Daalder & Steinberg on Rules for War

Ivo Daalder and James Steinberg, both of the Brookings Institution, published an essay last week on the issue of "New Rules on When to Go to War". Their argument is that behind the questions of whether or not to initiate a war against Iraq is a broader question about the changing nature of when a state is justified in using military force. They identify two lines of thinking that are dominant in the United States:

Two positions, equally unsatisfactory, have emerged. One holds that, except in a clear case of self-defence in response to an actual or tangibly imminent attack, the decision to use force requires explicit authorisation by the United Nations Security Council. The other argues that, in an age of large-scale terrorism, waiting for others to strike first is suicidal. The right to self-defence must include the right to act pre-emptively, before a real threat has fully materialised; this includes the right to act unilaterally when international organisations, notably the UN, fail to act.

Their criticism of the first position rests on the now out-dated procedural structures of the United Nations system:

The UN operates on the Westphalian assumption (enshrined in Article 2(4) of the UN charter) that the primary concern is aggression by one state against another, not what happens within states. Yet, in our increasingly interconnected world, the main threats to international security derive more from developments within states than from external behaviour of states. Indeed, the last three wars fought by the US, Britain and others were all in response to such internal developments—the ethnic cleansing of Albanians in Kosovo, the provision of a terrorist sanctuary in Afghanistan and the presumed development of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Their criticism of the second position is that unilateral action is usually justified as being a no-nonsense and decisive solution to an immediate problem. However, as Daalder and Steinberg point out, this is a short-sighted and ultimately self-defeating attitude:

George W. Bush has insisted that Washington will not wait for a "permission slip" to act and will define for itself which internal developments constitute a sufficient threat to justify early intervention. Under this principle, however, any state that perceives a possible future threat from another state would be justified in intervening militarily. That is more a recipe for international anarchy than for international order. In practical terms, moreover, this policy may well prove self-defeating, as Iraq has shown. When a country acts without perceived international legitimacy, it will fail to rally the international support that is inevitably required to do the job properly.

While not providing much of a thrid-way proposal themselves (at least in this piece), the authors acknowledge that the solution is somewhere in between the two extremes: there must be a way to act immediately and forcefully when required, but with broad international support that will remove any notions of illegitimacy from the endeavour.