American hegemony and ethics of war after 9/11: A critical approach to revisionist views

The “just war” doctrine posits that wars must be morally justified. It provides conditions that must be satisfied for a war to be justly waged and justly conducted. The doctrine’s core principles are embodied in modern international law, which has imposed a legal restraint on the use of force by even the most powerful. However, since the September 11th attacks, there has been a concerted effort among some American policymakers to reinterpret the doctrine to justify the War on Terror. Their revisions to the classic doctrine alter the nature and the scope of rules on self-defence, humanitarian interventions as well as war crimes. The paper exposes and critically analyses the revisionist arguments to show the underlying US-centred unilateralism and exceptionalism. The success of such arguments reveals how the US hegemony has extended to the global ethics on war and how it may effectively obliterate the rights-based moral constraint that the just war theory intended to provide.