The Gamble of War

Is It Possible to Justify Preventive War?

A. Colonomos

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781349437276, 9781137018946
• eBook ISBN: 9781137018953
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book analyzes the justification of preventive war in contemporary asymmetrical international relations. It focuses on the most crucial aspect of prevention: uncertainty. It builds a new framework where the role of luck—whether military, political, moral, or normative—is a corrective to the traditional approaches of the just war tradition.

PART 1

On the Forms of Preventive War

CHAPTER ONE

Narrating, Explaining, Defining Preventive War

One does not only defend oneself against a superior power when one is attacked; one takes measures in advance to prevent the attack materializing . . . we have reached a stage where we are forced to plan new conquests and forced to hold on to what we have got, because there is a danger that we ourselves may fall under the power of others unless others are in our power.

Alcibiades¹

Preventive war is suicide from fear of death.

Bismarck²

After September the 11th, I made a commitment to the American people: This nation will not wait to be attacked again. We will defend our freedom. We will take the fight to the enemy. Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.

George W. Bush, June 28, 2005

What is a preventive war? We have to overcome an initial paradox here. It would seem to be dual in nature, both offensive and defensive. Preventive war—the most striking example being the war launched by the United States against Iraq in 2003—is a conflict waged in a resolutely offensive mode. However, the watchword etched on the US standard was the security of the United States and the world. This chimes with a more or less well-founded belief that preventive war is necessary when a strictly defensive action would have failed and would have unjustly endangered the state that feels compelled to give battle.

To leave matters here is to sidestep a major conceptual, empirical, and practical difficulty, the most crucial of all the problems surrounding this singular enigma. It is, first, to fail to differentiate the action from a merely offensive war. The large number of preventive wars is very often due to the excessive openness of this type of definition.³ Declaration of a preventive war might merely be the mask of a desire for aggression or even conquest. Preventive war might be a mere title, a rhetoric, and not a military strategy and political doctrine, nor a legal and moral issue. It could be a mere label.

Objectively, the action would be an offensive war. It could also simply be the product of a belief of varying degrees of sincerity. The war could, subjectively, be defensive in part if the attacker believes that significant danger exists and represents a potential challenge to his security. The preventive attack might be motivated by the conviction, on the part of the aggressor, of the probability, in an indeterminate future, of a clash that would deprive him of control over the security of his citizens or of part of his sovereignty or, quite simply, his influence.

Action, intention, justification, and aims—these various levels constantly intermingle. To wage a preventive war is also to operate simultaneously in the registers of speech and action, to the point where it is often difficult to distinguish between the two. To convince someone of the plausibility of a preventive war—to assert, for example, a doctrine of anticipation—is already to “wage” war; prevention here forms part of its initial aspect, deterrence. Preparations for war, strategy, and tactics are also signals of an intention that constitute the terms of a dialogue, even if only an implicit one.

What are the different levels of action and language? The main stumbling block here lies in the difference between what a preventive war might be if the fears of a state that embarks on it were plausible and objectivizable and what it might be if its fears were imaginary and unfounded. There are several possibilities in the latter case. For example, such fears might be unfounded because its leaders are inventing a pretext (a threat that does not exist, even in their eyes), are deliberately overestimating the threat, or are mistaken in the assessment of the threat, either because there are deficiencies in the information at their disposal (they should have investigated the capacities and intention of their adversary better) or because it is impossible to obtain information that would have enabled them to arrive at a different conclusion. The levels of preventive war (of its justification and enactment) are plural; it is a question both of doing and saying and of believing and convincing others.

Historians, specialists of international relations, legal scholars, and philosophers approach prevention differently. There are, admittedly, overlaps between such varied definitions. The analytic registers are, however, quite distinct: one group (historians and specialists in international relations) proposes to recognize preventive initiative by its causes or pretexts, while the other group (legal scholars and philosophers) pays most attention to reasons or even motives. With regard to causes, the notion of “interests” predominates—that is to say, the gains objectively derived from going to war. These interests may be calculated objectively and may also be influenced by beliefs or preferences. Reasons are objective and are set in a framework whose value depends on coherence and withstanding criticism. Reasons may also be more or less subjective, and this is particularly the case when the leaders of a state announce a need to defend themselves in response to a threat. These definitions or descriptions, explanations or justifications are selective; these definitions or descriptions take only a few deliberately exaggerated elements from this mode of use of force. The so-called preventive wars may be said to have different facets that are difficult to group within a single category. It might be argued that a unitary notion of preventive war does not exist, though to leave matters there would be disappointing.

There is another way to approach this question. This is to describe the preparatives for—and first developments of—certain preventive wars by showing how they combine specifically with the justification for declaration of war. To fight a preventive war in a democracy involves, first, convincing others by justifying that war, then giving an account of—and accounting for—its conduct and outcomes. These first impressions and evaluations substantially influence its course and foretell something of its future as a recurrent practice and doctrine. The protagonists in these conflicts argue; they express their reasons and motives, and declare their intentions. Commentators explore these declarations and actions in the light of the facts. This mix of evidence and expertise is characteristic of the justification of prevention. Its various threads must be disentangled, to elaborate a satisfactory definition or a typology better, to complete the explanatory analysis by bringing out the role of norms and justification, and to integrate the contributions of causal explanation into normative definitions. Explanatory analysis casts light on new situations—“bluff,” for example, errors of calculation, or disinformation—, which are not necessarily envisaged in legal or ethical thinking. Judgment of the war may depend on the elucidation of the context in which it unfolds.

