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ABSTRACT
Some liberal-cosmopolitan theorists have sought to justify preventive war by proposing new institutions meant to ensure the accurate evaluation of non-imminent threats, and also make any war against them proportionate. In the debate over these proposals there has been little consideration of the post-war conditions any preventive war will likely produce. This is a serious omission; many theorists emphasize the degree to which the ability to secure a just peace is crucial to whether a war is proportionate. This article begins to remedy this missing piece of the debate over what it calls ‘cosmopolitan preventive war’ (CPW). After reviewing the debate, it discusses preventive war in the context of theorizations of post-war justice, or jus post bellum. It then investigates CPW’s ability to account for jus post bellum concerns through a counterfactual 2003 Iraq CPW. Showing that the proposed institutions do not do enough to account for the likely, and possibly immense, post-war harm wrought by preventive war, the article concludes with a negative evaluation of the CPW program and a brief statement on the ethics of preventive war in general.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Notably, it is a spare cosmopolitanism that simply foregrounds human rights and the need for slightly more robust supranational authority structures. This piece is meant to be a sympathetic internal critique, though, and so any in-depth discussion of how and whether CPW is truly cosmopolitan is outside its scope.
2 Some have touched on preventive war and the problems relating to the peace to be won, but none in the way I am articulating here (see May Citation2013; Nathanson Citation2013; Chatterjee Citation2015).
3 Thanks to Mark Raymond for pointing to these works.
4 It should be noted that such concerns need not reflect any sort of rote traditionalism. Indeed, some cutting edge work on the ethics of war’s end takes an even more pessimistic view toward the moral salience of robust forms of peace, contending that we would often do well to be satisfied with truces guided by ‘a straightforward moral principle: economizing on the costs of war’ (Eisikovits Citation2016, 29; for pertinent commentary see Breen Citation2017; Eisikovits Citation2017; Metz Citation2017).
5 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this issue.
6 The risk of ‘living with them’ could be quite low. Realists generally contended that even a confirmed WMD-seeking and terrorist-connected Iraq could be contained (Mearsheimer and Walt Citation2003).
7 Mearsheimer and Walt (Citation2003, 56–59) argue convincingly that Saddam Hussein was rational enough to not use WMD against the US himself, though for the sake of argument I am parting with them here in positing he would somehow materially support their use by terrorists.
8 Indeed, Buchanan (Citation2006) uses the Iraq War as an example of what not to do for both preventive war and forcible democratization.
9 Nagel (Citation2013, 323) defines moral luck as a situation where ‘a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment’.