The Bacon Doctrine

Every country is able to convince itself that its acts of war are purely "defensive" in nature; that doesn't mean we should believe them.

In that great handbook of cynical political wisdom, Francis Bacon’s Essays, the Elizabethan philosopher at one point advises Britain’s rulers not to worry so much about the nice distinctions between “just” and “unjust” wars. Every war is just, he says, if you look at it the right way; because any war that preemptively crushes a potentially dangerous adversary can be seen as “defensive.”

It’s a piece of counsel that Bush notably put into effect in Iraq in 2003; Putin in Ukraine; and now, it would seem, Netanyahu in Iran.

We tend to think of Bacon of the father of modern empirical philosophy. But, in his Essays, he also shows himself to have been a ruthless political “realist” who could outdo Machiavelli himself in Machiavellianism. (As the future Richard III would put it in Shakespeare’s play, he could “set the murderous Machiavel to school”—and no, I don’t think Bacon himself wrote those words, though some have insisted as much.)

Time and again, the Bacon of the Essays purports to show how things really work in statecraft.

And when it comes to the subject of war, Bacon says that we should dispense with the Scholastics’ fine arguments about “aggression” in international affairs. A country shouldn’t have to wait until it is attacked before it can exact revenge, Bacon wrote. It should be allowed to make a preemptive strike—as we would now call it—for what it merely judges to be a likely future risk:

Neither is the opinion of some of the schoolmen to be received, that a war cannot justly be made, but upon a precedent injury or provocation; for there is no question, but a just fear of an imminent danger, though there be no blow given, is a lawful cause of a war.

And so, according to Bacon, a wise ruler will not hesitate to strike first. They will take action not only to retaliate for an act of international aggression from their neighbors—but to prevent their neighbors from getting too powerful in the first place, such that they might one day be in a position to strike themselves. He wrote, early on in the same essay:

[P]rinces do keep due sentinel, that none of their neighbors do overgrow so (by increase of territory, by embracing of trade, by approaches, or the like), as they become more able to annoy them than they were; and this is generally the work of standing counsels to foresee and to hinder it.

This is a version of the argument that one nowadays hears shorthanded as the “Thucydides trap”—the idea, that is, that the globe “is not big enough for the two of us”; that two countries of roughly equal size or power cannot abide the existence of each other for long; that—as a character puts it in Jean Giraudoux’s The Trojan War Will Not Take Place:

[W]hen destiny has brought up two nations […] to a future of similar invention and authority, and given to each a different scale of values, the universe knows that destiny wasn't preparing alternative ways for civilization to flower. It was contriving the dance of death[.] (Fry trans.)

And so, the country that strikes first in any conflict is always able to convince itself—no matter how flagrant its aggression—that it was really just fighting to “defend” itself from the threat posed by the other. One way or the other, the situation was bound to result in war—“destiny” has so decreed—so there can be no fault in hitting first. “We had to get them before they got us,” the argument always runs.

This is essentially what Netanyahu has been arguing this week about Iran. He went on Fox News in recent days to justify his government’s airstrikes against Iranian nuclear facilities and senior military officials. He said that the only other alternative would have been to wait until Iran acquired a nuclear weapon and gave it to the Houthis—or one of their other regional proxies—and the latter detonated it in Israel.

As the international relations theorist E.H. Carr once observed, every party to every conflict agrees in principle that aggression is wrong; But they all think that they are the ones playing defense.

After all, the hardliners in the Iranian regime likewise think that their own disastrous pursuit of nuclear power is preemptively “defensive” in nature. If they had nuclear parity with Israel—the argument goes—then they would be able to deter the kinds of strikes that we have been witnessing this week.

Indeed, as the New York Times pointed out yesterday, the Israeli strikes may actually have the perverse consequence of strengthening the hardline faction in Iran. They will now argue that these latest bombings merely underline why Iran needs a nuclear arsenal of its own so urgently.

Putin made the same argument in attacking Ukraine. It was all “defensive,” his government and its apologists still insist. “If we hadn’t invaded,” they say, “then Ukraine would have joined NATO, the Western alliance would have brought in nuclear weapons, and we’d end up with an arsenal of warheads aimed at us from just outside the borders of our own country.” (The fact that Ukraine actually gave up its own nuclear arsenal decades ago on the express promise that they would never be invaded in precisely this way is—in the Putin narrative—conveniently brushed aside.)

