The “New” Doctrine of Preventive War
We cannot let our enemies strike first.
—The National Security Strategy of the United States of America,
September 2002
There is nothing more foolish than to think that war can be stopped by war. You don’t “prevent” anything by war except peace.
—President Harry Truman1
The Iraq war was the product of a strategic doctrine formally announced by Condoleezza Rice as the “National Security Strategy of the United States of America” on September 20, 2002. This doctrine appeared to be new, and yet was deeply rooted. It was probably formulated as a formal concept in the immediate aftermath of 9/11; it was adumbrated in a number of speeches by President Bush during the following year, most vividly at West Point in the spring of 2002, when the president warned, “we must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”2Its underlying logic goes back to a report on “Rebuilding America’s Defense” prepared by the Project for a New American Century, an informal group meeting in the late 1990s that included William Kristol, Robert Kagan, John Bolton, and others, many of whom are currently members of or advisers to the Bush administration.
The formal National Security Strategy paper is prefaced by a letter from President Bush putting its points in a nutshell. Conditions have changed fundamentally, the president concludes: “Enemies in the past needed great armies and great industrial capabilities to endanger America. Now, shadowy networks of individuals can bring great chaos and suffering to our shores for less than it costs to purchase a single tank. Terrorists are organized to penetrate open societies and to turn the power of modern technologies against us.” This demands a fundamental change in strategy: America will now have to “act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed.” This is a recipe for preventive war. Changed conditions—”America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. . . . We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies”—demand changed tactics: “The greater the threat, the greater is the risk of inaction—and the more compelling the case for taking anticipatory action to defend ourselves—even if uncertainty remains as to the time and place of the enemy’s attack. To forestall or prevent such hostile acts by our adversaries, the United States will, if necessary act preemptively.”
The document’s logic assumes, quite correctly, American hegemony: “The United States possesses unprecedented—and unequaled—strength and influence in the world.” More important, it assumes that hegemony is the American birthright and that peace requires it be maintained: “Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military buildup in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States . . . we must build and maintain our defenses beyond challenge.” But in the name of benign ends: American power will be deployed only to encourage “free and open societies” not to seek “unilateral advantage.” In the exceptionalist spirit, this “rare union of our values and our interests” defines “a distinctly American internationalism.”
According to the Washington Post, the full secret version of the doctrine “goes even further” and “breaks with 50 years of U.S. counter-proliferation efforts by authorizing preemptive strikes on states and terrorist groups that are close to acquiring weapons of mass destruction or the long range missiles capable of delivering them,” the idea being to destroy parts before they are assembled.3 The document’s top secret appendix is reported to name Iran, Syria, North Korea, and Libya as well as Iraq among countries that will be the central focus of this new approach, and it pledges to “stop transfers of weapons components in or out of their borders.”
Conceived as a response to new dangers, the preventive war doctrine introduces new risks. It intends to get beyond the shortcomings of the policies of deterrence and containment that defined the Cold War: “deterrence based only upon the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states more willing to take risks . . . traditional concepts of deterrence will not work against a terrorist enemy whose avowed tactics are wanton destruction and the targeting of innocents; whose so-called soldiers seek martyrdom in death and whose most potent protection is statelessness.”4
Yet the new doctrine ends up reproducing some of containment’s most perilous features. It assumes a certainty about events and their consequences that the history of events gainsays at every turning. George F. Kennan, America’s foremost realist (now well over ninety years old), said in a recent interview that anybody who has studied history understands “that you might start in a war with certain things on your mind,” but the war rapidly becomes about things you “never thought of before.”5 By its logic of “anticipatory self-defense,” the preventive war strategy relies on long-term prediction and a presumed concatenation of events far less certain than those appealed to by the immediate logic of self-defense. By shooting first and asking questions later, it opens the way to tragic miscalculation. By transgressing international law’s traditional doctrine of self-defense, it sets a disastrous example for other nations claiming their own exceptionalist logic. And in abandoning the prudent logic of social contract and deference to law that was perhaps the finest achievement of American independence, it finally abjures the very idealist legacy in which it pretends to be grounded.
