Ukraine and a peace worthy of the name

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Pope Leo XIV’s spiritual lodestar is St. Augustine. In his first months in office, the Holy Father summoned the Church to pray, fast, and work for an end to the 21^st century’s wars. That spiritual orientation and that summons invite us to consider what “peace” is possible in this world. 

In his masterpiece, The City of God, the great Augustine defined “peace” as tranquillitas ordinis, the “tranquility of order.” This is not the peace of Isaiah 11:6, in which predators and prey co-exist (think of Edward Hicks’ sixty-two “Peaceable Kingdom” paintings). That, the Bishop of Hippo knew, is the “peace” of the Kingdom of God, in the time beyond time when the redemption wrought by Christ will be completed and God will be “all in all” (1 Corinthians 15:28). Nor is it the “peace” that Christians wish each other before approaching the Lord’s table, which is the “peace” of communion with Christ the Lord and, through him, with each other. 

The peace of “order” is a more modest thing. The peace of order is built from just political and legal structures through which peoples can live in security and freedom. Conflicts continue, but conflicts are adjudicated and resolved by law and politics, not by mass violence. This is the “peace” that exists within properly functioning cities, states, and countries. Building a similar peace in world affairs is a more difficult task. But it is not impossible, at least in pieces: the example of the 21^st-century peace that exists between France and Germany after two catastrophically destructive 20^th-century wars (and centuries of bloodletting before that) is worth considering.   

What does this Augustinian approach to war and peace suggest about peace in Ukraine?

A historical vignette, possibly apocryphal, helps sharpen that reflection.

In the first volume of The Second World War, Winston Churchill quotes Marshal Ferdinand Foch, commander of the victorious Allied armies in World War I, on the Versailles Peace Treaty: “This is not peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.” Whether Foch actually said that is irrelevant. The point is that “peace” is not merely the cessation of hostilities, important as that can be as a step toward a just future. For unless a halt in the killing is followed by adequate measures to build the peace of order, there will be neither security nor freedom, only a temporary pause before the killing begins again. 

Recognizing that brings us to the nub of the problem of peace in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin is determined to dominate Ukraine, or even better, eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation; Ukraine refuses to be dominated or eliminated. Putin has long said that there can be no peace between Russia and Ukraine without a resolution of the root cause of the war — a theme he repeated during his meeting with President Trump in Alaska. That is true. The brute fact, though, is that Putin himself is the root cause of the war. What is going on right now in Ukraine — the ongoing slaughter of the innocents described poignantly by Archbishop Borys Gudziak during an August 19 visit to Kharkiv — is not “Joe Biden’s stupid war.” It is Vladimir Putin’s imperialist war. That basic reality must be recognized, and addressed, if there is to be true peace in and for Ukraine. Otherwise, there can only be a truce, likely more fragile than the “armistice” concocted at Versailles in 1919-20. 

Building the peace of order in these circumstances thus requires measures beyond deal-making that ends the fighting. An Augustinian peace requires a security architecture that precludes a future Russian invasion of Ukraine. That will be primarily the responsibility of European states, not least those who would be next on the menu, should Putin succeed in dominating or eliminating a sovereign Ukraine. American support for that security system will be essential. The nature of the support can be debated, but it is past time to remove from that discussion the Putin apologists and neo-isolationists.

Security is not all that is owed Ukraine. In the commentary surrounding the Alaska and Washington summits — and did the luncheon menu in Alaska really have to say that the meal was “in honor of” a war criminal? — I haven’t heard a word about rebuilding Ukraine after the devastation Russia has wrought on that bleeding country’s infrastructure these past three years. In February, the World Bank estimated that such reconstruction would cost $524 billion over the next decade. There are now some $300 billion in frozen Russian foreign exchange reserves in Europe. Will those funds be part of any peace negotiation?

A truly artful — and just — deal would at least put those funds into play.