Is War Justifiable? | Melanie Phillips

[00:00:00]The Europeans, the British and the Europeans have this fatal liberal universalist mindset that there is no conflict which cannot and should not be solved by negotiated compromise.

[00:00:15]I've heard people say over and over again no problem was ever solved by war.

[00:00:24]What do they think was going on between 1939 and 1945?

[00:00:29]It is so ridiculous, but they're so they're so you know, bamboozled by this doctrine that the worst thing in the world is dead people and consequently we cannot cause dead people and we cannot cause people to die even if it's a just war to stop innocent people dying, we can't do that. We must cut short altogether this option of war and we must simply negotiate because everybody in the world is fundamentally open to appeals to their self-interest.

[00:01:07]You're dealing with religious apocalyptic messianic religious fanatics and you're supposed to they really believe that these people are open to appeals to their self-interest. So this is the arrogance of the West. This really is Western colonialism. Um it is cultural colonialism. It's this desire to to impose upon other cultures Western ideas and values and assumptions which are it's simply wrong. They don't have them. They operate by a completely different set of values and the West is so arrogant and so ignorant because of its arrogance that it never learns to approach other cultures on the basis on which they are operating. It insists instead on up on on on approaching them on the basis of the West.

[00:01:59]>> It's interesting, isn't it? I take your point that Europeans in particular think diplomacy can solve every problem.

[00:02:05]Uh and the Americans are not quite at that point. They plainly believe that the mistake they made in a way was thinking that bombing alone would do it.

[00:02:14]Bombing alone was never likely to do it.

[00:02:16]Unfortunately, if you're going to do something like that, you've got to be prepared to put people on the ground.

[00:02:21]>> Yes, that's right.

[00:02:22]>> And that's where it meets with the European. We won't put people's lives at risk.

[00:02:25]>> That's right. But this But they come They They arrive at the same position almost as Europe, but they start from a very different premise. Um it's not that they are liberal universalists who believe in negotiated compromise. Um although of course Democrats do. I mean, that's they're part of the same ideology. Uh it's more the you know, American isolationism.

[00:02:50]Uh they believe they are a world unto itself entire.

[00:02:54]And that um far away conflicts don't actually affect them until something directly impacts, for example, Pearl Harbor.

[00:03:06]Um they were very late coming into the Second World War. They only came in because of Pearl Harbor. Otherwise, they wouldn't have come in.

[00:03:13]Um First World War, other wars, they're very slow in coming forward um because they don't think it's anything to do with them.

[00:03:22]Um and that's just you know, that's that's part of how America is. And we can see now, you know, in the republic in in Republican circles, this isolationism has really come to the fore in a very, I think, a very unpleasant way.