Preventive military strike or preventive war? The fungibility of power resources

Abstract

Differential rates of growth explanations for preventive war assume that power resources are highly fungible. That is, they assume that a state’s power resources are easily and quickly ‘moveable’ into practical military capability. This ‘unidimensional and undifferentiated’ baseline obscures an important distinction in the motivations for preventive military strikes and preventive wars. To forestall or block an anticipated adverse power shift, under conditions of perceived low fungibility of power resources, leaders have strong motivation to launch a limited preventive military strike. High fungibility of power, in contrast, makes only preventive strikes—not all preventive action—less likely. Leaders have strong motivations to launch preventive wars, including all-out invasion and conquest, aimed at damaging and/or destroying many of the challenger’s power assets, including non-threatening ones. In this article, I examine Israel’s decision to use preventive military force, and specifically military strikes, to delay Iraq’s (1981) and Syria’s (2007) nuclear weapons programs.