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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.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Leaders can use other delaying strategies, including diplomatic and economic statecraft, to curtail foreign support. They also have strategies that accept that the power transition is inevitable, such as target-balancing and building up defence and deterrence capabilities ( Silverstone Citation2007, 5–80; Lobell Citation2018, 596–597).
2 Leaders can also pursue covert action. For instance, in the early 1960s, Israel used a range of covert actions to delay and destroy Egypt’s nascent missile program including assassination and intimidation against German scientists until their assistance stopped ( Black and Morris Citation1991, 334; Brom Citation2005, 135, 141; Bergman Citation2018, 61–85).
3 In contrast to fungibility, latency assumes that states are on the threshold of possessing the threatening domain. For instance, nuclear latency means that a state has already gone very far in the nuclear process and can rapidly build a nuclear weapon (Fuhrmann and Tkach Citation2015).
4 Bas and Coe correctly note that at this stage the focus is on ‘assessing the progress, rather than the existence’ of a program (2016, 656).
5 Brittle power resources also contribute to delays in returns on military investment, dampening power shifts (Debs and Monteiro Citation2014, 6).
6 I would like to thank a reviewer for suggesting this point.
7 The quotes from the interviews reflect recent comments about past events.
8 Interview by author, Tel Aviv, Israel, 27 January 2014.
9 Interview by author, January 2014.
10 Interview by author, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2018.
11 Interview by author, Tel Aviv, Israel, 26 January 2014.
12 Interview by author.
13 Ariel Naor, interview by author, Jerusalem, Israel, 24 January 2014.
14 Amos Yadlin, interview by author, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 2018.
15 Efraim Sneh, phone interview, 12 June 2018.
16 Iraq possessed a sophisticated air defence system capable of downing striking planes (David Ivri, interview by author Tel Aviv, Israel, 6 June 2018; Harel and Benn Citation2018).
17 Yaari, interview by author; Moshe Nissim, interview by author, 10 June 2018.
18 Ehud Olmert, interview by author, Tel Aviv, Israel, 6 January 2018.
19 Olmert, interview, Tel Aviv, Israel, 6 January 2018.
20 Nevertheless, it does not appear that leaders have fully accepted the inevitability of a nuclear Iran. Clandestine actions (such as Stuxnet) and ‘subvert[ing] factories, supply chains and launchers’, including ‘identifying the networks of suppliers and subcontractors’ on the black market, are low-risk ways to delay Iran’s program (Sanger and Broad Citation2019).
21 Bar-Ilan University Ambassadors’ Forum 2011.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Steven E. Lobell
Steven E. Lobell is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Utah. His research interests include neoclassical realism, the political economy of security, the challenges of hegemony, beyond great powers and hegemons, and escalation dynamics in pre- and near-crises. Lobell is the PI of a Minerva Research Initiative/Office of Naval Research award on ‘Power Projection, Deterrence Strategies, and Escalation Dynamics in an Era of Challenging Near Peers, Rogue States, and Terrorist and Insurgent Organisations’. Email: [email protected]