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Q: Can I stop you on the word pre-emptive? I know it was used in the National Security Strategy of September 2002, but pre-emptive carries with it the thought of stopping some imminent attack. We now know in Iraq there probably wasn’t an imminent attack likely. Wouldn’t preventive be a better word?


A: The terms are confusing because there was a fairly clear and sharp distinction during the Cold War between pre-emptive and preventive war. In the Cold War, pre-emption meant imminent danger. Preventive was understood to be a more long-term question. I have always felt that these terms were not easily separated, that there was a kind of blur between them. And I think that is all the more relevant as you move out of the Cold War and as we get away from the context of nuclear war in which these terms were being used. The idea of pre-emption or prevention is not new in American foreign policy.


It’s deeply rooted in American foreign policy, going all the way back to the aftermath of the War of 1812. It was a dominant feature of our foreign policy for 100 years, coming all the way up through the early 20th century Roosevelt corollary to the Monroe Doctrine [that made the Western Hemisphere off-limits to European colonization]. There were no clear distinctions made between pre-emption and prevention in the thinking of that period.


I think we are actually back to a kind of situation which 19th-century strategists had to deal with: the danger of non-state actors who, with state support or taking advantage of the failure of states, might gain locations from which they could threaten American interests. There was a sense that these dangers had to be pre-empted or prevented by taking over Florida, for example, from Spain, or taking over Texas from Mexico, or, according to many historians, provoking a war with Mexico so [the United States] could take California to prevent the French or British from taking it later.


[Another example is] our interventions in Central America at the beginning of the 20th century, which were intended to prevent so-called failed states from providing excuses that might lead European powers like imperial Germany, for instance, to intervene. There is a long tradition behind this, and I think it obscures more than it illuminates to try to provide this pre-emption/prevention distinction from the nuclear debates in the 1950s and 1960s and try to make them work in this new situation.

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Q: How dramatic or new is this doctrine of preemption?

A: Well, the doctrine of preemption has a long and distinguished history in the history of American foreign policy. Our doctrine throughout most of the 19th century -- at the time that we were expanding along the frontier and confronted European colonies along the frontier, confronted Indians, confronted pirates, confronted hostile non-state actors along the frontier -- was very much one of preemption.

Preemption is how we took Florida. Preemption is, in some way, how we took Texas. Preemption is how we took the Philippines, basically, in 1898. So to say that preemption is an un-American doctrine is not right historically. However, preemption has not been the primary American doctrine for a very long time, and it certainly was not during the Cold War for pretty obvious reasons. Because preemption ran the risk, of course, of nuclear war, equally damaging to both sides during the Cold War. So, very little was heard about preemption, at least in public, during the Cold War.

But the idea is coming back, and it's coming back for some of the same reasons that it was there in the 19th century: because, again, we face a situation of domestic insecurity, of being insecure in our own homes and work places, which was the condition of frontier existence in the 19th century. So, in that sense, it's not totally surprising that preemption would come back.

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Before going further consider well whether this is or is not your position. If it is, it is a position that neither the President himself, nor any friend of his, so far as I know, has ever taken. Their only positions are--first, that the soil was ours when the hostilities commenced; and second, that whether it was rightfully ours or not, Congress had annexed it, and the President for that reason was bound to defend it; both of which are as clearly proved to be false in fact as you can prove that your house is mine. The soil was not ours, and Congress did not annex or attempt to annex it. But to return to your position. Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him,--"I see no probability of the British invading us"; but he will say to you, "Be silent: I see it, if you don't."

"What a prodigious growth this English race, especially the American branch of it, is having! How soon will it subdue and occupy all the wild parts of this continent and of the islands adjacent. No prophecy, however seemingly extravagant, as to future achievements in this way [is] likely to equal the reality."