war prevention essay

Essay on How to Prevent War

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100 Words Essay on How to Prevent War

Understanding war.

War is a serious conflict between nations or groups, often leading to suffering and loss. It’s crucial to prevent war to maintain peace.

Education is key. Learning about different cultures, histories, and perspectives can promote understanding and reduce conflicts.

Open and honest communication can solve disagreements before they escalate. Diplomacy is a powerful tool for preventing war.

Cooperation

Countries working together on common goals, like climate change or poverty, can foster unity and lessen the risk of war.

International Laws

Strong international laws and organizations can mediate disputes and prevent wars from starting.

250 Words Essay on How to Prevent War

Understanding the roots of conflict.

War, a manifestation of extreme conflict, often stems from disputes over resources, territorial claims, or ideological differences. To prevent war, it is essential to understand these roots of conflict. Education plays a crucial role in fostering understanding and empathy among diverse groups, reducing the likelihood of ideological clashes.

International Diplomacy and Cooperation

International diplomacy and cooperation are key in preventing war. By promoting dialogue, countries can resolve disputes peacefully. International organizations like the United Nations play a significant role in mediating conflicts and enforcing international law. These institutions should be strengthened and supported to effectively prevent wars.

Disarmament and Non-Proliferation

Disarmament and non-proliferation treaties can also help prevent war. By reducing the number of weapons, particularly weapons of mass destruction, the potential for conflict is diminished. These treaties must be enforced rigorously, with violators held accountable.

Economic Interdependence

Economic interdependence can serve as a deterrent to war. When countries are economically intertwined, the cost of conflict becomes too high. Thus, promoting global trade and economic integration can contribute to peace.

Encouraging a Culture of Peace

Finally, fostering a culture of peace within societies can prevent war. This involves promoting values such as respect for human rights, tolerance, and non-violence. Through education and societal norms, we can cultivate a mindset that rejects war as a means of resolving disputes.

In conclusion, preventing war requires a multifaceted approach that addresses the root causes of conflict, strengthens international cooperation, enforces disarmament, promotes economic interdependence, and cultivates a culture of peace.

500 Words Essay on How to Prevent War

Introduction.

War, a state of armed conflict between different nations or states, is a devastating event that brings about immense loss of life and property. It disrupts the social, economic, and political balance of the involved regions and leaves a lasting impact on the global community. The prevention of war is a complex task that requires international cooperation, diplomatic efforts, and a deep understanding of the root causes of conflicts.

Understanding the Root Causes of War

The first step in preventing war is understanding its root causes. Wars often stem from unresolved conflicts, territorial disputes, economic disparities, and ideological differences. By identifying these triggers, we can devise strategies to address them proactively. For example, through diplomatic dialogues, nations can resolve territorial disputes peacefully, and through international aid, wealthier nations can help alleviate economic disparities that often spark conflicts.

Strengthening International Institutions

International institutions such as the United Nations play a crucial role in preventing wars. These institutions provide a platform for dialogue and peaceful resolution of conflicts. Strengthening these institutions, therefore, is critical. This can be achieved by ensuring that all nations respect and uphold international laws and treaties, and by providing these institutions with the necessary resources to mediate conflicts effectively.

Building Trust and Promoting Dialogue

Trust-building is an essential component of war prevention. This can be achieved through open dialogue, transparency in international relations, and the promotion of cultural exchange programs that help foster understanding and respect among different nations. By promoting dialogue, nations can address misunderstandings and miscommunications that often lead to conflicts.

Education and Awareness

Education is a powerful tool in preventing war. By educating people about the devastating effects of war and the importance of peace, we can foster a culture of non-violence. Additionally, education can help promote critical thinking and empathy, which are essential for understanding and respecting different perspectives.

Investment in Peacekeeping and Diplomacy

Investing in peacekeeping forces and diplomacy is another effective strategy. Peacekeeping forces can help maintain peace in conflict-prone regions, while diplomacy can help resolve conflicts peacefully. By investing in these areas, nations can prevent conflicts from escalating into full-blown wars.

Preventing war is a collective responsibility that requires international cooperation, diplomatic efforts, and a deep understanding of the root causes of conflicts. By addressing these causes proactively, strengthening international institutions, building trust, promoting dialogue, educating people, and investing in peacekeeping and diplomacy, we can create a more peaceful world. The prevention of war is not only about avoiding conflict but also about building a world where peace, justice, and human rights are upheld for all.

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• Essay on Horrors of War
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16.4 Preventing War and Stopping Terrorism

Learning objectives.

• Outline approaches that show promise for preventing war.
• Understand the differences between the law enforcement and structural-reform approaches to preventing terrorism.

War has existed since prehistoric times, and terrorism goes back at least to the days of the Old Testament (e.g., when Samson brought down the temple of the Philistines in an act of suicide that also killed scores of Philistines). Given their long histories, war and terrorism are not easy to prevent. However, theory and research by sociologists and other social scientists point to several avenues that may ultimately help make the world more peaceful.

Preventing War

The usual strategies suggested by political scientists and international relations experts to prevent war include arms control and diplomacy. Approaches to arms control and diplomacy vary in their actual and potential effectiveness. The historical and research literatures on these approaches are vast (Daase & Meier, 2012; Garcia, 2012) and beyond the scope of this chapter. Regardless of the specific approaches taken, suffice it here to say that arms control and diplomacy will always remain essential strategies to prevent war, especially in the nuclear age when humanity is only minutes away from possible destruction.

Beyond these two essential strategies, the roots of war must also be addressed. As discussed earlier, war is a social, not biological, phenomenon and arises from decisions by political and military leaders to go to war. There is ample evidence that deceit accompanies many of these decisions, as leaders go to many wars for less than noble purposes. To the extent this is true, citizens must always be ready to question any rationales given for war, and a free press in a democracy must exercise eternal vigilance in reporting on these rationales. According to critics, the press and the public were far too acquiescent in the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, just as they had been acquiescent a generation earlier when the Vietnam War began being waged (Solomon, 2006). To prevent war, then, the press and the public must always be ready to question assumptions about the necessity of war. The same readiness should occur in regard to militarism and the size of the military budget.

In this regard, history shows that social movements can help prevent or end armament and war and limit the unchecked use of military power once war has begun (Breyman, 2001; Staggenborg, 2010). While activism is no guarantee of success, responsible nonviolent protest against war and militarism provides an important vehicle for preventing war or for more quickly ending a war once it has begun.

People Making a Difference

Speaking Truth to Power

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is a Quaker organization that has long worked for peace and social justice. Its national office is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and it has local offices in more than thirty other US cities and also in more than a dozen other nations.

AFSC was established in 1917 to help conscientious objectors serve their country in nonmilitary ways during World War I. After that war ended with the defeat of Germany and Austria, AFSC provided food to thousands of German and Austrian children. It helped Jewish refugees after Hitler came to power, and sent various forms of aid to Japan after World War II ended. During the 1960s, it provided nonviolence training for civil rights activists and took a leading role in the movement to end the Vietnam War. Since the 1960s, AFSC has provided various types of help to immigrants, migrant workers, prisoners, and other “have-not” groups in need of social justice. It also works to achieve nonviolent conflict resolution in urban communities and spoke out against plans to begin war in Iraq in 2003.

In 1947, AFSC and its British counterpart won the Nobel Peace Prize for their aid to hungry children and other Europeans during and after World Wars I and II. The Nobel committee proclaimed in part, “The Quakers have shown us that it is possible to carry into action something which is deeply rooted in the minds of many: sympathy with others; the desire to help others…without regard to nationality or race; feelings which, when carried into deeds, must provide the foundations of a lasting peace.”

For almost a century, the American Friends Service Committee has been active in many ways to achieve a more just, peaceable world. It deserves the world’s thanks for helping to make a difference. For further information, visit http://www.afsc.org .

As we think about how to prevent war, we must not forget two important types of changes that create pressures for war: population change and environmental change. Effective efforts to reduce population growth in the areas of the world where it is far too rapid will yield many benefits, but one of these is a lower likelihood that certain societies will go to war. Effective efforts to address climate change will also yield many benefits, and one of these is also a lower likelihood of war and ethnic conflict in certain parts of the world.

Finally, efforts to prevent war must keep in mind the fact that ideological differences and prejudice sometimes motivate decisions to go to war. It might sound rather idealistic to say that governments and their citizenries should respect ideological differences and not be prejudiced toward people who hold different religious or other ideologies or have different ethnic backgrounds. However, any efforts by international bodies, such as the United Nations, to achieve greater understanding along these lines will limit the potential for war and other armed conflict. The same potential holds true for efforts to increase educational attainment within the United States and other industrial nations but especially within poor nations. Because prejudice generally declines as education increases, measures that raise educational attainment promise to reduce the potential for armed conflict in addition to the other benefits of increased education.

In addition to these various strategies to prevent war, it is also vital to reduce the size of the US military budget. Defense analysts who think this budget is too high have proposed specific cuts in weapons systems that are not needed and in military personnel at home and abroad who are not needed (Arquilla & Fogelson-Lubliner, 2011; Knight, 2011; Sustainable Defense Task Force, 2010). Making these cuts would save the nation from $100 billion to $150 billion annually without at all endangering national security. This large sum could then be spent to help meet the nation’s many unmet domestic needs.

Stopping Terrorism

Because of 9/11 and other transnational terrorism, most analyses of “stopping terrorism” focus on this specific type. Traditional efforts to stop transnational terrorism take two forms (White, 2012). The first strategy involves attempts to capture known terrorists and to destroy their camps and facilities and is commonly called a law enforcement or military approach. The second strategy stems from the recognition of the structural roots of terrorism just described and is often called a structural-reform approach. Each approach has many advocates among terrorism experts, and each approach has many critics.

Law enforcement and military efforts have been known to weaken terrorist forces, but terrorist groups have persisted despite these measures. Worse yet, these measures may ironically inspire terrorists to commit further terrorism and increase public support for their cause. Critics also worry that the military approach endangers civil liberties, as the debate over the US response to terrorism since 9/11 so vividly illustrates (Cole & Lobel, 2007). This debate took an interesting turn in late 2010 amid the increasing use of airport scanners that generate body images. Many people criticized the scanning as an invasion of privacy, and they also criticized the invasiveness of the “pat-down” searches that were used for people who chose not to be scanned (Reinberg, 2010).

In view of all these problems, many terrorism experts instead favor the structural-reform approach, which they say can reduce terrorism by improving or eliminating the conditions that give rise to the discontent that leads individuals to commit terrorism. Here again the assessment of the heads of the 9/11 Commission illustrates this view: “We must use all the tools of U.S. power—including foreign aid, educational assistance and vigorous public diplomacy that emphasizes scholarship, libraries and exchange programs—to shape a Middle East and a Muslim world that are less hostile to our interests and values. America’s long-term security relies on being viewed not as a threat but as a source of opportunity and hope” (Kean & Hamilton, 2007, p. B1).

Although there are no easy solutions to transnational terrorism, then, efforts to stop this form of terrorism must not neglect its structural roots. As long as these roots persist, new terrorists will come along to replace any terrorists who are captured or killed. Such recognition of the ultimate causes of transnational terrorism is thus essential for the creation of a more peaceable world.

Key Takeaways

• Arms control and diplomacy remain essential strategies for stopping war, but the roots of war must also be addressed.
• The law enforcement/military approach to countering terrorism may weaken terrorist groups, but it also may increase their will to fight and popular support for their cause and endanger civil liberties.

For Your Review

• Do you think deceit was involved in the decision of the United States to go to war against Iraq in 2003? Why or why not?
• Which means of countering terrorism do you prefer more, the law enforcement/military approach or the structural-reform approach? Explain your answer.

Arquilla, J., & Fogelson-Lubliner. (2011, March 13). The Pentagon’s biggest boondoggles. New York Times , p. WK12.

Breyman, S. (2001). Why movements matter: The west German peace movement and US arms control policy . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Cole, D., & Lobel, J. (2007). Less safe, less free: Why America is losing the war on terror . New York, NY: New Press.

Daase, C., & Meier, O. (Eds.). (2012). Arms control in the 21st century: Between coercion and cooperation . New York, NY: Routledge.

Garcia, D. (2012). Disarmament diplomacy and human security: Regimes, norms, and moral progress in international relations . New York, NY: Routledge.

Kean, T. H., & Hamilton, L. H. (2007, September 9). Are we safer today? The Washington Post , p. B1.

Knight, C. (2011). Strategic adjustment to sustain the force: A survey of current proposals . Cambridge, MA: Project on Defense Alternatives.

Reinberg, S. (2010, November 23). Airport body scanners safe, experts say. Bloomberg Businessweek . Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com .

Solomon, N. (2006). War made easy: How presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.

Staggenborg, S. (2010). Social movements . New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Sustainable Defense Task Force. (2010). Debt, deficits, & defense: A way forward . Cambridge, MA: Project on Defense Alternatives.

White, J. R. (2012). Terrorism and homeland security: An introduction (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.

Social Problems Copyright © 2015 by University of Minnesota is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

How to avoid war and conflict – with a little help from social psychology

Professor in Psychology, Keele University

Disclosure statement

Ken Rotenberg does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Keele University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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The posturing of US President Donald Trump and North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un gave rise to a terrifying realisation: that we are moving closer to a nuclear war. The recognition that such a war could be our last raises the most serious questions about human behaviour.

Can we prevent war? If so, how? Can we can make our world a safer place to live in? Fortunately, social psychological research provides some answers.

One insight is provided by Social Identity Theory (SIT), originally formulated by the psychologist Henri Tajfel . He believed that people are naturally inclined to self categorise into an “ingroup” (us) and an “outgroup” (them).

According to SIT, the ingroup seeks to distinguish itself from the outgroup by attributing them with negative qualities. The theory has been used to account for discrimination and hostility towards different groups. Outgroup members of a different race, culture, and political affiliation are seen as less trustworthy than ingroup members.

Distrust of outgroup members, and the hostility it creates, provide fertile grounds for conflict. But SIT also provides potential for intervention strategies. Specifically, the major goal of any intervention should be to promote trust.

One way is through third party mediation. This involves the opposing parties meeting in the presence of a neutral person, with the goal of finding solutions to the dispute, and resolving the conflict. Social psychological research has shown that mediation is effective in restoring the victim’s sense of power as well as the perpetrator’s moral image. The use of mediation (among other forms of peacekeeping) has been used by the United Nations with some success in resolving international conflicts, such as the one in Cyprus during the 1970s.

The aim of mediation is to build trust by encouraging communication. But its effectiveness depends in part on the extent to which the conflicting parties trust the mediator. This poses a problem for mediation between warring nations because the mediator has to be trusted by both countries.

Another approach involves a group of strategies involving what is known as “structured reciprocally cooperative interactions”. This approach is shown in the work of the American psychologist Charles Osgood , who was concerned with the cold war and the arms race of the 1960s.

He suggested that hostile nations engage in a strategy of “graduated reciprocation in tension reduction” (GRIT) to achieve disarmament. The strategy involves the first nation making a modest reduction in arms, which, crucially, is verifiable. They then wait until the other nation reciprocates with a similar reduction.

The first partner then engages in a greater reduction in arms which is matched by the other. As a consequence of these reciprocal exchanges, a trusting relationship emerges between the nations, and mutual disarmament is achieved.

