Even Republics Must Sometimes Strike Back

Abstract

The general was frustrated. In the summer of 2011, General James Cartwright, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, put his concerns this way in a congressional hearing: “If it’s O.K. to attack me, and I’m not going to do anything other than improve my defenses every time you attack me, it’s very difficult to come up with a deterrent strategy.” He happened to be speaking about dealing with cyber attacks, but he could have made a similar point about a wide range of security threats. Our reticence about retaliating in kind for cyber attacks seems to reflect wider uneasiness about using force in a retaliatory – or punitive – spirit. Yet some forms of military retaliation may be quite necessary to our national security. Whatever else one might say in assessing America’s military involvement in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past decade, the experience demonstrates the limits of American commitment to nation-building and on-the-ground policing. But the United States still faces threats from many sources. It cannot hope to reconstruct every country that has hostile intentions. Instead, it must find ways to punish countries that sponsor attacks on America or allow their own territory to be used for planning and launching attacks. As the first section of this article explains, there are plausible legal grounds for inhibitions, given widely accepted understandings of