Who Is My Neighbor? Ukraine, Just War, and the “Good Samaritan” Ethic

This month, we have arrived at the two-and-a-half-year mark of the war in Ukraine. Two and a half years of bombing, bloodshed, and attempted obliteration of this beleaguered people by Russian forces. Given the war’s duration, we in the West perhaps have taken Ukraine’s remarkably stubborn resistance to this unjust war for granted. Perhaps we have forgotten, if we ever did recognize, the war’s meaning and significance for the international order. But because the war is wholly unjust, and patently so in the light of the moral criteria of the “just war” tradition, it demands a response by nations that claim to care about human rights and human dignity.

Since the war’s beginning, the pattern of Western nations, inclusive of the U.S., has been characterized by two conspicuous elements: a “fear of escalation” and the slow-walking of aid and support to Ukraine. Absurdly, and as evidence of this “fear of escalation,” the United Kingdom and the United States imposed no-fly zones over Ukraine at the war’s beginning, even when offering military aid. And as of August 2024, the US is still placing restrictions on Ukraine in terms of weaponry that is being supplied. 

At bottom, there has been no resolve collectively among Ukraine’s allies to ensure that Ukraine wins. Would we, it is worth asking, respond differently and with greater resolve if Canada, Costa Rica, or Colombia needed defending from invasion by a rogue neighbor-state or superpower? And why?

Where the war is being covered in news and analysis, there is no mention whatsoever of the 1994 accord that in fact promised Ukraine security measures. I refer to the Budapest Memorandum (BM), signed by four nations: Russia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (France and China later extended security assurances to Ukraine but were not signatories to the BM.) At the time, Ukraine was home to the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal; as part of the BM accord, Ukraine agreed to relinquish this arsenal in exchange for its independence. The signatories agreed to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine” and to do so “in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.”

Disconcerting yet unavoidable questions confront us in the West, particularly the US and UK. Was the BM a mere political decision, to be discarded in time as it was by Russia in 2014? Was it a moral commitment? Was it both? Given the “sovereignty” and “territorial integrity” that the US promised to protect, what, if anything, has released us from this obligation? And how, then, do we as signers of this accord honor those commitments? Should we keep our word?

“Who Is My Neighbor?”

One approach to answering this question can be found in Jesus’s use of parabolic discourse, a technique common to “wisdom literature.” His use of this method is often intended to unsettle and challenge those in his audience. One such example merits our consideration. The simple question raised by a lawyer in dialogue with our Lord—“Who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10)—turns out to be somewhat haunting in character, given the need for its application in a real-world scenario. The expression of justice and mercy issuing from genuine religious conviction is not to be confined to ecclesiastical or religious circles, as this parable graphically demonstrates. It extends to the entire created order and those in our world who have been traumatized and stand in dire need. That, on occasion, will involve international relations and responsible foreign policy.

The parable differs in nature from, say, an allegory in that the details of the latter are thought to have spiritual meaning, whereas the parable is illustrative, mirroring everyday life and the real world of human interaction and human need. Thus, to allegorize the “Good Samaritan”—by which, for example, Jerusalem becomes paradise, Jericho is hell, the robbers are Satan, the inn is the church, and the Samaritan is Jesus—would be illegitimate. That is not what parables do; rather, they teach important lessons, and they do so in real-world terms. But as is so often the case with Jesus, they contain a twist, a barb, or a reversal, by which popular expectations are turned upside down and the listener is stunned. This is surely the case with the “Good Samaritan,” which impales the lawyer on his own hook.

The details of the parable, familiar to many, elicit a measure of intrigue. A certain person, identity unspecified, was “traveling down” from Jerusalem to Jericho. The language here is important: this is a stretch of road seventeen miles in length that descends from more than 2,500 feet, Jerusalem’s elevation, to below sea level, the location of Jericho. Because of topography and location, the road was well known to be dangerous, with gangs of thieves and murderers not infrequently hiding behind rocks and in caves. By Jesus’s day, this stretch of road had acquired a distinctive reputation—“the way of blood.” The traveler, we are told, fell among a gang of thieves who both assaulted and stripped him—a double indignity—and “left him for dead.”

Two fellow travelers, both of them religious officials, each in turn approach the victim but are unmoved by his suffering and trauma; they “pass on by.” A third individual, identified as a Samaritan, stops, doing everything he can for this half-dead individual. He brings him to the nearest inn, asking that the innkeeper attend to the victim’s needs, and promises to repay the innkeeper for his trouble. This is true charity and mercy.

