Preemption, Prevention and Proliferation: The Threat and Use of Weapons in History by George H. Quester

Author:George H. Quester [Quester, George H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351497077
Google: JpguDwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 35865503
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2009-06-30T00:00:00+00:00

The United Nations and Anticipation

The United Nations that was to emerge from the aftermath of World War II was thus a blend of the Wilsonian dream of a system forbidding wars and aggressions, and a more “realist” recognition that one had to work with the existing distribution of military power around the globe. Collective security as a global principle should have applied to every country, large or small, militarily ready or militarily defenseless. Yet there would have to be some world sympathy and understanding for contrary assumptions, for the idea that a nation might have to launch preventive wars or preemptions, where the states that were meant to be a buffer simply turned out to be a power vacuum. The United Nations Charter gives the Security Council the authority to respond not only to acts of aggression, but also to “threats to peace.” If one ever needed a license for preemptive action or even for preventive military action, this would seem to be it, for it is in the eye of the beholder whether peace is threatened by one nation or another’s behavior.

Critics of the actions taken by the United States without United Nations sanction, either under President George W. Bush or earlier under President Clinton, would note that this license to anticipate threats to peace is not doled out to individual nations by the Charter, but reserved particularly to the Security Council. Yet supporters of peace around the world had been inclined to condemn the anticipatory thinking that had produced World War I, the thinking that was behind many other wars in the past. In the “collective security” principle of the League of Nations, they had pushed forward the principle that nations should defend themselves (and be defended by others) only after they had been attacked. If whoever struck first was thereby in the wrong, wars would not break out as often; anticipation is often based on erroneous data, and the result, when each side is ready to act on the basis of anticipations, is often arms races and wars that no one had really wanted.

The United Nations Charter thus in effect gave the Security Council the authority to engage in anticipatory, preemptive or preventive action with regard to “threats to peace,” while mostly limiting individual nations to the inherent right of self-defense. The Security Council is relatively free to define for itself what constitute threats to peace, with various resolutions having defined the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction as ringing this alarm bell, or the sharing of weapons of mass destruction with non-state actors.18 If an individual member of the United Nations were actually attacked by another state, it of course retained the right to use arms to defend itself.

If a state merely saw such an attack coming, it would not have the right to preempt such an attack by attacking first, but would rather have to make a plea to the Security Council, with the UNSC being able then to take any preemptive action. Yet the

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.