Of Smoking Guns and Mushroom Clouds: Explaining the Bush Doctrine and the Rise of Military Pre-emption
* This article is based on an address to the Socratic Forum on ‘Pre-emptive Wars: Legal? Ethical? In the National Interest?’ supported by the Key Centre for Ethics, Law, Justice and Governance, Griffith University, Brisbane, on 1 December 2003.
The American doctrine of pre-emptive military action, outlined by President George W. Bush during 2002, is a realistic and morally justified response to dangerous, new security challenges in the 21st century. This article identifies two basic reasons for the rise of such a doctrine and discusses their implications for international order. First, the idea of pre-emptive strike has come about because of the globalisation of security and the revolution in military affairs that it has created. The second reason for the rise of pre-emptive military thought is connected to the unfortunate gulf that has developed between strategy and the law. While the world of contemporary strategy has been forced to adapt to the harsh realities of global change, international law has failed to adjust to new conditions. As a result, the United Nations (UN) Charter is increasingly unable to provide a legal framework to guide the use of force in the 21st century.
If international law, as embodied in the Westphalian principles of the UN, does not meet the challenge presented by the rise of the Bush Doctrine of pre-emption, then the UN, like the League of Nations before it, will fade into irrelevance. The core of this article’s argument, then, is that the rise of a strategy of pre-emption is a symptom of both a changing security order and the failings of international law to provide a realistic basis for collective security.
The Globalisation of Security and the Military Revolution
The dramatic changes in the international security environment manifested themselves with surreal power on our television screens on 11 September 2001 in the form of the al-Qa’ida attacks on New York and Washington. On that terrible day we saw demonstrated the reality that it is now possible to organise violence outside a state structure on a scale that is potentially devastating to an entire society. The rise of mass-casualty terrorism has challenged the 20th-century paradigm of modern war in which armed conflict was the monopoly of states and governments. Since the Peace of Wesphalia in 1648, our norms of diplomacy, war and international law have been predicated on armed conflict as a phenomenon that occurs between sovereign states.
Today, the Westphalian nation-state model of statecraft, which links military power to legal sovereignty and territorial borders, has been challenged by the four great new realities of the age of globalised security. First, recognition of universal human rights now requires adherence by all countries, irrespective of a particular state’s internal laws and physical sovereignty. In the 1990s, in the wake of such Balkan massacres as Srebrenica, we saw the rise of a new doctrine of humanitarian military intervention based on the conviction that, if a state permits the slaughter of its citizens, it forfeits its rights of sovereignty. Like the concept of pre-emption, such a doctrine challenges normative principles of international law based on non-intervention.1 We saw this doctrine enunciated in the war over Kosovo—a war fought by the NATO powers against Yugoslavia in order to prevent the Serbs from ethnically cleansing the Kosovars.
Second, there is the reality of a proliferation of global and transnational threats such as mass-casualty terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missiles. These new threats bypass the barriers of national geography and state borders, and undermine the nation-state’s monopoly over violence. In short, the modern state has lost its basic ability to ensure the safety of its citizens from non-state forces and transnational dangers. In this way the military balance between state and non-state organisations has changed. Third, there is the reality of a global economic system that ignores national frontiers. The global economy brings with it the trappings of Western modernity, yet creates widespread social dislocation that fuels armed conflict.
Fourth, there is the reality of a global communications network that penetrates all borders electronically, ensuring that a modern sense of global consciousness will be resisted by countervailing forces of cultural and religious fanaticism. It is a striking irony that the interconnectedness of our new age provides a web of networks and nodes for the creation of extremist and clandestine non-state armies such as al-Qa’ida, enabling their cadres to wield destructive power through non-territorial space.
