Infinity Journal Volume 5, Issue 2, Spring 2016

Volume 5, Issue 2, Spring 2016

Infinity Journal

Page 17

During a recent hearing in the U.S. Senate Armed Services

committee, Senator Lindsey Graham asked American

military leaders to characterize the North Korean threat and

he pressed them on the options available to respond to its

growing nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. According

to General Curtis Scaparrotti, the commander of American

forces in Korea,“all of these things,in about five or six years,are

going to be a formidable problem.” Admiral Harry Harris, the

commander of U.S. Pacific Command, went further, agreeing

with Senator Graham that military strikes were indeed an

option to blunt North Korea’s ballistic missile development.

This was not the first time American officials talked about this

particular problem in these terms.

In 1994, Secretary of Defense William Perry urged President

Clinton to order airstrikes against North Korea’s nuclear

facilities at Yongbyon in response to its threatened withdrawal

from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Perry justified this

bold recommendation with a warning: “whatever dangers

there are in [the military attack option]”, he argued, “these

dangers are going to be compounded two to three years from

now when…they’re producing bombs at the rate of a dozen

a year.”[i] In 2006, Perry and his former Assistant Secretary

of Defense for International Security Policy, Ashton Carter

(now Secretary of Defense under President Obama), spoke

out again on the subject. In co-authored opinion pieces

published in the

Washington Post

and

Time

magazine, they

called on President Bush to launch military strikes “to destroy

[North Korea’s] missiles at their test sites.”

While the security challenges posed by North Korea present

their own distinctive features, when set in a broader historical

perspective there is nothing new in the strategic perspective

embedded within these specific policy statements.The North

Korean nuclear question merely illustrates the most recent

flare up of the preventive war theory. In simple terms, the

objective of a preventive attack is to seize the initiative and

militarily beat back the rising power of a rival.This is not about

defense against actual aggression, or even a first strike to

preempt an adversary’s imminent attack. It is the choice to

strike a rival as it grows stronger, to avoid the mere possibility

that it might one day be strong enough to pose a great

danger, even though the future remains inherently uncertain.

The impulse to launch preventive attacks reaches back at

least to the Peloponnesian War among the Greek city-states

2,500 years ago. Repeatedly, through history we find three key

ingredients stirring a temptation to fight: shifting power, fear

of the future, and strong voices warning of the terrible fate

that lies ahead unless the growing threat is neutralized with

military action.

Indeed, the allure of preventive attack remains vibrant in

the United States. During a September 2015 speech at the

Brookings Institute, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

drew from the same strategic logic used by Secretary Perry

to address the potential threat from a different source. She

proclaimed that as president “I will not hesitate to use military

force if Iran attempts to pursue a nuclear weapon.”[ii]

Secretary Clinton’s blunt language on Iran, and the broader

reaction to her declaration, reveals the reflexive confidence

reserved for the preventive war option in American security

policy. While Clinton’s assertion was widely covered in the

press, the idea itself was largely met with collective silence

from other political leaders and virtually ignored by opinion

shapers and media commentators. An attack against

North Korea or Iran would constitute one of the most serious

initiatives imaginable in contemporary American foreign

policy.Yet there was no debate over the merits of preventive

attack against Iran, nor discussion of its viability as a solution

to the security problems driving American fears.

The objective of this article is to jump into the vacuum that

currently surrounds the question of preventive war to offer

some observations that should inform deliberations over

how to deal with the power-shift problem.The goal is twofold:

first, it will outline how the central logic of preventive war

rests on stunted strategic grounds, since it fails to recognize

Scott A. Silverstone

United States Military Academy at West Point

Scott A. Silverstone is a Professor of International Relations

at the United States Military Academy at West Point and

a Carnegie Fellow with New America, a think tank in

Washington, D.C. He is currently writing a book on the

strategic challenges of preventive war and the European

security dilemma of the 1930s.

To cite this Article:

Silverstone, Scott A.,“Haunted by the Preventive War Paradox”,

Infinity Journal

,Volume 5,Number 2, spring 2016,

pages 17-21.

Haunted by the Preventive War Paradox

Checking/observation Point On The Afghan Border 3 Photo