Preventive War and American Democracy

Scott Silverstone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781135928001
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

This volume explores the preventive war option in American foreign policy, from the early Cold War strategic problems created by the growth of Soviet and Chinese power, to the post-Cold War fears of a nuclear-armed North Korea, Iraq and Iran.

For several decades after the Second World War, American politicians and citizens shared the belief that a war launched in the absence of a truly imminent threat or in response to another's attack was raw aggression. Preventive war was seen as contrary to the American character and its traditions, a violation of deeply held normative beliefs about the conditions that justify the use of military force. This 'anti-preventive war norm' had a decisive restraining effect on how the US faced the shifting threat in this period. But by the early 1990s the Clinton administration considered the preventive war option against North Korea and the Bush administration launched a preventive war against Iraq without a trace of the anti-preventive war norm that was central to the security ethos of an earlier era.

While avoiding the sharp partisan and ideological tone of much of the recent discussion of preventive war, Preventive War and American Democracy explains this change in beliefs and explores its implications for the future of American foreign policy.

1

The Preventive War Temptation versus the Anti-Preventive War Norm

With his commencement address to West Point graduates in June 2002, President George W. Bush set in motion an extraordinary national and international debate over waging war with Iraq. While he never mentioned Iraq specifically, the new strategic vision he unveiled in this speech, a vision centered on initiating “preemptive” wars against “unbalanced dictators” seeking weapons of mass destruction,¹ was clearly inspired by this more immediate policy problem. Through the summer and fall this issue came to dominate American politics as political leaders, opinion makers, and the general public wrestled with the implications of this initiative and the seemingly resolute march toward war by the Bush administration in the early months of 2003. Among the different arguments cited to justify war against Iraq, one theme was dominant with those who supported this controversial option: the United States could not tolerate the uncertain threat environment created by the mere possession of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons by the Iraqi regime. Administration officials never claimed to have evidence that Iraq was actually preparing to use these types of weapons against the United States or its allies, or that Iraq would actually provide them to terrorists. It was simply the potential for an attack by Iraq or its surrogates with weapons of mass destruction that was at the core of the strategic logic driving the move toward war. This strategic logic, in turn, makes the Iraq case a classic example of preventive war.

Preventive war is a persistent theme in the history of international politics and in theoretical explanations of war. In fact, as Paul Schroeder contends, preventive war has been a “normal, even common tool of statecraft.”² Simply put, preventive war is fought to halt the erosion of relative power to a rising adversary and the future dangers this power shift might present. According to Jack Levy, if political leaders in a given state “fear what their rising adversary might do once he gains superiority, and if they believe that this is their ‘last chance’ to avoid a situation in which the adversary has the potential to do substantial harm,” the preventive war temptation may be potent enough to drive that state to attack and blunt its rival’s growth.³ The temptation to initiate a preventive war might even appear “if the declining state is expected only to be weakened rather than actually surpassed in strength. Victory might still be expected later” in a possible military clash, “but with less certainty and at higher costs.”⁴ This is particularly relevant to the case of the United States and Iraq. Iraq hardly challenged American superiority as a global power or even a regional power in the Middle East. Since the Gulf War of 1991, however, American officials have claimed that an Iraqi nuclear capability would represent a serious shift in the distribution of power in the Gulf region. Specifically, it would erode America’s ability to wield its own power without the fear of a potent retaliatory strike.⁵ Despite the gross power imbalance that would remain between the United States and Iraq, Iraqi nuclear weapons would dramatically increase the potential costs of a future U.S.-Iraq war. American officials also worried that, should Iraq develop a nuclear arsenal, Saddam Hussein might brazenly test American resolve and make a play to extend his influence over the Gulf region.⁶ A preventive war would thus deny Iraq this particularly potent military capability to challenge the status quo while allowing the United States to avoid the nightmare scenario of facing a nuclear Iraq in a future armed conflict. Even after the invasion of Iraq and the destruction of the Saddam Hussein regime, this same preventive logic has led American leaders to treat nuclear proliferation to such rivals as Iran and North Korea as a top national security problem. With the Bush administration’s so-called preemption doctrine, articulated most formally in the National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002 and reaffirmed in the 2006 NSS, preventive war remains the ultimate anti-proliferation policy tool to stop the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

