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Law and Warfare

September 2, 2014
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As part of Tikvah’s advanced institute “Liberalism, Conservatism, and the Jews,” Ran Baratz, the founding editor of Mida, argued that Israel is overly obsessed with exercising power cleanly. War is never as clean as we design. Hoover Institution scholar Peter Berkowitz expanded the claim, pointing out that the same impulse exists in other liberal democracies that rely on their armies, like the United States. The attempt to clean-up war’s messiness is an impulse of Western liberalism as old as the Enlightenment. In creating legal procedures that constrain warriors, the ideological descendants of Thomas Paine use reason to make all things transparent.

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