Notice the reversal at work here in Jesus’s technique. The characters and their actions are inverted, so that the listener is shocked or at least caught off guard. Part of this inversion, of course, is to cast a Samaritan as the virtuous and compassionate “neighbor.” Though in fact “neighbors” geographically, Samaritans would not have been considered such by first-century Jews; tensions existed between the two groups for centuries due to ethnic-racial and political reasons. Hence, for Jesus to use a Samaritan as an ethical model would have been to some degree scandalous, as Jesus’s own encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4 indicates.

What makes the Samaritan “good”? Central to this goodness is how we might answer the question “Who is my neighbor?” Although the lawyer initially answers the question correctly, contemporary expectations and application need adjustment. Jesus commends the lawyer for summarizing the burden of moral law and our ethical obligations as expressed in the “Great Commandment”: love God and love your neighbor as yourself.

“As yourself,” of course, represents none other than the “Golden Rule.” Thus, in the case of an innocent third party being assaulted or molested, we respond through defense and protection, where possible. That is, we do not allow to be done to others what we ourselves would not want done to us ourselves, based on charity and justice. The “Golden Rule” or “Good Samaritan” ethic has obvious geopolitical ramifications for relatively free nations against the backdrop of socio-political evil. And as already noted, in our day the unjust invasion of Ukraine by a terrorist regime demands our response.

While not all matters of foreign policy involve agonizing over whether to engage in war or coercive intervention, these are nonetheless part of the tragedy of living in a fallen world. With the end of the Cold War, many in the West assumed that to wrestle with such tensions is unnecessary. But since the dissolution of the former Soviet Union, we are ill-prepared to deal with the need for military deterrence and, on sad occasion, military intervention. Failed states, terrorism, hatred of “Western hegemony,” and an increasingly aggressive posture toward the US and the West—notably from Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran—make it quite clear that we were naïve in our post–Cold War expectations. The Cold War never ended; it simply went underground, emerging in a new form with frightening potential.

A Discipline of Deliberation

At least in the broader Western cultural heritage, the just war tradition has been the chief moral grammar by which moral judgments concerning war and interventionary force have been shaped. Should we intervene? Why or why not? And how is a justly-ordered peace maintained? At its core, this tradition is a mode of statecraft that refuses to separate politics and ethics, power and morality. 

Nurtured primarily in the Christian moral tradition, just war thinking is anchored in neighbor-regarding love and embodies a moral realism that is ideologically distinct from the two polar opposites of militarism and pacifism. The tradition offers a “discipline of deliberation” that provides moral principle and wisdom where that wisdom is sought. It assists us in making sense of the ethics of war and peace.

At its base, just war thinking assumes a realism about human nature, acknowledging that both good and evil are part of the human condition. Responsible public policy takes this realism into account. In addition, it acknowledges that justice without force is a myth, since evil must be hindered so that human beings can flourish. As already suggested, just war moral reasoning refuses to pit charity and justice against one another, recognizing their fundamental unity. 

In this regard it is highly instructive that Thomas Aquinas treats the subject of war not under the heading of justice, as we might expect, but as part of his discussion of caritas, charity. St. Augustine agrees and for this reason speaks of the necessity of “benevolent harshness.” That is, coercive force—even lethal force—can express charity in several ways. At one level, it is charity toward the criminal or terrorist to stop or prevent him from doing evil; at another level, it is charity toward society, which has been victimized by evil and is watching; and at yet another level, it is charity toward potential criminals who might be prevented from doing evil in the future.

Most importantly, just war thinking recognizes that “peace” is not merely the absence of conflict. There is a peace that can be unjust, as the Mafia, drug cartels and terrorists remind us; hence, peace must be justly ordered. So, for example, were a so-called “peace” or ceasefire in Ukraine negotiated today, not only would it leave all the Ukrainian territory annexed by Russia since 2014 in Russian hands, it would doubtless not stop Vladimir Putin’s imperialist designs. The Russian dictator has frequently made public statements to the effect that Ukraine and other former Soviet-bloc nations need “returning” to “the Russian motherland.” In his 2005 state of the union address Putin publicly lamented the dissolution of the Soviet empire as a “genuine tragedy” and “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the [past] century.”

Following the breakup of the Soviet empire and coinciding with the 1994 bloodbath in Rwanda, during which in a matter of months between 750,000 and 1.25 million people were macheted or clubbed to death, political philosopher and author of Just and Unjust Wars Michael Walzer called into question the morality of non-intervention as fixed policy. Walzer insisted that simply ameliorating the effects of unjust aggression after the fact—for example, providing medical supplies, food, and shelter—was an insufficient response. Rather, he argued, when and where gross injustice is occurring—for example, genocide, crimes against humanity, and the subjugation (or extermination) of a people-group—human decency requires that nations having the capacity to prevent outrageous socio-political evil have a duty to do so and “alter power relations on the ground.”

