Trae (Trey) Stephens

And there are all sorts of principles around this.

There's a principle of just cause, like do we have the information that we need to make a decision, a righteous decision about whether or not we're going to go and engage in violent conflict.

There's the principle of discrimination.

If you're going to do it, are you going to do it in a way that is highly discriminant, that you're attacking the right players, the combatants, rather than innocent life?

You have the principle of proportionality.

Are you responding in turn to a conflict, or are you going way overboard and increasing the stakes and the level of violence by your counter response?

Anyway, there's all of these principles that St.

Augustine laid out.

thousands of years ago.

And the way that that kind of applies to modern day is really interesting.

So if you think about the way that conflict, violence has emerged over the course of human society, you know, it started, you know, we're hitting each other with like rocks and things like that, you know, the Cain and Abel story.

And then we figured out bow and arrows and swords.

And eventually we got into catapults and trebuchets and, you know, the advent of gunpowder.

You know, we're just climbing the curve of the amount of destruction a single individual is able to inflict on another party or another set of parties.

That kept going up that curve, up and up and up until the atom bomb.

And that was kind of the moment where, you know, humanity, we looked at ourselves in the mirror and we said,

This can't go on.

We can't just become ever more destructive.

And the Cold War was really the story of humanity figuring out how to de-escalate that level of violence.

And so during the Cold War, you see things like precision-guided munitions.