It was a visionary idea: by ceding some of their national sovereignty in a precisely defined era, pooling their resources and using them more efficiently (the reasoning went) war would become, in Schuman's words, "not only unthinkable but materially impossible".
It is a form of moral reasoning about war.
But much of my work over the last several years has led me to deep suspicion of its continued employment as the default paradigm for all Christian moral reasoning about war and peace.
By examining periodicals, editorials, sermons, and other historical documents, Stout illustrates how each side formed an ideology that justified its conduct and reasoning for war, even as the conflict grew bloodier and more gruesome.
We see him reasoning that the war in Vietnam is destroying the country it was supposed to save, and that the war has to end without American victory.
As a patriotic gesture, the American had stopped making sculpture from aluminium sheeting during the war, reasoning that it would be better used for bombers than for art.
In a divided 163-page ruling, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected Bahlul's constitutional challenge to his conviction for conspiracy under the laws of war, reasoning that Congress has authority to make the crime of conspiracy a punishable offense that can be tried in an American war tribunal.
Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick won the general non-fiction prize for his book Black Flags: The Rise of Isis, which shows how the flawed reasoning behind the Iraq war helped Isis grow.
The more governments that gather around America's tent, if not inside it, before a war (the reasoning goes), the less likely they will be to squabble over the rebuilding of Iraq afterwards.Until recently the council's formal blessing for, or even its mere acquiescence in, the use of force had seemed a fast-receding possibility.
This sort of reasoning "runs thro' politics, war, commerce, economy, and indeed mixes itself so entirely in human life, that 'tis impossible to act or subsist a moment without recourse to it" (T, 2.3.1.15/405).
