15 Oct Goodbye Bush Preemption Doctrine?
15.10.09
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5 Comments
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.
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
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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,… Read more »
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.