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Print This PageGoodbye Bush Preemption Doctrine?
It sure looks like it, according to Bloomberg.
The Pentagon is reviewing the Bush administration’s doctrine of preemptive military strikes with an eye to modifying or possibly ending it.
The international environment is “more complex” than when President George W. Bush announced the policy in 2002, Kathleen Hicks, the Defense Department’s deputy undersecretary for strategy, said in an interview. “We’d really like to update our use-of-force doctrine to start to take account for that.”
It would be interesting to see if the new strategy pays more than simply ritual obeisance to the international law governing the use of force, or whether it explicitly incorporates such norms.
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[...] Opinio Juris colleague Julian Ku noted there a few days ago that Bloomberg had reported that the Obama administration is considering plans to [...]
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[...] Obama administration may scrap the pre-emptive war part of the “Bush Doctrine.” Hat tip to Julian Ku. Meanwhile, Russia and the U.S. both continue to claim the right to use nuclear weapons in a [...]
And the Russians are going for otherwise. Preemption even with nukes.
“The head of Russia’s Security Council, Nikolai Patrushev, said in an interview with the Izvestia newspaper earlier on Wednesday that the revised military doctrine would stipulate for preemptive nuclear strikes against potential aggressors and the use of nuclear weapons not only in large-scale conventional wars but also in regional and local conflicts.”
Fortunately, it is still a draft. http://www.en.rian.ru/mlitary_news/20091014/156468672.html
at 3:10 pm EST Justinas
I wonder if disavowing a preemptive strike doctrine is the most advantageous policy choice given the multitude of middle ground options available for the Executive Department to embrace. The record of decisions in the ILC and even a textual analysis of the UN Charter leave it debatable whether a nation has an affirmative right to preemptively strike a nation under the events categorized as “imminent” in today’s new technological environment. Under the Caroline case, the court limited a nations’ right to respond to force with force based on 2 elements: the danger had to be imminent and the responsive force proportionate to the threat. These 2 prerequisites were softened under the Bush Administration’s considerations of modern warfare, as much as by other nations.
Perhaps the United States achieves greater goodwill from the global community for assertedly rejecting this former doctrine on the front-end, but one must ask if by rejecting the doctrine in-whole, do we render ourselves more vulnerable to attack both militarily and on the Public Relations side in the back-end? I am of the opinion that living up to one’s words and only asserting policy statements a nation can support in its actual policymaking will generate greater transparency, predictability and therefore stability for a nation in dealing in the international arena. Not to mention it avoids hostility from other nations when we inveitably become hypocrites; (inevitably, the United States will find it necessary in this new international arena, where warfare is detached from soverign states declaring war, to intrude on a nation’s soverignty in some minor sense to disarm an aggressor terrorist at some point.) Perhaps President Obama’s Department of Defense should return to first principles: actions speak louder than words. I would add a second principle: sometimes silence is golden. And a third: only speak when necessary. Such an affirmative statement of policy was unnecessary at the time it was volunteered and only serves to try to create black and white statements of law and policy out of innately grey areas. By staying silent and affirmatively adopting its policy in actions, rather than words, the Defense Department stands to gain far more than making promises or abstract statements that will only cloud international opinion about the reliability of America’s words in international affairs. I believe by adopting real efforts, rather than statements about policy changes, the U.S. will more quickly grow closer to its old status as the “benevolent hegemon”, as true as that ever was.
at 5:05 pm EST Laura Little
Response… I hope by scraping or expunching the pre-emptive war part will generate a global support and more acceptability of US foreign policy, I am particularly worried about the Arab world; if this Obama’s decision will bring the Arab world (I am talking particularly about the fundamentalists) closer to the rest of the world Obama must be appreciated.
at 2:05 pm EST Habila M. Istifanus