It’s also the same reason why India and Pakistan both became nuclear powers—and were able to threaten us all with the nuclear “dance of death” just a few weeks ago. Each one says it needs its nuclear weapons, not to use them, but purely in order to prevent the other from using them. When we do it, the war is always preventive and defensive—the powers all claim; when they do it, it’s aggression and war.

And there’s often just enough reality to the threat to make the argument stick. India has suffered horrendous cross-border terrorist attacks from jihadist groups linked to Pakistan. Kashmir is suffering atrocious human rights violations at the hands of India’s Hindu nationalist regime.

Israel does have good reason to fear Iran’s theocratic regime and its regional proxies, who have been lobbing rockets indiscriminately at civilian targets in Israel. (And it’s worth observing that, as much horrendous and unjustifiable death and suffering as Israel’s airstrikes have inflicted on civilians, Iran’s retaliatory strikes do not even seem to have the pretense of being targeted at military sites. They are blatantly indiscriminate—and if they have killed fewer innocent people so far, it is only because they are mostly being intercepted by Israeli air defenses before they can land on populated areas.)

The world is full of bad actors and bad behavior; there is always enough actual violence or extremist rhetoric from the “other side” to justify the claim that any action on our side is “defensive” in nature.

We heard the same thing about Iraq back in 2003. No one could deny that Saddam Hussein was a horrible bloodthirsty dictator. No one could deny that it would be bad for the world if he ever obtained weapons of mass destruction. And even if he never did actually possess them, as the bogus intelligence claimed—many people managed to convince themselves that the mere prospect that he might someday do so was enough to justify “taking him out” now.

So too—was Iran about to use a nuclear weapon against Israel when the latter attacked? No. Was Iran about to build or acquire a nuclear weapon in the immediate future? Again, no; so far as we can tell. But—they seem to want one some day. They might try to build or acquire one. Ten years down the road, they might have one. And then, they might give it to the Houthis. So why not “take them out” now?

It should be clear already that there is no ultimate limit to this line of thinking. Every attack against any non-aggressing party can be portrayed as interrupting some hypothetical causal chain at its earliest stages. The Greeks could throw the infant son of Hector from the walls of Troy because he might grow up some day; he might acquire weapons; he might take his vengeance against the Greek invaders on behalf of his father, etc.

Israel justifies its airstrikes on Iran with the argument that they are necessary to prevent “a second Holocaust, a nuclear holocaust,” as Netanyahu put it in his Fox News interview. But unless they are prepared to commit a nuclear holocaust of their own, there will still be future generations of Iranians. Their desire for their own nuclear deterrence—their own argument that any power they gain at the expense of their neighbors is purely “defensive” in nature—will be just as strong as before; indeed, it will only be strengthened by these kinds of aggressive incursions.

There is actually no better replacement, then, for the distinctions of the “schoolmen” that Francis Bacon tried to dismiss—the same distinctions we still recognize in international law today.

It actually does matter who is the aggressing party. The prohibition on aggression must remain absolute in international relations. It is the only way to interrupt the infinite regress we say above—according to which any act of violence may be justified because it prevents some future potential harm.

For the same reason, we must define aggression rigorously. Fear of hypothetical future action—no matter what motives we attribute to the opposing side, or how rotten we think their government may be (and the Iranian theocracy certainly is rotten—no argument from me there)—can never suffice on its own to convert an aggressive act into one of “defense.”

“But look at the Iranian regime’s crimes!” people will say. “Look at their human rights record! Look at how they have used their proxies to attack innocent people and destabilize the region!”

Again, we heard the same thing about Saddam Hussein back in 2003. “He was a bad actor! He tortured political prisoners! He gassed his own people!” And who could deny it? The charges against him were all true.

But perhaps, in international relations, the question ought not to be—is someone a bad actor?; but rather—who, if anyone, has the right to punish them under conditions of international anarchy?

And to this question, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius had a clear answer. Let us end with his moral wisdom, as the perfect palate-cleanser to the counsel of the “murderous Machiavel” with which we began:

The Spring and Autumn Annals recognize no just wars. It is only a question of there being some wars that are better than others. “Correction” is only when someone in authority punishes those who are subject to their rule. It is not for peers to punish one another by war.