Outgroup distrust can be reduced and peace promoted if conflicting nations or groups are engaged in specific cooperative ventures with mutual benefits. These interventions are most effective when they involve interactions which involve equal status, common goals and cooperation. Using such an approach, social psychologist Miles Hewstone found that cross religion friendships promoted trust between Catholic and Protestant adolescents in Northern Ireland.

Prevention is better than cure

Unfortunately, by the time that conflict arises and there is a threat of war, the nations or groups involved have usually already made significant progress on this path. More attention needs to be given to developing and implementing prevention strategies that remove the conditions for conflict and war.

Adopting preventative strategies based on cooperative ventures with mutual benefits is invaluable, and would help us to make the world a safer place to live. It must be hoped that world leaders will draw upon the recommendations from social psychology.

Tweeted threats can simply fuel the fire of conflict. Well thought out strategies for mediation and cooperation may well help to extinguish it.

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International organizations and preventing war.

• Martin S. Edwards Martin S. Edwards School of Diplomacy and International Relations, Seton Hall University
•  and  Jonathan M. DiCicco Jonathan M. DiCicco Department of Political Science, Canisius College
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.407
• Published in print: 24 January 2012
• Published online: 11 January 2018

International organizations (IOs) such as the United Nations play an important role in war prevention. In theory, IOs reduce the risk of war between belligerents by improving communication, facilitating cooperation, and building confidence and trust. In practice, however, IOs’ war-preventing capacities have sparked skepticism and criticism. Recent advances in the scholarly study of the causes of war have given rise to new and promising directions in research on IOs and war prevention. These studies highlight the problems of interstate and intrastate wars, global and regional organizations, preventive diplomacy and peacekeeping, and the relationship between IOs and domestic institutions. They also offer novel insights that both complement and challenge studies of traditional concepts such as collective security. An interesting work is that of J. D. Fearon, who frames war as a bargaining process between rational states. Fearon articulates a central puzzle of international relations: since war is costly, the question that arises is why rational leaders of competing states choose to fight instead of pursuing less costly, nonviolent dispute settlements. Three general mechanisms account for rational, unitary states’ inability to identify an alternative outcome that both would prefer to war: bluffing about private information, commitment problems, and indivisibility of stakes. Despite the obvious progress in research on IOs and war prevention, there remain methodological and theoretical issues that deserve consideration for further investigation, two of which are: the interaction of domestic and international organizations, and the implications of variations in IO design.

• international organizations
• United Nations
• war prevention
• preventive diplomacy
• peacekeeping
• domestic institutions
• collective security
• J. D. Fearon

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The Ethics of Preventive War

Deen K. Chatterjee (ed.),  The Ethics of Preventive War , Cambridge University Press, 2013, 255pp., $29.99 (pbk), ISBN 9780521154789.

Reviewed by Bas van der Vossen, UNC Greensboro

This collection brings together twelve essays on preventive war. There is a lot to like here. The collection addresses a very important and current issue. Its contributions cover a wide range of issues concerning preventive war, and it boasts a truly impressive line-up of highly accomplished authors coming from different disciplines and backgrounds. This volume is more than the sum of its parts. While some of the chapters contain genuinely interesting contributions to the debate, the volume is a little uneven. Some chapters stick to familiar territory, one or two are of dubious quality, and this reader would have liked to see a slightly heavier editorial hand.

Preventive war is controversial because it involves military attack in the absence of two commonly accepted justifications: self-defense and so-called preemption. Wars of self-defense are said to be justified (when they are) because they involve countries' responding to (unjust) initiations of military force. Wars of preemption are said to be justified (when they are) because they involve countries' responding to an imminent threat of an (unjust) initiation of force. The rationale for the latter is that one need not wait until unjust aggressors actually initiate their attacks before self-defense becomes permissible.

Commonly, the permissibility of such preemptive attacks is thought to be subject to rather strict conditions of imminence -- conditions tracing back to the 1837 Caroline case. On this view, preemptive attacks are permissible only if the threat of unjust aggression is "instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means and no moment for deliberation." (32) The case for preventive (as opposed to preemptive) war attempts to stretch the condition of imminence beyond this. Preventive wars respond to threats of attack that may be further in the future and more uncertain.

While the United States has unilaterally proclaimed that it does not consider preventive war unlawful, the standard view under international law is that preventive war is illegal, unless specifically approved by the UN Security Council. The debate on the moral status of preventive war has intensified since the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and, more recently, Iranian attempts at obtaining nuclear capabilities. The latter is discussed in an interesting and informative chapter by Alex Newton, which summarizes some of the key facts of the Iranian case as well as the basic legal standing of potential US preventive action, and argues that such action would be morally impermissible.

Others, however, think that these recent cases are cause for reconsidering the standard distinction between preemptive and preventive war. The chapters by Chris Brown and George R. Lucas, Jr. offer such arguments. Brown claims that the distinction between preventive and preemptive war "is difficult to sustain under twenty-first century conditions." (28) He thinks that we should loosen the Caroline -based constraints on preventive violence because the new threats must be intercepted at an early stage if they are to be intercepted at all. The reason Brown gives is that countries are now facing threats that are both more damaging and can materialize faster. (34)

The latter part of this idea is puzzling, however. If technological innovations shorten the time needed to launch an unjust attack -- "the average laptop can carry out a billion or more 'instructions per second.'" (34) -- presumably they also shorted the time needed to launch a preemptive attack in self-defense. So it is unclear why this point would count in favor of loosening the strictures on preventive war. The innovations of speed seem to cancel each other out. It is unfortunate that Brown does not discuss the defensive part of the equation here.

But there is more that is puzzling. Brown dismisses all rule-based moral reasoning, including Kant's Categorical Imperative, in a single paragraph, and proposes what he calls an Aristotelian view on which the morality of prevention is determined by the decisions of political leaders. The view is surprising, to say the least. Why deny that even the most conscientious leaders can (and often do) make unjust decisions? For Brown's view to seem at least initially acceptable, we need a lot more (and better) defense than he provides.

The highlight of this volume for readers seeking serious discussion of the ethical issues involved in preventive way is the chapter by Jeff McMahan. McMahan asks under what conditions people become liable to preventive attack. With the care and sophistication that is typical of his work, McMahan builds a (highly limited) case for when preventive attack may be justified. The basic case turns on two claims. One is that people can become liable to attack not just in virtue of unjustly attacking another, but also in virtue of developing the intention to do so. The other is that even unmobilized soldiers who are unculpably unaware of their government's preparations for attack can become liable to attack "if two conditions are satisfied: (1) that they chose to become members of the military, even if they did so under a certain degree of compulsion, and (2) that there is a substantial probability that they will obey an order to fight if it is given." (132) In both cases, McMahan argues that the "Subjective and objective conditions sufficient for liability are both present: a blameworthy intention and an increase in the objective probability [due to the intention] of a person's being wrongly killed." (126) And this remains true even though it is possible that would-be attackers might change their minds in the future.

The case McMahan builds is mostly of interest because it demonstrates, if successful, that preventive attack can at least sometimes be justified. This point is commonly denied -- indeed, it is denied by some of the other contributors to this volume. But McMahan's argument is no endorsement of many actual preventive wars. As he notes, the problem is that the people who are liable to attack because of their role in increasing the risk of future aggression are only a subset of the people targeted in preventive attacks. And the conditions of proportionality that apply to attacks to non-culpable persons are likely very strict indeed.

Two other philosophically interesting contributions are by Stephen Nathanson and Michael Blake. Nathanson defends the traditional view that all preventive wars are unjustified. His argument for this conclusion takes a rule-utilitarian form. Preventive wars, even the ones that remove real threats and have a high probability of success (if there are such cases), should not be allowed, says Nathanson, because allowing any such wars opens the door to abuse. We are on balance better off not allowing preventive wars at all because, he writes, "preventive wars may be launched against threats that would never materialize" and "history shows . . . that a permissive doctrine of preventive war leads to more wars, many of them unnecessary." (161)

Such an argument requires an assessment of the comparative risks of different possible implemented moral rules. Unfortunately, Nathanson does not offer any such careful assessment. All we get is the quick assertion that the allegedly preventive US involvement in Korea and Vietnam during the Cold War was unnecessary. Perhaps this is true; it is hard to know. But more of a defense is required for such a central claim. Similarly, Nathanson says not just that an overly permissive doctrine of preventive war will lead to too many wars, but that any doctrine of preventive war will have this effect. His motivation: "national leaders are not only fallible but are also often arrogant, reckless, and desirous of war." (163) But while Nathanson is certainly right about both the great perils of allowing unnecessary preventive wars, and the tendency of politicians to become bellicose once in office, this step too needs more support. Perhaps variations in the form of government that constrains politicians might have a sufficient constraining effect. Or perhaps suitable international institutions might be created that help avoid these worries. The rule-utilitarian argument requires that we carefully inspect and compare these possibilities before we are entitled to draw the kind of sweeping conclusions Nathanson proposes.

Blake asks whether the legal prohibition of preventive war makes a difference to the moral assessment of such attacks if governments are justified in believing that such an attack would be morally permissible. In a carefully argued chapter, he inspects three kinds of arguments for why governments might be obligated to obey international law in those cases: that there is a prior duty to obey international law, that there are supposed bad consequences of law-breaking, and that there are epistemic reasons to obey the law. Of these, Blake is most sympathetic to the epistemic argument, which can support at least the duty to seek "intersubjective agreement on the nature of the threats involved prior to military attack." (83) But as arguments for a duty to obey international law, Blake finds all of these approaches largely wanting. None is sufficient for concluding that states will always be duty-bound to refrain from preventive war in proportionate self-defense.

This conclusion seems correct. My only complaint about Blake's argument is that it does not seriously explore whether the rights of (at least) legitimate states can make a difference here. Blake's question concerns cases where it is reasonable for governments to believe that other states pose a significant future threat. And perhaps his explicit focus on the Bin Laden case made Blake assume that all such cases will concern illegitimate states. But this need not be. Countries can have reasonable evidence that legitimate states pose threats to their safety (including, for example, a threat of unjust preventive attack). Might (small) preventive attacks be justifiable in those cases? In passing, Blake offers the thought that the rights of attacked states ought to be "balanced" against the rights of self-defense of attacking states. (75) This is fine, of course, but does not take us very far. The important question is how to "balance" these rights. And in any case, talk of "balancing rights" here seems to signal that the strictures against preventive war need not be the same concerning legitimate and illegitimate states -- the latter presumably not having the same rights as the former.

These are some of the more interesting and rewarding pieces in this volume. Another contribution particularly worth reading is Larry May's argument for putting the International Criminal Court in charge of deciding whether preventive wars are to count as acts of aggression or justified self-defense.

Unfortunately there are also some chapters that readers do best to ignore. One example is the piece by the late Jean Bethke Elshtain, which meanders through some rather familiar issues loosely related to preventive war and humanitarian intervention, espouses plenty of strong opinions, but offers virtually no real arguments or evidence in support. Another is the chapter by Richard Falk, which sets out to inspect the (interesting) issue of the preventive role that threats can play in international relations, and promises to apply this to the case of Iranian attempts at acquiring nuclear technology. But Falk's piece is very unfocused -- discussing Cold War deterrence, an indictment of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Al-Qaeda, and the 1986 Nicaragua judgment, among other things -- and fails to offer any arguments, or even actually to discuss the Iran case. What is left is a litany of seemingly ideological assertions directed against the US and Israel, and the rather bizarre speculation (without, again, any support) that the world would in fact be safer if countries like Iran had nuclear capabilities. (97-8)

Falk's piece is not the only one with ideological overtones. Distaste for the Bush administration is palpable throughout the volume (for example in the chapters by Brown and C. A. J. Coady). This reader would have preferred the editor to have weeded some of this out, as it is frequently accompanied by claims or assertions that receive no support or reference. One example is the following statement by Falk, offered with no support or reference:

There is much evidence supporting the view that had American foreign policy been guided by international law with respect to the use of force ever since the Vietnam war and up through the Iraq war, its national economic and international political standing would be higher and its global leadership position more widely accepted. (91)

This hinders rather than furthers genuine analysis.

At other points, too, the editor might have used a somewhat heavier hand. There are a number of easily avoidable mistakes, such as faulty references ("David Walzer", (74)), typesetting errors (148), and Elshtain's factually incorrect assertion that the US 2003 invasion of Iraq was not illegal (16). And the volume's introduction fails to explain what preventive war is or how it is different from preemptive war, despite mentioning that the distinction is frequently confused. On balance, then, this is a successful, if somewhat uneven volume. Readers are advised to pick and choose.

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The concept of preventive war, democracy and preventive war, preventive war and democratic politics: presidential address to the international studies association march 1, 2007, chicago.

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Jack S. Levy, Preventive War and Democratic Politics: Presidential Address to the International Studies Association March 1, 2007, Chicago, International Studies Quarterly , Volume 52, Issue 1, March 2008, Pages 1–24, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2478.2007.00489.x

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I define the concept of preventive war, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and examine numerous conceptual issues that confound theoretical and empirical analyses of prevention. I then consider the argument that democracies rarely if ever adopt preventive war strategies because such strategies are contrary to the preferences of democratic publics and to the values and identities of democratic states. I examine a number of historical cases of anticipated power shifts by democratic states, and analyze the motivations for war and the mobilization of public support for war. The evidence contradicts both the descriptive proposition that democracies do not adopt preventive war strategies and causal propositions about the constraining effects of democratic institutions and democratic political cultures.

Preventive war is a strategy designed to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power and driven by better-now-than-later logic. Faced with a rising and potentially hostile adversary, it is better to fight now rather than risk the likely consequences of inaction—a decline in relative power, diminishing bargaining leverage, and the risk of war under less favorable circumstances later.

The concept of preventive war is a familiar one to diplomatic historians, political leaders, international relations theorists, and international legal scholars and just-war theorists. Historians have used the term to characterize the causes of numerous wars and limited military strikes, ranging from the Peloponnesian War to the Israeli strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. 1 Political leaders from Frederick the Great to George W. Bush have explicitly invoked the concept, sometimes to justify a policy they regarded as imperative and sometimes to criticize a policy they saw as unnecessarily risky. Preventive logic has long been central to realist theories of international conflict, including Morgenthau's (1948) balance-of-power theory, Gilpin's (1981) hegemonic-transition theory, and Copeland's (2000) dynamic-differentials theory. 2 Prevention is one of several possible causal mechanisms intervening between power shifts and war in power-transition theory ( Kugler and Lemke 1996 ) and in long-cycle theory ( Rasler and Thompson 1994 ), and its logic underlies the commitment problem in the bargaining model of war ( Fearon 1995 ; Powell 2006 ). Questions of the moral and legal status of prevention and preemption have also been a key focus of theories of anticipatory self-defense and the law of war ( Walzer 1977 ).

