RESPONSE TO COMMENTARY ON PREVENTIVE WAR-BECKER
I am gratified by all the responses, negative as well as positive, to my short commentary on preventive war. I do not have the time to respond to individual responses, so I will be brief and make only a few general points.
I was accused of not using economics, neglecting the costs of preventive war, and a variety of other errors and omissions. Some of the comments are well taken, but let me restate my argument in a slightly more formal way, although I will still avoid equations. When threatened by an adversary, the options are either to preemptively attack, wait to retaliate until attacked, or wait to accumulate better information before deciding whether to attack preemptively. The theory of deterrence argues that the threat of swift, powerful, and credible responses can often deter crime and other aggressive acts.
I do very much believe in the power of deterrence-indeed, I contributed to the development of the modern theory of deterrence. However, the point of my piece it that deterrence is less powerful now as a tool against certain enemies than during the cold war when the adversary was a single major state. The reason is that some of the threats now come from irresponsible nations states with powerful weapons, as well as from terrorist groups that can also acquire these weapons. These groups are not easily deterred because they are dispersed, often operate in small groups, and increasingly will get access to more and more powerful weapons. Moreover, some terrorists and their leaders do not care if they die as long as they inflict sufficient damage on their enemies, and dictators of rogue states are willing to sacrifice many of their subjects if they can obtain advantage by attacking other states and groups.
The third option- waiting for additional information-is part of what economists call the “option value” of delaying. Unfortunately, it is often difficult to know how long we should wait, and many times it is worth taking preemptive actions with very imperfect information because the risks of destructive attacks due to delay are so great. Still, as some respondents argued, we probably should have waited much longer before attacking Iraq so that we could have been much more confident about our information. I have supported the Iraqi war, but Iraq is not the main stimulus for my commentary. I mainly wanted to show why the issue of possible preventive war and preemptive attacks will arise in the future much more frequently than in the past.
I wish I had read before writing my piece the article by Eric Posner and Alan Sykes on Optimal War at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=546104. They also start from the theory of criminal deterrence and take a very similar “rational choice” approach to mine, although they develop their argument much more thoroughly.
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12/09/2004
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