I watched the “talking heads” programs on broadcast news this morning with rapt attention, eager for insights into what’s going on in Iran. I will post links to transcript of them as they become available. What stood out most to my eye was that President Trump’s supporters were uniformly arguing in favor of preventive war, a subject on which I posted. In short, I think it’s wrong and is bad policy.
However, I wanted to call specific attention to a remark by, I believe, a Republican senator who declaimed confidently that “the requirement for imminence is a fallacy created by the Obama Administration”. Far from being a creation of the Obama Administration, imminence as a requirement for anticipatory or pre-emptive self-defense has been a keystone of American foreign policy for nearly 200 years.
It dates back to the “Caroline affair” in 1837. In December 1837 a group of Canadian militiamen set fire to the steamboat Caroline in New York and sent it over Niagara Falls, killing a black American watchmaker, Amos Durfee. That triggered a reprisal and diplomatic incident that unfolded over several years.
During the diplomatic contretemps letters by U. S. Secretary of State Daniel Webster to British representative Lord Ashburton articulated the conditions under which one country may attack another in anticipation of attack:
those exceptions should be confined to cases in which the necessity of that self-defense is instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation
That remains remains the classic statement of anticipatory self-defense in customary international law to this day and has heretofore been American policy.
It highlights a persistent complaint of mine here, that those who do not know history are doomed to say tomfool things about it.
The senator’s abrupt dismissal of a requirement for imminence is a de facto argument for preventive war. The existence of nuclear weapons does not repeal the distinction between imminent attack and speculative future capability as I have already argued in my post on preventive war linked above.