Cautious owls eying the long-term future of law and international order have protested. One remarked that the Bush administration, in its approach to the prisoners of the war on terrorism, “appears not to have understood, or cared to understand, that it had more legal arguments—and therefore, at least arguably, more legal options—than it brought to bear when it decided that Geneva, by and large, didn’t apply or was too much trouble to apply. Here, as in its confrontation with the new International Criminal Court, which the administration is sworn to resist and has never recognized, it has shown zero interest in influencing the development of what is termed ‘international humanitarian law,’ as the law of war is euphemistically known nowadays.”6 Partisans of the empire of fear are persuaded that the capacity to shock and awe does far more to make men meek that all the law’s vaunted majesty.
Preventive war has some precedent in the history of America’s international relations, but as officially promulgated doctrine it is a radical departure from the conventions of American strategic doctrine and actual warfare. The United States has certainly taken military action in the past without congressional approval and in a fashion that has been seen by some as hypocritical and by others as imperial. But it has always tried to root its right to deploy troops in the Constitution (the Tonkin Bay Resolution that legitimized the Vietnam War), in the United Nations Charter (Korea), or international law (Panama). It may have acted hypocritically but always paid the principles of law and self-defense the compliment of refusing to admit it was operating outside their compass.
Faced with Soviet Communism, a totalitarian threat more nefarious in the eyes of some Americans than German Nazism had been, preventive war was a constant temptation. President Truman’s Secretary of the Navy Francis P. Matthews argued that the United States had to be ready “to pay any price, even the price of instituting a war to compel cooperation for peace,” inaugurating a controversy about the advantages of a nuclear “first strike” that defined debates about preemption throughout the Cold War years.7 Winston Churchill had contemplated opening a front against the Nazis from the Balkan underbelly of Europe in order to cut the Soviets off from war spoils in middle Europe. Some thought after the war concluded that America should finish off its erstwhile Russian “ally.” Remarkably, much the same language of novel conditions and radically altered circumstances that have attended the promulgation of the preventive war doctrine after 9/11 was being used by Cold Warriors trying to persuade America that its more civilized views of warfare (after Hiroshima!) would have to be replaced by tougher thinking. In rationalizing the covert activities of the OSS in World War II, General James H. Doolittle was already pleading changed circumstances:
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination by whatever means and at whatever cost. There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto acceptable rules of human conduct do not apply. If the United States is to survive, longstanding American concepts of “fair play” must be reconsidered. We must develop effective espionage and counterespionage services, and must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, more sophisticated, and more effective methods that those used against us. It may become necessary that the American people become acquainted with, understand and support this fundamentally repugnant philosophy.8
President Bush might have borrowed this paragraph without changing a single word to craft the preface to his preventive war national security doctrine of September 20, 2002.
Once the Soviets acquired their own nuclear (and then thermonuclear) weapons, of course, prevention became more complicated (as it is today with North Korea). It became clear that the United States, if it waited to get hit, could never do more than “punish” the other side for its “victory” by destroying it in return. This was the mad logic of mutual assured destruction, or MAD, which tempted hawkish critics into thoughts of decisive preemption. Strategist Herman Kahn had calculated that even with the loss of forty or fifty million Americans, a first strike that put an end to the prospect of mutual annihilation could be deemed rational.
Throughout the Cold War, the calls for preemptive and preventive nuclear war against the Soviets never let up. They were parodied in scathing comedies of the era like Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and transmogrified into paranoiac fear in dramas like Seven Days in May and On the Beach. In the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 which was to test President Kennedy’s nerve, the call for preemptive action was on the table for “rational” consideration. Kennedy actually faced the hard choice of launching a preventive strike against Cuba (after covertly installed Russian missiles were discovered there) in which Russians as well as Cubans would die and a nuclear exchange would be risked, or doing nothing and risking that the missiles—once operational—might be used in a first strike against the United States. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was portrayed in the same moralizing language of evil (“totalitarian dictatorship” and the “empire of evil”) that was recently deployed to justify preventive war against Iraq.9
President Kennedy ultimately chose compromise and diplomacy over preemption—despite the fact that the Soviet enemy possessed the means to annihilate the United States almost instantaneously—and managed to disarm Cuba of its Soviet missiles without war. Participants in those gut-wrenching days of decision agree that during the crisis the world came within a cat’s whisker of Armageddon. It was saved not by prudent long-term strategic planning but only by the unexpected hands-on prudence of an aggressive American president and a belligerent Russian premier, helped along by diplomatic legerdemain.10 Following President Kennedy’s prudent decision to opt for compromise, successive Democratic and Republican administrations (until recently) have chosen to stay with the more complicated and accommodating politics of multilateral diplomacy and containment and deterrence (risky enough in their own right).
