Retaliation “Many Times Over” Is Not a Lawful Power

I begin where your news begins: with the names of the dead. A young woman of nineteen, a young man of twenty‑five, sent by their country to a base in Jordan, killed by an Iranian strike; another American service member killed when dealing with an Iranian drone. In answer, explosions now reported near Tabriz and other ports in Iran, one person there killed and more wounded. And over this, the voice of the chief magistrate of the United States vowing that every time Iran kills an American soldier, it “will pay for that killing many times over.” The world is thus invited to watch not only a war of arms, but a claim of power.

When I wrote the *Second Treatise of Government*, I defined political power, in paraphrase, as a right to make laws with penalties for the regulating and preserving of property—that is, men’s lives, liberties, and estates—for the public good. This definition is not a flourish; it is a chain on power. If an act of state violence cannot be sincerely brought under that description, it is not an exercise of political power at all, but only force. The lives of the slain soldiers are property in the highest sense. Their country owes them protection and, when injured, proportionate vindication. But whether a long train of night‑time strikes and open threats of making another nation “pay…many times over” is such a vindication must be proved, not presumed.

Men are by nature free, equal, and independent; no one is born with a saddle on his back, nor another booted and spurred to ride him. From this it follows that the burden of proof sits always upon rule, not upon liberty. The government of the United States may indeed possess, by consent of its people, a power to employ soldiers abroad and to strike those who attack them. Yet consent is not a noise that, once made, sounds forever in the air. It must be shown, in each kind of measure, that free people could reasonably will such a power for the preservation of all, and that the particular use of it is no more than that trust allows.

Here I note how little the public is plainly told. You hear of “ten consecutive nights of attacks,” of strikes meant to “further degrade” Iran’s capabilities against ships in the Strait of Hormuz, of explosions in several Iranian cities, and of the president’s vow of multiplied vengeance. You are not told, at least in what lies before me, what standing law authorises these particular blows, what limits bind them, what impartial judgment has weighed their necessity and proportionality, or how their dangers, including to innocents in Iran, have been laid before the people. Where such reasons are obscure, prerogative grows in the dark.

In that same *Treatise* I allowed that in sudden emergencies a ruler might act without, or even against, the letter of the law, where rigid forms would cost the commonwealth itself. I called this prerogative, and I made it clear that it is power held only on trust, revocable the moment it ceases visibly to serve the public good. A promise to retaliate “many times over” for each loss does not sound like a sober appeal to emergency necessity; it sounds like a standing licence to escalate according to passion or honour. Such language, if allowed to guide the sword, turns the magistrate into a judge in his own case, and other peoples into mere instruments for easing his anger.

One might object: are not the Iranians first aggressors here, having killed soldiers at their base? Does not the law of nature, which forbids one man to harm another in his life or possessions, also allow punishment of the offender to prevent further harm? I grant the point in its place. But punishment, to be rightful, must yet be governed—first, by a known rule; secondly, by a settled judge; and thirdly, by a sincere aim at the future safety of those under the law. When neither side acknowledges a common judge, nations stand, as I once said of princes, in a state of nature one toward another. In that state, the only thing that distinguishes just defence from naked revenge is reason’s curb: a care to do no more than what is needed for security.

The question I would press upon the American people is therefore not whether they grieve, nor whether they may defend their soldiers and trade, for they may. It is whether they are content to entrust to one office a roving power to strike abroad, night after night, under a general promise of making others “pay…many times over,” without clear measure, law, or open accounting. If they suffer such prerogative to harden into custom, they should not be surprised one day to find the same arbitrary spirit turned inward. The dissolution of a government, I once argued, is not the dissolution of society; a people may replace a broken legislative without falling into chaos. That truth ought to steady their hands now, as they judge how far they will let fear of enemies excuse a silent accretion of absolute power at home.

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