany, seeing its enemies mobilizing, attacked. That is, believing that war is inevitable and imminent can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. That’s important if we’re thinking that politics is war.
Preemptive war does involve choice—the nation doesn’t have to go to war immediately, and could wait and see if the other really attacks. But the choices are clearly limited, in that, if the evidence is accurate, and the interpretation of the opponent’s intentions is accurate, peaceful co-existence is not one of the options.
A kind of war of choice sometimes rhetorically presented as preemptive war is preventive war–we start a war because we believe the other side intends to start one at some point in the future, and now is the most advantageous moment for our side. Preventive and preemptive wars can seem similar, but they are very different. Robert Jervis says “The difference between the two is in the timescale: The former means an attack against an adversary that is about to strike; the latter is a move to prevent a threat from fully emerging” (Jervis R. Mutual Assured Destruction. Foreign Policy. 2002;(133):40). The Encyclopedia of United States National Security defines preventive war: “Attacking an enemy now in order to avoid the risk of war under worsening circumstances later”
Preventive war doesn’t prevent war; it’s supposed to prevent losing a war we believe is inevitable, but not imminent. Hitler’s invasion of Poland was preventive war, not toward Poland (which wasn’t ever going to invade Germany), but as the most advantageous moment for Hitler to start the apocalyptic war he believed was inevitable (discussed later). The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, Third Punic War, and Iraq invasion were all preventive wars.
What I want to show in this post is that the rhetorical challenges inherent to advocating preventive war can easily create a kind of rhetorical trap for a rhetor and community, in which we end up constraining our win condition to extermination/subjugation of the Other.
Arguing for preventive war is rhetorically challenging for many reasons. The main problem is that an advocate of defensive war has to thread the needle of saying that the threat is and is not imminent. It isn’t imminent in the sense that we are about to be attacked, but the threat is such that we have to act now.
Rhetors arguing for preemptive war have evidence that an attack is imminent because they can point to massing of troops, documents that say war is intended, military installations, and so on. There is a demonstrable imminent existential threat. Rhetors arguing for preventive war try to redefine the situation justifying our aggression right now by projecting out-group aggression into the future. What evidence can they give to justify a hypothetical case about the future? It’s difficult (but not impossible) for advocates to make a falsfiable argument, since they’re talking about hypotheticals. A community is likely to respond, since the threat is not imminent, why go to war now? An advocate of preventive war has to show that diplomatic measures are unavailable, implausible, already exhausted, or futile. One way to argue that they’re futile is to argue that the Other is essentially and eternally a threat to us–that there are not specific material objectives we can reach (get this land, that resource) that would change their basic nature.
The case for preventive war is almost always inherently speculative, grounded in signs rather than evidence. Until Japan and Germany declared war on the US, any participation in WWII on the part of the US would have been a preventive war. Any military response on the part of the UK or France to Hitler’s various provocative acts (short of his invasion of Czechoslovakia) would have been preventive war. Various rhetors tried to argue for preventive war against Nazi Germany, but were completely unsuccessful. The arguments they were making seemed too much like the arguments for the Great War, which many people in the UK and US considered an unnecessary escalation of what could and should have been Hapsburg squabbling with Serbia.
Arguments for an aggressive response to Hitler were grounded in arguments about Hitler, who he was, and what he’d always said he wanted—they were arguments about identity and intention. And they could be countered by pointing out how often he talked about wanting peace (which he did, after about 1932), his having toned down his antisemitism (he shifted to dog whistle), arguments about sovereignty (we have no business going to war because of what a government does to its own citizens), and a shift in sympathy, what Robert Graves and Alan Hodge refer to as “anti-French feeling” that “caused a revulsion in favour of the poor downtrodden Germans” (which they date as early as 1922, The Long Week-End 90). Quotes from Mein Kampf had to be taken as more authoritative evidence than quotes from his latest speeches.
Just to be clear: I’m not saying preventive war against Hitler would have been wrong, or that the arguments for and against a more aggressive stance toward Hitler were equally strong. On the contrary, I think that, if ever there was a justified preventive war, it would have been one against Hitler, and that the evidence that he was a threat was better than the arguments people made that he wasn’t. I’m saying that, even with a case that seems so clearcut to us, at the time, it was a very difficult case to make. Arguing for preventive war is hard. The rhetorical solution is generally, as it was with Hitler, to argue that Hitler was essentially an existential threat to Europe.
It’s a funny kind of historical irony that Hitler made the mirror image of that argument. Hitler had an apocalyptic narrative about nations and races. An oversimplified version of it is something like this: nations are locked in a battle of survival—wars are inevitable. A nation prepares itself for war through racial purity, martial training, and being in continual war. A pure Aryan nation is, if fueled by sufficient will, destined and entitled to be the master race. If it isn’t the master race, it will be destroyed by others. Thus, anything less than complete domination means extermination by some other nation or race. We must conquer the other, or they will do to us what we are advocating doing to them.[3] The win condition for Hitler was extermination or subjugation of all countries other than Nazi Germany. There was no such thing as peaceful coexistence of equals.[4]
For a while, I had the hypothesis that preventive war necessarily has win conditions of extermination/subjugation because the rhetorical strategy that rhetors inevitably adopt is an argument about essential threat–because the very existence of the Other is essentially and eternally threatening for us, the only solution is extermination (or subjugation so severe it amount to political extermination). The Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 is a striking counterexample.
Russia was building a railway and fortress close enough to Japan that they would enable effective military action when completed. Neither the railway nor fortress were a threat at the moment, and they wouldn’t even be an existential threat when completed, but they would give considerable military advantage to Russia in case of a war over Korea. Japan had reason to believe that Russia intended just such a war. Japan was successful in the war, but didn’t try to exterminate or subjugate Russia. There were limited and specific win conditions—eliminate the threat of the railway and deter Russia from mucking around in Korea. Once it achieved those goals, the conflict could end.
There were two things that made Japan’s rhetoric about the war different from, for instance, Hitler’s. First, given the governmental structure, there wasn’t much need to mobilize the Japanese people through arguments about the need to go to war. Second, the “need” was very specific, and so the case was very specific—Russia’s behavior in a specific region in Asia. Japan didn’t need to make the argument that there was an apocalyptic battle between Russia and Japan made inevitable by their very natures (the argument made for preventive war between Sparta and Athens, for instance) or by the nature of history itself (Hitler’s argument). In other words, the rhetoric for starting the war implies the conditions that can end it. If the argument for the war is that the very existence of the Other presents an existential threat to us, then the Other will have to be exterminated. If the argument for the war is that the Other will use its power to subjugate us, then the Other will have to be subjugated so thoroughly that it has almost no power.
I really wish we didn’t think of politics as war, but that’s a different post. Here I’m saying that, if we are going to imagine it as war, then, it matters what kind of war we imagine. If it’s a war to achieve certain specific objectives, then it’s a war that can end when the Other grants those objectives. If it’s preventive war necessitated by the very existence of the Other being an existential threat to us, then it’s a war of extermination or subjugation. Then it’s a war on democracy.
[1] To keep from getting excessively pedantic and having too many terms, I’m using “war” in the broadest sense, including any kind of military action, and not just formally declared wars between nations.
[2] The possibility of a nation engaging in preemptive war means that nations have to be careful with threats of military action, even if intended as bluffs to get better terms in negotiation. If they are understood as bluffs, they have no impact on negotiation. But, if they are taken as genuine massing of forces for aggression, they can provoke preemptive war on the part of the other nation.
[3] One of the paradoxes of this way of thinking about co-existence is that it’s basically self-fulfilling. The belief that sharing power with the Other, for instance, means that, if they ever want power (and it’s likely they will), then we are started on the ladder of extermination, then we start on the ladder of a war of extermination.
[4] There was, at best, and perhaps only temporarily, a sphere of influence coexistence. Japan might be allowed to be dominant in Asia, and Hitler intermittently said that he would allow Britain to keep its colonies, but no country could exist that could ever present a threat to Germany hegemony.