Lex humana cannot then be written off as a policy for less perilous times in its refusal to accept “first strike” nuclear doctrines, or arguments for war not rooted in a “just war” cause or traditional self-defense (as specified in Article 51 of the United Nations Charter). It was the successful (if risky) response to far more dangerous times, when the United States faced enemies far more potent than al-Qaeda, let alone Iraq. The Soviets had weapons of mass destruction that were the real McCoy—serious nuclear and thermonuclear bombs—as well as the means to deploy them globally. They possessed an ideology of righteous historical wrath directed at capitalist democracies and at their leading agent, the United States. The attraction of an international legal system and a complex and often compromising system of alliances and treaties was that they were believed to afford protection against tyrannical enemies of law and order like the Soviets. They alone offered an alternative to the governance of fear implied in the “balance of terror” by which the peace was being kept.
The fears generated by 9/11 effectively destroyed the policy consensus of the Cold War period. Following its formal promulgation in Rice’s national security statement, the logic of preventive war became the key to defending the threatened use of force against Iraq. In his October 8, 2002, speech to the nation on Iraq, the President declared that in light of the devastating attacks of 9/11, and “facing clear evidence of peril,” America is unwilling to “wait for the final proof, the smoking gun, that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.” Having “every reason to assume the worst and . . . an urgent duty to prevent the worst from occurring,” it simply cannot and will not resume “the old approach to inspections, and applying diplomatic and economic pressure.”11
The new doctrine clearly liberated President Bush, allowing him to express as official policy the tough line he had been rehearsing for a year in cabinet meetings (in time it permitted him to forgo evidence altogether): “The time for denying, deceiving and delaying has come to an end,” he now felt able to say. “Saddam Hussein must disarm himself or, for the sake of peace, we will lead a coalition to disarm him.” Ever sensitive to the potent rhetoric of American exceptionalism, the president added that the United States was taking this position not simply to secure itself but to meet its “responsibility of defending human liberty against violence and aggression.” And then on to the characteristic American apotheosis: “By our resolve we will give strength to others. By our courage we will give hope to others. And by our actions we will secure the peace and lead the world to a better day. May God bless America.”
If President Bush was looking to anticipatory action against Taliban Afghanistan and Saddam’s Iraq as a potent preventive response to terrorism, Paul Wolfowitz, perhaps the most hawkish and militant of the eagles in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, was looking for still more. Well before Rice drafted her document, he was seeking a policy of preemptive termination—quite literally “ending states who sponsor terrorism.”12 Rice’s language in the new strategic document suggests that Wolfowitz’s view prevailed. After all, Wolfowitz’s boss, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, was a champion of “thinking outside the box” of traditional defense doctrines. That might mean not just entertaining preemptive strikes, but whatever it takes to “end states” including assassination or even the poisoning of enemy food supplies—although if Bob Woodward is to be believed, this latter notion did not make it into the policy mix.13 Assassination did, however, at least in administration rhetoric. Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer thus allowed as how if “the policy [in Iraq] is regime change,” then “the cost of a one-way ticket is substantially less than [that of invasion]. The cost of one bullet, if the Iraqi people take it on themselves, is substantially less than that.”14
Radical and new as these ideas may seem, the explicit logic of preventive war was evident much earlier. National Security Presidential Directive 17 (also known as Homeland Security Presidential Directive 4), which was the first major policy collaboration of the National Security Council and the new Homeland Security Council chaired by Tom Ridge and which the President signed in May 2002, had announced that “traditional nonproliferation has failed, and now we’re going into active interdiction.” An administration official clarified the meaning of “active interdiction: it is “physical,” he said; “it’s disruption, it’s destruction in any form, whether kinetic or cyber.”15
Cofer Black, the CIA’s counterterrorism deputy, spoke with equal audacity and far more relish on behalf of the spirit of the new doctrine and what it might entail. Although the attack on the Taliban could be construed in more traditional terms of self-defense, it also had an aspect of prevention (the Taliban had not attacked America, though their proxies had). Not long after 9/11, Black promised President Bush he would bring him Osama bin Laden’s head; in case he was deemed to be kidding, he ordered boxes for the purpose when he embarked on his first mission to meet with Afghanistan’s North Alliance as the war there got under way. “When we’re through with [the Taliban and al-Qaeda], they will have flies walking across their eyeballs,” he pledged, coining a phrase that captures the spirit not only of White House outrage at terrorist behavior but of preventive war itself, whose policies appear to be written in blood.
