By Rich Lowry
Friday, April 17, 2026
Countless protest signs have informed us over the years that
“war is not
the answer.”
We hear this message, with varying levels of sophistication
and differing underlying worldviews, from institutions and people ranging from Code
Pink to Pope Leo.
“War does not solve problems,” the pontiff said in an Angelus
address last year. “On the contrary, it amplifies them and causes deep wounds in
the history of peoples — wounds that take generations to heal.”
Now, there are many things that can be said about the tragedy
of warfare without crediting the blatantly ahistorical cliché that it is never the
answer, or doesn’t solve disputed questions, often with a terrible finality.
Warfare can determine international boundaries and the nature
of governments. It can decide who will rule and who will not. The relative power
of states, the extent of religious faiths, and the status of a culture can depend
on it.
Wars might be pointless, or fought for prestige, revenge,
or territorial aggrandizement. That’s all true, but it doesn’t change the fact that
military conflict is, at times, necessary and highly consequential; it can achieve
beneficent ends, as well as awful ones.
It mattered for the spread of Christianity, for instance,
that Constantine, who would become the first Christian emperor of Rome, won the
Battle of Milvian Bridge in 312. Later, Christendom benefited from Ferdinand and
Isabella taking back Granada from its Muslim rulers in 1492, and from the Holy Roman
Emperor defeating the Ottoman besiegers of Vienna in 1683.
Certainly, it would have been better if all this could have
been amiably worked out among the relevant parties, but that’s not how the world
usually works.
In the early 19th century, Europe had a Napoleon problem —
a world-historical military genius determined to bend the continent to his will
through force of arms. After serial failures, the Allies finally solved this problem
in the War of the Seventh Coalition. The ensuing diplomatic settlement at the Congress
of Vienna forged a peace that lasted nearly a century but wouldn’t have been possible
without victory at Waterloo.
In the early 20th century, Europe had a Hitler problem — a
fanatical, race-obsessed militarist who wanted his Third Reich to dominate Europe.
This problem, too, was solved by force and led to a lasting peace, although a very
tense one during the Cold War. If it’s true that war should usually be the last
resort, the Allies would have been better off if it had been the first resort against
Hitler, checking him when he was relatively weak.
More parochially, the United States wouldn’t be what it is
today absent two existential wars. When the colonies began agitating for independence,
the British weren’t simply going to cede what they considered sovereign territories,
especially given their economic and strategic value. The American cause — and all
the good that has flowed from it — depended on prevailing in a grinding eight-year
war.
About a hundred years later, it all could have collapsed had
the United States not prevailed in the Civil War, an appallingly bloody conflict
that extinguished American slavery and preserved the foundation for the nation’s
gathering greatness.
None of this is a warrant for heedless warmongering, or a
reason to dismiss, say, the sheer cynical brutishness of the Roman destruction of
Carthage in the Third Punic War, or the horrors of Passchendaele.
That war is terrible, however, doesn’t mean that it’s ineffective.
In our times, Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 in the erroneous,
but not crazy, belief that a sharp, decisive military campaign would topple the
Western-oriented government in Kyiv and force the creation of a regime more to the
Kremlin’s liking. This was a war that never should have been launched, yet Ukraine
had no alternative but to fight it.
If Kyiv wants to protect its sovereign territory and eventually
get a tolerable diplomatic outcome, war is the answer — as, sadly, it has been so
often throughout human history.
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