Finland’s President Alexander Stubb says yes. History says no.
Stubb’s declaration in his recent UN speech – “War is always a failure of humanity” – sounds morally attractive, but it reduces a complicated world to something far too simple.
There will always be leaders and movements, both state and non-state, whose goals clash with Western liberal democracy. Not everyone wants freedom of speech, pluralism, and accountable government. Some prize obedience, purity, or domination. Treating all values as equal is a comforting myth. It is not a safe basis for policy.
History bears this out. Scarred by the Great War, European leaders bent over backwards to avoid another one. They misread Hitler and the grievances he harnessed. Neville Chamberlain scampered from pillar to post, waving treaties and proclamations, desperately seeking peace. His peace-seeking blinded him to Hitler’s true nature and ambitions. Appeasement did not prevent war; it guaranteed a worse one. The failure was not the decision to fight. It was the refusal to confront aggression when it could have been contained.
Sometimes refusing to act is the larger moral failure. Rwanda, 1994: more than 800,000 murdered in weeks. A minimal, timely intervention could have saved lives. That would not have required a grand war, only the will to stop mass killing. Calling all war a failure can, in practice, become an excuse to do nothing.
The nature of evil
Part of the problem is that we picture evil as obvious and theatrical. Often it is neither. Hannah Arendt called it the ‘banality of evil’: ordinary people doing ordinary jobs, paperwork weaponised, conformity rewarded, silence rationalised. Systemic evil advances in small increments until it is embedded and hard to uproot. In that context, clinging to peace at any price is not virtue. It is complicity.
Negotiation and moral suasion have limits. To those who worship power, dialogue sounds like weakness. When evil is organised and armed, sometimes only force, ugly and imperfect though it is, can halt it.
What’s worth defending
I do not think all value systems are morally equivalent. There is such a thing as good and evil, and I have made the judgment that Western liberal democratic values are better than many alternatives. They are imperfect, but better.
By that, I mean societies are better where people can speak without fear of prison. Where individuals move, work, and worship freely. Where governments answer to citizens and can be removed without bloodshed. Where minorities have rights even when unpopular. Where the rule of law binds the powerful as well as the powerless.
But this is not just about abstract freedoms. It is about what we reject. Liberal democracy rejects child marriage, which shackles young girls into lives of abuse and exploitation. It rejects ‘corrective rape,’ where sexual violence is used as a tool of punishment. It rejects female genital mutilation, which mutilates girls in the name of culture. It rejects caste systems that deny dignity to millions of people because of the family they were born into. It rejects practices like foot-binding that crippled generations of women for beauty’s sake, and witch burnings that turned fear into mass persecution. It rejects the eugenics programmes of the 20th century, where governments in the West sterilised the ‘unfit’, and the apartheid system that divided human beings into categories of worth.
These are not cultural quirks or neutral alternatives to Western democracy. They are cruelties. They are evil.
That does not mean the West has done everything right. It does mean that some systems, however flawed, are demonstrably better than those that normalise oppression and violence. If we are unwilling to admit that, then we lack the clarity to defend the very values we claim to stand for.
The cowardice of absolute pacifism
Here is the hard edge of my view: absolute pacifism is moral abdication. Refusing force in every circumstance keeps one’s hands clean while others pay the price. History shows evil does not stop because bystanders announce their peacefulness. At the extreme, pacifism shades into complicity. There is nothing noble about refusing to resist aggression. There is nothing virtuous about watching innocents being crushed and insisting that violence is never justified. Absolute pacifism is not higher morality. It is the quiet cruelty of indifference dressed as principle.
Finland’s own lesson
That is what makes President Stubb’s statement so striking. When he told the UN that ‘war is always a failure of humanity’, he evoked a moral ideal that resonates. But Finland’s own history complicates the claim.
In 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland in what became known as the Winter War. Outnumbered and outgunned, Finland fought with extraordinary resilience. Though it ultimately ceded territory, it preserved its independence and prevented full Soviet occupation.
Was that war a ‘failure of humanity’? Or was it the opposite: a desperate, courageous stand for survival and sovereignty against overwhelming force? For Finland, war was not a moral breakdown. It was the price of continuing to exist as a free nation.
That history should remind us that sometimes the most terrible choice is also the only honourable one. Without resistance, there would be no Finland today, no liberal democracy where a president can stand in New York and declare war a universal failure.
When war breeds more war
None of this romanticises war. Some conflicts are blunders of arrogance or miscalculation. The First World War shows how a local dispute can cascade into global slaughter, when leaders sleepwalk and alliances lock. In those cases, war is a failure of prudence, imagination, and statecraft.
And even justified wars can breed future conflict if victory is not followed by good policy. The 2003 invasion of Iraq succeeded quickly on the battlefield, then unravelled. There was no coherent postwar plan. The power vacuum fed insurgency and sectarian violence. War without state-building sows the next war.
The pacifist’s case and why it fails
There is, of course, a powerful argument against everything I have written. Pacifists will say that violence only breeds more violence, that war unleashes destruction far greater than the evil it claims to resist, and that nonviolent resistance has in some cases—India under Gandhi, the American civil rights movement—proved more enduring and transformative than armed struggle. They might also point out that Western liberal democracies, the very systems I praise, have waged unjust wars and committed atrocities of their own. If all that is true, who am I to claim that war is sometimes necessary?
These are serious points. But they do not erase the hard reality: that Gandhi could confront Britain because Britain, however flawed, still retained a conscience. Hitler had none. Martin Luther King could appeal to the American Constitution because it was there to be appealed to. The Hutu militias in Rwanda had no such check. The lesson is not that non-violence never works, but that it only works against adversaries who can be shamed. When faced with enemies who cannot be moved by shame, words alone are not enough.
It is also true that war often unleashes horrors far beyond the battlefield. Civilians suffer disproportionately. Whole societies are destabilised for generations. And Western powers are not innocent: Vietnam, Iraq, and colonial wars show how democracies too can abuse their strength and act unjustly. Acknowledging this is vital. But the existence of bad wars does not erase the necessity of just ones. The fact that some leaders wage reckless wars does not mean all wars are equally reckless. The challenge is not to abolish war in principle, but to recognise when its costs, however high, are less than the costs of doing nothing.
The hard truth
War is tragic and costly. But calling all war a failure is a retreat from moral discrimination. Sometimes war is not humanity at its worst, but humanity refusing to yield to its worst elements. Sometimes it is resistance, the last narrow space in which justice can still be defended.
Peace is not the natural state of human affairs. It must be built and defended. Those who see peace as a chance to prey upon the weak will keep testing the line. We should also admit that, in a world where evil is real and often banal, the refusal to fight can be the greater sin.
[Image: British Library on Unsplash]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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