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War is as old as humanity. Long before it became a matter of law or strategy, it was written into our myths and instincts: the urge to dominate, the struggle for survival, the fall from paradise into conflict. As the author Robert Ardrey once observed, we are not only animals; we are armed ones.

In modern times, the reality of war has become impossible to ignore. The photographs of Hiroshima’s ruins, the televised images from the Vietnam War, the viral pictures from the Bucha massacre in Ukraine and the latest livestreamed bombardments of Gaza all make clear what earlier generations could more easily conceal or forget. War is not only the threat of violence. It is the collapse of moral and political order: a moment when the rules of coexistence fall apart, laws twist into something else, and human life loses its value, or takes on a new one.

Yet even in such devastation, responsibility does not disappear. To inherit war is to inherit the responsibility to restrain it. In democracies, that burden is said to be shared – rooted in consent, exercised through representation. And still, while war may be as old as humanity, democracy is not, and that difference reshapes the questions citizens must ask.

What happens when the gravest of political acts – the decision to kill – is taken without the citizens’ assent? That is the paradox of what I call the silent mandate: leaders treat the people’s silence, which is structurally imposed, as if it were consent, turning absence into acquiescence. It is the point where democracy keeps its name but loses its meaning. If conflict is the most serious act a political community can undertake, shouldn’t it face a higher bar than ordinary political decisions in a democratic state? And even if a conflict seems to meet the conditions of a ‘just war’ – if such a thing exists – it may still be illegitimate if those in whose name it is fought were never asked.

In democracies, wars are rarely directly fought by civil society itself, but they are financed by it, and money carries its own moral weight. The decision is made not on the battlefield but within institutions that claim to speak for the people while avoiding their voice. Some doctrines allow for war in so-called ‘supreme emergencies’. But can such reasoning ever suffice in a democracy, where legitimacy should flow from the will of the people? Such silence is dangerous. It binds us, citizens, to the consequences of war while denying us any role in deciding whether it should be waged.

When violence is carried out in our name but without our voice, what kind of democracy remains?

This kind of democratic deficit is not new. In modern democracy, the United States offers perhaps one of the most emblematic cases of a recurring paradox: a democracy that, at the height of its power, exposes the fragility of its own principle. Among the many moments that reveal it, none is more telling than the US president Harry S Truman’s decision in 1945 to use the atomic bomb. Although the US Constitution grants Congress the power to deliberate on matters of war, the conflict with Japan had been declared years earlier, and Truman was under no legal obligation to seek a new authorisation. But that does not change the substance of the matter. A decision of such magnitude, the use of a weapon capable of erasing entire cities, should have required, at least to my mind, a broader sense of responsibility, a gesture of accountability no less than toward the institutions that claimed to represent the people.

Yet, no record exists of any dialogue with US Congress and certainly not of any public debate. One of the most irreversible choices in human history was made by a single man, probably with the support of a handful of advisers, and formalised in a brief handwritten note during the Potsdam Conference. In that note, addressed to the US Secretary of War, Truman authorised the release of a public statement with the remark ‘release when ready’. Those three words, written in the margin of a communiqué, have often been read by history as the final seal on Hiroshima. Everything happened in the silence of institutions and, even more profoundly, in the silence of citizens. The decision did not pass through the US Congress but through the president’s own conscience. Only after Hiroshima did Truman turn to Congress, not to justify his act but to propose the creation of an Atomic Energy Commission. Crucially, it was a gesture that borders on irony. However, that moment marked a point of no return: the atomic bomb entered history not with public justification, but with the quiet efficiency of routine.

At first glance, this might seem a modern failure of democracy, a symptom of institutions that have drifted away from their people. But the logic runs deeper. The idea that leaders can decide on war without consulting those who will bear its costs........

© Aeon