Despite a long history of preventive behavior, only a limited theoretical literature had emerged by the end of the Cold War ( Levy 1987 ; Vagts 1956 ; Van Evera 1999 ). That all changed with the Bush Administration's emphasis on the logic of prevention in its National Security Strategy and in its initial rationalization for the 2003 Iraq War. Public intellectuals debated the causal role of preventive logic in U.S. decision-making leading up to the Iraq War and the appropriateness of U.S. preventive strikes against other aspiring nuclear powers. Historians and political scientists began to examine the role of preemption and prevention in the history of American foreign policy, in part to assess the extent to which this aspect of the Bush Doctrine constituted a new departure in American foreign policy ( Gaddis 2004 ; Trachtenberg 2007 ). Scholars examined other historical cases in an attempt to understand the conditions under which states are most likely to adopt strategies of prevention ( Copeland 2000 ; Renshon 2006 ; Ripsman and Levy 2007 ), and to examine the possible constraining effects of democratic institutions and political cultures ( Schweller 1992 ; Silverstone 2007 ). Philosophers and international legal theorists began to rethink conventional theories of anticipated self-defense in a changing technological and political environment ( Doyle 2008 ; Luban 2004 ; Shue and Rodin 2007 ). 3

This surge of research has enhanced our understanding of preventive war, but still left us short of a satisfactory theory. Conceptual problems remain, as many scholars continue to confuse prevention and preemption or to define the concept so broadly that it loses its analytic utility. We lack a set of conditional generalizations that specify which kinds of states, facing which kinds of rising adversaries, adopt preventive military strategies instead of other strategies, and under what conditions. This is a serious omission, because narrowing power differentials do not usually lead to preventive attacks ( Lemke 2003 ). The unconditional argument that democracies do not fight preventive wars, once widely accepted, is no longer credible; yet there is hardly any empirical research on this question ( Schweller 1992 ). Scholars have given almost no attention to the consequences of preventive strategies—for the preventer, for the target, and for the international system.

I cannot deal with all of these issues in this essay, but I can move things forward on a number of fronts. First, I define the concept of prevention, distinguish it from preemption and other sources of better-now-than-later logic, and deal with a number of conceptual issues that impede theoretical development and empirical research on preventive war. I then turn to the question of whether democracies are significantly inhibited in their preventive use of military force. I specify the theoretical arguments advanced on behalf of the democracies-do-not-fight-preventive-wars proposition, and assess the validity of those causal mechanisms in a number of historical cases. I give only passing attention to moral and legal aspects of prevention and preemption, or to the consequences of preventively-motivated wars or limited strikes.

Scholars have applied the concept of prevention not only to such relatively straightforward cases as the 1981 Israeli attack against the Iraqi nuclear reactor ( Nakdimon 1987 ; Perlmutter, Handel, and Bar-Joseph 2003 ), German policy in 1914 ( Fischer 1967 ), and to the Bush Doctrine, but also to U.S. military interventions on its western frontier in the 19th century, in Central America in the early 20th century ( Gaddis 2004 ), and in Grenada in 1983 ( Mueller et al. 2006, 182–187 ). The expansive view of prevention by some reflects continued ambiguity regarding the meaning of the term and threatens to strip the concept of analytic utility. Admittedly, no single definition is optimal for all theoretical purposes, and different theoretical aims might call for different definitions. My primary aim is to understand the causes of war, which requires an assessment of the relative weights of different causal variables and of their interaction effects, and I proceed with that objective in mind. 4

We can talk about a state's strategy of preventive war, driven by better-now-than-later logic (as further refined below). We can also talk about the preventive motivation for war, or preventive logic, as a variable that intervenes between power shifts and war and that provides one possible causal mechanism through which the former can lead to the latter. The concept of “ a preventive war,” though widely used, is problematic. It implies that preventive war is a type of war, as defined by its causes. Like any categorization of outcomes in terms of their causes, this confounds cause and effect in a single concept and complicates efforts to explain outcomes. Most wars have multiple causes, and to identify a war as “a preventive war” privileges one cause over others. It also emphasizes the motivations of one state while neglecting those of the other.

Referring to a particular war as preventive would not be a problem if the preventive motivation was a sufficient condition for the war—if current issues, conflicts of interest, and perceptions of adversary intentions played no role, and if the only issue was future power and the bargaining leverage it provided. Yet I have not been able to find a single case that qualifies. 5

One can find numerous cases for which the preventive motivation was a necessary condition for war. Many of these cases involved other necessary conditions, however, and labeling the war as preventive privileges one necessary condition over others and downgrades the causal impact of other causal variables. 6

Preventive logic can also influence the timing of a war sought for other reasons, and it would be misleading to characterize the war as “a preventive war.” An important motivation for the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 was the perception that Soviet economic power and military potential were growing while Germany's was reaching its peak, leaving a window of opportunity for war in the east that would close by 1943 ( Copeland 2000, 137–144 ; Tooze 2007 ). Given Hitler's well-established plans for a war in the east ( Mawdsley 2005 ; Weinberg 1994 ), however, it would be misleading to explain the war itself primarily in terms of preventive logic—unless, perhaps, one were to argue that adverse demographic trends in the east were the primary motivation for Hitler's expansionist policies ( Weisiger 2008 ).

A similar argument applies to preemption, which by definition causally preempts something that the initiator believes is about to happen for other reasons. 7 The concept of “a preemptive war” may help to describe the proximate path to war, but it fails to capture the underlying causes of the war. 8

For these reasons, it is better to avoid the concept of “a preventive war” and focus instead on the preventive motivation for war as a causal variable that intervenes between power shifts and war. Given my emphasis on the anticipation of a power shift and the fear of its consequences, I treat the preventive motivation as a perceptual variable, the strength of which varies with psychological as well as structural factors. An alternative approach would be to treat the preventive motivation as an “objective” variable, equivalent to changes in relative capabilities. This is useful for the important task of assessing the aggregate relationship between power shifts and war, 9 but in my view it does not fully capture the nuances of preventive logic. 10 Perceptions of the magnitude and even the direction of a power shift may vary across states and across leaders, and these perceptions are critical in assessing behavior. 11

Another conceptual problem is the persistent tendency, despite ample clarification in the literature for at least two decades, for scholars to confuse prevention with preemption, or to deliberately treat the two concepts as interchangeable. 12 This is not helpful. Prevention and preemption are each forms of better-now-than-latter logic, but they are responses to different threats involving different time horizons and calling for different strategic responses. Preemption involves striking now in the anticipation of an imminent adversary attack, with the aim of securing first-mover advantages. Prevention is a response to a future threat rather than an immediate threat. It is driven by the anticipation of an adverse power shift and the fear of the consequences, including the deterioration of one's relative military position and bargaining power and the risk of war—or of extensive concessions necessary to avoid war—under less favorable circumstances later. The incentive is to forestall the power shift by blocking the rise of the adversary while the opportunity is still available. 13

Most preemptors do not want war but believe it is imminent and unavoidable. Preventers want war in the short-term to avoid the risk of a worse war in the future. Preventers often initiate war, but they sometimes attempt to provoke the adversary into initiating a war so as to secure for themselves the diplomatic and domestic political advantages of appearing as the defender. 14 The classic example of preemption is the Israeli initiation of the 1967 war ( Oren 2002 ). The classic example of prevention is the Israeli strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981. 15 Thus the Bush doctrine of preemption is based on the logic of prevention, though the causal role of preventive logic in the complex processes leading to the 2003 Iraq war has yet to be established. 16

The distinction between preemption and prevention is important for many reasons. Historically, prevention is far more common than preemption. 17 Theoretically, the conditions under which states adopt each strategy are quite different. 18 Legally, preemption is far easier to justify than is prevention because imminent threats, unlike temporally distant threats, preclude alternative strategic responses that take time to implement ( Doyle 2008 ; Walzer 1977 ). In terms of policy, optimal strategic responses to threats of prevention differ from those for preemption. As Betts (1982, 144–145) argues, “Countermobilization is the best way to deter an enemy contemplating preventive attack and the worst way to deter one considering preemption.”

Even if we limit the concept of prevention to forestalling future threats, we need to specify what kinds of threats qualify. How broadly prevention is defined helps to shape assessments of both the historical frequency and the effectiveness of preventive war strategies, which in turn can have an enormous impact on policy debates that invoke history for support. Many critics of the Bush Doctrine implicitly adopt a narrow definition of prevention and argue that the emphasis on preventive logic marks a new departure in American foreign policy, while the administration's supporters adopt a broader definition and often emphasize continuity with a deeply rooted historical tradition. This raises the concern that policy arguments that seek justification from history are often shaped more by definition than by history, and that definitions themselves are shaped by policy preferences rather than by their analytic utility ( Levy 2007 ).

Turning to more serious scholarly analyses, Renshon (2006 , chapter 1) defines prevention as “an action… fought to forestall a grave national security threat,” which he defines to include the loss of status or prestige as well as a decline in relative military power. 19 Gaddis (2004, 16–22) , while less explicit, also uses an expansive conception of “preemption,” which he uses interchangeably with prevention. He describes as preemptive John Adams’ response to cross-border incursions from Spanish Florida and Andrew Jackson's policy of using military force on the vulnerable western frontier before specific threats materialized. He also refers to a “succession of preemptive interventions” by the United States to contain political instability in Central and South America in the early 20th century. He argues that “even the prospect of power vacuums invited preemption,” and that “concerns about ‘failed’ or ‘derelict’ states, then, are nothing new in the history of United States foreign relations, nor are strategies of preemption in dealing with them.”

Gaddis's (2004) argument, with its emphasis on defensively motivated expansion driven by the security dilemma and a worst-case analysis of potential threats, provides a useful counter to interpretations that emphasize a more offensively oriented expansionism, though more extensive testing of these rival interpretations is warranted. It is not useful, however, to classify such actions as preventive. That would lump U.S. interventions on the Western frontier in the 19th century and in Central and South America early in the 20th century in the same category as Israel's 1981 strike against Iraq's nuclear reactor or Germany's strategy for a war in 1914 before Russia grew too strong. Similarly, Mueller et al. (2006, 182–187) go too far in classifying the 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada as preventive (to forestall the establishment of a Soviet military base).

Some define prevention even more broadly to include any development that might leave the state worse off in the future. Taylor (1954, 166) , for example, argues that each great power war in the 1848–1918 period “started as a preventive war.” The problem with expansive conceptions of prevention is that they incorporate too many different things under a single category and, in the extreme, result in nearly all wars being classified as preventive. This is a classic case of “conceptual stretching” ( Sartori 1970 ). It weakens the discriminatory power of our analytic concepts and complicates efforts to construct an explanatory theory that applies to all cases within a given category. 20

It makes a difference, for explanatory theory, whether the use of military force is driven by a fear of imminent attack, fear of a deteriorating power position that might leave one vulnerable in several years, fear of political instability on one's borders, or a fear of a loss of prestige or status in the international system. Thus we need different concepts to describe these behaviors. With regard to Renshon's (2006) inclusion of an anticipated loss of both prestige and of relative power in his definition of prevention, I agree that prestige can reinforce power, but would argue that it is only by analytically distinguishing between these two variables that we can assess their separate causal effects. 21

For these reasons I focus narrowly on the perception of threat deriving from changing power differentials and on a military response to the threat, and exclude other sources of better-now-than-later logic from the category of prevention. 22 I am not necessarily suggesting that these other factors have a smaller causal impact than do negative power shifts and preventive logic. That is an empirical question, and one that can be answered only by first analytically distinguishing among various causal variables.

Preventive logic can lead to a limited military strike as well as to an all-out war. 23 Whether a limited strike remains limited or escalates to war depends not only on the actions of the preventer, but also on those of the target. Presumably the initiator anticipates the target's likely response and incorporates it into its initial decision calculus. It might launch a limited military strike if it expects no military response and refrain from military action if it expects a major military response. Israel's anticipation that Iraq would not respond to a limited Israeli strike contributed to its decision to launch a surgical strike against the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 ( Nakdimon 1987 ; Perlmutter et al. 2003 ). In contrast, the U.S. anticipation that North Korea would probably respond to a limited strike against its nuclear facilities in 1994 with an all-out attack on South Korea was a major factor in the U.S. decision against military action ( Sigal 1997 ; Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci 2004 ). Similarly, India was deterred from launching a surgical strike against Pakistan's nuclear facilities by its belief that Pakistan would respond in kind and that the radioactive fallout from an attack on India's nuclear reactors would be enormously costly ( Ganguly and Hagerty 2005, 55–57 ; Perkovich 1999 ).

The preventive motivation for war, usually associated with power transitions involving the overtaking of a declining leader by a rising challenger, can also arise in response to more limited power shifts. One example is a “rapid approach” that levels off short of a power transition ( Wayman 1996 ). Another is the challenger's crossing a particular threshold of military power, leading to a step-level power shift. While such limited power shifts are presumably less threatening than those leading to a reversal of power relations, they can still trigger military responses, even in a non-nuclear context. The Czech/Russian arms sale to Egypt was a major factor leading to Israel's preventive motivation for war in the 1956 Sinai Campaign ( Levy and Gochal 2001–2002 ). The anticipated completion of Russia's trans-Siberian railroad and its expected enhancement of Russia's power projection capabilities in East Asia contributed to Japan's decision for war in 1904 ( Patrikeeff and Shukman 2007 ).

The crossing of the nuclear threshold is the most consequential manifestation of a step-level power shift. In addition to their role in triggering Israel's attack against the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 and possibly the American war in Iraq in 2003, fears that an adversary was about to acquire nuclear weapons led to serious considerations of a preventively motivated military strike by India against Pakistan in the early 1980s ( Ganguly and Hagerty 2005 ; Perkovich 1999 ), by the United States against North Korea in 1994 ( Wit, Poneman, and Gallucci 2004 ), and, to a lesser extent, by the United States against the Soviet Union and then against China in the 1950s and 1960s ( Silverstone 2007 ; Trachtenberg 2007 ).

The preventive logic associated with an anticipated power shift that falls short of a complete power transition is the same that underlies any power shift—the expectation that a decline in relative military capabilities will lead to a commensurate decline in its bargaining leverage, leaving the state less able to defend its interests, less able to defend its allies, and compelled to make unwanted concessions in the future. This, and not the fear of a power transition per se, was what motivated the United States in the 1994 North Korean nuclear crisis, and was a major factor for some (but not all) U.S. decision-makers in their support of the 2003 Iraq war.

While the literature on prevention focuses primarily on dyadic power shifts, third states can also play an important role. First, the target of the threat posed by the rising power may be one's allies rather than oneself, as suggested by the U.S.-Iraqi case in 2003. Second, the source of the threat may not be the primary adversary alone, but instead a coalition of states. Frederick the Great, anticipating the formation of a hostile coalition of Austria, Russia, and France, attacked Austria in 1756. 24 In 1914, German leaders never doubted their ability to defeat their rising Russian adversary in a bilateral war, but they feared the implications of Russia's rise for Germany's ability to defeat Russia and France together in a two-front war by 1917.

In elaborating on the concept of prevention, I have focused more on the perceptions and decisions of the preventer than on the behavior of the target. This reflects my working assumption—which needs to be explored empirically—that power shifts often involve relatively little bargaining between the declining and rising state, precisely because it is difficult to reach a negotiated settlement under conditions of shifting power. As I argued before ( Levy 1987 , 96), the declining state hesitates to accept a settlement, even one involving substantial concessions, knowing that the rising state can repudiate any agreement once it becomes dominant. Each knows there is nothing the rising state can do to assure its adversary that it will refrain from using its new power to overturn a settlement, so that current agreements are not enforceable. The only concessions the declining state would be likely to accept are those that place limits on growth of the rising state's power, which the latter is unlikely to grant. This argument has been stated more formally and rigorously in the bargaining model of war, and is now well known as the “commitment problem” ( Fearon 1995 ; Powell 2006 ; Wagner 2000 ).

