The virtues of preemptive deterrence.(Twenty-Fourth Federalist Society Student Symposium, Law and Freedom)

I. INTRODUCTION

Although much about America's twenty-first-century foreign and defense policies seems to irritate its many critics, the so-called Bush Doctrine, announced in a series of speeches following the September 11, 2001, attacks and most articulately expressed in the National Security Strategy of the United States, (1) is their favorite target. It vigorously advocates strategic preemption--the use of military force against threats that have not yet fully matured, but nevertheless endanger American security--as a core component of American statecraft in the Twenty-First Century.

The Bush Doctrine was prominently featured in the 2004 presidential campaign. Senator John Kerry argued that the President's formulation was overly zealous and weakened the Atlantic alliance and that preemption, while an option in the case of dire necessity, was not to be bandied about in public and certainly not cast as a centerpiece of America's post-Cold War security strategy. These counter-preemption criticisms, although embraced by many pundits and public officials, both in the United States and abroad, are grounded in fundamental misconceptions about the nature of deterrence and the reasons for the transatlantic discord about core security issues. Even more fundamentally, they manifest a dangerous failure to appreciate the strategic predicament the United States faces in today's world and the corresponding need to adjust the American strategic doctrine and declaratory policy to cope with the new threats.

II. PREEMPTION'S VENERABLE PEDIGREE

The United States has long relied upon preemption to assure its national security; indeed, the Bush Administration's embrace of the doctrine is nothing new. (2) President John F. Kennedy's 1962 decision to forestall Soviet installation of short and intermediate range offensive nuclear missiles in Cuba by declaring a "quarantine" of the island stands as the most prominent modern example of U.S. strategic preemption. (3) Although carefully characterized by the United States as an act of self-defense, the quarantine, directed at Soviet ships carrying nuclear missiles to Cuba, indisputably constituted a belligerent act under international law. (4) Significantly, neither the Soviet Union nor Cuba had attacked the United States, nor was there any imminent threat that the missiles would be launched at the United States once they were deployed. Clearly, President Kennedy acted to preempt an attenuated and distant threat. (5)

In the post-September 11 geopolitical environment, the imperatives recommending preemption have grown even stronger. Neither toppling the Taliban regime nor killing Osama bin Laden during the summer of 2001 could have reliably prevented the 9-11 attacks. By that point, al Qaeda operatives had already infiltrated the United States and could have proceeded without further assistance. The only way to avert (with a sufficient degree of certainty) clandestine terrorist attacks by pan-national Islamist organizations is to act against them months, or even years, in advance.

Even if preemptive U.S. action cannot destroy the pan-national terrorist threat entirely, taking the battle to the enemy still offers considerable advantages: the U.S. operations against al Qaeda, in addition to killing or capturing numerous operatives, have disrupted the organization's plans and put it on the defensive. In the future, even before the United States actually uses force against a potential adversary, credible preemptive threats can disrupt that adversary's plans, force him to take extra precautions, and diminish his ability to launch new attacks. Moreover, requiring that the United States wait to respond until an attack occurs will often prove ineffectual, given that terrorists routinely relocate their facilities and stand down many of their ongoing activities just before an attack, thereby diminishing their vulnerability to anticipated counterattacks.

Today, preemption's necessity is further reinforced by Islamist terrorists, who, unlike America's Cold War enemies, cannot be reliably deterred. Traditional deterrence fails because of the messianic nature of Islamist terrorists' aspirations, the willingness and even eagerness of their leaders and footsoldiers alike to die for their cause, (6) as well as the more prosaic fact that these groups seldom have valuable assets that may be easily identified and targeted. Even the most robust deterrence "means nothing against shadowy terrorist networks with no nations or citizens to defend." (7)

Despite preemption's palpable necessity, its opponents tend to focus on the Bush Administration's candid embrace of preemption as a doctrine, (8) rather than as an acknowledgment of its past record and possible future utility. These same pundits also fret that preemption has taken too prominent a place in the administration's strategic thinking. They prefer to treat preemption like the crazy aunt in the attic: always looming in the background but rarely mentioned.(9) Unfortunately, to extol deterrence sans preemption, or even to claim that preemption ought not to be a component of one's declaratory strategy, is to betray a profound misunderstanding of the logic of deterrence itself.

III. THE DELICATE LOGIC OF DETERRENCE

A. Balancing the Goals

Deterrence, a venerable concept, (10) was greatly refined at the dawn of the nuclear era by a number of brilliant American strategists. (11) Notably, none of these expositors of modern deterrence theories would have disagreed with the proposition that the American strategic doctrine, together with the associated force structure and the weapons employment policies, has always meant to advance multiple goals. An ideal strategic policy, both at the declaratory and operational levels, should provide the highest possible level of dissuasion of one's enemies and ensure their defeat if deterrence fails, while simultaneously enjoying the warmest reception from one's allies, even when they cannot be overtly identified with the understood policies of their patron.

Unfortunately, the inherent tension between and among these goals often makes them incapable of being achieved simultaneously. We seem to have forgotten this; even during the Cold War, the United States and its European allies had longstanding, contentious disagreements over deterrence requirements. At the risk of oversimplifying several decades' worth of transatlantic debates, it can be said that the United States generally displayed much greater preoccupation with the survivability of its own nuclear forces, (12) targeting and employment flexibility, and continuous refinement of declaratory policy than did its European allies. (13)

During the last two decades of the Cold War, a number of U.S. strategists (American civilian and military strategists were also not always in accord) tended to argue that the best way to deter the Soviets, who believed that nuclear war was winnable, was to anchor …