Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
People keep throwing the word "proportionate" around like it's something to be desired.
Was Nuking Japan twice and waging total war against them a "proportionate" response to loosing a few boats and a few thousand people at Pearl Harbor? No of course it wasn't, "proportionality" was never the intent to begin with.
My understanding is that proportionality has a specific meaning in international law as pertains to armed conflict, although I can't claim to always use that correctly.
It's probably worth noting in your example that Japan actually did quite a lot more than just bomb Pearl Harbor!
Anyway, I don't object to moving vertically up the escalation ladder. I do object to using military force against civilians in a way that is not directly connected to military objectives. For instance, if we are at war with Iran, and we intentionally airstrike a public school and hit civilians, the degree to which that airstrike will be justified under the laws of armed conflict will depend on the nexus to a military objective. If we did it for no reason, then it would be disproportionate. If we did it to kill a single low-ranking Iranian soldier, it would likely still be disproportionate. If we did it to strike a surface-to-air system that was colocated with the school, it would be much more defensible (and also the Iranians might be themselves guilty of a war crime).
My objection to a concentrated campaign against the Iranian power grid is not a principled objection to hitting power facilities, but rather that I think that such a campaign would not degrade the Iranian military forces more efficiently than allocating those weapons elsewhere would. To the extent that hitting Iranian power facilities would degrade the operations of their military forces in ways that could not be more easily achieved by other military means, I have no particular objections. But most high-end weapons systems are going to have generators as either a primary (if mobile) or secondary (if fixed) power source. Thus, as a general rule, I think that a concentrated air campaign against weapons systems and military facilities themselves is a more efficient allocation of resources than hitting centralized power sources.
There is a certain logic to striking purely civilian facilities in Iran because Iran has not respected the civilian-military distinction themselves, and according to old custom, the laws of the civilized do not apply to barbarians (defect against defectors). But I do not think the United States needs to do this to accomplish its goals in the region, and it would undermine our pretensions to moral conduct in war and give future opponents precedential cover to make such attacks against us.
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