Preventive intervention

Abstract

Intervention (short for military intervention) is the use of military force by one state (the intervener) against another (the target state) when the force is not in reaction to military aggression by the target state.1 Intervention is not defense against an occurring military attack. This makes intervention morally problematic because jus ad bellum is usually understood to proscribe cross-border use of military force in cases other than defense against an occurring military attack. This chapter is about the moral status of preventive intervention, one form of intervention.2 In launching a preventive intervention, the intervener seeks to prevent an expected future aggression against it by the target state.3 Preventive intervention is not a response to actual aggression, but to aggression expected at some indefinite time in the future.4 Generally, the intervener expects future aggression because it perceives the target state as an opponent whose military power is on the rise relative to the intervener. According to Jack Levy, "The preventive motivation for war arises from the perception that one's military power and potential are declining relative to that of a rising adversary, and from the fear of the consequences of that decline. "5 Those consequences include, in the intervener's view, the opponent's future aggression. The aggression is expected because the intervener believes that the opponent will over time increase its relative military strength. The aggression is not expected immediately due to the time it will take the opponent to build its military strength. Preventive intervention is based on the intervener's calculation that it is better to fight now, when it has a military advantage, rather than later, when it does not. Better a small war in which it has the advantage now than a large war when it does not later. Preventive intervention is often connected with the idea that states exist in a balance of power.6 A state's expected rise in military power relative to an opponent would upset the balance and perhaps lead that state to aggress against the opponent when it has achieved a military advantage. Preventive intervention is a state's attempt to maintain an existing balance that an opponent's expected rise threatens to upset. Moreover, fear of such loss may be the spur for more acts of aggression than the desire for gain. In other words, most acts of aggression may be cases of preventive intervention, undertaken not for positive gain or conquest, but to avoid an expected loss.7 Preventive intervention may seem to be a form of self-defense, a kind of anticipatory or proactive self-defense, rather than aggression, given that it is undertaken to avoid aggression, albeit expected aggression. But the question is whether it is defensive in a morally relevant sense. To say that military action is defensive in this sense is to offer a prima facie moral justification for it, given the just cause criterion of jus ad bellum. It would be question begging at this point to regard preventive intervention as defense in this sense, because its moral status is precisely what is in question. One way to ask the question whether preventive intervention is ever morally justified is to ask whether it is sometimes an instance of defense in the morally relevant sense. David Luban points out that arguments for the moral justifiability of preventive intervention "in effect assimilate preventive war to the paradigm of self-defense."8 Any discussion of the moral justifiability of preventive intervention should begin by drawing the distinction between prevention and preemption. Preemption is acting militarily to thwart an attack that has, in some sense, already begun, but has not yet had its initial impact. A common way of glossing the distinction is to characterize preemption as a response to an imminent attack, one that is about to happen. The expected aggression to which prevention is a response is not yet imminent. But it is not immediately clear why this temporal difference makes a moral difference. If preemption is a response to an attack that has already begun, a better way to capture the difference between preemption and prevention would be to refer to the attack to which preemption is a response as incipient, as having already begun.9 In contrast, the attack to which prevention is a response has yet to begin. Replacing the idea of imminence with that of incipience makes clear the moral basis of the distinction between preemption and prevention. The attacks to which both preemption and prevention are responses may both be intended, but only in the case of preemption has the attacker put its intention into action. There is normally thought to be an important moral distinction between merely intending to do some action in the future and beginning to perform an intended action. The current relevance of the topic of preventive intervention is that the recently adopted US military policy is based on the view that some new international circumstances (revealed by the terrorist attacks of 9/11) have rendered preventive intervention sometimes morally justified. These new circumstances include the existence of international networks of terrorists independent of states and bent on civilian attacks in developed states, the fact that these terrorists may be able to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and would have no compunction against using them, and the reality that some states (so-called rogue states) may themselves be prepared to attack developed states with WMD or help terrorists acquire WMD. In response to these new circumstances, the Bush administration has adopted a strategy of preventive intervention: "As a matter of common sense and self-defense, America will act against such emerging threats before they are fully formed."10 The Iraq War begun in 2003 was the first preventive intervention under the new strategy.11 Under this strategy, other preventive interventions may be undertaken in the future, so moral clarity about this form of military action is important. My discussion will focus on preventive intervention pursued unilaterally, undertaken by a single state on its own initiative without any formal international institutional sanction.12 In addition, I will understand preventive intervention as having the goal of replacing the government of the target state ("regime change"). These features fits the traditional understanding of preventive intervention as well as the current US policy. But at the end, I will consider the implications of the discussion for alternative forms of preventive intervention, namely, those pursued in a formally multilateral way and those that may involve isolated military strikes rather than an effort to overthrow a regime. © 2007 Springer.