Preemptive war: a prelude to global peril? - National Affairs

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 2003 by Charles W. Kegley, Jr., Gregory A. Raymond

If a permissive climate of opinion on the acceptability of preemptive and preventive warfare takes root, will the U.S. and the world at large be safer and more secure? That is doubtful. It has taken a long time for an international consensus to build behind the view that a preemptive attack to prevent an enemy's potential attack is outside the boundaries of justified warfare. In earlier epochs, states believed that they could attack another country for any reason deemed in the attacker's national interests. That climate of normative opinion has evaporated, and, partially as a consequence, the frequency of interstate war has steadily declined and almost vanished since the Cold War ended. Now, however, the U.S. has justified preemptive war under the claim that the benefits of preemption exceed the costs of acting only on retaliation for prior attacks for defense.

This shift is not a cure; it is a curse. In pleading for preservation of the restrictive norms that prohibit preemptive strikes, historian Paul Schraeder, writing in The American Conservative, warns that the universal values "are changeable, fragile, gained only by great effort and through bitter lessons of history, and are easily destroyed, set aside, or changed for the worse for the sake of monetary gain or individual interest. And the fate of these norms and standards depends above all on what great powers, especially hegemons and superpowers do with them and to them.... The American example and standard for preemptive war, if carried out, would invite imitation and emulation, and get it.... A more dangerous, illegitimate norm and example can hardly be imagined. As could easily be shown by history, it completely subverts previous standards for judging the legitimacy of resorts to war, justifying any number of wars hitherto considered unjust and aggressive. [And] one can easily imagine plausible scenarios in which India could justly attack Pakistan or vice versa, or Israel or any one of its neighbors, or China Taiwan, or South Korea North Korea, under this rule that suspicion of what a hostile regime might do justifies launching preventive wars to overthrow it."

The Bush Administration has been vocal about the urgent need it perceives to do something about the dangers that confront U.S. security, but silent about the consequences that are likely to follow from that doctrinal shift to preemptive warfare. Do we really want to remove the normative handcuffs on the use of force? Do we really want to return to the freewheeling unrestricted sovereign right of any and all rulers to define for themselves when they are threatened, so as to license anticipatory preemptive warfare? Europe experimented with that Machiavellian basis for international statecraft in the 17th century during the deadly Thirty Years' War, which reduced its population by a third. Autonomy makes for global anarchy. Is severing normative anchors on permissible warfare that demonstrably have reduced its incidence really an idea that serves American and global interests and ideals? This radical departure in radical times looks increasingly like a path to peril and a road to ruin.