Earlier this year, Pope Francis took the bait from a Swiss journalist and mused publicly about whether Ukraine should raise a white flag and offer to negotiate with Russia. Asked if calling for surrender would “legitimize the stronger party,” Francis replied: “I believe that the stronger one is the one who sees the situation, who thinks of the people, who has the courage of the white flag, to negotiate.” Misunderstandings, along a number of different lines, were inevitable.
One misunderstanding of the pope’s words was that raising a white flag simply means surrender. No. A white flag is a call for a parley under the protection of the norms of battlefield behavior, which were once chivalric and are now diplomatic. During the parley, some kind of surrender may have to be on the table, but the very purpose of negotiations is to ensure that it is not an “unconditional” surrender but an “honorable” one, with conditions attached that allow the surrendering force to avoid utter humiliation.
Another pervasive misunderstanding is that those who fight for a just and honorable cause betray that cause if they even consider the possibility of surrender—of any kind. That may be the case in a holy war. If a cause is so “just” as to seem holy, all other moral considerations—including every requirement for waging war lawfully, proportionately, and discriminatingly—fall aside. “You gotta do what you gotta do” and win at all costs, or die trying. Having thankfully distanced itself from the Crusades, the Catholic Church now officially condemns such vicious and indiscriminate warfare. In contrast with holy war, the Catholic just-war tradition emphasizes self-restraint, even in the defense of a very just cause.
But perhaps the deepest source of misunderstanding arising from the pope’s remarks came from just-war thinkers themselves. Many have shown a reluctance to recognize just how much just-war theory actually demands of them. As I’ll try to show, just-war theory means that surrender can never be off the table—not despite the justice of one’s cause, but because of it.
Following Pope Francis’s reference to a white flag, the Vatican moved quickly to clarify that Francis was not asking Ukraine to surrender, but only to consider a parley, aided by Western powers or perhaps the Holy See itself. Given that the pope’s interviews can sometimes be too freewheeling, some measure of damage control was politically astute. Still, within hours, Ukrainian officials were countering that even to contemplate negotiation with the Russians was to offer surrender. “Ukrainians cannot surrender because surrender means death,” said the Permanent Synod of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church in a statement responding to the pope. “In Putin’s mind, there is no such thing as Ukraine, Ukrainian history, language, and independent Ukrainian church life.... Recent history has demonstrated that with Putin there will be no true negotiations.”
It is impossible to know the mind of Putin, the cagey former KGB officer, but Pope Francis has not given up on the path of negotiation—and, really, cannot. “A negotiated peace,” Francis told CBS’s Norah O’Donnell in an interview for 60 Minutes that aired in May, “is always better than endless war.” The pontiff’s confidence in just-war theory has been tenuous in recent years, yet that statement reflected a lingering willingness to use its principle of proportionality to ask hard questions—what should be obvious questions—about the wisdom of waging a war.
To be clear, my purpose here is not to counsel Ukrainians on whether, or eventually how, to negotiate. Though I count myself among antiwar activists, I am not on the ground doing actual peacebuilding work. That would require listening closely to the pain, trauma, guiding narratives, and underlying interests of all parties, but especially those of the more vulnerable—clearly the Ukrainians in this case. Even if negotiations were on the horizon, gratuitous advice and cheap commentary from afar is not my job.
My point, rather, is to show what a serious—potentially vitiating—problem the very concept of surrender poses to the just-war tradition. The fact that it is difficult to even mouth the word “surrender” and be understood illustrates the problem. In the long run, for the tradition to claim utility it will need more, not less, discussion of the possibility of honorable surrender. Astute critics and even a few honest proponents of just-war theory have said this for decades: just war can claim to work only if it includes a much clearer, tighter, accountable, and obligatory casuistry of surrender.
When John Howard Yoder, a Mennonite theologian and a leading voice for Christian pacifism in the second half of the twentieth century, wrote a 1986 article with the blunt title “Surrender: A Moral Imperative,” he did not cite other pacifists or, in this case, even the teachings of Jesus. He cited the two most influential just-war thinkers of the time: John Courtney Murray, SJ, “the most qualified Roman Catholic authority in America in his generation dealing theologically with the political order,” and Paul Ramsey, “without contest the preeminent American Protestant author in the field.” Indeed, as Yoder noted, Murray himself had quoted “the greatest theorist of war in modern times, von Clausewitz,” who had written that “[w]e must…familiarize ourselves with the thought of an honorable defeat.”
