Preemption Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

Many political scientists draw a major distinction between preemption and preventive war. Some define preemption as action taken when an enemy attack is imminent, such that the term should not be applied when an adversary poses a longer-term threat. Others point to the nature of the logic driving such actions, with preemption referring to situations where the offense is favored in warfare, such that either side will feel driven to attack if war is imminent, by the mere calculation of how to be a winner rather than a loser on the battlefield. The logic of preventive war, by contrast, is not driven by an offensive-favoring cast to military weaponry, but by forecast of the trends in military, economic, or demographic power, as one may be stronger than an adversary now, and weaker in the future.

Moral Versus Analytical Assessments

Leaving aside analytical disputes, an important part of the debate may instead derive from the world’s strong moral preference for peace over war. Preemption, in this moral balance, is a situation where war is now inevitable, and the choice is then simply between one kind of war and another—the war that captures the advantages of striking first and the war where the other side gains this advantage.

Arms control experts and people in general lament the situation that drives opposing states into such a war and hope to avoid such situations by seeking crisis stability or strategic stability, by avoiding the weapons that favor the attack, and by stressing the kinds of weapons that reward sitting on the defensive. When wars are straightforward actions of preemption, they become no-fault wars, where neither side wanted war, but each wanted to avoid being defeated in a war. The situation of the adversaries is very much that portrayed in the game theory prisoners’ dilemma, where both sides wind up in a bad situation, because they fear something even worse.

In this moral assessment, a preventive war by contrast amounts to a conscious choice to replace peace with war for the present. The world would remain at peace for months or years or decades into the future, while diplomatic means are explored for the resolution of disputes, while worst-case fears of future trends are proved or disproved. Rather than blaming the situation, the peace-loving audience condemns the national leader who makes the choice to launch such a war—a war that did not have to happen.

The Burdens Of Leadership

In defense of any leader launching such a war, however, is the heavy responsibility for protecting a nation’s safety, so that worst-case assumptions are recognized as very real. If an adversary is rolling tanks toward a nation’s border, the response of anticipatory self-defense is accepted as preemption. However, if this adversary is simply training new troops, or developing new military technologies, or merely growing in population and industrial strength, these scenarios challenge the parameters for defining first moves of a coming attack. Preemption may be characterized as the case where war was inevitable, so that there was no peace lost in the actions taken. But the national leader charged with looking far into the future may see such war as inevitable, and thus may feel that the decision for action does not reduce the total of world peace in the process.

Nonmilitary Examples

The phenomenon of preemption is hardly confined to military conflict, for it is found in many examples from ordinary life in law-abiding domestic society. The term most generally refers to an action taken in anticipation of an action by an opposing actor. The ploy of the preemptive bid in the card game of bridge serves as one familiar example.

While the occurrence of negative campaigning in any electoral contest in a democracy is generally deplored, the logic behind such negativity is often a calculation that one’s opponent may score a point with some mudslinging the following morning; in this case, the candidate likely moves to beat the opponent to it with some such attacks the prior evening. If the electoral public is inclined to frown on whoever makes personal attacks in a campaign, the temptation to launch such attacks, and the fear that someone else is about to launch them, lessens, and the prisoners’ dilemma disappears. When the public, however, tends to be titillated by such attacks and to believe that there must be some truth to the charges, it is very difficult to avoid the traps of preemption.

American Attitudes In The Past

With regard to international military conflict, those who want preemption confined to very narrow bounds likely cite what may be the most significant American contribution to international law, the Caroline doctrine developed in an 1841 note by Secretary of State Daniel Webster in response to an 1837 British preemptive attack on an American ship in the Niagara River loaded with arms intended for rebels in Canada. Ironically, supporters of the American incursion into Iraq today argue that one should not make too much of the Caroline doctrine, but the international legal community has often cited the parameters proposed by Webster, that a preemptive attack could only be justified if the opposing attack were immediately imminent, and that the preemption must be proportionate in scale to the attack being fended off.

Skeptics about such a standard emphasize that this doctrine emerged when Britain was dominant on the high seas, and America was weak, and when Britain had professed a willingness to engage in preemption or preventive war more generally if its naval preponderance was ever challenged. Such skeptics also cite the example of the Nazi threat of world dominance in the 1930s, and the prospect of terrorist attacks today with weapons of mass destruction, as arguments that a much broader array of preemptive attacks may have to be legitimate.

Bibliography:

Gaddis, John. Surprise, Security and the American Experience. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004.
Glad, Betty, and Chris J. Dolan, eds. Striking First. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Keller,William, and Gordon Mitchell, eds. Hitting First. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006.
Mueller, Karl Jasen J. Castillo, Forrest E. Morgan, Negeen Pegahi, and Brian Rosen. Striking First. Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2006.
Silverstone, Scott. Preventive War and American Democracy. New York: Routledge, 2007.
Vagts, Alfred. Defense and Diplomacy. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1956.

This example Preemption Essay is published for educational and informational purposes only. If you need a custom essay or research paper on this topic please use our writing services. EssayEmpire.com offers reliable custom essay writing services that can help you to receive high grades and impress your professors with the quality of each essay or research paper you hand in.