Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 46: Dirty work by proxy – The ethics of the Kanzler’s outsourced war

Across civilizations, ethics converge: Power without restraint is tyranny. The war on Iran is the latest proof.

The KGB was reputed to favor a characteristic test to take the measure of a man: Place him in a deliberately trying situation and observe how he responds. The premise was deceptively simple: Under acute pressure even a carefully composed façade would collapse, and true nature would stand revealed.

Mars as the ultimate stress tester

Mars is the sternest examiner of would-be statesmen. Although truth is famously said to be war’s first casualty, it nevertheless prevails in one decisive respect: It reveals character.

The crucible of conflict does not merely test armies or strategies; it strips away pretenses, laying bare the moral fiber, intellectual judgment, and trustworthiness of those who claim the mantle of leadership. The recent war statements by German Chancellor Friedrich Merz are instructive.

On the tenth day of the Israeli-American war of choice against Iran, Merz called the Islamic Republic the “center of international terrorism” and demanded that it be “shut down,” adding that Americans and Israelis were “doing that in their own way.”

He insisted the war would end the moment the “mullah regime” stopped, placing sole responsibility on Iran to halt the fighting; otherwise, the US and Israel would continue their “defense.” Earlier, he had remarked that Israel was doing the world’s “dirty work.”

Beyond questions of logic, Merz’s war rhetoric invites scrutiny from two perspectives: moral philosophy and political rhetoric. From the standpoint of ethics, the chancellor’s remarks raise fundamental questions about responsibility for war, its justification, and the normalization of violence.

Aristotle on practical wisdom

Long before the advent of digital media, philosophers warned against precisely the kind of simplification that today defines “viral geopolitics”: the compression of intricate international realities into emotionally resonant, morally polarizing, and memetically transmissible slogans, algorithmically optimized for speed and scandal rather than reflection and comprehension.

In Aristotle’s virtue ethics, sound judgment requires practical wisdom (phronesis). The Greek philosopher defines this intellectual excellence as a truth-attaining, reason-guided disposition intrinsically oriented toward action concerning the particular goods and harms of human beings. Although the concept may sound abstract, it yields simple and highly practical insights.

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In plain terms, such prudence is the stable capacity to deliberate well about what is good or harmful for human life in particular situations. In short, phronesis arises from the truthful union of reason and character in action. Crucially, a decision-maker must be able to discern “good ends” and the best means of achieving them.

Such ethical judgment concerns not abstract ideals but particular goods and concrete situations, which become intelligible only through experience – something no theory or slogan can ever substitute for. Context-sensitivity requires profound moral insight, the ability to apprehend the full complexity of circumstances, and the capacity to anticipate unintended consequences.

For Aristotle, practical wisdom constitutes the virtue of the ruler. He thus effectively identifies statesmanship with practical wisdom applied to the affairs of the polis. Political judgment, then, is essentially a particular form of phronesis. Governing well, for Stagirite, is not a matter of technique but of judging how to act in complex human affairs. Because phronesis guides decisions about human flourishing in concrete situations, Aristotle treats this disposition as the central quality of statesmanship.

To bring utter ruin upon a nation that bears an ancient civilization such as Iran, in systematic fashion and on false pretexts, in service of the imperial ambitions of the region’s most destabilizing and only nuclear power, Israel – the Jewish state that exerts outsized influence over Germany and unduly constrains its national freedom and development – is a moral transgression of the highest order. Judged by the standards of Aristotelian ethics, such a course can scarcely qualify as the prudent pursuit of a “good end.”

Merz’s complicity and instrumental role in an information war that underwrites and propels a policy of annihilation exposes a marked deficiency in phronesis. This is especially true from the standpoint of a German chancellor who, in endorsing such a course on behalf of Israel, compromises the interests of his own nation. Given Aristotle’s contention that experience is indispensable for developing practical wisdom, this shortcoming may plausibly be attributed to his limited leadership record.

It is a simplistic assumption that blaming a single foreign government for a complicated geopolitical conflict and eliminating that government will resolve the problem. It betrays, yet again, an evident want of practical wisdom, as it reflects a failure to deliberate soundly about appropriate means.

From an Aristotelian ethical perspective, “moral outsourcing,” a form of strategic distancing, would likewise merit condemnation. Merz’s formulation that allies are acting “in their own way” to remove a global threat enables him to endorse coercive action while preserving rhetorical distance from its execution. The speaker signals approval of the goal and its outcome while simultaneously dissociating himself from the means, leaving them shrouded in diplomatic ambiguity.

By creating a discursive buffer, this subtle maneuver of moral displacement affords plausible deniability – the ability to evade accountability with a straight face – since the moral and practical burden of operational details is explicitly shifted elsewhere.

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St. Thomas Aquinas on the just war

From the perspective of just war doctrine, Christian moral thinkers would be equally dismissive of Merz’s narrative. St. Thomas Aquinas argued that even when a cause is legitimate, the means must remain morally constrained. One cannot morally approve of an outcome while refusing to scrutinize the methods adopted to achieve it. The end, in short, never justifies the means.