The immediate context for Murray’s and Ramsey’s interventions was the Cold War nuclear standoff. The use of nuclear weapons, they determined, would inevitably escalate and lead to planetary destruction completely out of proportion with any good one could imagine protecting. Even before nuclear weaponry, obliteration bombing during World War II had prompted moral theologian John C. Ford, SJ, to document a “direct intent to do...injury” to innocents on the part of the Allies, and to warn that “[e]ven if this were not true, it would still be immoral, because no proportionate cause could justify the evil done; and to make it legitimate would soon lead the world to the immoral barbarity of total war.”
The problem for just-war theory as a whole is this: one is hard-pressed to find in any standard list of just-war criteria a required mechanism for backing down before committing illicit and unjust acts like these. If Murray, Ramsey, and Ford are right, parties contemplating a just war will have to define a point at which they will be willing to lay down their arms rather than employ unjust tactics. Even before they ramp up for war, they must plan an off-ramp they will take if a just path to victory proves unavailable. Michael Walzer, the well-known just-war theorist and author of the oft-assigned book Just and Unjust Wars, has muddied the waters on this point. He proposes that in a “supreme emergency” in which the state faces an “existential threat,” otherwise morally unthinkable actions like the targeting of civilians might be justified.
This issue is at the heart of Yoder’s respectful probing. In the very subtitle of his book When War Is Unjust, he implicitly asked his colleagues if they really were “being honest in just-war thinking.” Does the tradition really offer the “teeth” its practitioners need to restrain their own side and call policymakers to account? His own thesis: “If the only way not to lose a war is to commit a war crime, then it is morally right to lose that war.”
But this shouldn’t just be a thesis just for Christian pacifists like Yoder. It is merely Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative adapted for the context of just-war thinking. If you are unwilling to refrain from immoral or unjust actions that are beneficial to your cause, then don’t kid yourself—you are working in the holy-war tradition after all. All bets are off as to the justice of your war. If you do hope to claim the mantle of just self-defense, you had better be looking a lot harder to find nonviolent alternatives, including investing in systems of civilian-based defense and launching, as Harvard’s Gene Sharp called it, a process of “transarmament.”
My point is by no means that Ukraine should surrender, but simply that dismissing the very possibility of conditional surrender is not compatible with serious just-war theory. To be sure, the Ukrainian situation raises relevant and illustrative questions of proportionality. Israel’s war in Gaza—and now Lebanon—raises similar questions, about both proportionality and indiscriminate tactics that disrespect noncombatant immunity.
Even while distancing themselves from calls for “surrender” in Ukraine, therefore, Vatican officials and Pope Francis himself have hinted at persistent questions: At what point does a danger of nuclear escalation by Russia become imminent and thus decisive? Could there come a point, short of that, when continuing the war would do more harm to the Ukrainian people than suing for peace? Pope Francis’s exhortations in favor of “negotiated peace” over “endless wars,” suggest that the Vatican’s clean-up of his injudicious reference to white flags has not dislodged a quite judicious weighing of these concerns.
Of course, the Russians almost certainly have a far greater moral obligation to render these questions moot by withdrawing from Ukrainian territory. But Russian culpability shouldn’t be relevant to just-war deliberation on the side of Ukraine or its allies. If just-war practitioners are being true to the theory’s best insights, their deliberations must always be about what “our side” does against aggressors. It is taken for granted that those aggressors on the “other side” are unjust—maybe extremely so. Why else would our side resist them? The question is how to resist them without effectively becoming them through our own injustice.
Beyond the kerfuffle over Pope Francis’s comments, there is a serious lesson that deserves to outlast the news cycle. Namely, if just-war thinkers and commentators really want to offer tools to vulnerable peoples in the face of unjust aggressors, they still have a long way to go. For if they are embarrassed to speak of self-restraint when it means parley or even surrender, maybe they should look elsewhere for a philosophical framework. It is one thing to say that it is not yet time to raise a white flag. It is quite another to feel ashamed even to keep a white flag in one’s knapsack.
