Preventative Diplomacy

Diplomacy should be our nation’s first line of defense. Engaging foreign leaders and attempting to prevent misunderstandings between nations is a true preventative approach to international conflict. Diplomacy is valuable even when incapable of resolving conflicts on its own.

The Bush Doctrine attempts to prevent war with war and rejects the inherent value of discourse. It asserts that it is the United States’ right to use military force against any country perceived to be a potential threat. Imminent attack is not a prerequisite; rather, a perception of future threat is sufficient cause for a declaration of war.

Policy that claims to be preventative should actually prevent war.

The Bush doctrine advocates the use of force against budding adversaries. Any state that may, at some point in the future, do harm to the United States is worthy of invasion. If we believe this premise, we are headed down a dark, slippery slope of making a habit of waging war. There are two reasons why preventative war is just plain bad foreign policy: impracticality and amorality.

Preventative war is impractical because it relies on subjective threat calculations. Even if it were a good idea to squash rising powers long before they were powerful, how will their level of potential threat be determined? How will potentially threatening states or non-state actors be identified? How will various actors’ aggressive intent be decided? And assuming our national government can, in fact, accurately identify threats, how popular will preventative war be outside the shadow of a national tragedy? Will the American people rally behind frequent calls to preventative war?

The answer to these questions is that we simply do not know. Our leaders can only guess which powers consider the destruction of the United States a strategic objective. Intelligence allows us to make educated guesses about the intentions of state and non-state actors; but these methods have recently fallen victim to political manipulation. The intelligence community and the Bush administration misjudged the pre-9/11 al Qaeda threat and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The U.S. was attacked by nomadic terrorists, a threat that was not taken seriously, and Congress declared war on a dictator who was interested in protecting his image with regional rivals but who lacked the capacity to attack the U.S. militarily. Regardless of these misjudgments, it is entirely unreasonable to think that the American people would have accepted a pre-9/11 attack of Afghanistan in the name of preventative war.

The moral argument against preventative war is that nobody likes the bully. Running around the playground beating up little kids just because you can is mean, and it is not going to win you any friends. Likewise, indiscriminately launching attacks against countries we designate as future threats will not win the U.S. allies. On the contrary, it will create new enemies. Even if the government chooses its targets wisely and eliminates a real potential threat, how many more threats will that action have created? It is unwise to use military force first when there is an alternative.

Imagine that your child comes home from school one day to announce he is planning to fight a boy at school. Your child has not been hit, the boy didn’t steal his lunch money, and the other child has not been outwardly mean to him. Your child’s motivation is his fear that the boy will be bigger, smarter and richer than him when both are 35.

Such is the logic of the Bush doctrine and preventative war. A hunch that a state might someday be in a position to challenge the United States’ dominance is sufficient justification for a war declaration. No parent in their right mind would encourage their child into an unjustified schoolyard fight. So why are we so utterly willing to allow the same logic to carry our nation to war?

Preventative war is impractical and amoral. Not only is it difficult to quantify threats that will not materialize until years down the road, but abandoning diplomacy as a way to prevent conflict is a careless gamble of United States resources and interests. Leaders should embrace ingenuity and nuance when framing foreign policy, rather than acting carelessly with the U.S.’ reputation and soldiers’ lives. It is irresponsible to forgo diplomatic efforts in favor of offensive military action simply because the United States has access to overwhelming force.

Diplomacy is an art that should be studied and practiced not only because it will earn the U.S. respect in the world, but because it has the potential to win peace without war.