Judaism, Internationalism, and Leo Strauss

The brilliant and much-maligned political philosopher Leo Strauss has often been painted by his detractors as a reactionary warmonger. In a recent book, Robert Howse argues that in fact he espoused a firm belief in international law and cooperation. Furthermore, Howse contends, Strauss came to his position through introspection and the peculiarly Jewish process of teshuvah—repentance and return—in his case, for his youthful flirtation with the German right. Howse comes to these surprising conclusions in part through careful analysis of recently-published transcripts of Strauss’s classroom teaching. Steven B. Smith writes:

It is only in [his] seminars on [the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Hugo] Grotius and [Immanuel] Kant . . . that Strauss applied the insights gleaned from Thucydides to the revival of international law and just-war theory in the years after World War II. Strauss, we learn, was by no means opposed to a policy of enlightened internationalism. The very fact that he devoted an entire course to Grotius’s Rights of War and Peace is itself revealing. Here he found Grotius struggling with the same question that had occupied him since his early Weimar period, namely, how to fashion a political theory that threads the needle between sheer Machiavellianism and Kantian moralism. Accordingly, he finds in Grotius’s idea of a law of peoples, the ius gentium, a way to provide a ground for political ethics that is both rational and secular, and yet that recognizes the need for statesmanlike prudence and the ability to adapt to the needs of circumstance.

Read more at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

More about: Hugo Grotius, Immanuel Kant, International Law, Leo Strauss, Political philosophy, Repentance

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF