George Weigel has produced yet another outstanding defense of just war in this month’s First Things.

Kaplan notwithstanding, we can get to an ethic appropriate for leadership in world politics without declaring ourselves “pagans.” And, as Brian Anderson has argued in a thoughtful review of Kaplan’s book in National Review, we can get there while retaining “a crucial place for a transcendent ought that limits the evil governments can do.” An ethic for world politics can be built against an ampler moral horizon than Kaplan suggests.

As a tradition of statecraft, the just war argument recognizes that there are circumstances in which the first and most urgent obligation in the face of evil is to stop it. Which means that there are times when waging war is morally necessary to defend the innocent and to promote the minimum conditions of international order. This, I suggest, is one of those times. Grasping that does not require us to be “pagans.” It only requires us to be morally serious and politically responsible. Moral seriousness and political responsibility require us to make the effort to “connect the dots” between means and ends.