The following is the most general definition there is: preventive war is conducted by a state that either fears it can no longer maintain itself in a situation of predominance or, especially in the case of a preemptive war, fears it cannot survive if it does not take the initiative with an enemy, which, in a virtually immediate, imminent, or distant future, will attack it if it does not act (this is the belief of its leaders). The more it is the former, the more the offensive aspect predominates; the more it is the latter, the more plausible is the defensive character of the action. Traditionally, though this is not the only pattern, preventive war aims to destroy the means—most often weapons—with which the country that is attacked could one day harm the attacker. In the case of prevention, the threat is a long-term one; in the opposite case of preemption, the time horizon is much shorter. Preemptive war is an attack on another army that is on the point of attacking. Preemption is less difficult to justify, since, in that case, the defensive character of the recourse to arms is less hypothetical than in the case of preventive war. These criteria of definition imply a distancing from the category of offensive war. In this case, preventive war would no longer be a type of offensive war, but would exist on its own terms.

Let us assume that war is declared “for offensive or defensive reasons based on real or imaginary perceptions among a state’s elites of a change in the balance of power against them,”⁴ then the change in the balance of power is also likely to include a serious infringement of the security of the citizens of that state. This explanation includes motives within causes, and distinguishes reasons that are regarded as objective (defined by the belligerent itself and potentially confirmed by an external view) from subjective reasons. The different levels of language and action are to be investigated by studying the coherence of the arguments presented for public consumption and differentiating them from those more revealing of what are, at times, unavowed intentions.

The Lessons of History

The Peloponnesian War: Objective or Subjective Causes?

. . . the truest cause of the war, though the one advanced the least, lies, in my view, in Athenian expansion, which worried the Spartans and hence forced them to fight.

Thucydides⁵

The above explanation is familiar: in a world without a social contract, the preventive temptation is always present. International politics in the Greek world was mostly bipolar and relied on the interplay between the two coalitions formed around Athens and Sparta. Given the uncertainty surrounding the maintenance of equilibrium, war was regarded as inevitable by its different protagonists.

A number of Realists take inspiration from Thucydides in the development of their theories. Though it is highly questionable to regard Thucydides as having been the first proponent of a school that only formed 24 centuries later, his analysis of the balance of power nonetheless partly finds its meaning within the Realist framework.⁶ This is Leo Strauss’s interpretation; it is also the argument of Pierre Hassner: as a critic of the propensity to agitation of the overturbulent Athenian democracy, Thucydides can be seen as leaning toward Spartan moderation and caution. For all that, the ancient bipolar system was stable; it consolidated itself by gathering other political units around the two great powers—kingdoms, islands, and city-states that sought assistance from them and lent them aid. Despite it being in the interest of the two powers not to disturb the balance, mutual suspicion encouraged them to seek to be primus inter pares. In Thucydides’s view, it was Athens that took this first step and, when Sparta immediately reacted, war ensued. For fear of the rise of Athens, a power that would eventually surpass it, Sparta initiated direct confrontation.

Athens acted on its satellites to influence their relations with the Lacedaemonians’s allies. Many feared for their security if there were to be a clash between the two major powers, while others saw an opportunity either to associate with the one that seemed likely to come out on top or to shake off the yoke of the power dominating them. Corcyra called for the assistance of Athens⁷ and encouraged it to take the initiative in the war against Sparta, the first episode of which was the clash with its enemy, Sparta’s ally, Corinth. Corcyra’s leaders deployed classic arguments:

In case of war we should obviously be useful to you, but some of you may think that there is no immediate danger of war. Those who think along those lines are deceiving themselves; they do not see the facts that Sparta is frightened of you and wants war.⁸

In the bipolar system, with the set of alliances in the Greek world of the fifth century BCE, perceptions of shifts in power between the two major states were what drove the desire to go to war; those directly affected by the potential transformations of the power balance also played a part in shaping those perceptions. It is surprising to see how extensive the debates were within the assemblies of each of the protagonists—and how much time was given to exchanges between future belligerents. The Corinthians, allies of Sparta, went to Athens. Athenian delegates traveled to Sparta as observers of the complaints leveled by the Corinthian delegates against the Lacedaemonians for their lack of foresight regarding the rise of Athens.⁹ These interventions fuelled the contagion within a system, which, by promoting mutual fear, militated in favor of the outbreak of hostilities.

The Peloponnesian War is the paradigm case, the prime conceptual model of preventive war. Being a recent creation—less than a century old—the discipline of international relations is characterized by an obsession with finding structural analytic models that predate its own thinking, classics that would give it an intellectual foundation. Thucydides plays this role. In a bipolar scenario, he argues, the more powerful of the two states would attack to thwart the rise of the other.¹⁰ Such an explanation assumes very good knowledge of the material capacities of the two protagonists, and of their nature and the chronology of their decision making. Even when this information is available and thoroughly mastered, this approach has the drawback of generating confusion: in fact, it clouds the issue by barely separating explanatory causes from declared reasons or motives. This is a problem that always arises with the reading of Thucydides. By dint of his dual position—as a historian dealing with causal analyses of a phenomenon and a witness who is not only describing but is also actively involved with one side—he tends to confuse the causes of preventive war (explanation) with the motives of the belligerents (narration).

Several explanations of the outbreak of this type of war may be envisaged. One of these would, in fact, give primacy to causes: the historian or international relations specialist may produce a retrospective analysis to the effect that the preventive war ensues from a change in the balance of power that would eventually have taken place. In this case, causal explanation equates with the description of motives, and the motives invoked equate with objective causes. A second explanation may regard the motives as mere pretexts for classical, offensive war and dissociate them from the causal analysis of a shift in the balance of power to the detriment of the attacker. This latter explanation is seen as merely wishing to increase his power and stave off decline. There is,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures, Graphs, and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: New Departures in the Military Arena
• Part 1   On the Forms of Preventive War
• Part 2   Waging War
• Part 3   Moral Luck
• Conclusion: The Gamble on the Best of All Worlds
• Notes
• Name Index
• Thematic Index