Beyond Preemption

America’s three most recent wars—in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq—have raised profound questions about when to use military force, for what purpose, and who should make the decision whether to go to war. These crucial questions have been debated around the world with increasing intensity, and by beginning to provide important answers, Beyond Preemption moves the debate forward in significant ways. During the past three years, the contributors to this volume have engaged in a global dialogue with political officials, military figures and strategists, and international lawyers from around the world on when and how to use force and in what way its use can best be legitimized. They found consensus that the world has changed so dramatically that much of the old way of thinking about when and how to go to use force to deal with new challenges has become largely obsolete. Drawing on these high-level discussions, Ivo Daalder and his colleagues make specific proposals for how to forge a new international consensus on the vexing questions about the use of force, including its preemptive use, to address today’s interrelated threats of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and humanitarian crises. In Beyond Preemption, the authors also consider the critical matter of how these strategies could be best legitimized and be made palatable to domestic audiences and the international community at large. Contributors include Bruce W. Jentleson (Duke University), Anne E. Kramer (Brookings Institution), Susan E. Rice (Brookings Institution), James B. Steinberg (Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin).

Ivo H. Daalder is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies and the Sydney Stein Jr. Chair in International Security at the Brookings Institution. He is the coauthor, with James M. Lindsay, of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy (Brookings, 2003) and the coauthor of Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo (Brookings, 2001), written with Michael E. O'Hanlon.