Let me end this section by emphasizing that I do not attach any particular normative evaluation to this definition of preventive war strategies. “Preventive” does not necessarily mean “defensive” or normatively justifiable. If state A embarks on an aggressive war and conquers territory from B, B then gradually begins to build up its arms, and A then strikes at B to forestall B 's further rise in power and any potential threat to A ‘s new territories, I would label the motivation preventive but not necessarily as defensive. 25

Perceptions of an impending power shift might also lead through preventive logic to shape the timing of a fundamentally aggressive war. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 is one example. German policy in World War I is another, regardless of whether one views Germany as seeking a war to maintain a favorable status quo in Europe ( Albertini 1952–1957 ) or to overturn the status quo and achieve hegemony over Europe ( Fischer 1967 , 1975, 470 ; Lieber 2007 ; Mombauer 2001 ). In either case, the rise of Russian power in combination with the threat of a two-front war in Europe made it a “now or never” situation for Germany. German leaders hoped that a local war in the Balkans would break up the Franco-Russian alliance and precipitate a diplomatic realignment in Europe, but they were willing to fight a continental war if necessary to block the rise of Russia while the opportunity was still available. Mombauer (2001, 108) describes German policy as preventive “not in the sense of preempting an attack from one of Germany's possible future enemies, but of preventing a situation in which Germany would no longer herself be able to launch an attack successfully” (in pursuit of its revisionist aims). 26

Prior to 2002, scholars commonly argued, often in quite unconditional terms, that democracies rarely if ever fought wars for preventive reasons—because institutional constraints and domestic political pressures blocked democratic political leaders from adopting such strategies, and because such wars were morally abhorrent and contrary to the collective identity of democratic states. After the central role of preventive logic in the Bush Administration's National Security Strategy and in its primary rationale for the 2003 Iraq War, I suspect that fewer people would make that argument today. Still, there has been little empirical work on this question. After summarizing the theoretical arguments advanced in support of the proposition that democracies rarely if ever fight “preventive wars,” and specifying their testable implications, I turn to the historical evidence. 27

Assertions about democratic aversion to strategies of prevention go back to the early Cold War period, when the anticipated end of the U.S. nuclear monopoly prompted scholars, public intellectuals, and policy makers to debate the wisdom of a strategy of preventive war. Morgenthau (1948, 155) argued that preventive war was “abhorrent to democratic public opinion” because of the moral condemnation of war in the West, and a year later George Kennan (in Gaddis 1982 , 49n) wrote that “[a] democratic society cannot plan a preventive war.” Kissinger (1955, 416) argued that “there has always been an air of unreality about a program [of preventive war] so contrary to the sense of the country and the constitutional limits within which American foreign policy must be conducted.” Brodie (1965, 237) saw “a powerful and rigid barrier, largely on moral grounds, to American planning of preventive war.” These attitudes were shared by most U.S. policy makers, at least through the 1950s ( Silverstone 2007 ).

Among contemporary international relations theorists, the claim that democracies are averse to preventive military strategies is most closely linked to Schweller (1992, 238–248) , who argued that “only nondemocratic regimes wage preventive wars against rising opponents. Declining democratic states... do not exercise this option.” Schweller based his argument primarily upon the expected costs of war. He drew on Kant's ([1795] 1977, 438) argument that because “the consent of the citizens [in republican regimes] is required to decide whether there should be war or not,” the people will “hesitate to start such an evil game.” State leaders anticipate this and refrain from all but the most necessary wars. Given his emphasis on the costs of war, Schweller (1992, 248) conceded that democracies might fight low-cost preventive wars, which he operationalized as wars fought against weaker opponents, and qualified his argument to state that democracies do not adopt preventive war strategies in response to “power shifts between states of roughly equal strength.” 28

Schweller also emphasized the constraining role of democratic political cultures, which induce lack of a martial spirit, the resistance to universal peacetime conscription, a general unpreparedness for military action, and the lack of flexibility and decisiveness that are necessary for the practice of realpolitik . Because of these cultural and institutional factors, democratic leaders face more serious obstacles than do autocratic leaders in gaining support for war where there is no immediate threat to the national interest and where the primary issue is the rising power of an adversary, even a hostile adversary. Thus Schweller (1992, 242–243) argued that to gain support for war, democratic political leaders must demonstrate “evidence of a clear and present danger,” which generally requires “several provocations.” 29 This echoed Brodie's (1965, 39) earlier argument that for the American democracy “war is generally unpopular and the public mood inclines to support really bold action only in response to great anger or great fright. The fright must be something more than a sudden new rise in [the adversary's] capability.”

This brief review suggests two general explanations for why democracies might be disinclined—or at least less inclined than autocratic states—to respond to rising powers with a strategy of preventive war. One focuses on domestic political constraints and on political leaders’ response to or anticipation of public opposition to preventively motivated wars. Public resistance can be driven by cost aversion, casualty aversion, moral concerns, short time horizons, or other considerations. The other explanation focuses on political leaders themselves—their conceptions of democratic political identity and their moral concerns about preventive action. Leaders might also oppose preventive strategies for a variety of strategic or diplomatic reasons, but those should not significantly differentiate them from nondemocratic leaders.

These two explanations generate two sets of questions that guide our historical cases: (i) Did domestic publics oppose strategies of preventive war, and did public opposition, actual or anticipated, influence political leaders? (ii) Did concerns about the morality of preventive war, or its appropriateness for a democratic state, significantly influence the judgments and decisions of political leaders? Or was any opposition to prevention driven by calculations of costs and benefits defined in terms of material interests?

A third question guiding this study is more descriptive: what is the empirical validity of the unconditional proposition that democracies never resort to preventive war strategies, or of the qualified proposition that they do so only if they expect low costs, defined as those against states of approximately equal military capabilities. 30

Given the relatively unconditional formulation of the common argument that democracies do not fight “preventive wars,” or at least not against states of roughly equal power, a few contrary cases would be sufficient to disconfirm the argument ( Dion 1998 ). Toward this end I examine one anticipated power shift that led to war (Israel's Sinai Campaign in 1956) and one that led to a limited military strike (the Israeli attack against the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981). I also look at the United States in both the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War and (more briefly) in the 2003 Iraq War, focusing not on the complex question of the role of the preventive motivation in the causes of each war, but instead on the degree of domestic support for a preventive military strategy. Further evidence bearing on the causal propositions that domestic constraints and leaders’ moral concerns inhibit preventive strategies by democratic states can be extracted from cases of nonwars, and with that aim in mind I examine the U.S.-North Korean nuclear crisis of 1994. A full treatment of each of these cases is not possible in this study, but even a cursory look at the evidence provides considerable leverage for our theoretical propositions. I examine only democratic preventers and thus cannot make comparisons between democratic and authoritarian states in their responses to adverse power shifts.

Israel's 1956 Sinai Campaign

The 1955 Soviet/Czech arms sale to Egypt was an important trigger for Israel's 1956 Sinai Campaign against Egypt. 31 At a time when Israeli leaders perceived continuing hostility from the Arab world, as evidenced by persistent armed infiltration into Israel from Arab territories and Egypt's ongoing interference with Israeli or Israel-bound shipping through the Suez Canal and the Gulf of Aqaba, Israeli leaders feared that the full integration of these armaments into the Egyptian arsenal would lead to a significant shift in the dyadic balance of military power and provide Egypt with a qualitative as well as quantitative advantage. They also feared that Egyptian Presdient Gamal Abd'el Nasser's pan-Arabic ideology would lead to the strengthening of the Arab coalition against a diplomatically isolated Israel.

Israel's Sinai Campaign was a strategy of preventive war to avert an impending power transition in a high-threat environment ( Levy and Gochal 2001–2002 ). 32 The anticipated power shift and the preventive motivation it generated constituted a necessary condition for war. While the Egyptian blockade of Israeli shipping and the armed infiltration of Fedayeen imposed enormous economic and social costs on Israeli society, they were tolerable as long as the survival of the Israeli state was ensured. These factors would not have led to war in the absence of the anticipated shift in the balance of power. The armed infiltration and the naval blockade were a constant reminder, however, of the existential threat posed by Arab states that refused to acknowledge Israel's right to exist. Along with Nasser's belligerent rhetoric, they generated a widely-shared belief among Israeli elites that Nasser was implacably hostile and that a second round of war was inevitable, possibly within a year ( Ben-Gurion 1983 , 273, 294, 301, 317, 319, 325; Shlaim 2001, 155 ).

These factors were not jointly sufficient for war, however, because Israeli leaders perceived that war would have been too costly in the absence of French and British participation, which Israel required to avoid diplomatic isolation, provide air cover for her civilian population, and eliminate the risk of British intervention on the side of Jordan in an Israeli-Jordanian war ( Golani 1998, 21 ; Morris 1993, 277 ). Thus British and French participation was another necessary condition for war.

Although the combination of the unfavorable shift in power, grievances over the maritime blockade and armed infiltration, perceptions of the inevitability of a second round of war, and assurances of British and French intervention made an Israeli decision for war very likely, that decision was not inevitable, at least not in the fall of 1956. An important contributory cause of the war was Israel's limited success in securing armaments from the West—France and the United States in particular—to counterbalance the growing Egyptian arsenal. If war was inevitable, if the passage of time favored Egypt and its Arab allies, and if the continued search for Western arms would not work to counter the deteriorating military balance, Israel had run out of options, preventive logic became compelling, and Israeli leaders turned to war as what they saw as the only alternative.

Although perceptions of the inevitability of war and the inability to secure adequate armaments were enormously important contributory conditions for the Sinai campaign, it would go too far to say that either of these was a necessary condition for war. If Israelis had perceived Nasser as merely likely, rather than certain, to initiate war within a few years, or if Israel had been more successful in securing higher quantities of superior Western armaments, the likelihood of the Sinai campaign would have been reduced but not eliminated, particularly given independent British and French incentives for war ( Tal 2001 ). 33

The 1981 Israeli Strike against Iraq 34

Israel's raid against Iraq's Osiraq nuclear reactor on June 6, 1981 is probably history's clearest case for a preventive strike driven by the fear of a shift in the balance of power. Israeli leaders believed that Iraq, led by a hostile and undeterrable Saddam Hussein, would soon acquire nuclear weapons that would undercut Israel's (unofficial) nuclear deterrent and, in conjunction with Arab states’ decisive quantitative military superiority over Israel, threaten the existence of the Israeli state. As Ariel Sharon (quoted in Feldman 1982 , 122) stated, “For us it is not a question of balance of terror but a question of survival.”

Israeli concerns about a possible Iraqi nuclear capability date to the mid-1970s. Iraq's nuclear program accelerated with Saddam Hussein's rise to power, and the 1970s saw a fourfold increase in Iraq's military arsenal, including the acquisition of bombers that could be equipped with nuclear warheads capable of reaching Israel. Israeli fears were exacerbated by Saddam's belligerent rhetoric, by a number of technical factors that led Israeli leaders to conclude that the main purpose of Osiraq's reactor was to build a nuclear weapon, and by the termination of inspections by the International Atomic Energy Agency in 1980. Prime Minister Menachem Begin and other Israeli leaders believed that Iraq could develop nuclear weapons by 1985 and perhaps sooner ( Evron 1994, 28 ; Feldman 1984, 118 ; Nakdimon 1987, 115 ; Perlmutter et al. 2003 ; Snyder 1983, 581 ).

The debate in Israel was not so much about whether Iraq was developing a nuclear weapons capacity, but whether preventive action or deterrence provided the best policy response. 35 A March 1980 report to Begin emphasized the risks of military action. It would alienate world opinion, especially if it resulted in radioactive contamination of Iraqi civilians; violate international norms against attacking nuclear reactors, which could lead to severe international sanctions; unify Arab and Islamic opinion against Israel and possibly even provoke a Soviet-assisted regional war; and alienate the United States, leading to a reduction in American aid and possibly to an increase in Arab-American cooperation ( Nakdimon 1987, 114 ).

A deterrence strategy was also problematic. One lesson many Israeli leaders learned from the 1967 and 1973 wars was that Israeli conventional forces could no longer deter an Arab invasion. The balance of power had deteriorated, the Arabs now had a five-to-one quantitative superiority over Israel, and Soviet influence in the region was growing. In addition, Israel had lost confidence that American power provided a reliable guarantee of Israeli security. Israeli leaders believed that the role of their nuclear capability in enhancing conventional deterrence would be neutralized by Iraq's acquisition of nuclear weapons, leaving Israel to contend with an overwhelming Arab quantitative conventional superiority. In addition, geography imposed limits on Israel's ability to disperse and conceal its retaliatory force and thus to assure a second-strike capability, and the concentration of Israeli population in a few major population centers left the Israeli population extremely vulnerable to even a limited nuclear strike. Consequently, any balance of terror in the Middle East might be far less stable than the U.S.-Soviet balance ( Feldman 1982 , 124). Finally, the economic costs of maintaining an adequate deterrent were quite substantial. 36

In addition, Saddam's highly belligerent, anti-Israeli rhetoric fueled Israeli beliefs that Iraqi plans for a nuclear program were driven by a fanatical ideology, not defensive Iraqi security concerns. Saddam's decision to attack Iran in 1980 further reinforced the image of Saddam as a risk-acceptant, possibly irrational, and ultimately undeterrable leader. Many Israeli leaders thought it highly likely that Saddam would use the bomb once he acquired it. The consequences would be catastrophic, especially in the eyes of Begin, who was more preoccupied than most with images of the Holocaust ( Renshon 2006, 51–52 ; Silver 1984, 65 ). As Perlmutter et al. (2003, 70) argue, “For Begin the Jewish historical tragedy and the trauma—personal and collective—of the Holocaust were clearly the triggers that made him decide to annihilate the Iraqi reactor…”

Other Israeli leaders dissented from this view and placed more confidence in deterrence. Shimon Peres, one of the architects of the Israeli nuclear program and the leading opposition candidate in the Israeli elections of 1981, opposed any attack on Osiraq. As he explained in a 10 May 1981 letter to Begin (reprinted in Perlmutter et al. 2003, 59 ), the international response would leave Israel isolated “like a tree in the desert.” The letter only strengthened Begin's determination to proceed with a military strike, because it reinforced his beliefs that a Labor government would not act forcefully to deal with the threat. Begin concluded that he had to act while he had the political power to do so ( Snyder 1983, 584 ), since Peres was leading in the polls at the time. Begin believed that the negative reaction to an air raid could be minimized by striking before Osiraq became operational (perhaps mid-July), and thus before the danger of radioactive contamination of Iraqi civilians, which would trigger an international outcry. 37 These differences over the diplomatic costs of an air strike were the primary dividing line between hawks and doves ( Mueller et al. 2006, 215 ).

The formal report of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1981) explained the air strike as a response to the “imminent realization” of Iraqi plans to acquire a nuclear weapon, Iraq's continued insistence on a declared state of war with Israel and “persistent denial of Israel's right to exist,” and the failure of diplomatic efforts to prevent foreign assistance to the Iraqi nuclear program. The fact that the attack was justified to the public in terms of preventive logic runs contrary to the argument that democratic publics will not support preventive wars in the face of future threats.

