War & Peace Quote by Stephen Cohen

A defensive line disguised as reassurance, Cohen's sentence is doing two jobs at once: it fortifies dissent as morally coherent, and it preempts the familiar demand that critics must eventually apologize. "But" is the tell. It signals he's entering after a wave of retrospective scolding, the kind that comes when wars get narrativized into lessons and winners get to edit the memory of early opposition. The claim isn't that critics were right about every detail; it's that their stance remains justified even if history turned messy.

The phrase "no reason to regret" is carefully calibrated. Regret isn't the same as error. Regret is emotional, almost penitential - the social ritual of saying you were naive, disloyal, or insufficiently realistic. Cohen is pushing back against that ritual, insisting that skepticism toward war is not a phase you grow out of once the tanks roll. It's also a subtle indictment of the pro-war position: if someone is begging for regret, they suspect the original case can't stand on its own.

Context matters because Cohen, as an educator and public intellectual, is speaking from the credibility economy of expertise. He's defending a community of critics not as fringe agitators but as people exercising the most civic form of foresight: demanding evidence, questioning motives, anticipating unintended consequences. The subtext: even if the war achieved some goals, the moral and institutional costs - normalization of militarism, propaganda pressure, the narrowing of debate - make the act of dissent itself worth preserving. This is less about vindication than about protecting the right to be unconvinced when consensus turns coercive.