Although a year away from being formally proclaimed, the spirit of preemption was in the air immediately after 9/11. Black wanted everyone to know—this meant the Russians too, who might still regard Afghanistan as their turf—that America was on its way. “We’re in a war, we’re coming. Regardless of what you do, we’re coming anyway.” When the Russians responded with a warning about how America was likely to “get the hell kicked out of” it in Afghanistan, Black was unfazed: “We’re going to kill them. We’re going to put their heads on sticks. We’re going to rock their world.”16 The hegemon was incensed. And as far as Afghanistan and Iraq were concerned, the hegemon was right. “This nation is peaceful, but fierce when stirred to anger,” promised President Bush in his National Cathedral speech. It was no longer waiting for the bad guys to draw first. Mullah Omar was Osama bin Laden; the Taliban were Mullah Omar; the government of Afghanistan was the Taliban. America was no longer wedded to self-defense in the strict sense or civility in any sense at all. It no longer felt constrained to persuade others of the justice of its cause. Yes, it was respectful of “the values, judgment and interests of our friends and partners,” but America was “prepared to act apart when [its] interests and unique responsibilities require.”17 As it would say again and again right through its war in Iraq, it needed no one’s permission to identify and make preventive war on perceived enemies. The axis of evil and everyone vaguely associated with it had been put on notice. The only oddity is that the United States acted surprised when some of those put on notice reacted—like the North Koreans.
By the time the president gave his major policy address at the Citadel on December 11, 2001, the anger aroused by 9/11 in the president and in Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Cofer Black had spawned the official term active counterproliferation. Counterproliferation meant no more reliance on treaties and promises; the nonproliferation treaty had failed and the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty had been found wanting. America itself had unilaterally withdrawn from the Antiballistic Missile Treaty. There would be no more pusillanimous efforts at bribing potential buyers of WMD; the Nunn-Lugar Program approved by Congress authorizing the buying up of loose nukes in the ex-Soviet territories had been effectively defunded.18 Rather, what counterproliferation meant was preemptive strikes against facilities being used for the development of weapons of mass destruction. A heavy club in place of the carrot, wielded not as a deterrent but as a preemptive punisher of potentially bad children. Counterproliferation was a euphemism for preventive war, active interdiction of potential delinquency by fed-up parents no longer willing to wait to find out what the kids were going to do next.
Preventive war, driven by fear and uncertainty, replaced the indicative logic of self-defense (“we’ve been attacked!”) with a new subjunctive logic (“someone may be preparing to attack us”). Self-defense says: “We are already at war thanks to our enemies: our declaration of war is but a confirmation of an observable condition.” Preventive war says: “It is a dangerous world where many potential adversaries may be considering aggression against us or our friends, or may be acquiring the weapons that would allow them to do so should they wish to: so we will declare war on that someone and interdict the possible unfolding of this perilous chain of could-be’s and may-be’s.”
It is immediately clear that the effects of threats of preventive war are not always what is intended. Blustery war rhetoric is of course a specialty of the isolated regime of Kim Jong Il, but rhetorical war is usually a two-way street. In identifying North Korea as a charter member of the axis of evil, President Bush effectively identified it as a potential target of the new preventive war strategy. In calling Kim Jong Il a “pygmy” whom he “loathed,” the president identified him as an adversary as repugnant as Saddam Hussein, someone “next” on the “one at a time” serial preventive war target list. How is a nation targeted as a candidate for “assisted suicide” (the term some use to describe the administration’s “tailored containment” plan that awaits the collapse of a bankrupt North Korea) likely to react to such bluster? Is it surprising that, as Bill Keller has written, they “have taken our bellicose talk fairly seriously”? Especially when “we abruptly cut off discussion, adopt military ‘pre-emption’ as our doctrine for dealing with nuclear wannabes, and cite North Korea as a justification for building a missile defense system in Alaska.”19
It should not be surprising that North Korea has been panicked by this logic and its inflammatory rhetoric into a state of genuine fearfulness. Whatever America may be saying now, North Korea surely reckons it is next on the axis of evil hit list—but at a time and place America will select when its war on Iraq is over.20 Why else the axis of evil? Why else a contingency plan to go nuclear against it in the name of eliminating its nuclear capabilities? Why else dozens of B-1 and B-52 bombers ordered to Guam in early 2003? Why else the refusal to negotiate bilaterally with North Korea when its aim appears to be pushing the United States to the bargaining table rather than into war?
