Drone War Without Consent

While two American envoys ride the rails into Kyiv after three hours of closed talks in Moscow, drones and small missiles cross the night air in far greater numbers. We are told that one side launched 108 long‑range drones and missiles, of which 82 were brought down; the other claims to have destroyed 258 incoming drones over its own regions and occupied territories. In the midst of this exchange, at least two persons are reported killed and others grievously wounded, on both sides of the border. Thus the stage is set: men sitting in guarded rooms to discuss peace, while in the dark outside machines range abroad to deal death at a distance.

When I wrote that to understand political power aright we must first consider men in the state of nature, I meant a simple thing: that every man, as the workmanship of one Maker, is by nature free, equal, and independent, owing no obedience to another’s will save what he can reasonably consent to for the preservation of his life, liberty, and estate. Reason, which is the law of nature, teaches that no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. This is the measure by which all later contrivances of government, technology, and war must be tried. If they do better in preserving that property, they may be justified; if they do worse, they stand condemned.

It will be said that war is a different state, that once one party has invaded another, ordinary restraints fall away. I grant that he who uses force without right against another, whether by soldier or drone, puts himself into a state of war with him, and the injured party may use proportionate force to resist and repair the wrong. But even war is not a license to treat all men in the enemy’s territory as if they had forfeited their rights. The innocent peasant, the child asleep, the woman travelling in a car that happens to be struck by a drone, have not by any act of theirs consented to be targets. To harm them knowingly, or with reckless indifference, is not an act of public justice; it is a violation of the very law that first gave rise to the right of resistance.

Here the peculiarity of these flying engines sharpens the danger. They allow those who command them to project death far from any field of battle, at the push of a button, often without so much as seeing the faces of those who fall. This greatly increases the power of rulers and commanders, but it does not enlarge their right. Political power, as I argued in the Second Treatise, is only a right to make laws and employ force for the public good of the people who consented to it. When such power is turned to actions that a free and equal man could never reasonably entrust to another—indiscriminate or grossly disproportionate attacks, where the death of innocents is no accident but a predictable cost—it ceases to be the exercise of government and degenerates into mere force.

I am not present to weigh particular targets, nor do the reports lay out each intended aim of the 108 drones on the one side and the 258 on the other. The facts given us are thin: a headquarters struck, regions named, numbers of machines intercepted, a few deaths and injuries spoken of amidst a much larger, unstated peril. This very obscurity should trouble any friend of liberty. Those subject to force are entitled not merely to be told that their rulers act for a “comprehensive assessment” of the battlefield, or for “tangible advances,” but to know the rule by which danger is apportioned and the judge before whom injuries may be heard. Where life and limb depend on decisions taken in secret, by those who are judges in their own case, we are very near the arbitrary power that is worse than the state of nature it pretends to cure.

Some will answer that in such a conflict rulers must be left a wide prerogative: a power to act for the public good without, and sometimes against, standing rules. I have allowed such prerogative where the public safety plainly requires quick action and where that power remains answerable to the people who lent it. But prerogative is a trust, not an estate in fee simple. The moment emergency powers in war harden into a settled claim to strike whomever, wherever, and however the executive judges convenient, with no effective inquiry into civilian harm and no clear prospect of peace, that moment prerogative turns into usurpation. A long train of abuses in this kind does not strengthen a title; it silently cancels it.

Against this backdrop, the appearance of envoys seeking to “restart stalled peace negotiations” takes on its proper character. If these meetings in Moscow and Kyiv are truly directed to ending attacks that now imperil the innocent on both sides, they answer to the very end for which men left the state of nature and set up common governments: the secure enjoyment of their lives, liberties, and estates under a known law and an impartial judge. If instead such talks become a mere cloak for securing advantage while the drones fly on, they will be yet another instance of using the language of peace to prolong a state of war. Which of these they shall prove to be we cannot yet know, but the people who suffer under those night skies have a right to demand the former, and not be fobbed off with the latter.

uncertainty_note":"I write without access to the full conduct and purposes of the belligerents or the envoys, and so I judge only from the scant public reports, which may hide as much as they reveal about who is truly seeking peace and who clings to arbitrary power."}```}่อน