The greatest treason? On the subtle temptations of preventive war

Abstract

Over the last decade or so, growing attention has been paid to notions of preventive war. The most notorious case is the approach adopted by the Bush administration after the 9/11 attacks, but there has been a much wider debate. This article traces the lineaments of that debate, and the advocacy of a legitimate doctrine of preventive war, by those who are normally seen—rightly—as defenders of the rule of law and the just war tradition. This article argues that such attempts to justify some notions of preventive war are profoundly problematic and the attempt to make them fit within the rubric of the just war tradition is doomed to failure and potentially very damaging for the coherence of the tradition as an approach to the restraint of war.