The war on fishing
The Guardian has the latest on the Ecuadorians who say they were bombed and kidnapped by the U.S. military in March of this year.
(I’ve bolded some phrases in this entry’s quotes.)
Not an isolated case, unfortunately. It appears to have belonged to “the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear campaign,”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Those who know something of just war theory – and, in particular, of Michael Walzer’s influential 1977 book Just and Unjust Wars (which I read some twenty years ago) – may be interested in this New Yorker piece:
The New Yorker writer summarizes Just and Unjust Wars:
Walzer’s “change of mind” is described in these passages:
Well, maybe that’s the best any theorist could do; maybe life just is messy. But the problem with embracing indefiniteness in justifying war is that it’s hard to square with accepting definite constraints outside of war. In the domestic sphere, extrajudicial execution and detainment are held to be absolute no-nos, even when the subject is guilty. There are good reasons why, in theory at least, countries don’t allow themselves to kill or detain their own fishermen, or to wreck their fishermen’s property, until certain procedural standards are met – even when the cause is supremely just, even when fishermen do, in fact, traffic drugs, commit serial murder, or whatever (which, we all know, usually, they don’t). Agents and initiatives that run afoul of accepted standards are decomissioned, punished, and/or made to perform restitution. The challenge for the war apologist is to say why it should matter whose country the fishermen belong to.
(I’ve bolded some phrases in this entry’s quotes.)
Not an isolated case, unfortunately. It appears to have belonged to “the Trump administration’s Operation Southern Spear campaign,”
announced in November 2025 ostensibly to counter “narco-terrorists” it said operated in the Caribbean and Pacific.I hope so, too.
The Washington office on Latin America (Wola) said as many as 250 people have been killed by the US military in [attacks since the fall of 2025; the Guardian’s timeline is not as clear as one would like]. The group considers the actions extrajudicial executions because the government has provided no proof that the victims were engaged in trafficking. …
“Some of the Democrats that we met with are very interested in doing hearings on these boat strikes,” [the fishermen’s U.S.-based attorney] said.
“We hope this case will encourage the Democrats when they get sworn in in January to start some hearings. I think it will have that impact.”
♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦
Those who know something of just war theory – and, in particular, of Michael Walzer’s influential 1977 book Just and Unjust Wars (which I read some twenty years ago) – may be interested in this New Yorker piece:
The New Yorker writer summarizes Just and Unjust Wars:
The book’s fundamental precepts are not complicated. It is just to defend your country from an invasion and it is unjust to invade a country that has not attacked you – although Walzer does allow for exceptions, mostly for humanitarian causes. It is just to assume certain risks to avoid civilian casualties and it is unjust to bomb towns indiscriminately to compel an enemy to surrender. The justice of going to war – what philosophers call jus ad bellum – is separate from jus in bello, the justice of how a war is fought. Soldiers on either side of a war have the same rights and the same obligations, regardless of which side is more broadly in the right.There are several important points here, but the one to keep in mind is this. Atrocious conduct in warring – looting, raping, hauling civilians off to other lands, indiscriminately bombing townspeople (or fishermen!), etc. – is wrong but doesn’t make going to war wrong. This is important for just war theorists because if atrocious conduct could make warring wrong, full stop, it’d seem that virtually every modern war should be counted as wrong, full stop. By that criterion, the Union’s war against the Confederacy was wrong, the Allies’ war against Nazi Germany was wrong, and so on.
Walzer’s “change of mind” is described in these passages:
In October [of 2026], I called Walzer again. … It was plain to him now that the Israeli government intended to occupy Gaza the way it has occupied the West Bank. “So I could say the war became unjust when it became clear that the end of the Israeli government was unjust,” he mused. Then he paused. “I don’t want to take that as a way out. I do think that the commitment to the siege was an act that was clearly unjust by in bello terms – and I think it required an opposition to the war itself, not just to the conduct of the war.” He offered a wry smile. “I’m not sure, at age ninety, that I’m going to rewrite the theory. But if I write on this issue, I’ll have to express that anxiety – that gross misconduct, war crimes, could reach a point where we are obligated to oppose the war itself.” …So, now, the theorist has retreated to an “unspecified threshold” position of the sort that just war thinking tries not to fall back on. One of the traditional aims of just war thinking is to set clear-ish limits on warring, in terms of kind rather than degree of harming (because people are tempted to judge the harming they do – or want to do – with dangerous laxity when it’s a mere matter of degree, but they judge with salutary strictness when the harming falls under an identifiable category, e.g. “killing noncombatants” or “kidnapping noncombatants”). Walzer’s new position is too close to just saying that warring is too harmful to do when doing it is too harmful, which is true but uninformative. (How many Dresdens would have been too many for the Allies’ war to have been wrong, full stop? The tidiest answer is the categorical answer, one; the choice between two and three, or between three and four, etc., seems arbitrary.)
The wall between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, which had sustained his theory for almost half a century, was no longer sturdy. Walzer thought the matter through aloud with me, at one point letting out a small chuckle at his intellectual perplexity. A few minutes later, he looked down, … speaking with resignation. “There is a sense in which the carnage of Gaza, the ongoing carnage, simply made the war unjust,” he said. “Did the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? I thought they were violations of jus in bello, but you could say they made the war unjust. It went beyond a war crime. I don’t know how to explain it.”
I suggested an analogy with what, in his earlier work, he calls supreme emergencies: moments when you must do whatever it takes to preserve the “ongoingness” of your community. In those cases, your cause is so just that you are warranted to be immoral in protecting it. Perhaps, I said, on the other end of the spectrum, if your way of fighting surpasses the threshold of extreme carnage, the justice of your cause vanishes. “That sounds right to me. That sounds very good,” Walzer replied. “Most wars don’t reach anything like the carnage of Gaza,” he added. “Even the firebombings of German cities, which I thought was a war crime, I wonder – if it had gone on and on, if there had been five Dresdens, would that have made me think, No, this isn’t right anymore?”
Well, maybe that’s the best any theorist could do; maybe life just is messy. But the problem with embracing indefiniteness in justifying war is that it’s hard to square with accepting definite constraints outside of war. In the domestic sphere, extrajudicial execution and detainment are held to be absolute no-nos, even when the subject is guilty. There are good reasons why, in theory at least, countries don’t allow themselves to kill or detain their own fishermen, or to wreck their fishermen’s property, until certain procedural standards are met – even when the cause is supremely just, even when fishermen do, in fact, traffic drugs, commit serial murder, or whatever (which, we all know, usually, they don’t). Agents and initiatives that run afoul of accepted standards are decomissioned, punished, and/or made to perform restitution. The challenge for the war apologist is to say why it should matter whose country the fishermen belong to.
