NATO's out-of-area operations, Just War and game theory

« Comme la mode fait l'agrément, aussi fait-elle la justice. La justice 
change selon les pays. Ce qui est juste sur le bord d'un fleuve est injuste 
de l'autre côté; et cette instabilité est encore un effet de la faiblesse 
humaine, car il fallait que la justice fût unie à la force pour conserver la 
paix, qui est le souverain bien. [...] La justice n'a donc été chez les 
différentes nations que l'expression de la volonté du plus fort. Ainsi il ne 
faut pas dire au peuple que ses lois sont injustes; car il est quelquefois 
nécessaire de le tromper; il ne faut pas même lui dire qu'il doit obéir aux 
lois parce qu'elles sont justes; il n'aurait qu'à vouloir les examiner: il 
faut lui dire qu'il doit leur obéir parce qu'elles sont établies, car il faut 
surtout éviter les séditions. »
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         Blaise Pascal, Pensées 309 
 
 
Chapter 1 
Classical and modern theory of just war and jus ad bellum 
The perpetual genesis of the idea of „just‟ and „justice‟ 
 
 
Introduction 
 
To understand when a conflict is considered legitimate today and to comprehend 
the bases that determine NATO‟s decision-making on the lawfulness of an 
intervention, it is necessary to introduce a preliminary historical remark on the 
topic, which has constituted the focal point of the discipline of “just war”. 
The main overarching idea of the present chapter is that affirming that an action or 
a phenomenon is just implies stating our own ideas about the world but also 
reveals those norms and values that we have been absorbing from the society. 
Thus, the evaluation of the lawfulness of an armed intervention encapsulates 
social, societal, sometimes even geographical and generational significances.  
                                                             
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 Translation of the author of the present work: “As customs determine what is agreeable, also 
does it determine justice. Justice changes from country to country. What is just on one bank of a 
river is unjust on the other bank. It is this instability that is further effect of human weakness, since 
it would be necessary to combine justice and strength to consolidate peace, which is the supreme 
good. Therefore justice has not been anything but the expression of the will of the strongest in the 
different nations. So, one cannot tell people that their laws are unjust because sometimes it is 
necessary to break transgress them. Similarly, one cannot tell them to break laws since laws are 
just. There will not be any much choice but to examine them. It is necessary to tell people to obey 
since laws are established and, most of all, because we must avoid seditions.”  
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By providing an excursus on the evolution of the theory of just war, this chapter 
will show how the concept has developed according to the legal and institutional 
framework in which it has been embedded and how it has evolved around three 
main motifs: religion, politics and morality.  
The first section will introduce the theory of just war and will refer to the first 
scholars interpreting it, from Plato to Thucydides going through Aristotle. The 
remark on the Hellenic time is necessary to introduce the naissance of the idea of 
justice within a variegated conjunction of myths and polytheist cults. 
The following paragraph will devote its attention to the evolution of the discipline 
within the religious motif. It will focus indeed on the Roman tradition both 
relevant for Augustine of Hippo‟s contribution – for many the founding father of 
the concept of „just war‟ – but also for the primarily attempt of the Roman legal 
system of legislating conflicts. Thus, the analysis of the religious justification of 
conflict will proceed with the other two main monotheistic religions: Judaism and 
Islam.  
The next section will synopsize the „political‟ tradition of legitimizing conflicts. It 
will pick up the thread of the narrative initiated by Thucydides and will present 
Machiavelli‟s raison d‟état, which epitomizes the significance of just war theory 
within the mere context of state actors. Within the political justification of war 
falls as well the more modern contribution provided by Hugo Grotius and the sets 
for the international order established by the Peace of Westphalia.  
As the new legal system engendered by these two latter contributions started to 
take a concrete form, international institutions have entered the game with the 
attempt of institutionalizing, regulating and avoiding conflicts. However, such 
institutions have introduced a third factor to the tradition of just war: the moral 
universal category. As a matter of facts, within the context of a more 
institutionalized system, framed within concrete legal constraints, the League of 
Nations has been presenting itself as the champion of world peace, rather as a 
military organization that aimed to guarantee the security of only certain states. 
The League of Nations eventually paved the way to our coeval institutions, as the 
United Nations, an organization that can be located in both political and moral 
categories, albeit the latter certainly prevails. What about NATO, the cardinal 
point of the present thesis? As it will fully illustrated in Chapters 2, the Treaty of 
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the Alliance presents mainly political justifications although Chapter 3 will argue 
that the moral pretext is becoming more and more recurrent.    
 
1.1 Defining “just war” 
 
The reasons behind an armed intervention have historically been determined by 
what the actor perpetrating the hostilities has considered just and they have been 
interpreted by the international community in which it is embedded according to 
the legal system in force. This implies that the notions of justice and the 
justification of a conflict have gone through an extensive evolution over centuries, 
and thus a particular foreign policy might have been considered reasonable and 
permissible at Thucydides‟ time, while it might be seen illegal and unacceptable 
today. Such considerations on the validity of an armed intervention do not take 
place only at the eyes of the single citizens or of single states, but also in the 
presence of the international community, conceived as a unitary legitimating 
actor.    
The debate presented in the present chapter will be modelled on two main 
concepts: justification - or legitimization - and the connotation just - or necessary. 
It is not by chance that the two concepts that the words „justification‟ (possibly 
connected to perceptions and opinions or, in other words, what can be done) and 
„justice‟ (more determined and factual, what has to be done and commonly 
associated with an objective perspective), for how conceptually different, found 
origin in the same etymologic root.  
Finally, the connotation of „justice‟ and „justification‟ (of a war) have been 
evolving over time and for centuries both single nations and the international 
society have tried to reach agreements in order to regulate and prevent wars, to 
understand when an intervention can be waged (according what is perceived to be 
just in that particular moment of time) and when it should be conducted (in 
accordance to what the predominant judicial system believes to be justifiable).  
 