Contrast the decision by President Bush to launch a preventive war against Iraq in 2003 with President Harry Truman’s situation in the early Cold War. American leaders in the late 1940s and early 1950s faced a similar strategic dilemma. The USSR was on the verge of breaking the nuclear monopoly America had enjoyed since the final months of World War II, and once they had tested their own nuclear weapon the Soviets were poised to develop an arsenal that could threaten American security like no other previous adversary. For a number of government officials and outside observers the appropriate response to this dramatic shift in military capabilities was preventive war. In 1946 General Leslie Groves, the director of the Manhattan Project, described America’s strategic dilemma this way: “If we were ruthlessly realistic we would not permit any foreign power with which we are not firmly allied, and in which we do not have absolute confidence, to make or possess atomic weapons. If such a country started to make atomic weapons we would destroy its capacity to make them before it had progressed far enough to threaten us.”⁷

Despite the logic of the preventive war approach to the frightening prospects of facing a nuclear Soviet Union, President Truman rejected preventive war out of hand. And he did so, this book will demonstrate, on purely normative grounds, that is, based on beliefs about forms of behavior that are illegitimate, unjust, or contrary to the character of the United States. As Truman saw it, preventive wars are aggressive wars, the “weapons of dictators, not of free countries like the United States.”⁸ President Truman’s view was not idiosyncratic, but reflects one of the most widely held beliefs of his time: launching a preventive war, in the absence of an imminent threat, was believed to be repugnant to the ethical or cultural standards of democratic American citizens. It was said that the American character, its democratic norms restraining violence, and its foreign policy traditions, made preventive war impossible to initiate. In the 1950s, Alfred Vagts went so far as to claim that, for democracies, initiating preventive war is “taboo.”⁹ Among the many hard-nosed scholars and statesmen who shared this view on America and the normative implications of preventive war we find Hans Morgenthau, Henry Kissinger, George Kennan, Bernard Brodie, Henry Stimson, and John Foster Dulles. Moreover, NSC 68, the seminal strategic document that laid out America’s containment strategy in 1950, rejected preventive war in surprisingly frank and uncompromising language, grounding its objections firmly in the limits the American people place on what is normatively acceptable for the use of military force. During both the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, the belief that preventive war is simply illegitimate as a strategic option—an anti-preventive war norm—was an explicit part of the American security ethos. In turn, this belief had a decisive restraining effect on how the United States reacted to the power shift then under way created by the Soviet nuclear arsenal as well as rapid communist Chinese military growth in the mid-1950s. These are not the only cases in which America faced strategic situations appropriate for the logic of preventive war. We also see the preventive war temptation at work during the Cuba crisis of 1962, in the years leading to the Chinese nuclear test in 1964, and during the North Korean nuclear crisis of 1993–1994.

Over the course of the half-century that separates the early Cold War from America’s first preventive war in Iraq, something clearly observable and profound has occurred in how Americans think about preventive military force and the subsequent role it plays in U.S. policy. In the 1940s and 1950s the anti-preventive war norm was deeply engrained, genuinely held, and cut widely across the ideological and political spectrum. By the early 1990s, however, the anti-preventive war norm was completely marginalized in American discussions of military options to prevent such states as North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya from becoming nuclear powers. Normative resistance to the preventive war option was nonexistent during the North Korea crisis of 1993–1994, and, while visible in the debate over Iraq, it was inconsequential in the progressive march toward war.

The objective of this book is twofold. First, it seeks to demonstrate that normative beliefs about preventive war were in fact taken seriously by an earlier generation of Americans, and these beliefs then played an important role in American strategic decision-making. This is a controversial claim; prominent scholarly works that examine the preventive war option in the early Cold War argue that American leaders rejected it on purely strategic grounds, that is, the military difficulties of executing preventive war at an acceptable cost. In contrast, I argue that the preventive war option cannot be understood without looking closely at beliefs about American foreign policy behavior held by America’s leaders and its citizens. To do so the book brings together two bodies of research in international relations: realist arguments about state behavior that emphasize the central role of power in world politics and the motives for competition and war produced by changes in the distribution of material power; and ideational arguments on how normative beliefs about legitimate or illegitimate forms of behavior place limits on what states are willing to do as they seek security in a frequently dangerous world. In the process, an important goal is to show that norms do matter for state behavior. Second, the book traces the changing role of the anti-preventive war norm between the end of World War II and the Iraq War of 2003. Most important here is an explanation for why it was a marginalized belief by the early 1990s. The explanation points not to American reversion to raw strategic calculations on the preventive war option, but to a new norm that emerged between the 1960s and the Gulf War of 1991 that created a more permissive normative order for preventive war to enforce nuclear nonproliferation against so-called rogue states. The book remains agnostic on whether preventive war is a sound policy option from a strategic perspective to deal with shifts in the threat environment. It does not pass judgment on whether preventive war should be rejected by the United States on normative grounds, nor does it take a position on the international legality of preventive war as a particular motive for armed conflict. Each of these issues, for the Iraq case primarily, has been addressed by others. Much of the recent discussion of the ethical and legal dimensions of preventive war has been highly partisan and ideological, as supporters of war in Iraq and President Bush have squared off against opponents of Bush administration policies. This book will not wade into this partisan morass. In fact, by taking an empirical approach to these questions, it is hoped that the book will provide a deeper historical and theoretical context for the study of preventive war in American foreign policy.