After the air strike, the Israeli government emphasized that Iraq was a unique case and that Israel would not necessarily adopt a preventive strategy if Egypt or some other less belligerent Arab state were to embark on a weapons-capable nuclear program ( Snyder 1983, 582 ). Israeli officials stressed that Israel was willing to use force only against what Defense Minister Sharon deemed “confrontation states” or otherwise “fanatical” Arab regimes (quoted in Feldman 1982 , 122). Israel had not responded to Egypt's development of a nuclear program (though it did use covert operations in the 1950s), but that program, unlike Iraq's, was not currently capable of developing nuclear weapons. Moreover, Egypt, unlike Iraq, had recognized Israel's right to exist.

To summarize, Israel's military raid on Osiriq was driven by its anticipation of an adverse power shift and its implications for the future, not by existing conflicts of interests, grievances, or misperceptions. In the absence of Iraq's nuclear program, Israel would not have attacked Iraq in June 1981, so the anticipated power shift and resulting preventive motivation constituted a necessary condition for military action. But it was not quite sufficient. Contrary to a “pure power” model of prevention, perceptions of adversary intentions played an important role, as did individual-level belief systems. The October 1980 decision for the air strike passed by only a narrow margin (10–6) in the Cabinet, with numerous influential political and military leaders opposed ( Mueller et al. 2006, 215 ; Perlmutter et al. 2003, 71 ), and one can certainly imagine a different outcome.

The United States and the 1990/1991 Persian Gulf War

The question of the causal impact of preventive motivation on the U.S. decision to go to war against Iraq in January 1991 is an interesting and important one. The fear that Saddam's Iraq might acquire nuclear weapons and the temptation to destroy that capability before it became a threat to U.S. interests and stability in the Middle East is clearly one of many factors contributing to the U.S. decision for military intervention. Numerous U.S. officials explicitly used preventive logic in their arguments for confronting Saddam. 38 Establishing the relative causal weight of this factor is, however, a more time consuming task than is possible here. Instead, I focus on the role of the preventive motivation in the mobilization of public support for the war. This issue bears directly on the argument that democratic publics do not support wars on preventive grounds, and that they punish political leaders who embark on such wars. 39

The first Bush Administration's public justification for American military intervention in the Persian Gulf region varied widely from the initial stages of the crisis in August of 1990 through operation Desert Shield and then Desert Storm, ranging from arguments about a moral crusade to those based on economic or strategic interest. This suggests that the administration was searching for the optimum way to sell military action to the American public and the Congress ( Baker 1995, 273, 333 ), at a time when the public was evenly split on the merits of going to war to drive Iraq out of Kuwait and when Bush's approval ratings were falling ( Mueller 1994, 29 ). Reinforcing the search for an optimal rationale was the warning from Bush's chief pollsters that too many arguments for the war actually confused the public ( Freedman and Karsh 1993, 222 ).

From the beginning of the crisis in early August through an October 16 speech by Bush, administration officials stressed the immoral nature of Iraqi aggression. Only six days later Bush warned that “our jobs, our way of life, our own freedom would all suffer if control of the world's great oil supplies fell into the hands of that one man, Saddam Hussein.” On October 29 Secretary of State Baker emphasized Saddam's contempt for the norms of civilized warfare, referring to the use of hostages as human shields. Baker repeated the emphasis on American hostages in his meeting with Congressional leaders (and Bush) the next day, but the argument fell flat ( Freedman and Karsh 1993, 223–224 ).

Two weeks later, on 13 November, Baker reverted to the economic argument. He emphasized the importance of oil for the economic stability of the country, the industrial world, and for the “average American citizen,” concluding “it's jobs” ( Baker 1995, 336 ; Freedman and Karsh 1993, 214–215, 224 ). This argument also failed to elicit much popular support, and Bush's approval rating continued to decline ( Gallup Poll Monthly, cited in Mueller 1994, 193–194 ). The limited appeal of the economic argument and Bush's declining popularity were connected. Most people believed that the primary U.S. motivation was defending oil supplies, but regarded that as an insufficient argument for war, and the president's popularity suffered as a result ( Freedman and Karsh 1993, 224 ; Mueller 1994, 39, 42 ). 40

The rationale that did elicit more support for American intervention was the threat of an Iraqi nuclear capability. A CBS/ New York Times poll of 13–15 November (cited in Mueller 1994, 255 ; Table #134) showed that 54% of the respondents believed that stopping Saddam Hussein “from developing nuclear weapons” was a “good enough reason to take military action” in Iraq, as compared to 31% describing protecting “the source of much of the world's oil” as a “good enough” reason, and 35% for restoring the Kuwaiti government and defending Saudi Arabia. 41

This revelation quickly led to a change in the administration's rhetoric. In a 22 November speech President Bush presented the new rationalization for American military involvement in the Persian Gulf. He said that “Those who would measure the timetable for Saddam Hussein's atomic weapons program in years may be seriously underestimating the reality of the situation and the gravity of the threat.... No one knows precisely when this dictator may acquire atomic weapons.” Bush acknowledged some uncertainty about Saddam's future capabilities and intentions, but concluded by saying that “We know this for sure: He has never possessed a weapon that he hasn't used” (in Freedman and Karsh 1993, 224 ). Bush's remarks about the danger of an Iraq armed with nuclear weapons and the bellicose nature of Hussein were further reinforced by the analogies he made with the failure of appeasement in the 1930s, thus linking Saddam with Hitler ( Freedman and Karsh 1993, 222 ; Wayne 1993, 39 ). Other administration officials followed Bush's lead.

The administration's change in emphasis was successful in increasing the public's support for U.S. military action in the Persian Gulf crisis. Polls consistently showed a near monotonic drop in Bush's approval rating (and assessments of his handling of the crisis) from late August 1990 through 15 November (immediately after Baker's “way of life speech”), and a sharp upward bump at the very end of November and beginning of December (the next polling period after Bush's “atomic” speech). 42 The increases in approval ratings were in the range of 4–7%, with increases in the range of 11–15% for questions relating to support for the initiation of war. As the US News (1992 , 179) team concludes, “...concern over Saddam's potential for nuclear weapons was a real ‘hot button’ issue with the American people. Bush, Baker, and Cheney would quickly conclude that it would be Iraq's putative nuclear threat that would enable them to forge a domestic consensus for war in Iraq.”

The evidence is compelling. Behavior in the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf crisis suggests that the American public believed, by a considerable margin, that the threat that Iraq might acquire nuclear weapons was the most persuasive argument for supporting military intervention against Iraq. U.S. political leaders soon emphasized that threat in their efforts to mobilize the American public behind a major war effort. This support for the war effort was not based on the belief that war would be quick and costless. In a January 8–12, 1991 Los Angles Times poll asking about possible justifications for a “ major war” (my emphasis), 54% of Americans believed that “the United States is justified in getting involved in a major war to destroy Iraq's nuclear and chemical weapons,” while 36% believed that such an objective did not justify a major war ( Los Angeles Times poll, in Mueller 1994, 253 ). This evidence runs strongly contrary to the argument that democratic publics will not tolerate preventive military action and withhold their support from political leaders who initiate it, regardless of whether Bush Administration officials were sincere in their emphasis on preventive logic.

The 2003 Iraq War

A similar argument can be made about the processes leading to the U.S. war in Iraq in 2003. While analysts continue to debate the relative importance of various motivations leading to the U.S. decision for war, most agree that the presumed threat of an Iraqi nuclear weapons program was the primary means by which the George W. Bush Administration tried to mobilize public support for the war, and that it was the primary source of public support for the war. There is enough documentation for this in the literature ( Isikoff and Corn 2006 ; Kaufman 2004 ; Rich 2006 ; Whitney 2005 ), and a few comments will be sufficient here. I leave aside the tactics through which the administration attempted to mobilize support for the war, and also the question of the extent to which members of the administration actually believed (and with what probability assessments) that Iraq had an active nuclear program. 43

It is clear that contrary to the hypothesis that democratic publics will not tolerate preventively-motivated wars, in fact Americans believed that military intervention to destroy a developing nuclear weapons program, at least in Saddam's Iraq, was justified. In a September 2002 poll 82% of Americans believed that “strong evidence that Iraq is developing nuclear weapons or is about to the develop nuclear weapons” would justify American military intervention (NBC/ Wall Street Journal Poll, September 3–5, 2002). In a January 2003 poll by the Pew Research Center, conducted while United Nations inspectors were in Iraq with UN authorization, 76% of respondents supported American military intervention if UN inspectors found evidence that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction, while 46% favored military action if they found that Iraq was hiding its ability to easily make WMD. Nearly 30% were willing to go to war if the inspectors found no weapons but either Iraq or UN inspectors could not assure that such weapons did not exist ( Silverstone 2007, 188 ).

The public's willingness to support military action to destroy Iraq's WMD capabilities was not directly linked to fears of terrorism, as evidenced by support for such action prior to 11 September 2002. When Iraq blocked UN inspectors from unrestricted access to sensitive sites in early 1998, a February 1998 Gallup poll revealed that 60% of respondents believed that Iraqi defiance of the UN gave the United States the “moral justification” to use military force and that this was an important enough issue over which “to go to war.” 60% supported the use of ground troops for that purpose, and 70% supported air strikes ( Silverstone 2007, 185–186 ).

Contrary to the argument that institutional checks and balances in democratic states are a central means by which democratic leaders are constrained from undertaking preventive military strategies, the U.S. Congress failed to erect significant obstacles in the processes leading to the American war effort. Of the 77 Senators and 296 Representatives who voted in favor of the October 2002 Congressional resolution to authorize the president to use force against Iraq, many identified the nuclear threat as one of the primary reasons for their support ( Kaufman 2004 ). Many subsequently stated that if they had known that Iraq did not have an active nuclear weapons program, they would not have voted for the war. Hillary Clinton later said that “if we knew then what we know now, there wouldn't have been a vote ... and I certainly wouldn't have voted that way” (NBC, “Today” show, 12/18/2006). The implication is that strong evidence that a hostile adversary is significantly increasing its military power, or at least developing a nuclear capability, is regarded as a legitimate justification for war.

The 1994 U.S. – North Korean Crisis 44

In 1994, the Clinton Administration engaged in serious deliberations regarding a possible air strike against the North Korean nuclear complex at Yongbyon to prevent Kim Il Sung's regime from acquiring nuclear weapons. U.S. suspicions about a North Korean nuclear program go back to the early 1980s. In January 1992 the International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) initiated inspections at Yongbyon and demanded more intrusive inspections. The Kim Il Sung regime rejected these demands and in March 1993 withdrew from the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. By fall 1993, the Clinton Administration believed that North Korea might already have enough plutonium to make two nuclear bombs, enough fuel rods to make five or six more, the capability of making ten or twelve nuclear bombs a year once its reactor moved into full-scale operation, and the ability to multiply that several times once its larger reactors were completed. North Korea's decision in spring 1994 to begin defueling its reactors triggered the crisis ( Wit et al. 2004 ). The failure of diplomatic efforts led the Clinton administration to threaten the North Korean regime with economic sanctions if the North Korean regime did not terminate its nuclear program. Kim Il Sung responded by warning that sanctions would constitute an “act of war” and threatened “to turn Seoul into a sea of flames” ( Carter and Perry 1999, 129 ).

The U.S. developed plans both for an air strike against the Yongbyon complex and for the defense against a North Korean invasion of the South that might follow. Secretary of Defense Perry later described these two options as “unpalatable” and “disastrous.” A nuclear North Korea involved “intolerable” risks, but a military strike was “very likely to incite” North Korea to attack the South. Moreover, an attempt to deter or defend against a North Korean invasion by building up American military forces risked a preemptive attack by the North ( Carter and Perry 1999, 126–131 ; Oberdorfer 1997, 323 ).

Domestically, Republicans in Congress and conservative commentators were demanding a hard line against North Korea, and opinion polls showed substantial support for military action to keep North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons, even at the risk of a broader war. In a June 1994 poll, 48% of respondents said it was worth risking war to keep North Korea from making nuclear weapons ( Sigal 1997, 302–303 ).

As Trachtenberg (2007, 17) notes, “the smell of war was in the air.” Robert Gallucci, who led the U.S. negotiating team, feared that the 1994 crisis resembled the July 1914 crisis, and “had an escalatory quality that could deteriorate not only into a war but into a big war” ( Oberdorfer 1997, 306 ). Oberdorfer (1997, 306) notes that the top U.S. Air Force general in Korea said that “although neither he nor other commanders said so out loud, not even in private conversations with one another, ‘inside we all thought we were going to war.’” Perry believed at the time that “we were poised on the brink of a war that might involve weapons of mass destruction.”

The crisis was resolved peacefully, however, when the Clinton Administration settled for a compromise with North Korea. There were two primary factors pushing away from a U.S. air strike. One was the expectation that the attack would probably lead to a major war that would be very costly. Perry, Head of JCS General John Shalikashvili, and General Luck told Clinton on May 19th that a war to repulse a North Korean attack before it reached Seoul, followed by a counterattack into North Korea, would result in 52,000 U.S. troops killed or wounded, 490,000 Republic of Korean military casualties, “enormous” numbers of North Korean and civilian deaths, and a $61 billion cost, mostly to be paid by the US. ( Oberdorfer 1997, 315 ; Sigal 1997, 211–212 ). 45 In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee several months later, Perry explained the administration's decision in terms of the fear that an air strike would result in “North Korea's 1.1 million member army…leveling Seoul” ( Carter and Perry 1999, 128–129 ; Silverstone 2007, 145 ).

Another critical factor was the mission of former President Jimmy Carter to North Korea in the middle of the crisis. Clinton was “within minutes” of adopting one of three options to increase U.S. troop deployments in South Korea, which he recognized would have increased the risk of a general war on the peninsula and possibly lead to a preemptive attack by North Korea, when word of a provisional agreement negotiated by Carter arrived. Clinton Administration officials were furious at Carter's independent negotiating role, one calling it “near traitorous” ( Oberdorfer 1997, 331 ). At that point, however, they believed that it would be diplomatically costly to reject the Carter plan outright, and they proceeded to use it as the basis for the “Agreed Framework” that brought a peaceful end to the crisis ( Creekmore 2006 ; Gilinsky 1997 ; Wit et al. 2004 ). 46

There is no evidence that normative beliefs that a preventive strike was immoral or contrary to American democratic identity played any role in the Clinton administration's decision-making. Silverstone (2007, 141–145) , who emphasizes the constraining role of the “anti-preventive war norm” in the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations and to a certain extent into the 1960s, finds “no hint” of that norm in the 1994 North Korean crisis. He argues that U.S. decision-makers “toyed with the preventive war option in a political atmosphere completely devoid of normative concerns about the legitimacy of preventive war.” He notes that even those columnists and others who opposed war did not invoke the anti-preventive war norm. The Clinton Administration's decision against war “was embedded not in normative beliefs about preventive war, but in raw calculations of the enormous material costs.”

