How to Use casus belli in a Sentence

casus belli

noun

• Russia had all but warned that this would be casus belli.
  — Mario Loyola, National Review, 17 Feb. 2022
• And that’s just in one Bush department, thus leaving out the false casus belli in Iraq or the yawning deficits or the financial collapse of 2008.
  — T.a. Frank, The Hive, 4 May 2018
• In the writings and speeches of nearly all American Founders, the threat of disarmament was a casus belli.
  — David Harsanyi, National Review, 8 June 2021
• The Tonkin Gulf incident, which provided a casus belli for the Vietnam War, gets a single sentence.
  — Fred O’Brien, National Review, 3 Mar. 2022
• These days, a casus belli can be declared in broad daylight and in time for the evening news, complete with a live enemy caught red-handed trying to remove the evidence.
  — Kevin Baker, Harper's magazine, 19 Aug. 2019
• The standoff is brought to an end by a military assault, resulting in mass casualties and creating, on the right, both a casus belli and martyrs for the cause.
  — Fintan O’Toole, The Atlantic, 16 Dec. 2021
• False flag attacks are risky, while leaders seeking to manufacture a casus belli can select from a range of subtler and less costly alternatives.
  — Scott Radnitz, The Conversation, 17 Feb. 2022
• India was itching to intervene militarily but lacked a cast-iron casus belli.
  — Tunku Varadarajan, WSJ, 18 Mar. 2022
• Take the killing of Qasem Soleimani: Foreign policy sages fret about long-term reprisals from Iran, the administration's unsubstantiated casus belli and an impulsive commander-in-chief.
  — Stephen Collinson and Caitlin Hu, CNN, 19 Jan. 2020
• Less can be said of the muddled casus belli, as Dahomey’s struggle for independence unpersuasively evolves into a proto-pan-African struggle for abolition.
  — Julian Lucas, The New Yorker, 16 Sep. 2022
• Also on Wednesday, a senior Biden administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, accused Moscow of trotting out a bevy of false claims with the intention of using them as a casus belli for an incursion into Ukraine.
  — Los Angeles Times, 17 Feb. 2022
• There is much to criticize in Jones’s piece—the insipid prose, the intellectually dishonest mischaracterization of the casus belli in Iraq—but what is most relevant here is Jones’s thinking about second-best outcomes.
  — Kevin D. Williamson, National Review, 27 Oct. 2019
• But invocations of genocide represent more than just a superficial casus belli.
  — New York Times, 19 Feb. 2022
• But the immediate casus belli was tension over Texas, a former Mexican territory that had declared independence in 1836.
  — Gary Kamiya, SFChronicle.com, 10 Jan. 2020
• By exposing this plan, the Biden administration sought to undermine its emotional power and stop the Kremlin from manufacturing a casus belli, or justification for war.
  — Scott Radnitz, The Conversation, 17 Feb. 2022

Last Updated: 24 Jul 2024