Similarly, CIA chief George Tenet testified to the Senate Committee on Intelligence (February 11, 2003) that Iran remained a serious concern because of its support for terrorism—the very charges that led America to invade Iraq. In the view of one observer, this militarization of policy leaves the U.S. government “increasingly dependent on its military to carry out its foreign affairs,”21 which in turn convinces Thomas Powers that “the implication seems clear: Iraq first, Iran next.”22 According to Paul Krugman of the New York Times, a British official with ties to the Bush team reported that “Everyone wants to go to Baghdad. Real men want to go to Tehran.”
Israel under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon shares the view. Ranan Lurie of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington explains Sharon’s perspective this way: “It is inconceivable that [the United States] will attack Iraq, succeed, destroy its unconventional laboratories and arsenal, come home for a ticker-tape parade on Wilshire Boulevard and go to the beaches while Iran is still there. Imagine a brain surgeon penetrating the skull of a patient who has two malignant tumors and yet extracting only one of them. Logic says that, as long as you are in that skull, the same incision should serve for the removal of the second tumor.”23 As if to give impetus to this logic, Iran announced in March 2003 that (like North Korea) it had embarked on an aggressive nuclear energy program of its own that might be used to produce weapons-grade plutonium, while President Bashar al-Assad insisted America’s war in Iraq was intended to “redraw the map of the region” and that Syria was a potential target. Meanwhile, some conservatives who had pushed for war in Iraq were “already moving on to the next step, and perhaps farther than the President is ready to go,” calling Iraq the opening of a “Fourth World War” (the Cold War having been, in their view, the third).24
Preventive war doctrine has domestic as well as foreign policy consequences. As it trumps traditional self-defense arguments and permits more aggressive moves abroad, it trumps civil liberties arguments and permits more aggressive moves at home. The same logic of special circumstances, novel adversaries, and altered technology used to legitimize preventive war is used to rationalize preventive detention. As Joseph Lelyveld articulates the argument (on the way to criticizing it),
Jihadists are different from other warriors, in that their struggles won’t obviously be ended by an armistice or surrender proclaimed from on high. The overriding objective of any detention regime in these circumstances has to be the gathering of intelligence about the network and its targets that may serve to prevent future attacks. Prevention is more important than prosecuting individuals for past actions. If you are looking to the future, it’s hard to say who among the detainees is important—that is, dangerous—and who’s not. If future actions are the primary concern, it would be reckless to release persons who have already shown themselves to be adherents of movements that directly or indirectly supported the suicide attackers of September 11.25
To be sure,” as even Paul Wolfowitz admits, many of the detainees may “turn out to be completely harmless.” But “if we put them in the Waldorf Astoria, I don’t think we could get them to talk.”26 This is, of course, the slippery slope logic that has led Alan Dershowitz to consider the legitimacy of “legal” torture in the age of terrorism.27
The subjunctive logic of prevention, so crucial to the recent changes in both foreign and domestic policy that have unsettled European friends of the United States, patently lay behind America’s preoccupation with nations like Iraq and North Korea after 9/11. But such thinking animated other presidents well before President Bush pointed to an axis of evil and promulgated a doctrine of preventive war. The Clinton administration, for example, had contemplated a preemptive strike against the North Korean nuclear processing plant at Yongbyon during its first term and actually delivered a preventive blow against what it mistakenly believed was a Sudanese chemical weapons plant during its second (in 1998). The logic of prevention was codified in Clinton’s Presidential Decision Directive 62 aimed at “Protection Against Unconventional Threats to the Homeland and America Overseas.” A former Clinton administration official summarizes the directive’s classi-fied language in this syntactically challenged way: “If you think terrorists will get access to Weapons of Mass Destruction, there is an extremely low threshold that the United States should act militarily.”28
In fact, there is nothing partisan in this new doctrine. In its 2000 Party platform, the Democratic Party suggested that an evolving international environment called for a new doctrine of “forward engagement” that would “mean addressing problems early in their development before they become crises, addressing them as close to the source of the problem as possible, and having the forces and the resources to deal with these threats as soon after their emergence as possible.”29 Forward engagement is not preventive war, but it is not exactly traditional self-defense either.
