John Bolton is leading a cry for preemptive war against North Korea.
John Bolton, who served as United States Ambassador to the United Nations under former President George W. Bush, has an Op-Ed in The Wall Street Journal calling for pre-emptive war against North Korea:
Pre-emption opponents argue that action is not justified because Pyongyang does not constitute an “imminent threat.” They are wrong. The threat is imminent, and the case against pre-emption rests on the misinterpretation of a standard that derives from prenuclear, pre-ballistic-missile times. Given the gaps in U. S. intelligence about North Korea, we should not wait until the very last minute. That would risk striking after the North has deliverable nuclear weapons, a much more dangerous situation. In assessing the timing of pre-emptive attacks, the classic formulation is Daniel Webster’s test of “necessity.” British forces in 1837 invaded U. S. territory to destroy the steamboat Caroline, which Canadian rebels had used to transport weapons into Ontario. Webster asserted that Britain failed to show that “the necessity of self-defense was instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” Pre-emption opponents would argue that Britain should have waited until the Caroline reached Canada before attacking. Would an American strike today against North Korea’s nuclear-weapons program violate Webster’s necessity test? Clearly not. Necessity in the nuclear and ballistic-missile age is simply different than in the age of steam. What was once remote is now, as a practical matter, near; what was previously time-consuming to deliver can now arrive in minutes; and the level of destructiveness of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons is infinitely greater than that of the steamship Caroline’s weapons cargo. Although the Caroline criteria are often cited in pre-emption debates, they are merely customary international law, which is interpreted and modified in light of changing state practice. In contemporary times, Israel has already twice struck nuclear-weapons programs in hostile states: destroying the Osirak reactor outside Baghdad in 1981 and a Syrian reactor being built by North Koreans in 2007. This is how we should think today about the threat of nuclear warheads delivered by ballistic missiles. In 1837 Britain unleashed pre-emptive “fire and fury” against a wooden steamboat. It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current “necessity” posed by North Korea’s nuclear weapons by striking first.
Bolton goes on to cite historical examples to support his argument, including warnings that President Franklin Roosevelt voiced prior to World War Two that called the then existing three-mile extension of what were considered American “territorial waters” and eventually and rather unilaterally went on to extend America’s “waters of self-defense” to extend as far east as Greenland, Iceland, and parts of western Africa. In a similar vein, in 1988 President Reagan unilaterally expanded the three-mile limit to twelve miles via Executive Order that “cited U. S. national security and other significant interests in this expansion, and administration officials underlined that a major rationale was making it harder for Soviet spy ships to gather information.”
Before proceeding any further, the differences between what Bolton is advocating and what FDR and Reagan actually did should be apparent. Where their actions were arguably principally defensive in nature due to the fact that they sought to limit the ability of Soviet and other naval forces to get close to American shores, the kind of first-strike that Bolton is suggesting would, much like the Iraq War that he also favored, be nothing more than unprovoked and naked aggression against the DPRK that would likely be viewed as a violation of international law even by some of America’s closest allies. Given that difference, it’s entirely unclear why Bolton even bothered to raise this argument. Absent the existence of an imminent threat, the justification for unilateral preemptive war against North Korea simply cannot be made simply by citing these two limited historical examples.