1.2. The incipience of the discipline in Greek tradition   
 
Before starting the digression on the mere concept of just war, it seems 
appropriate to introduce a short remark on the concept of justice introduced in the 
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Western tradition by Plato, reshaped by Aristotle and eventually associated by 
Thucydides with the necessity of waging a conflict. Indeed, only by defining first 
the meaning of that „jus‟ contained in the expressions ius ad bellum (“the right to 
wage a war”) and ius in bello (“war waged justly”) it will be possible to fully 
understand the significance of such expressions and the evolution that their 
connotations have experienced over time.  
As mentioned above, Plato was a pioneer in introducing dissertations on the idea 
of justice. In the Republic, the Greek sage (428 BC – 348 BC) exposed one of the 
most exhaustive studies on what is and has to be just
2
. A just man – he writes – 
will never be able to harm another one
3
. Moreover, Plato inaugurates Book VIII 
of his oeuvre with Socrates‟ elucidation on the conduction of a war: its pursuits 
must be shared and unambiguous, the king has to have full responsible leadership 
and its limitations and boundaries need to be clear as well. As it will be shown 
during the redaction of the present thesis, are these very characteristics that set the 
bases for the discipline of just war theory.  
The second early contribution to such branch of learning was provided by one of 
Plato‟s disciples, Aristotle (384 BC – 322 BC). In Aristotle‟s conception, the 
bellum iustum was intended as a way of regulating relations among states. For the 
peripatetic scholar a war is legitimate whenever three conditions – or dìkaios 
pòlemos - are met: as a self-defensive measure against subjugation; as a way of 
establishing a hegemonic rule for the interest and benefit of the ones who are 
subdued; and in order to enslave those who deserve to be enslaved
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.  
As a final remark on the Greek tradition, it is necessary to point out that also in 
the Peloponnesian War are presented explicit references to the right to wage a 
war. In fact, in the infamous Melian Dialogue
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, Thucydides (460 BC – 395 BC) 
encapsulates some of the most relevant concepts that centuries later would be 
                                                             
2
 With the purpose of engendering in the reader a profound reasoning on the notion of justice, the 
author mounts a dialectic disputes between Thrasymachus – who believes that justice is “what is 
advantageous to the stronger, while injustice is to one's own profit and advantage"
2
 – and Socrates 
who sustain the opposite. The anecdote of Gyges aims as well to amplify the dialectic debate on 
justice: in Glaucon‟s speech Plato concentrates the idea that injustice and impunity are strictly 
connected – an idea that will come particularly handy in the following sections. 
3
 Plato, (2004), Republic, Indianapolis, Hackett Publishing Company, p. 12. 
4
 Aristotle, (reprint: 2006) Politics. Teddington. The Echo Library. 7,1333 b 37- 1334 a 10. 
5
 A fundamental bibliographic reference on the topic is represented by the following work: 
Clavadetscher-Thürlemann S., Pòlemos dìkaios und „bellum iustum‟. Versuch einer 
Ideengeschichte, Zürich, 1986 
6
 The event is part of the Peloponnesian wars and date back to 416 BC, when the King of Sparta, 
Archidamus, invades the Athenian territory.  Original source: Thucydides V 84 114.  
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identified as part of the Realist School of International Relations. The motifs 
presented with the dialogue are abundant: from the legitimation of war as self-
defense (what it has been identified previously as the political justification) to the 
perpetual peace; from amorality within politics (again, the political category), to 
the relation between ethics and might; from the dissertation on the connotations 
on justice (which for the Athenians it is a synonym of the capacity to compel, 
while for the Malians it does not), to the connection between power and justice. 
What it is possible to infer from such Dialogue is that for the Greek military 
general and historian, war is an essential situation that emerges whenever a 
political actor attempts to impose its hegemony on a second and weaker party
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. 
Legitimized by the very nature of the actors, war according to Thucydides could 
be either defensive or aggressive, but what was sure to the scholar was that it rose 
as a consequence of the imbalance of power:  
 
“[…] the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”
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1.3 Just war in the Roman tradition  
 
Within the ancient Roman tradition we recognize the presence of a peculiar 
category in which the legitimation of a conflict falls: the religious-political one.  
As a matter of facts, it is interesting to underline how according to one of the most 
representative scholar of that time, Cicero, it was a conjunction of mystic and 
defensive arguments that allowed the declaration of a war 
For Cicero indeed no justification could sustain the decision of initiating a conflict 
if not the need of “repelling enemies”
9
 with the ultimate aim of establishing 
“peace unharmed”
10
. However, he sustained that “legalistic rituals” were the 
requisite for legitimization
11
 and such rituals represents a novelty introduced by 
introduced by the Romans with regards to the discipline of bellum iustum and it 
                                                             
7
 He indeed wrote: “The truest cause [of the war] is obscured by speech. I think that Athenians, by 
becoming great, inspired fear among the Lacedaemonians, making the war necessary.” 
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars, I.72.  
8
 Ibid, V, 17.  
9
 Cicero De Officiis I, 11. In Regan R. J. Just war: principles and cases.1996, Washington DC, The 
Catholic University Press, p. 16 
10
 Ibid.  
11
 Eilers C. Diplomats and diplomacy in the Roman world. 2009. Danvers, MA. Koninklijke Brill, 
p. 19.  
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