The Justice of Preemption and Preventive War Doctrines

Abstract

The Bush administration reacted to the horrific September 11th attacks by proclaiming a right to preemptive self-defence, making preemption official US military doctrine. A preemptive war doctrine is, so it argued, the only way to make the United States safe. The Bush administration rightly points to the changed nature of military threats and poses a dilemma for scholars of just war theory: how long, in an era of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, can states afford to wait to use their military force in self-defence? But the administration’s doctrine is actually also a preventive war doctrine. And although the doctrine seems compelling at first glance, the logic of the just war tradition’s prohibition on preventive war still holds.