President Clinton had in fact himself voiced many of the same fears with respect to Iraq and the need for interdiction that President Bush would articulate four years later. In a statement frequently cited by the Bush administration, Clinton had warned that the “predators of the 21st century will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them . . . there is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.” Sounding more like Bush than either Bush or Clinton would probably wish, Clinton ended his peroration by warning that if the United States failed to act, Saddam would “conclude that the international community has lost its will. He will then conclude he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.”30
Even before President Clinton, there is strong evidence that Dick Cheney, in his guise as President George H. W. Bush’s secretary of defense back in the late 1980s, was already urging a preemption option. In a document known as the Defense Planning Guidance, Cheney argued “that the United States should be prepared to use force if necessary to prevent the spread of nuclear weapons . . . (and should) maintain United States military primacy and discourage the emergence of a rival superpower.”31 These ideas were controversial at the time, and not embraced by Bush père. Their time had to await Bush fils and the shock of 9/11.
Given the President’s disposition to moralizing language, it is interesting that the Bush doctrine does not invoke the concept of just war; nor did the Clinton administration or its Cold War predecessors. Just war debates turn on religious and moral arguments with a universal compass and such arguments are quite distinctive from preventive war doctrine.32 Arguments for humanitarian intervention, however, have sometimes been confounded with arguments for prevention. But humanitarian interventionism is sui generis. Unlike the American argument for preventive war, it is not based on exceptionalist claims and it works best when framed by multilateralism and international law (which recognizes the rights of peoples subjected to persecution and genocide—hence the Genocide Convention). The Rwandan tribal war between Hutus and Tutsis (aggravated by aggressive government media) and the Balkan “ethnic cleansing” campaigns are perhaps the two most familiar recent instances where liberal internationalists (David Rieff and Michael Ignatieff, for example) believed there were good reasons for American (and/or European and United Nations) intervention, despite the absence of any direct threat to the United States or its interests.
Yet while some proponents of humanitarian intervention ended up supporting the invasion of Iraq on grounds of humanitarianism (Saddam Hussein was, after all, a monstrous oppressor), the argument for humanitarian intervention and the argument for American preventive war are distinct. For humanitarian interventionism embodies a doctrine that can be made universal: it calls on every state and on the international system to intervene and does so not to protect the intervening state but to protect others who are unable to protect themselves.
The humanitarian argument was used as a fallback position by the Bush administration in Iraq (Saddam was a brutal tyrant and had used chemical weapons during his war against Iran; overturning his regime was an act of charity to the Iraqis), but it is clear that preventing terrorism through disarmament, interdicting the threat of weapons of mass destruction, and regime change were the primary arguments and that in their absence neither the American public nor the administration itself would have supported a “merely” humanitarian war. Going to war with Iraq was a clear consequence of 9/11 and the unique circumstances and special obligations created on that fateful day—which putatively endowed the United States with a special right to preventive war that other nations (say India facing Pakistan over Kashmir) could not claim.
Just war theorists might of course claim that America’s high ideals generate a special obligation for it to participate in humanitarian wars against tyrants who may otherwise be of no threat to the United States, but they would argue that other nations have the same obligations. Preventive war theorists, on the other hand, claim that America’s special destiny permits it to pursue policies aimed at disarming potential adversaries and democratizing potential tyrants because its own existence is special and worthy of special measures—a rationale not permitted to other nations. In general, just war arguments are rooted in universal principles that make exceptionalist arguments more difficult to employ: in theory, every nation, regardless of culture or special character, has an obligation, say, to end genocide in Rwanda or deter ethnic cleansing in Kosovo—nothing exceptionalist here. But when the French adduce from their (self-described) unique relationship with civility an obligation to civilize other nations (la mission civilatrice) or when Rudyard Kipling infers a noblesse oblige which allowed Britain to rationalize its colonies or when Teddy Roosevelt alludes to America’s racial superiority as a justification for its wars of colonial liberation against Spain, something other than just war theory is at stake. Moral right here is being adduced from special character, not from universal principle. Thus, when the United States invoked special virtue or manifest destiny on the way to building an empire, exceptionalism rather than just war theory was at stake. Rudyard Kipling, if not President Bush, at least understood that exceptionalism had few rewards other than its own virtue. To “take up the White Man’s burden,” Kipling wrote could only be to
. . . reap his old reward—
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.
