Striking First: Preemption and Prevention in International Conflict.

• Author: Preble, Christopher
• Position: Book review

Striking First: Preemption and Prevention in International Conflict

Michael Doyle

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008, 175 pp.

In this concise book, lead author Michael Doyle and three distinguished commentators wrestle with one key question: "Under what circumstances is preventive war justified?"

The question itself is hardly revolutionary; for several centuries, scholars have attempted to differentiate preemptive wars--those launched in anticipation of an imminent attack from preventive wars--launched before a particular threat materializes. The former are generally justified as self-defense forms; the latter historically have not been.

In the past decade, however, the world's sole superpower, the United States, has launched at least two wars--against Serbia in 1999 and Iraq in 2003--that did not meet the accepted criteria of preemption. Not surprisingly, these two wars, in particular, have prompted many scholars to ask whether our existing norms against preventive wars have been overcome by events. More provocatively, in a world where nonstate actors appear to pose a greater threat to peace and security than do states, do the rules designed to constrain states need to be revisited? Is there too little war in the world, or too much? Do states resort to war too frequently, or not often enough? Doyle's book is a useful discussion of these issues, but it focuses too much on legalistic rationales for preventive war without contemplating its limited utility in the first place.

Doyle, the Harold Brown Professor of International Affairs, Law, and Political Science at Columbia University, developed the book from a series of lectures given at Princeton in November 2006. He begins with the Caroline incident of 1837, an attack on an American ship along the U.S.-Canadian border that helped define international standards governing preemption. Doyle reviews the particulars of the ease, in which a group of Canadian militiamen under the command of a British Royal Navy Commander destroyed the American steamer Caroline, which had been leased to a group of Canadian separatists. The militiamen had expected to find it berthed at an island on the British-Canadian side of the border, but they ventured into U.S. territory and seized the ship and several rebels at an American village, Ft. Schlosser. Reports of casualties varied, but the end result was never disputed: The Canadian irregulars set fire to the Caroline and pushed her over Niagara Falls.

U.S. officials complained bitterly that the Canadians (and, by implication, the British) had acted unjustly. In the course of a series of diplomatic notes...