The above trends from the globalisation of security have been recognised by strategic analysts and defence policy makers from Washington through Moscow to Beijing. In 1999, the bipartisan US (Hart–Rudman) Commission on American Security in the 21st Century reported that, as a result of the globalisation of security, the Cold War strategies of nation-states—notably deterrence, containment, retaliation and mass military forces—were increasingly irrelevant to the maintenance of international order in the new millennium.2 In his magisterial study of strategic change, The Shield of Achilles, the leading American strategic analyst, Phillip Bobbitt, has observed that in the 21st century ‘national security will cease to be defined in terms of borders alone because both the links among societies as well as the attacks on them exist in psychological and infrastructural dimensions, not on an invaded plain marked by the seizure and holding of territory’.3 Bobbitt has crystallised the strategic revolution in a striking passage:
We are at a moment in world affairs when the essential ideas that govern statecraft must change. For five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state; only states could muster the huge revenues, conscript the vast armies, and equip the divisions required to threaten the survival of other states ... This is no longer true, owing to advances in international telecommunications, rapid computation, and weapons of mass destruction. The change in statecraft that will accompany these developments will be as profound as any that the State has thus far undergone.4
Such views of international security trends are not confined to Americans. British, French and Russian defence experts now speak of the rise of multi-variant warfare. They speak of a spectrum of conflict marked by unrestrained ‘Mad Max’ wars in which symmetric and asymmetric wars merge, and in which Microsoft coexists with machetes and stealth technology is met by suicide bombers.5 Chinese strategists, meanwhile, have developed the theory of unrestricted warfare in which they state, ‘there is no territory that cannot be surpassed; there is no means which cannot be used in war; and there is no territory or method which cannot be used in combination’.6
What the above views of security have in common is a conviction that, in the age of globalised security, the greatest danger to advanced technological nations is no longer the threat of military invasion of the territory of the sovereign nation-state, but an assault on its modern, complex, networked societies by non-state organisations. Faced by a spectrum of global threats that know no geographical boundaries, we are compelled to move towards a new strategic paradigm. Such a paradigm does not abandon deterrence and containment but supplements both, at least in the United States and many Western arsenals, by adding new policies of military prevention and pre-emption. As Secretary of State, Colin Powell, put it in September 2002, ‘A doctrine of preemption in our strategy is appropriate... but don’t see it as a new doctrine that excludes or eliminates all the other tools of national security’.7
It is, then, the globalisation of security that provides the essential background to the 2002 Bush Doctrine and the US National Security Strategy, which together elevate pre-emption to the centre of American strategic thought.8 President Bush has simply articulated what many professional strategists now accept: that Western nations face a new threat that emanates from ‘the perilous crossroads of radicalism and technology’.9 Nor should we be surprised by the statement that ‘America is threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies in the hands of the embittered few’.10 Many defence intellectuals in both Britain and Australia—America’s two closest allies—would now accept such a view.
The Bush Administration’s philosophy reflects a growing strategic consensus that, in an era of globalised security, prevention and pre-emption are necessary because we cannot deter or contain an attacker whose armed struggle is existential and millenarian, and is expressed through mass-casualty suicide terrorism against innocent civilians. Nor can we ignore the quest of non-state fanatics for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons in order to maximise their means of destruction. Such a dangerous adversary must be subject to preemption by both the intelligence services and the armed forces of Western nations.
International Law and the New Strategic Environment
The realities of the new strategic environment outlined above have not been matched by necessary changes in international law. Pre-emption, or anticipatory self-defence, has not yet been adapted to meet the non-state threat of new weapons technology and mass-casualty terrorism. Instead, the rules of pre-emptive war remain governed in customary international law by the famous 1837 Caroline Doctrine enunciated by US Secretary of State, Daniel Webster, after a dispute with Britain over the use of force against Canadian rebels on American soil.11
The Caroline Doctrine states that a pre-emptive war is justified only when a state faces a threat in which the necessity for self-defence is ‘instant, overwhelming and leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation’.12 Webster’s formulation, which emphasises the imminence of threat, served to set the standard for permissible pre-emptive action until the formation of the UN in 1945. Under the UN Charter, Article 2(4) and Article 51 justify anticipatory self-defence only if special conditions of necessity and proportionality are met.13
Anticipatory self-defence has, of course, a long history. The doctrine was used by the United States to blockade Cuba by naval means during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It was also employed by the Israelis to forestall Arab attack in the 1967 Six Day War and to prevent the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak from becoming operational in 1981. The rise of pre-emption since the end of the Cold War, however, has much to do with the rise of the deadly trinity of weapons proliferation, rogue states and terrorism. That trinity was first identified as a serious global danger by the Clinton Administration in 1993.14
Indeed it was President Clinton who brought pre-emptive strike to the fore when he seriously considered a strike against North Korea’s Yongbyon nuclear reactor in 1994. In 1998, Clinton actually employed pre-emptive strikes, using cruise missiles against Saddam Hussein’s weapons sites in Operation Desert Fox, and against al-Qa’ida facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan. Clinton justified the use of pre-emptive strikes against both Sudan and Afghanistan by stating: ‘these strikes were a necessary and proportionate response to the imminent threat of further terrorist strikes’.15
Given this background, and the reality of the 11 September attacks on the United States, it is not surprising that the Bush Administration should have formally adopted a doctrine of pre-emption. The philosophical challenge that the Bush Doctrine poses to the international community is that of adapting the concept of imminence embodied in the Caroline Doctrine and Articles 2(4) and 51 of the UN Charter in order to meet new 21st-century strategic realities. The September 2002 US National Security Strategy throws the gauntlet down when it states, in a key phrase: ‘we must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries’.16 How does a state define the concept of imminent attack when the enemy is faceless, indiscriminate and suicidal, and may be armed with weapons that can kill thousands of people?