From the American perspective, exceptionalism means other nations have no particular right to deploy preventive strategies of their own. But from the perspective of other countries, America’s embrace of the preventive doctrine established a significant precedent, especially since America sees itself as a standard-bearer and standard-setter for the world community. Based on the American model, but disregarding America’s claim that its right to preemption is rooted in unique circumstances, Pakistan can argue for preventive war against India, anticipating an Indian strike in Kashmir; North Korea can justify a strike against South Korea, anticipating an American action (based on American rhetoric) against North Korea; or, for that matter, Iraq could have rationalized a preventive strike against the United States or its allies, anticipating what was, after all, a well-advertised American intention to launch a war against Baghdad. Comical perhaps, but in the interest-constrained world of international relations, why should Saddam Hussein not borrow America’s preemptive doctrine? He could claim with conviction that the United States was bent on war against his government, that it had weapons of mass destruction and was intent on acquiring more, and was led by a government manifestly hostile to Iraq. Either change your regime, America, and renounce your weapons of mass destruction, or face a preventive Iraqi strike!
Less comically, as I have already shown, North Korea seems to be engaging in something very much like preventive war strategy when it perceives in various American positions deep hostility to its very existence as a regime. Coupled with the American unwillingness to negotiate, this adds up to an aggressiveness sufficient to have caused the North Koreans to threaten a kind of preventive “catastrophe” of their own: the reopening of their plutonium processing plants and the renewed effort to produce nuclear weapons.
The defect of exceptionalism, then, is that it assumes America’s allies and even its enemies will share the special-case reasoning that persuades America it possesses unique extralegal prerogatives based on its exceptional righteousness. Even if there are reasons to think the United States has acted more virtuously in its foreign affairs than most nations, American virtue can hardly be accepted by others as a universal standard. Imagine an international law that read, “Nations may only resort to war in cases of self-defense, except the United States, which because it is special can resort to war whenever it wants.” It may be difficult for Americans to read their own doctrine in this skeptical manner, but it will be far less difficult for America’s adversaries and even some of its friends to do so. Indeed, America’s inability to see its own motives through this lens is why it is often viewed as arrogant even by its friends and allies.
But the more serious problem with the argument pointing to America’s democratic virtue is not that it provides hypocritical cover for base national interests (although as William James insists, it certainly may) but that even where virtue can be demonstrated the doctrine fails the basic test of international legality. Exceptionalism can never meet the Kantian principle (after the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant) which requires that the morality or legality of a precept be measured by its susceptibility to being universalized. If preventive war is moral for America, everybody else has America’s right to preventive self-defense (just as everybody else has America’s right to self-government and democracy). Or, if America denies others that right, its own resort to prevention cannot be morally justified. The whole point of exceptionalist reasoning is to exempt the United States from universal precepts with respect to war. It wants to persuade others that because it is uniquely moral, its policies must be ethical. But moral precepts are supposed to define moral agents, not the other way around.
Bush’s preventive war doctrine postulates America’s right to take steps against perceived enemies before they actually strike at America. In order for it to gain acceptance outside the United States, we have seen, it must be generalized to meet the Golden Rule standard of “do onto others.” Germany, Russia, Pakistan, and yes, even Iraq and North Korea, must have the same right to preempt what they perceive as potential or imminent aggression against them by their enemies. Of course, as the United States knows, that way lies only anarchy: each nation deciding on war whenever and wherever it sees fit. The doctrine not only fails the test of legality, it fails the test of realism. For no nation, not even one as powerful as America, can root its foreign policy in special reasoning forbidden to others. No nation can realistically succeed in an interdependent world unless it somehow secures its permanent dominion over the entire planet, something no nation in an interdependent world can possibly do.