Those material costs included perhaps a million fatalities from an expected war, and in that sense moral considerations influenced decision-making. They also motivated Carter's personal intervention ( Creekmore 2006 ). We must distinguish, however, between arguments for saving lives wherever possible and arguments that it is immoral to initiate or provoke war in the absence of a “clear and present danger.” There was no sense in 1994, as there was early in the Cold War period ( Silverstone 2007 ), that a strategy of preventive war in itself was morally questionable and contrary to American democratic identity. It is also clear that concerns about the human and economic costs of war came not from the American public, but from political leaders. Domestic pressures pushed more toward war than away from war.

I have argued that ambiguity regarding the meaning of the concept of preventive war has impeded the development of explanatory theory about this important phenomenon. I treat the preventive motivation for war as a variable that intervenes between power shifts and war and that constitutes a causal mechanism through which the former can lead to the latter. Expectations of an adverse shift in relative power induce fears about the risk of war under deteriorating circumstances in the future and about the kinds of concessions one would have to make to avoid such a war. Such fears generate better-now-than-later logic and the temptation to resort to military force to degrade adversary capabilities while the opportunity is still available.

I then turned to theoretical arguments that democracies rarely if ever fight preventively motivated wars because of institutional constraints, the electoral accountability of leaders, and beliefs that such strategies are contrary to democratic political values and identities. I summarized evidence from a number of historical cases, casting doubt on both the descriptive proposition that democracies do not adopt preventive war strategies and causal propositions about the constraining effects of democratic institutions and political cultures. There is one clear case of a democratic state going to war to block an adverse shift in the balance of power (Israel in 1956) and another of a democratic state initiating a preventive strike to destroy an adversary's developing nuclear capability (Israel in 1981). In each the anticipated power shift and the preventive logic it induced were necessary conditions for war. Both actions generated substantial domestic support, and the Israeli government in 1981 in particular justified its action explicitly in terms of the logic of prevention.

In two other cases (the United States in the 1990–1991 Persian Gulf War and in the 2003 Iraq War), I focused not on the role of the preventive motivation in the American decision for war but instead on the processes through which U.S. political leaders tried to mobilize public support for the war and on the public response. The evidence shows that in each case fears of an Iraqi nuclear capability and the need for preventive military action to block it were the primary means by which the administration attempted to sell the war to the American people, and the primary grounds on which the public supported the war. This runs contrary to the theoretical underpinnings of the democracies-do-not-fight-preventive-wars hypothesis regardless of whether political leaders were sincere in their emphasis on preventive logic.

In the fifth case, the Clinton Administration gave serious consideration to a preventive strike against the North Korean nuclear complex. Clinton officials were constrained not by the lack of public support, and not by any sense that a preventive military strike was morally unacceptable or contrary to American democratic identity, but instead by cost-benefit calculations of feasibility and cost. Even so, the administration was moments away from a decision (economic sanctions) that many assumed could easily lead to a major war, when that decision was “preempted” by the unexpected (and unwanted) intervention of former President Carter. 47

These case studies, while brief, provide strong evidence contradicting the unconditional statement that democracies never fight “preventive wars.” They also call into question causal arguments about the magnitude of domestic and normative constraints on democratic political leaders’ adoption of preventive war strategies. Much more work needs to be done on these questions, however, both in these and other cases involving democratic states facing a negative shift in military power. A more explicit comparison between democratic and nondemocratic states would also be useful.

This study suggests a number of other questions that need further exploration. One is alternative strategies for responding to rising adversaries. Nothing in this essay is meant to imply that prevention is the only strategy or the best strategy. Presumably it is a last resort, after the state attempts to enhance its own economic power and military potential or perhaps secure allies. At what point do states adopt a strategy of preventive war?

Another set of questions relates to bargaining. How much bargaining, and of what kinds, actually takes place between declining and rising states? Relatedly, to what extent do rising powers fear the possibility of a preventive strike, and what strategies do they adopt in response? Do they consider preempting the preventer? Does the possibility of prevention deter weaker states from building up their arms or does it provoke them into accelerating their buildup, perhaps with greater secrecy?

A somewhat related set of questions concerns the consequences of preventive strategies, both limited strikes and full-blown wars. Are preventive strategies successful in removing the threat? How quickly do defeated adversaries bounce back, and with what degree of added hostility? Do preventive strategies help undermine the international normative order that generally benefits the strong more than the weak? Do prospective preventers consider these future consequences in their calculations? These questions raise some difficult methodological issues. One is selection effects. An examination of preventively motivated strikes and wars that actually occur would bias the analysis toward cases where political leaders expected success, and result in a more favorable assessment of the likely success of preventive strategies than is warranted. Moreover, what is the standard against which success is evaluated? It presumably cannot be the status quo, since it was the expected deterioration of the status quo that motivated military action in the first place. The proper comparison is the likely outcome if the state had not acted, but this raises difficult counterfactual questions ( Levy 2008 ).

Equally basic are questions regarding the conditions under which states are likely to adopt preventive war strategies in response to rising adversaries. We have plenty of hypotheses ( Copeland 2000 ; Levy 1987 ; Ripsman and Levy 2007 ; Van Evera 1999 ), but little systematic empirical research. One question deserving particular attention is the impact of individual political leaders. Although we often think of preventive war strategies as structurally induced responses to relative decline, in fact states exhibit enormous variations in responses to rising states. Renshon (2006) argues, based on evidence from several cases, that much of this variation can be traced to individual political leaders and their belief systems. In terms of the cases surveyed here, it appears that individuals had a significant causal impact on decision-making in Israel in 1981 (Begin) and in the U.S. in 2003 (George W. Bush), a modest impact in Israel in 1956 (Ben-Gurion) and in the U.S. in 1994 (the role of Carter), and considerably less impact in the U.S. in 1991 (George H. W. Bush), but more work needs to be done on these and other cases.

Two key variables shaping leaders’ threat perceptions and decisions are their time horizons and propensities toward risk-taking, though each is difficult to study empirically outside of a controlled laboratory setting. The strategy of preventive war involves accepting some costs now to avoid larger costs later, so how much individuals discount the future will have an important impact on their willingness to bear current costs. This raises the additional questions of whether democratic leaders have shorter time horizons because of their electoral accountability, and whether some political cultures encourage longer time horizons than others.

Leaders’ propensities for taking risks are also critical. 48 Decisions on whether or not to resort to a preventive war strategy in response to a rising adversary involve enormous uncertainties as to the consequences of both action and inaction (or an alternative strategy). There is both a fog of war and a fog of peace, and each involves short-term risks and long-term risks, and domestic political risks as well as military and diplomatic risks. Political leaders must somehow balance these risks in making a decision. The question is whether there are systematic patterns in leaders’ responses to these multiple risks, perhaps influenced by loss aversion, as prospect theory suggests, or whether the response to risk is highly idiosyncratic, influenced by leaders’ operational code belief systems or personalities.

Bismarck recognized both sides of the dilemma confronting policy makers. He stated that “No government, if it regards war as inevitable even if it does not want it, would be so foolish as to leave to the enemy the choice of time and occasion and to wait for the moment which most convenient for the enemy.” Over time, however, Bismarck grew increasingly cautious. He said that “preventive war is like suicide for fear of death,” and that “We have to wait, rifle at rest, and see what smoke clouds and eruptions that volcano of Europe will bring forth.” Referring to Frederick's attack against Austria in 1756, he suggested that a policy of preemption or prevention would “break eggs out of which very dangerous chickens might arise” ( Fischer 1975, 377, 461 ; Vagts 1956, 290–291 ). This is both a useful warning to policy makers and a reminder to scholars of the central role of risk propensities in decisions for or against preventive war.

Thucydides (1996, 16) argued that the underlying cause of the Peloponnesian War was “Sparta's fear of the rising power of Athens.”

Preventive war strategies fit nicely into offensive realist theory, and it is odd that Mearsheimer (2001) never mentions them.

Most modern theories of anticipatory self defense begin with the criteria proposed by U.S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster in the 1837 Caroline case. Webster argued that the use of force in self-defense is justified only if the “necessity of self-defence is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation,” and if force is not “unreasonable or excessive.” Daniel Webster, letters to British Foreign Minister Lord Ashbutton, August 6, 1842, and to Mr. Fox, April 24, 1841. Cited in Henkin, Pugh, Schachter, and Smit (1980, 890–891) . These basic criteria of necessity, imminency, and proportionality are widely accepted in customary international law and in theories of just war. Walzer (1977, 80–85) argued for “the moral necessity of rejecting any attack that is merely preventive in character that does not wait upon and respond to the willful acts of an adversary.”

This section draws on Levy (2007) .

As Kydd (1997, 148) argues, “preventive wars sparked by fears about the future motivations of currently benign states almost never happen.” The Israeli attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 come close to a “pure” case of prevention, but as I show later even that falls short.

On possible criteria for evaluating the relative causal weights of multiple necessary conditions, see Goertz and Levy (2007, 39–43) .

This raises some interesting issues in the philosophical analysis of causation, including “causal preemption” and “preemptive prevention” ( Collins 2000 ).

If the initiator's perception of an imminent attack is mistaken, the sources of the misperception and the strategy of preemption that followed take on greater causal weight.

Lemke (2003) finds no relationship between power shifts and the onset of war. Weisiger (2008) concurs, but finds that wars involving power shifts on the eve of war are longer and more intense than wars that do not involve such power shifts.

Aggregate studies of power shifts and war need to give greater attention to the relative weight of different dimensions of power. The Correlates of War Project's summary measure ( Bremer 1980 )—which gives equal weight to military, economic, and demographic indicators of power—may not be appropriate for testing propositions on preventive war. My hypothesis is that in decisions regarding the resort to a preventive war strategy in response to an adverse power shift, leaders are most frequently concerned with the military dimension, occasionally concerned with the economic dimension, and rarely concerned with the demographic dimension. One advantage of case study approaches is that they can investigate how various political leaders evaluated different elements of shifting power.

Prior to Munich, for example, French and British leaders had diametrically opposed perceptions of the relative balance of power and how it was changing. French leaders believed that Germany was weaker than France and Britain, but growing stronger, while British leaders believed that Germany was already stronger but that its lead would not last, particularly if Britain began to rearm. The French were driven by better-now-than-later logic to prefer a strong stand against Germany at Munich, but only with British support, while the British were led by better-later-than-now logic to prefer a strategy of appeasement to buy time for rearmament ( Ripsman and Levy 2007 ).

The distinguished scholars Gaddis (2004) , Quester (2000) , Schroeder (2002) , and Trachtenberg (2007) each use preemption and prevention interchangeably. A useful RAND study ( Mueller et al. 2006 , xii) argues that prevention and preemption are driven by “similar logic,” and subsumes them both under the larger category of “anticipatory attack.”

For similar conceptualizations see Betts (1982, 145) , Freedman (2004, 85–89) , Huntington (1957, 360) , Levy (1987) , Renshon (2006 , chapter 1), and Silverstone (2007 , chapter 1), Van Evera (1999, 76) , Walzer (1977, 76) .

Lebow (1981) captures this in his concept of a “justification of hostility” crisis. In 1914, for example, German leaders feared the rising power of Russia and wanted a war before power shifted further, but they did not want to mobilize first, for fear of appearing as the aggressor. Once Russia mobilized Germany then struck first to gain first-mover military advantages. See Albertini (1952–1957) and Fischer (1967) .

Other wars commonly attributed to preventive logic include Prussia in the Seven Years War (1756–1763), Japan in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905), Germany in World War I, and Japan in the 1941–1945 Pacific War ( Copeland 2000 ; Mueller et al. 2006 ; Vagts 1956 ; Van Evera 1999 ).

The Bush Administration's rhetorical emphasis on preemption is probably explained by its recognition of the problematic legal basis of prevention, though it is also conceivable that they (like many scholars) did not appreciate the analytic distinction.

As Reiter (1995) notes, “preemptive wars almost never happen.”

States in relative decline are most likely to adopt preventive strategies when they expect that a power transition is virtually certain, that the adversary will have a substantial advantage, that the adversary is hostile and revisionist, and that a future war is likely. For these and other hypotheses see Copeland (2000) , Ripsman and Levy (2007) , and Van Evera (1999) .

Buchanan and Keohane (2004) , whose aims are more normative, define the preventive use of force as “the initiation of military action in anticipation of harmful actions that are neither presently occurring nor immediately impending.”

Excessively narrow definitions, which are less common, also strip the concept of much of its discriminating power by reducing it to a null set. Wolfers (1962, 153) , for example, concluded that “there seems to be no case in history in which a country started a preventive war on the grounds of security.”

Press (2005) demonstrates the utility of distinguishing between power and reputation by showing that states are influenced more by adversary capabilities and interests than by its credibility in responding to past threats.

My concept of the preventive motivation for war excludes “preventive diplomacy,”“preventive deployment,” and “preventive intervention,” which generally aim to avert humanitarian disasters. I also exclude nonmilitary actions to forestall economic or military decline, such as economic restructuring. Covert actions to degrade adversary military capabilities are preventively motivated, but I prefer to distinguish them from preventively motivated strikes and wars undertaken by a state's organized military forces, which is a defining element of war ( Vasquez 1993 , chapter 2).

Limited preventive strikes and the importance of relative power were key themes in Levy (1987) , but Renshon (2006, 148–151) mischaracterizes that discussion.

Anderson (1966, 34) calls this “the most famous preventive war in history.”

Thus I dissent from Mueller et al.'s (2006 , xii) statement that prevention and preemption are “offensive strategies carried out for defensive reasons.”

I thank Keir Lieber for his guidance on the new historiography of World War I.

This section draws on Levy and Gochal (2001–2002) .

This was an important qualification, but one rarely acknowledged by those citing Schweller's (1992) argument that democracies never, or almost never, fight preventive wars ( Elman 2000, 92 ; Lynn-Jones 1996 , xxxii; Mansfield and Snyder 1995, 21 ; Walt 1999, 40 ).

The requirement of a present danger raises the question of time horizons, and whether democratic leaders have shorter time horizons than do autocratic leaders because of the former's electoral accountability. Political scientists give little systematic attention to time horizons, but see Toft (2006) and Streich and Levy (2007) .

The probabilistic proposition that democracies are less likely than are authoritarian states to adopt preventive military strategies against rising adversaries ( Kydd 1997, 150 ) is more difficult to analyze, and I save it for another time.

I treat this case in more detail in Levy and Gochal (2001–2002) . Useful sources include Bar-On (1994) , Ben-Gurion (1990) , Dayan (1966) , Golani (1998) , Kyle (1991) , Maoz (2006 , chapter 2), Morris (1993) , Oren (1992) , Renshon (2006 , chapter 2), Shimshoni (1988) , Shlaim (2001 , chapter 4), Tal (2001) , and Troen and Shemesh (1990) .

Israeli revisionist historians argue that the arms sale was a pretext for a war that Israel wanted to expand its territory and bolster its position for future negotiations ( Golani 1998 ).

After Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal in July 1956, France and Britain were eager to recover their economic stakes in the canal and reestablish their status in the region ( Renshon 2006 , chapter 2).

This section draws on Levy and Gochal (2004) . See also Aronson and Brosh (1992) , Feldman (1982 , 1984) , McCormack (1996) , Nakdimon (1987) , Perlmutter et al. (2003) , Renshon (2006) , and Snyder (1983) .

The diplomatic option had already failed, after Israel unsuccessfully attempted to persuade France to cease its support for the Iraqi nuclear program and to prevent the termination of IAEA inspections of Osiraq.