The difficulty that we face is that the threat from mass-casualty terrorism is being judged by too many UN members according to outmoded legal standards drawn from Westphalian interstate norms and according to the provisions of a UN Charter that was drawn up in 1945 for a very different world. Properly applied, pre-emption is a legitimate aspect of a state’s apparatus of self-defence. Thus, there is an urgent need for a broader interpretation of the issues of imminence, necessity and proportionality in dealing with non-state threats and the possible use of destructive technology.17
We need a new calculus for pre-emption because it is absurd to expect any state to have to sustain mass destruction in order to prove an immaculate legal conception of self-defence. In the memorable words of US National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, if America waits for incontrovertible evidence of the smoking gun, it may instead witness a mushroom cloud hovering over one of its cities.18 Neither the United States nor its allies can permit the shield of state sovereignty—especially in rogue or failing states—to become a sanctuary behind which messianic Islamic terrorists can plan the destruction of Western democratic civilisation. Yet in stating this reality, how do we justify territorial intrusion without unleashing anarchy? Pre-emptive military action is akin to the practice of controlled burning in bushfire fighting: one wants to create an effective firebreak but not at the expense of a conflagration. Accordingly, nations need to undertake an international security dialogue in order to bring greater analytical and political clarity to the concept of imminence, which is the key determinant of pre-emptive action.
As that distinguished scholar of the just-war tradition, Michael Walzer, has pointed out, if a state faces the probability of unseen attack, ‘the line between legitimate and illegitimate first strikes is not going to be drawn at the point of imminent threat but at the point of sufficient threat’.19 Sufficient threat may involve a situation in which waiting, or inaction, greatly magnifies the risk of sudden attack. We need, therefore, to establish more intelligible criteria of the nature of threat in the 21st century—criteria that can provide a basis for collective pre-emptive action, whether by the UN Security Council or by a coalition of the willing.
Achieving an international consensus on pre-emptive military action will be a daunting challenge, but it is not impossible for three reasons. First, a close reading of the Bush Doctrine reveals that the document is not simply an appeal to unilateralism and American exceptionalism. Bush’s message upholds universal moral values in that it calls for all civilised nations to cooperate. Such cooperation is necessary in order to make the world safe for democracy because otherwise democracy will not be safe in the world. The rhetoric used is thus neo-Wilsonian in tone; it is not couched in the language of Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue.20
Second, an informed discussion on pre-emption can draw on the precedent of humanitarian military intervention in breaching state sovereignty. After all, NATO’s action in Kosovo was technically illegal, but few would argue that it was not legitimate. The lesson of Kosovo is that there may be circumstances in which acting illegally is more just to humanity than failing to act at all. This moral logic is a useful basis on which to begin to discuss the legal complexities of pre-emptive military action.21
Finally, we need to define the differences between pre-emption and prevention, because much of the controversy surrounding the Bush Doctrine conflates preventive war with pre-emptive war. For instance, the recent war against Iraq was not pre-emptive but preventive in character. Military intervention in Iraq was based on an incipient contingent threat rather than a credible imminent threat.22 Ultimately, the war was justified by twelve years of defiance of UN Security Council resolutions 678, 687 and 1441 that compelled disarmament on pain of military force. However, it may also be, as Michael Walzer has suggested, that the gulf between pre-emption and prevention has so narrowed in practice, that there is little strategic or moral difference between them.23 If he is right, then the case for a security dialogue and reform of the international laws governing armed conflict is even more compelling.
Conclusion
In 1995, the leading French military intellectual, Philippe Delmas, observed: ‘this world is without precedent. It is as different from the Cold War as it is from the Middle Ages ... Tomorrow’s wars will not result from the ambitions of States; rather from their weaknesses’.24 Delmas has been proven right, but our dilemma is that the international community has failed to come to grips with a new age of globalised security in which lethal, privatised non-state violence can penetrate borders and threaten entire societies.
As a result, the United States and its closest allies will justifiably resort to the doctrine of pre-emptive military action if, and when, they can identify a deadly threat against themselves. It is pointless for the UN to complain that such a course of action violates the traditional notion of sovereignty of the nation-state. The truth that the UN must confront is that there are no realistic post-Westphalian security procedures available to counteract the transnational nexus of terrorism, messianic revolution and advanced technology.