A decade later, the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) concept was adopted unanimously by United Nations member states. At the UN’s 2005 World Summit, protection by the international community against four crimes, including collective military action, was declared necessary: genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity. Sadly, our contemporary geopolitical climate is such that, based on self-interest and a “fear of escalation,” nations tend to resist this duty. Thereby they mirror the two officials who “passed on by” rather than the “Good Samaritan” whose credo was to “love your neighbor as yourself.”

Who is our neighbor? It is absurd and hopelessly narrow-minded for democratic nations—and especially the US—to fear escalation in the face of socio-political tyranny, crimes against humanity, and state-sponsored terrorism as the Russian Federation has advanced in the last two and a half years. Such self-deterrence only makes the world safe for criminals; will we appease tyrants or resist and deter them? Isolationist folly must never cause us to abandon our moral obligations to the world and those in need. It is equally narrow-minded for us to be concerned solely with our own internal problems, as an increasing number of politicians in our day seem to be. The preservation of liberties at home in no way cancels the need for survival of human liberties abroad; the two are inextricably linked. Why was the “Good Samaritan” pronounced “good”? Because he was willing to be inconvenienced and act on the basis of moral principle and fundamental justice when confronted with critical human need. As the parable reminds us, it is even possible to marshal religious reasons for not intervening. But this is inexcusable. To whom much has been given, whether as individuals or as nations, much will be required. That is a law as sure as the law of gravity.

Our excuses or ignorance notwithstanding, global security in the present hour starts with Ukraine. For what occurs there will spill over into other regions of the world, notably in the Pacific and Middle East regions. Given the wholesale collapse of international law, rogue and terrorist regimes—which are taking notes on what happens in Ukraine—will annex territory as they please and do the unthinkable; nothing will be present to stop them, unless, of course, coalitions of nations have the moral backbone and will to stop them. While NATO members share responsibility for a response to Russian atrocity, the U.S. and United Kingdom, as noted, bear a special burden.

Is there risk or reward in unjust aggression?

Ukraine Is Our Neighbor

According to Ukrainian authorities, as of the beginning of the recently concluded Paris Olympics, some 487 Ukrainian athletes have been killed since the Russian invasion in 2022. It was in honor of these that Ukraine’s first medal winner, Olga Kharlan, in a torrent of tears, dedicated her bronze medal (women’s saber event).

Few of us can imagine what Ukrainian people have endured in the last two and a half years. Cities have been reduced to rubble. War crimes and atrocities have been perpetrated that exceed our imagination—including genocide, indiscriminate attacks on densely populated areas, summary executions, torture and ill treatment, rape and sexual violence (to victims of all ages), as well as deportation. Tens of thousands of soldiers have died, just as tens of thousands of civilians have been killed or wounded. Thousands of Ukrainian children have been deported and placed in Russian “reeducation” camps.

This is fully aside from the roughly one-third of Ukraine’s citizens who have been forced to flee their homes, as well as the tens of billions of dollars’ damage done to the nation’s civil and energy infrastructure, which includes the recent bombings of three hospitals—one of which, Kyiv’s Okhmatdyt Children’s Hospital, is the nation’s largest oncological facility, seeing some 18,000 children annually.

Ukraine is our “neighbor” in this hour of dire need, and for this reason global security begins with her. Two and a half years after formally invading Ukraine, Russia continues to terrorize, shocking the world; international law and global security appear to be dead. There has been no accountability for Russian crimes. Terrorism and atrocity must be seen for what they are, regardless of whether they are committed by non-state actors or by totalitarian regimes. Justice and charity compel us to act on behalf of the defenseless, if, that is, we consider ourselves to be a decent people.

The language of “as long as it takes” that frequently has been offered by Western leaders in support of Ukraine at best guarantees a “war of attrition.” But what is the result of such a war? It has only emboldened Vladimir Putin. As political scientist Jakob Grygiel has recently argued in the journal Foreign Affairs, time is not on Ukraine’s side. With a war of attrition, she will collapse and then be “returned to the Russian motherland,” as issues of manpower, civilian destruction, and economic realities indicate. At stake, quite simply, is whether another nation—any nation—is permitted to invade and with coercion claim another nation’s territory.

It is time—indeed, past time—to act decisively. Ukraine is our neighbor. Will Russia, with her imperial designs and commitment to do the unthinkable, be deterred? Are we in the West willing to confront sociopolitical evil? And do so in the name of justice, charity, and human dignity?

Image by Sofiia and licensed via Adobe Stock.