Formal models of bargaining under shifting power often neglect the economic costs of deterrence as an alternative to fighting. For an exception see Powell (2006, 192–194) .

To the extent that moral issues were raised, they worked not to inhibit a preventive strike, but rather to strike earlier rather than later. Some argue that Begin saw a moral duty in destroying the reactor ( Renshon 2006 ).

Vice President Quayle frequently argued that “the administration's ultimate objective should be to defang Saddam Hussein's military machine, especially to destroy his weapons of mass destruction” ( US News and World Report 1992 , 140). Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney argued before Congress in September of 1990 that “the removal of Iraq's incipient nuclear capability was a long established objective of US policy.” CIA director William Webster stated in October that the administration would have “no real confidence that the area will ever be secure again” unless Saddam were “disassociated from his weapons of mass destruction” ( Freedman and Karsh 1993, 220 ).

This section draws on Levy and Gochal (2004) .

Subsequently, Baker (1995, 337) admitted that he severely overstated the importance of oil.

Similarly, a Gallup poll taken on the 15th and 16th of November showed that over 70% of the respondents believed that preventing Iraq's ability to threaten the region with biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons was a “good reason to go to war,” as opposed to 57–60% for preventing Iraq “from controlling a larger share of Mideast oil and threatening the U.S. economy” ( Mueller 1994, 254 , Table #133).

See Mueller's (1994) Polls #1 (180), #8 (193), #10 (195), #11 (195), #12 (196), #13 (197), #22 (200), #33 (200), #34 (201), #40 (208), and #57 (219).

This is a complex psychological question. American perceptions of the threat from Iraq were driven by unmotivated cognitive biases ( Jervis 2006 ) and unconscious motivated biases as well as deliberate efforts to “fix intelligence and facts to fit a desired policy” ( Danner 2006 ).

This section draws on Levy and Gochal (2004) and Levy (2007) .

Estimates varied. Four weeks later Luck warned that a war could lead to 1,000,000 dead, eighty to one hundred thousand of which could be Americans, and a price tag of $100 million ( Oberdorfer 1997, 324 ; Sigal 1997, 154–155 ).

The absence of diplomatic support from China and Japan ( Sigal 1997, 9, 118 ) was a minor factor. Gilinsky (1997) argues that Clinton sought a compromise that he could frame as a “diplomatic victory” before the November elections.

Material cost-benefit calculations, not domestic politics or a sense that a strategy of preventive war was contrary to democratic values, explain India's decision to refrain from a preventive strike against Pakistan's nuclear facilities in 1982 ( Ganguly and Hagerty 2005, 55–57 ; Perkovich 1999 ). Strategic calculations also explain the decisions by France and Britain not to go to war against Hitler at the time of the Munich crisis ( Ripsman and Levy 2007 ).

Technically, most of these decisions take place not under conditions of risk (where probabilities of outcomes are known) but rather under conditions of uncertainty (where probabilities are not known), which are more difficult to analyze.

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How to prevent World War 3

In the past 100 years we have learned a great deal about how to prevent conflict Image:  REUTERS/Olivia Harris

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Stay up to date:, fragility, violence and conflict.

This article is part of the World Economic Forum's Geostrategy platform

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." – Albert Einstein

Since the ‘war to end all wars’ − as H G Wells so wrongly predicted a century ago − the world has seen the ‘peace to end all peace’ lead to the horrors of the second world war, proxy wars through the Cold War and, today, violent conflicts that increasingly affect civilians disproportionately and cross the red lines laid by the laws of armed conflict. The machinery of war and the available firepower has increased dramatically. The risks of a third world war are enormous. If we add in all the means and methods of warfare − conventional, nuclear, cyber, drones, and so on − we have the military potential to destroy ourselves entirely.

Violence is raging in the Middle East, Europe and Russia are poised on the edge of conflict over Ukraine, the United States is once more engaged in military action in Iraq and, as NATO pulls out, Afghanistan is vulnerable. Other flashpoints over disputed islands in the South China Sea, tensions on the Korean peninsula and over Kashmir are just some of the easily identified points of escalation.

In the past 100 years, we have, however, learned a great deal about how to prevent conflict. After the Second World War, we established the United Nations with the primary purpose of saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war. The European Union grew over decades from a trade treaty to an organization that won the Nobel Peace Prize for its part in transforming Europe from a continent of war to a continent of peace. NATO has had its part to play in shoring up the transatlantic alliance that bonded many European countries in a common cause. Today war between Germany and France is almost impossible to imagine.

Other regional organizations have been established in Africa, Asia, the South Pacific and the Americas. International bodies have been established to implement disarmament and security treaties and civil society expertise has been channeled through universities and think tanks − including Chatham House, conceived in 1919 with a view to preventing future wars.

According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 254 armed conflicts have been fought since 1946 of which 114 are classed as wars (defined as more than one thousand battle-related deaths per annum). Since the end of the Cold War, the numbers of armed conflicts have dropped dramatically. Of the 33 armed conflicts listed in 2013, only seven were classed as wars – a 50% reduction since 1989.

Many factors have supported the reduction in armed conflicts including the withering of proxy wars, UN sponsored peace processes and economic development. Research by the Human Security Report demonstrates that peace negotiations and cease-fire agreements reduce violent conflict even when they fail.

Six peace agreements were signed in 2013 and four were agreed in 2012. Over recent years, despite common perceptions, we do seem to have learned how to create, keep and enforce the peace.

The laws of armed conflict and human rights laws along with the international criminal court, war crime tribunals, economic and military sanctions and domestic justice commissions serve to protect civilians. Although nuclear weapons possession or use, outlawed for most countries, are yet to be globally forbidden, international law has proscribed the possession and use of devastating weapons systems such as chemical and biological weapons, antipersonnel landmines, cluster munitions and blinding lasers.

Academic disciplines that study war and peace have developed a rich body of research that helps us understand how wars start and how they can be prevented or ended. No approach or system is perfect, of course, but we understand how resource scarcity, environmental change, economic stress, refugee flows and racism all fuel the engendering of conflict. We understand the importance of history and culture, the role of gender and the ways in which different political systems exacerbate or diminish the risks of conflict.

Have you read?

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} 4 things to know about the state of conflict today, un police don’t just keep the peace, they help prevent future conflict, the world today looks a bit like it did before world war i - but what does that mean.

In a study for the European Strategy and Policy Analysis System (ESPAS) , Chatham House and FRIDE predicted that the world in 2030 will be more fragile and governments and international institutions will struggle to cope with the twin trends of increased interdependence and greater fragmentation. Most significantly, we realized that the risks of inter-state wars are rising and a major inter-state war cannot be ruled out in the near future.

In the lead up to the First World War, many foolishly imagined that Europe was ‘too civilized’ to go to war. Prior to the Second World War people hoped that the aggression from Nazi Germany could be contained. In so many cases of war, we tend to be overly optimistic about the length of time (‘we’ll be home by Christmas’), the scale and the outcome of the conflict.

It is time that we put aside complacency and become more realistic about war and peace and ourselves. We know a great deal about how to prevent war. We owe it to all others who sacrificed their lives and families to put into action all that we have learned and ensure peace in Europe, the Middle East and Asia for forthcoming generations. Otherwise, there will be few left to hear our excuses.

How to Prevent the Third World War , Patricia Lewis, Chatham House

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War Prevention: A Top IDF Goal

• By Yaakov Lappin
• December 18, 2017

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 689, December 18, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Though it receives little public fanfare, war prevention is the IDF’s number-one goal. If war cannot be prevented, the object is to win so quickly and decisively that the enemy will be unable to launch another war for many years to come.

At the end of October, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman addressed graduates of a military officer’s course at Training Base 1, deep in Israel’s Negev Desert. During his speech, he warned of Iran’s attempt to place a chokehold around Israel, including an attempt to take over Syria. He warned that Israel would not back down from the need to act when necessary to lift this chokehold.

“We do not search for adventures, and our role is to first of all ensure the security of the citizens of the State of Israel, and to prevent wars as much as possible,” Lieberman said. “And that occurs, first and foremost, through strengthening deterrence, and through an effort in the diplomatic arena.”

Those brief comments accurately reflect the priority list guiding the Israeli defense establishment. War prevention is at the top of the list, but if war cannot be prevented, then winning it as quickly and decisively as possible shares the top spot.

War prevention receives little attention among the general public, yet it is a central planning component that guides the decision-making of the Israeli defense establishment on a daily basis.

The merits of war prevention are self-evident. The absence of high profile armed conflict, and the stability offered by prolonged periods of quiet, cultivate the Israeli economy. They offer Israeli citizens the chance to focus on their daily, routine affairs, free from the traumas and severe disruptions created by conflict, and free from enemy projectile fire on Israeli cities and towns. This boosts Israeli morale and national resiliency.

A prolonged quiet also enables the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to focus on force build-up and restructuring programs. These are critical in allowing the military to adapt to the challenges posed by the 21 st century hybrid terrorist armies that have formed across the Middle East, and to prepare for the multiple challenges posed by the Iranian regime.

Lieberman’s comments alluded to a central tactic used to promote war prevention: deterrence. This is a somewhat hazy concept and far from an exact science, but recent experience has shown that it can be developed and fortified through a range of actions. These include an effective force build-up program accompanied by the selective use of Israel’s enhanced strike powers.

In the War Between the Wars – Israel’s low-profile military and intelligence campaign to selectively disrupt the force build-up of the Iranian-led axis – force has reportedly been used for at least six years. In other words, low-profile, pinpoint military strikes, made possible by breakthrough intelligence capabilities and advanced weaponry, have served the goal of war prevention. They demonstrated to enemies both the extent of Israel’s intelligence penetration of their activities and the lethality of standoff, precise firepower that can strike targets near and far.

These strikes also, according to international media reports, place limits on the force build-up program of Hezbollah and its Iranian sponsors by preventing them from becoming overconfident. They are now less willing to launch provocations against Israel that can deteriorate into war, as Hezbollah did in 2006 when it attempted to kidnap Israeli soldiers.

In this complex security environment, then, military strikes, if conducted correctly, can push back war and promote the goal of war prevention.

“We will not hesitate, even for a single moment, to prevent the Iranians from setting up a chokehold [in Syria],” Lieberman vowed. Such a statement is designed to enhance Israeli deterrence, and thereby serves the objective of war prevention. This deterrence is magnified when it is backed up by action. This thinking can be found across the Israeli defense establishment, and has been alluded to in comments by the high command.

“The IDF’s first challenge is to prevent war, to provide security, and to make every effort to enlarge the window of quiet for the country, out of strength, and an understanding that this contributes to national security, allowing the country to flourish and develop,” IDF Chief of Staff Lt.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot told the Herzliya Conference in June this year. The second challenge is “to win in any war – in combat against terror or in large-scale combat, in a crushing manner, and to push back the next war.”

If the next war cannot be postponed, Eisenkot said, the IDF will seek to win it so decisively that Israel’s enemies will not be able to mount another military challenge for many years to come. Thus, even plans for war are guided by the objective of preventing the war that could come after it.

Yaakov Lappin is a Research Associate at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. He specializes in Israel’s defense establishment, military affairs, and the Middle Eastern strategic environment.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the Greg Rosshandler Family

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16.4 Preventing War and Stopping Terrorism

Learning objectives.

• Outline approaches that show promise for preventing war.
• Understand the differences between the law enforcement and structural-reform approaches to preventing terrorism.

War has existed since prehistoric times, and terrorism goes back at least to the days of the Old Testament (e.g., when Samson brought down the temple of the Philistines in an act of suicide that also killed scores of Philistines). Given their long histories, war and terrorism are not easy to prevent. However, theory and research by sociologists and other social scientists point to several avenues that may ultimately help make the world more peaceful.

Preventing War

The usual strategies suggested by political scientists and international relations experts to prevent war include arms control and diplomacy. Approaches to arms control and diplomacy vary in their actual and potential effectiveness. The historical and research literatures on these approaches are vast (Daase & Meier, 2012; Garcia, 2012) Daase, C., & Meier, O. (Eds.). (2012). Arms control in the 21st century: Between coercion and cooperation . New York, NY: Routledge; Garcia, D. (2012). Disarmament diplomacy and human security: Regimes, norms, and moral progress in international relations . New York, NY: Routledge. and beyond the scope of this chapter. Regardless of the specific approaches taken, suffice it here to say that arms control and diplomacy will always remain essential strategies to prevent war, especially in the nuclear age when humanity is only minutes away from possible destruction.

Beyond these two essential strategies, the roots of war must also be addressed. As discussed earlier, war is a social, not biological, phenomenon and arises from decisions by political and military leaders to go to war. There is ample evidence that deceit accompanies many of these decisions, as leaders go to many wars for less than noble purposes. To the extent this is true, citizens must always be ready to question any rationales given for war, and a free press in a democracy must exercise eternal vigilance in reporting on these rationales. According to critics, the press and the public were far too acquiescent in the decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003, just as they had been acquiescent a generation earlier when the Vietnam War began being waged (Solomon, 2006). Solomon, N. (2006). War made easy: How presidents and pundits keep spinning us to death Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. To prevent war, then, the press and the public must always be ready to question assumptions about the necessity of war. The same readiness should occur in regard to militarism and the size of the military budget.

In this regard, history shows that social movements can help prevent or end armament and war and limit the unchecked use of military power once war has begun (Breyman, 2001; Staggenborg, 2010). Breyman, S. (2001). Why movements matter: The west German peace movement and US arms control policy . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press; Staggenborg, S. (2010). Social movements . New York, NY: Oxford University Press. While activism is no guarantee of success, responsible nonviolent protest against war and militarism provides an important vehicle for preventing war or for more quickly ending a war once it has begun.

People Making a Difference

Speaking Truth to Power

The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) is a Quaker organization that has long worked for peace and social justice. Its national office is in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and it has local offices in more than thirty other US cities and also in more than a dozen other nations.

AFSC was established in 1917 to help conscientious objectors serve their country in nonmilitary ways during World War I. After that war ended with the defeat of Germany and Austria, AFSC provided food to thousands of German and Austrian children. It helped Jewish refugees after Hitler came to power, and sent various forms of aid to Japan after World War II ended. During the 1960s, it provided nonviolence training for civil rights activists and took a leading role in the movement to end the Vietnam War. Since the 1960s, AFSC has provided various types of help to immigrants, migrant workers, prisoners, and other “have-not” groups in need of social justice. It also works to achieve nonviolent conflict resolution in urban communities and spoke out against plans to begin war in Iraq in 2003.

In 1947, AFSC and its British counterpart won the Nobel Peace Prize for their aid to hungry children and other Europeans during and after World Wars I and II. The Nobel committee proclaimed in part, “The Quakers have shown us that it is possible to carry into action something which is deeply rooted in the minds of many: sympathy with others; the desire to help others…without regard to nationality or race; feelings which, when carried into deeds, must provide the foundations of a lasting peace.”

For almost a century, the American Friends Service Committee has been active in many ways to achieve a more just, peaceable world. It deserves the world’s thanks for helping to make a difference. For further information, visit http://www.afsc.org .