The Angelic Doctor likewise insisted that punishment is due only to those who have committed a fault and that it is never lawful to kill the innocent. These principles leave no room for the logic of collective guilt or collective punishment. Yet this is precisely the implication of the German chancellor’s equation of Iran with a “center of international terrorism” that must be shut down.

The consequences of such legally unjustified and morally hazardous reasoning are already becoming visible. Far from merely pursuing regime change, the Israeli–American assault on Iran was an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state.  It appears to replicate the devastating blueprint implemented in Gaza, which Israel, with unequivocal and decisive US support, has essentially wiped out: a campaign of total war that reduces an entire society to collateral damage in pursuit of broader geopolitical aims.

Foremost among those ends is the complete destruction of an entire civilization, Iran – its people, heritage, infrastructure, and environment – in order to pave the way for the establishment of “Greater Israel” as the uncontested power in the wider Middle East.

Kant on ethical universalization

Modern moral philosophy sharpens the critique further. Immanuel Kant argued that moral principles must be capable of universalization. Suppose the maxim implicit in Merz’s reasoning were adopted by all states: Whenever a government judges another country’s political leadership to be the source of instability, it may facilitate efforts to eliminate that government – and the country it governs – through allied action, leaving the allies free to employ whatever means they deem necessary.

If universalized, the rule would generate a world of perpetual “preventive” and “defensive” wars of choice. States could simply castigate, stigmatize, and anathematize their adversaries at will, proclaiming that peace requires their removal. Kant’s verdict would be categorical: Such a maxim cannot be willed as a universal law. Nor is this conclusion unique to Kantian ethics. A range of moral traditions likewise rejects the legitimacy of employing unbounded and indiscriminate force.

Other ethical traditions on unrestrained violence

From Confucian thought onward, ethical traditions across centuries and civilizations have stressed that the ends do not justify the abandonment of moral scrutiny and have cautioned against the unrestricted use of violence.

Confucius insisted that rulers must cultivate moral rectitude, self-discipline, and restraint, since political authority derives its legitimacy from moral example rather than coercive force.

Buddhist philosophy similarly emphasizes the ethical transformation of the individual, teaching that hatred cannot extinguish hatred; only compassion and non-hatred can bring it to an end.

Jewish moral thought, rooted in the Hebrew scriptures and later rabbinic tradition, likewise imposes strict limits on the use of violence and places strong emphasis on the protection of the innocent.

Islamic ethics, drawing on Qur’anic injunctions and prophetic traditions that explicitly forbid the killing of women and children, reiterates these constraints by insisting that the use of force remain subject to clear moral and legal limits.

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A civilizational consensus – and the cost of breaking it

Across the great moral traditions of humanity, the judgment is unmistakable: Political power must be bound by moral limits that forbid the instrumental destruction of entire societies. What is defended as strategic necessity thus stands revealed as a repudiation of the ethical constraints that ought to govern political power.

When force escapes law and accountability, it corrupts the wielder and multiplies, turning violence into a self-perpetuating cycle rather than a solution. Power that abandons restraint and treats entire societies as enemies forfeits its claim to legitimacy. It ceases to be statesmanship and becomes something far more primitive: brute force without moral authority, in other words, tyranny.

Judged against this universal standard, German Chancellor Merz and his Israeli-American patrons have failed the trial of leadership in the tribunal of Mars, humanity’s ultimate stress test. The KGB, it turns out, recognized a hard truth: Pressure reveals character.

The war on Iran is a stark reminder that overwhelming power grounded in military supremacy cannot secure moral authority or substitute for moral legitimacy. History’s verdict is consistent: Domination breeds resistance, and unchecked power eventually devours the very order it purports to defend.

Proxy warfare, in particular, has long been a tool of geopolitical competition, but it raises enduring questions about responsibility and restraint. It promises distance and deniability through blurred lines of accountability. The outsourcing of violence may therefore easily commend itself as a politically expedient course, particularly in moments of grave crisis.

But “moral laundering” does not outsource the ethical burden that accompanies it. Nor does it absolve those who wage proxy wars of ethical responsibility, nor spare them from the retaliation of their enemies.

Ultimately, the postmodern justification and normalization of collective violence by the ruling elite within the transatlantic liberal order stand revealed as less a matter of necessity than a profound erosion of moral sensibility and discernment.

Seen within the wider horizon of mankind’s rich ethical heritage, the inner corruption of this martial class of self-styled “warriors” and “crusaders” appears not merely as a failure of statesmanship, but as a failure of Western civilization itself.

[Part 2 of a series on viral geopolitics. To be continued. Previous column in the series: Part 1, published on 10 March 2026: Prof. Schlevogt’s Compass No. 45: The epoch of viral geopolitics – How the Kanzler sloganizes war]