In the Name of Defense

What happens when governments call war "defense"?In In the Name of Defense, M. H. Clairewell examines one of the most powerful words in political life and one of the most dangerous. The book argues that "defense" does more than describe a lawful response to attack. It can also compress time, shift moral burden, and turn contested choices into apparent necessity. Drawing on public records, legal materials, official statements, declassified documents, and major historical episodes, Clairewell shows how states and institutions frame force as protection, duty, rescue, or reluctant necessity.
From the Gulf of Tonkin and Korea to 1914, Nazi Germany, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Ukraine, and Gaza, the book traces how the language of defense can clarify real danger, but can also be stretched to justify escalation, blur legal categories, and hide aggression behind fear, alliance pressure, and moral language. This is not a cynical claim that every appeal to self-defense is false. It is a sharper and more unsettling argument.
Because self-defense is sometimes real, it is also politically useful. That is what makes the word so effective and so difficult to police. Clear, rigorous, and deeply grounded in historical and legal analysis, In the Name of Defense gives readers a disciplined framework for testing official justifications for war. It asks the questions that matter most. What actually happened. What was known at the time.
Which legal category is really in play. And when does a defensive claim stop describing danger and start laundering power. For readers of history, international law, foreign policy, and political analysis, this book is a guide to one of the central rhetorical strategies of modern war