As we think about how to prevent war, we must not forget two important types of changes that create pressures for war: population change and environmental change. Effective efforts to reduce population growth in the areas of the world where it is far too rapid will yield many benefits, but one of these is a lower likelihood that certain societies will go to war. Effective efforts to address climate change will also yield many benefits, and one of these is also a lower likelihood of war and ethnic conflict in certain parts of the world.

Finally, efforts to prevent war must keep in mind the fact that ideological differences and prejudice sometimes motivate decisions to go to war. It might sound rather idealistic to say that governments and their citizenries should respect ideological differences and not be prejudiced toward people who hold different religious or other ideologies or have different ethnic backgrounds. However, any efforts by international bodies, such as the United Nations, to achieve greater understanding along these lines will limit the potential for war and other armed conflict. The same potential holds true for efforts to increase educational attainment within the United States and other industrial nations but especially within poor nations. Because prejudice generally declines as education increases, measures that raise educational attainment promise to reduce the potential for armed conflict in addition to the other benefits of increased education.

In addition to these various strategies to prevent war, it is also vital to reduce the size of the US military budget. Defense analysts who think this budget is too high have proposed specific cuts in weapons systems that are not needed and in military personnel at home and abroad who are not needed (Arquilla & Fogelson-Lubliner, 2011; Knight, 2011; Sustainable Defense Task Force, 2010). Arquilla, J., & Fogelson-Lubliner. (2011, March 13). The Pentagon’s biggest boondoggles. New York Times , p. WK12; Knight, C. (2011). Strategic adjustment to sustain the force: A survey of current proposals . Cambridge, MA: Project on Defense Alternatives; Sustainable Defense Task Force. (2010). Debt, deficits, & defense: A way forward . Cambridge, MA: Project on Defense Alternatives. Making these cuts would save the nation from $100 billion to $150 billion annually without at all endangering national security. This large sum could then be spent to help meet the nation’s many unmet domestic needs.

Stopping Terrorism

Because of 9/11 and other transnational terrorism, most analyses of “stopping terrorism” focus on this specific type. Traditional efforts to stop transnational terrorism take two forms (White, 2012). White, J. R. (2012). Terrorism and homeland security: An introduction (7th ed.). Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. The first strategy involves attempts to capture known terrorists and to destroy their camps and facilities and is commonly called a law enforcement or military approach. The second strategy stems from the recognition of the structural roots of terrorism just described and is often called a structural-reform approach. Each approach has many advocates among terrorism experts, and each approach has many critics.

Law enforcement and military efforts have been known to weaken terrorist forces, but terrorist groups have persisted despite these measures. Worse yet, these measures may ironically inspire terrorists to commit further terrorism and increase public support for their cause. Critics also worry that the military approach endangers civil liberties, as the debate over the US response to terrorism since 9/11 so vividly illustrates (Cole & Lobel, 2007). Cole, D., & Lobel, J. (2007). Less safe, less free: Why America is losing the war on terror . New York, NY: New Press. This debate took an interesting turn in late 2010 amid the increasing use of airport scanners that generate body images. Many people criticized the scanning as an invasion of privacy, and they also criticized the invasiveness of the “pat-down” searches that were used for people who chose not to be scanned (Reinberg, 2010). Reinberg, S. (2010, November 23). Airport body scanners safe, experts say. Bloomberg Businessweek . Retrieved from http://www.businessweek.com .

In view of all these problems, many terrorism experts instead favor the structural-reform approach, which they say can reduce terrorism by improving or eliminating the conditions that give rise to the discontent that leads individuals to commit terrorism. Here again the assessment of the heads of the 9/11 Commission illustrates this view: “We must use all the tools of U.S. power—including foreign aid, educational assistance and vigorous public diplomacy that emphasizes scholarship, libraries and exchange programs—to shape a Middle East and a Muslim world that are less hostile to our interests and values. America’s long-term security relies on being viewed not as a threat but as a source of opportunity and hope” (Kean & Hamilton, 2007, p. B1). Kean, T. H., & Hamilton, L. H. (2007, September 9). Are we safer today? The Washington Post , p. B1.

Although there are no easy solutions to transnational terrorism, then, efforts to stop this form of terrorism must not neglect its structural roots. As long as these roots persist, new terrorists will come along to replace any terrorists who are captured or killed. Such recognition of the ultimate causes of transnational terrorism is thus essential for the creation of a more peaceable world.

Key Takeaways

• Arms control and diplomacy remain essential strategies for stopping war, but the roots of war must also be addressed.
• The law enforcement/military approach to countering terrorism may weaken terrorist groups, but it also may increase their will to fight and popular support for their cause and endanger civil liberties.

For Your Review

• Do you think deceit was involved in the decision of the United States to go to war against Iraq in 2003? Why or why not?
• Which means of countering terrorism do you prefer more, the law enforcement/military approach or the structural-reform approach? Explain your answer.

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Guest Essay

My Country Knows What Happens When You Do a Deal With Russia

By Paula Erizanu

Ms. Erizanu is a Moldovan journalist who focuses on politics and the arts in Eastern Europe. She wrote from Chisinau, Moldova.

More and more people, including Pope Francis , are asking Ukraine to drop its defense and sit at the negotiation table with Russia. Citing the stalemate on the battlefield and Russia’s superior resources, they urge Ukraine’s leadership to consider a deal. What exactly that would involve is largely left unsaid. But it would clearly involve freezing the conflict, resigning Ukraine’s occupied territory to Russia in exchange for an end to the fighting.

My country, Moldova, knows all about that kind of bargain. A small western neighbor of Ukraine, Moldova experienced Russia’s first post-Soviet war of aggression, which ended with a cease-fire agreement in 1992. Thirty-two years later, 1,500 Russian troops are still stationed on internationally recognized Moldovan territory, despite the Kremlin’s formal agreement to withdraw them in 1994 and then once again in 1999 . The case shows that Russia simply cannot be trusted.

But there’s a bigger problem for Ukraine than Russian untrustworthiness. It’s that freezing a conflict, without a full peace deal, simply does not work. For three decades, it has fractured Moldova, hindered national development and given Russia continued opportunities to meddle with Moldovan life. A frozen conflict, we should remember, is still a conflict. Anyone calling for Ukraine to settle for one should heed Moldova’s cautionary tale.

The ground for the Russian-Moldovan war was Transnistria , a strip of land in eastern Moldova with about 370,000 people. With support from Moscow — but no formal recognition — the territory declared independence from Moldova in 1990, setting off violence that escalated into conflict. Russian-backed separatists clashed with government security forces, and troops from both sides fought each other. Hundreds of people died. Russia stopped providing Moldova with gas, leaving people in cities to freeze in their apartments and cook their food outside on bonfires.

After four intense months of fighting, a cease-fire deal was signed in the summer of 1992 by President Boris Yeltsin of Russia and his Moldovan counterpart, Mircea Snegur. It established a security zone to be patrolled by so-called peacekeeping forces, effectively locking Moldova out of Transnistria. For 30 years, Transnistria has maintained a separate government, set of laws, flag and currency — all under Russian protection. Moldova has never recognized Transnistria’s independence, nor has any other member of the United Nations.

The self-proclaimed republic hasn’t fared well. It has become known for its arms and drug smuggling and a poor human rights record . Dissenters are persecuted and independent journalists are detained ; last summer an opposition leader was found shot dead at home. Most of the region’s economy is dominated by a single company, Sheriff, founded by a former K.G.B. agent.

Transnistria cleaves Moldova in two. On the right bank of the Dniester River, in democratic Moldova, there is a free press in Romanian, the official language of the country, along with Russian and other minority tongues. On the left bank, in autocratic Transnistria, the media is controlled by the authorities, who use it to transmit Russian propaganda.

Perhaps the starkest division is in education. Above Transnistrian schools, the Russian and Transnistrian — but not Moldovan — flags are mounted. There, as well as in the press, Romanian is written in Cyrillic rather than Latin script, just as it was in the Soviet Union. In history classes, pupils learn that ethnic Romanians on the right bank of the Dniester are fascists who want to kill them. With limited education and meager work opportunities, most young people leave the region after they graduate.

Some of them go to Chisinau, Moldova’s capital. But being in Russia’s sphere of influence has forestalled Moldova’s economic development. While Moldova used to export wines, fruits and vegetables to Russia, following the Soviet trade model, Moscow traded mainly gas and oil.

The Kremlin has always weaponized these commercial relations. In 2006 , Moscow placed an embargo on Moldovan produce after Moldova refused to accept a Russian-devised federalization plan. The Kremlin came up with new bans on imports in the run-up to Moldova signing an association agreement with the European Union in 2014 and again after Moldova became an E.U. candidate country in 2022 .

Similarly, Moscow has exploited Moldova’s reliance on it for energy. By signing contracts only at the last minute, reducing gas supplies ahead of winter and threatening to stop deliveries, Moscow exerts considerable control over the country. While Europe invests in good governance and infrastructure in Moldova, Russia has invested only in propaganda and agents of influence, fueling corruption, division and instability.

Russia has played on fears of renewed conflict since the 1990s. Since the invasion of Ukraine, those efforts have gone into overdrive . Rumors about Transnistria requesting Russian annexation and false reports of attacks in the region are common. Kremlin officials repeatedly threaten Moldova and claim it is a second Ukraine , adding to the anxiety people already feel living next door to a full-blown war.

This is a particularly bad year for Moldova to be under such pressure. In October, Moldovans will vote for their next president, as well as in a referendum on joining the European Union. With accession negotiations set to open this year, Moldova is looking to move closer to Europe. But Russia won’t let it go lightly.

For Moldovans, the war in Transnistria is a wound, constantly picked at in books and films. “Carbon,” released in 2022, is a good example. Set during the war in 1992, the film centers on a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan and his younger neighbor who wants to enroll in the Moldovan volunteer troops. On the way, they discover a carbonized body, which could be from either side of the conflict. They try, often comically, to find out its identity and provide it with a dignified burial.

Based on a true story and made by a crew with personal connections to Transnistria, the film broke national box office records. Mariana Starciuc, the scriptwriter, summed up the subtext. “Transnistria,” she said , “is the root for all of our problems for the past 30 years.”

Today her words ring truer than ever. It is because of the frozen conflict that Moldova is still under Russian influence, with its constant threats and endless jeopardy. Yet Moldovans fear escalation not because we haven’t sat down at negotiation tables with Russians but because we have, and the result was deeply damaging. Ukraine must not make the same mistake.

Paula Erizanu ( @paulaerizanu ) is a freelance journalist who has written for CNN, The Guardian and The London Review of Books.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

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An earlier version of this article misstated the locations of Transnistria and the rest of Moldova. Transnistria is on the left bank of the Dniester River, not the right bank. The rest of the country is on the right bank, not the left bank.

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Call for Papers | 2025 Student Paper Contest

May 1, 2024

Announcement posted 4/26/24

Preventing Chronic Disease (PCD) welcomes submissions from high school, undergraduate, graduate, and recent postgraduate students, and medical students and residents for PCD’s annual Student Paper Contest. PCD is interested in publishing papers relevant to the prevention, screening, surveillance, and population-based intervention of chronic diseases, including but not limited to arthritis, asthma, cancer, depression, diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular disease, and COVID-19 and chronic conditions. The journal is also interested in research examining the role that social determinants exact on health, including the less explored determinant of racism.

For 2025, the Student Paper Contest collection will also include a special section, “Students Have Their Say: Novel Approaches and Solutions to Current and Emerging Public Health Problems,” featuring student essays. For more information on eligibility and requirements, see PCD’s Announcements  page.

Contest Goals

• Provide applicants with an opportunity to become familiar with a journal’s manuscript submission requirements and peer-review process
• Assist applicants to connect their knowledge and training on conducting quality research with a journal’s publication expectations
• Develop applicants’ research and scientific writing skills to become producers of knowledge in addition to consumers of knowledge
• Provide applicants with an opportunity to become first author on a peer-reviewed paper
• Promote supportive, respectful, and mutually beneficial author―mentor relationships that result in strengthening applicants’ ability to generate and submit future scholarly manuscripts

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• Student applicants must be currently enrolled in a high school, undergraduate, graduate, or medical degree program. Postgraduate applicants must have received their graduate or medical degree within the past 12 months and be participating in a medical residency, postdoctoral fellowship, or similar training program under the supervision of a mentor, advisor, or principal investigator.
• Applicants should meet the standard to serve as first author. The first author is the person who conducted or led the topic being presented and prepared the first draft of the manuscript. The first author ensures that all other authors meet the criteria for authorship ( Editorial Policy ).
• Applicants and coauthors are expected to demonstrate the highest ethical standards in scholarly work ( Editorial Policy ).
• Applicants (not mentors) must serve as the corresponding author. No exceptions.
• Manuscripts must report on research done while the corresponding author was a student in an eligible student category.
• The research must have been completed within the last 12 months.
• Manuscripts must not be published previously or submitted elsewhere for publication.

Cover Letter

At the time of submission, applicants must submit a cover letter indicating their interest in being considered for the Student Paper Contest. This cover letter must include:

• Name and contact information of the student’s advisor.
• Current level of academic enrollment: high school, undergraduate, graduate or medical degree, or applicable postgraduate residency, fellowship, or other training program.
• All required disclosures (funding, conflicts of interest, and use of copyrighted material).

Learn more about general cover letter requirements on PCD’s How to Submit a Manuscript page.  

Letter of Recommendation

At the time of submission, applicants must provide a letter of recommendation from their advisor confirming the following:

• The student’s enrollment in a degree program or the postgraduate candidate’s residency or fellowship
• The research was conducted while in training under the advisor’s supervision
• The applicant conceptualized the analysis and was the primary author of the manuscript
• No one other than the applicant can serve as corresponding author

Deadline The deadline to submit a final manuscript is 5:00 PM EST on Monday, March 24, 2025. PCD requires a cover letter from the corresponding author of every paper submitted to the journal. Student corresponding authors are required to submit a cover letter indicating they (and their coauthors, if applicable) are currently matriculated in school. The letter must also identify educational level (high school, undergraduate, graduate or medical student, recent postgraduate, or medical resident), area of study (major), and minor (if applicable).

Manuscript Review Process

• Not all manuscripts submitted for consideration will undergo peer review. The Editor in Chief determines which manuscripts advance to peer review on the basis of fit, quality, and available human capital to handle submission volume.
• The decision-making process to identify which manuscripts will advance through the various stages of review is lengthy; applicants and advisors must have patience.
• An applicant receiving comments and suggestions on a manuscript does not mean the manuscript will be accepted for publication.
• Applicants interested information the status of a submission during the review process are encouraged to contact the journal. Such inquiries should come directly from the student applicant serving as corresponding author.

Recognition for Winners in Each Category

• Acknowledgment in the Editor in Chief’s editorial
• Special promotion on the journal’s social media platforms
• A podcast discussion the article
• Potential selection as a peer reviewer to determine next year’s winner

About the Journal PCD is a peer-reviewed public health journal published by CDC and authored by experts worldwide. PCD was established in 2004 by the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion with a mission to promote dialogue among researchers, practitioners, and policy makers worldwide on the integration and application of research findings and practical experience to improve population health. PCD has a current Impact Factor of 5.5 (2022) and is ranked 21st of 180 journals in Journal Citation Reports . For more information about the journal, please visit https://www.cdc.gov/pcd .

The opinions expressed by authors contributing to this journal do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Public Health Service, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the authors’ affiliated institutions.

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