The rest of this chapter sets up the essential theoretical background for the case studies. It first lays out the logic of preventive war in more detail. Drawing extensively from realist literature, it establishes the conditions likely to lead states to consider the preventive war option. Without this background it is impossible to explain why states are in a position to wrestle with the normative dimensions of preventive war in the first place. In this way the argument here does not deny the importance of power shifts that stimulate a reaction from states as they jockey for security. The chapter then looks closely at the concept of norms and beliefs in world politics. In recent decades there has been a surge of interest in the international relations literature in how ideas, norms, and identity influence state behavior, even in the security realm. Within this broader theoretical framework the chapter then examines the idea of an anti-preventive war norm in the United States, specifically, why Americans might accept such a norm and how it will interact with material strategic factors central to realist thinking to constrain how the United States actually responds to a changing threat environment.

The Preventive Motive for War

The preventive motive for war emerges directly from the basic background conditions of world politics so clearly laid out by realist scholars of international relations. It has become a truism in the field that individual states in the international system exist in a condition of anarchy, which simply means there is no higher authority among or above the states to provide security. At a minimum, anarchy creates a permissive environment in which states can use military force against one another for any number of reasons, ranging from achieving physical security, accumulating material wealth, and promoting an ideology or religion, to aggrandizing the stature of state leaders or a ruling party. Realists argue that the implications of anarchy are simple: if a state wants to survive and prosper, and all states are assumed to share these basic goals, it must have sufficient power to physically safeguard its interests against other states.¹⁰ In the realist canon, therefore, we find that power, most commonly defined in material terms (economic output, military strength, population, natural resources¹¹), is the defining feature of world politics. In the extreme, power determines whether states survive, how well they can defend their territory and population from predation, whether they can secure access to critical resources and trading partners essential for economic well-being, and whether they can set their own policies free from the coercive influence of other states. Power determines the hierarchy of states in the international system, thereby determining which states set the rules for international interaction.¹² Power decides the outcome of the inevitable conflicts of interest that arise among states. World politics in the realist framework, then, is simply a perpetual struggle for power.¹³ While a given state’s power may be a function of the material resources it can mobilize, power can only be measured relative to the resources other states can deploy. According to this view, state leaders must remain fixated on how strong their state is compared to others. Most important for the preventive motive for war, the relative distribution of power among a given set of states is rarely static. As Robert Gilpin notes, states will experience different rates of growth in the economic, military, and technological bases of power.¹⁴ National economies will expand and contract, the size of military forces will change over time, population growth rates will vary, and new technologies and organizational innovation can drastically alter particular states’ military effectiveness. Even during periods in which all major states are experiencing growth in the material bases of power, some states may simply grow faster than others, setting up an inevitable shift in the relative distribution of power as some states threaten to narrow the power gap or even exceed the power of others.

These shifts in relative power can have profound implications for state behavior. What is at stake if a power shift occurs is “future influence over a range of diverse and partly unpredictable issues.”¹⁵ The rising state, to the degree that it is dissatisfied with the international status quo, “will seek to alter the system in ways that favor [its] interests.” It may seek to do so by “chang[ing] the rules governing the international system, the division of the spheres of influence, and…the international distribution of territory.”¹⁶ According to John Mearsheimer, any weaker state in a position to revise the balance of power in its favor and then use its enhanced power in the struggle against other states will indeed do so.¹⁷ The dominant state must anticipate that, as a potential adversary’s power rises, so will its “appetites.”¹⁸ In other words, the dominant state must confront the possibility of direct challenges to a status quo it wants to preserv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Preventive War Temptation versus the Anti-Preventive War Norm
• 2 Preventing a Soviet Atomic Power Shift
• 3 Truman Rejects Preventive War
• 4 Eisenhower and the Growth of Soviet and Chinese Power, 1953–1955
• 5 The Cuba Crisis of 1962
• 6 Coercive Anti-Proliferation: From China 1964 to North Korea 1994
• 7 Conclusion: The Iraq War of 2003
• Endnotes
• Index