 Suárez places significant moral weight on the distinction, only tacitly present in Thomas Aquinas's treatment, between defensive and offensive or aggressive war. The defensive use of force aims to foil an attempt to inflict a wrong. The offensive use of force, by contrast, aims at obtaining some form of satisfaction for wrongful harms that have been already perpetrated (DDB 1.6). Suárez devotes some attention to cases in which applying this binary distinction becomes complicated. Because aggressive or offensive war seems morally more problematic, it was natural for Suárez to devote the most attention to it. Offensive war is an essentially a punitive response to the refusal to redress past wrongful harms. In the same way that domestic peace requires empowering the republic to punish domestic wrongs, so international peace requires that someone be vested with the power to punish international wrongs. Suárez reasons that, given the absence of a commonly acknowledged superior, this power must belong to each sovereign. Sovereigns thus assume the role of judges. A just offensive war is therefore the meting out of just punishment (DDB 4.5).