New security threats require new legal rules. Both the UN Charter and international law must be updated and modernised in order to reflect the underlying geopolitical realities of our age. In particular, the law must incorporate a more flexible justification for the role of pre-emptive action in the protection of a state’s citizens. Unless UN member nations meet the grave intellectual and ethical challenges posed by the lethal trinity of weapons proliferation, messianic terrorism and rogue states, they will begin to resemble a modern version of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Like the Knight of the Mournful Countenance, they will be condemned to fighting windmills and to losing their way in the real world, while all the time risking the lives of the innocent and compromising the moral values of our democratic civilisation.
Endnotes
1 Catherine Guicherd, ‘International Law and the War in Kosovo’, Survival, Summer 1999, vol. 41, no. 2, pp. 19–34.
2 US Commission on National Security/21st Century, New World Coming: American Security in the 21st Century, Supporting Research and Analysis, Phase 1 Report, The Commission, Washington DC, 15 September 1999.
3 Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace and the Course of History, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002, p. 813.
4 Ibid., p. xxi.
5 Michael Evans, ‘From Kadesh to Kandahar: Military Theory and the Future of War’, US Naval War College Review, Summer 2003, vol. 61, no. 3, pp. 132–50.
6 Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, Unrestricted Warfare, People’s Liberation Army Literature and Arts Publishing House, Beijing, 1999, p. 199.
7 Quoted in Robert S. Litwak, ‘The New Calculus of Pre-emption’, Survival, Winter 2002, vol. 44, no. 4, p. 59.
8 See The White House, ‘President Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point’, 1 June 2002 at <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases>. This speech is generally regarded as being the first major public occasion on which pre-emption was officially outlined by President George W. Bush. Many of the ideas in the West Point speech were subsequently codified in The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, September 2002, <http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.html>.
9 ‘President Delivers Graduation Speech at West Point’, 1 June 2002.
10 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, p. 1.
11 Anthony Clark Arend, ‘International Law and the Preemptive Use of Force’, Washington Quarterly, Spring 2003, vol. 26, no. 2, pp. 89–102.
12 Letter from Mr Webster to Lord Ashburton, 6 August 1942, cited in Arend, ‘International Law and the Preemptive Use of Force’, pp. 90–1.
13 Ibid., pp. 91–3.
14 For the background to pre-emption in US policy, see Melvyn P. Leffler, ‘9/11 and the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy’, International Affairs, May 2003, vol. 79, no. 5, pp. 1045–63.
15 Quoted in Litwak, ‘The New Calculus of Pre-emption’, pp. 65–6. Emphasis added.
16 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, p. 15. Emphasis added.
17 For discussion see Litwak, ‘The New Calculus of Pre-emption’, pp. 53–74; Abraham D. Sofaer, ‘On the Necessity of Pre-emption’, European Journal of International Law, April 2003, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 227–40; and George R. Lucas, Jr., ‘The Role of the “International Community” in Just War Tradition—Confronting the Challenges of Humanitarian Intervention and Preemptive War’, Journal of Military Ethics, 2003, vol. 2, no. 2, pp. 122–44.
18 Condoleeza Rice, ‘Anticipatory Defense in the War on Terror’, New Perspectives Quarterly, Fall 2002, vol. 19, no. 4 at <http://www.digitalnpq.org/home.html>; and Charles W. Kegley, Jr. and Gregory A. Raymond, ‘Preventive War and Permissive Normative Order’, International Studies Perspectives, 2003, vol. 4, p. 386.
19 Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars, 3rd edn, Basic Books, New York, 2000, p. 81.
20 Lucas, ‘The Role of the “International Community” in Just War Tradition—Confronting the Challenges of Humanitarian Intervention and Preemptive War’, p. 125.
21 Ibid., pp. 122–44. See also Adam Roberts, ‘NATO’s “Humanitarian War” over Kosovo’, Survival, Autumn 1999, vol. 41, no. 3, pp. 102–23.
22 Kegley and Raymond, ‘Preventive War and Permissive Normative Order’, pp. 388–93. See also Adam Roberts, ‘Law and the Use of Force After Iraq’, Survival, Summer 2003, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 31–56.
23 Michael Walzer at the Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, ‘Iraq and Just War: A Symposium’, 30 September 2002, p. 15 at <http://pewforum.org/events>.
24 Philippe Delmas, The Rosy Future of War, The Free Press, New York, 1995, p. 213.
