The Origins of ‘New’ Security Constructions

It is fair to argue that since the terror attacks of 11 September 2001, no initiative in international security affairs has generated more controversy than the Bush Administration’s embrace of the preventive war option to blunt the development of mass destruction weapons by particular states. The strategic logic of preventive war, rooted in the temptation to attack a potential adversary in the early stages of its growing power or development of specific military capabilities, ¹ was the dominant justification for the Iraq war of 2003. In the updated National Security Strategy of 2006 the Bush Administration reiterated its willingness to consider preventive war beyond the Iraq case, while a number of commentators have urged consideration of a preventive attack against Iran to arrest its suspected nuclear weapons ambitions. Put into a broader historical context, recent interest in preventive military attack represents a dramatic departure from the traditional American interpretation of the normative implications of this strategic option. From the end of World War II through the early 1980s, preventive war was classified as state aggression, and thus rejected overwhelmingly in the American political system. By the early 1990s, however, preventive attack was increasingly seen as a form of legitimate self-defence. The implications of this new interpretation of preventive war as legitimate self-defence rather than illegitimate aggression are profound, for American policy and its international effects alike. This chapter not only explains the origins of the characterization of preventive war as aggression and the process through which the legitimate self-defence interpretation emerged, it also explores how this conceptual shift has fundamentally altered the domestic political setting for considering preventive war as an option to deal with future power shifts.