Not Humiliating Putin Is a Legitimate Objective, but Talking About It As Macron Did Is a Mistake

This must remain secret and not be said publicly.

In early June 2022, Emmanuel Macron signed a statement saying that “Vladimir Putin should not be humiliated”. This may seem strange in wartime. When Hitler invaded Poland in a very similar way, would a head of state have been concerned not to humiliate him? The European chancelleries would have deplored a guilty naivety.

When an aggressor attacks you (or is at your doorstep), one does not worry about the moods of one's ego: one strike (or in this case, one provides weapons to strike), and that's all. Ukraine reacted angrily to President Macron's statement, and the whole of Central Europe is laughing at what it considers to be French mumbo jumbo.

But this concern for the consideration of the adversary, “not to humiliate Putin”, is not the naivety of a rookie. It is rather the extreme moralization of a postmodernist, who has lost his bearings to the point of not knowing how to conduct his virtues.

An ethic of war was bequeathed to us by the Christian centuries, which understood that if war is inevitable because of the plurality of cultures, it can however be policed and controlled in its excesses. Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius conceptualized what Louis IX had instinctively tried to do in his time: war is sometimes necessary, but it must keep its strict objectives of protecting society, and not become personal revenge.

A ruler may be driven to kill and defeat for good reasons, but it would be immoral for him to enjoy revenge, exaggerate the means of crushing the enemy or humiliate him for pleasure. In other words: the enemy is a human being, too - he will not be called, as in totalitarian regimes, insect names or diseases, he will not be demeaned.

There are two distinct motives for these recommendations:

• The principle of human dignity, demands respect even for an enemy.

• And the desire not to increase the scale of the conflict, because a humiliated being becomes all the more aggressive.

Of course, the West is not alone in having enacted these common-sense principles - Chinese culture contains the same type of reflections on the conduct of war. We are here the heirs of the Christian virtues, and modern theorists of war, such as Carl Schmitt, take up the lessons of our Renaissance masters.

These lessons are still valid since they concern the simple knowledge of humanity: in the twentieth century, we know what the German humiliation cost the world. Some people think that Nazism did not teach us a lesson and that we humiliated the Russians after the fall of the Wall, adding ironic disdain to the magnitude of the defeat of communism - ideological, economic, and national defeat. Hence the legitimate concern of French President Emmanuel Macron.

However, if the virtues of magnanimity, respect, and justice can be applied to war, discernment is needed. It is not a question of replacing war with charity, which would be worse than anything else. We have here a complex situation, where two contradictory elements coexist: necessary violence and necessary respect.

The contemporary moment is eminently moral and even moralistic.

This is a coherent process: when religion disappears, it is replaced by a plenipotentiary morality, which both borrows from it and denatures it. Emmanuel Macron is a typical son of this time. He fervently takes up the old Christian morality - here that of war. And he does not see that virtue is of the occult kind, which advances without showing itself and fans itself in the open air. A virtue that shows itself immediately spoils, and every moral posture is a sham - let your right hand ignore what your left hand is doing. For it is the conscience that acts here, in the deepest sense, and not the application of a manual of manners.

Besides the fact that the exhibition of virtue is obscene, it is in this case counterproductive, and amply so. One immediately understands how humiliated Putin must be to hear it said on the air of the lanterns that one does not want to humiliate him! He must feel like that cripple who would be told in front of him that he should be left to eat alone so as not to humiliate him, or like that little thug who would be told in front of him: don't look him in the eye - he'll slit your throat.

Yes, to hear this, Putin must feel even more like the poor fellow that the West sees in him, a kind of bandit with vanity as his only baggage, whose murderous wrath is feared to excite. Chesterton said that our world is full of Christian virtues gone mad. And here we have a characteristic example.

Final Thoughts

The will not humiliate the enemy is an essential paragraph of the ethics of war, and it is one of those secret resolutions which a ruler must keep to himself, or speak of only in his private cabinet. Otherwise, he destroys the very thing he wanted to display.

The Christian virtues described by Chesterton have gone off their hinges, they are dancing a kind of grotesque bacchanal and showing themselves off in all directions, in time and out of time, producing the opposite effect of that intended. Our contemporary tends to see morality as an efficient communication product, serving as an ostensible asset to any ambitious person; whereas it is a humble secret aimed at making the world a better place.

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