Preventive war, a useful tool

Conditional sovereignty is central to a new norm of state responsibility. In September, U.N. members embraced the idea that states have a responsibility to protect their citizens from genocide and other gross violations of human rights. That logic also suggests that states have a responsibility to head off internal developments -- acquiring weapons of mass destruction and harboring terrorists, to name two -- that pose a threat to the security of others.

When states fail to meet their responsibilities, the international community will need to step in. Diplomacy and economic pressure are frequently sufficient to do the job. But there will be times when limited military action will be the only effective way to obviate an imminent threat -- before, say, a state produces enough fissile material to make nuclear weapons or before terrorists are fully able to hatch their plots. One problem with the Bush doctrine, then, is not that it is overly reliant on preventive force but that it too narrowly conceives of its use, primarily to deal with terrorism and to remove threatening regimes.

The Bush doctrine's other problem is that it insists that individual states, or at least the United States, must have the right to decide when preventive force is justified, even though the threat affects the security of many. The decision to use force in these cases cannot be one state's alone.

Who, then, should decide? The Security Council, at least in the first instance, because it has become the most legitimate forum for deciding these questions. Before the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the council authorized the use of force beyond traditional peacekeeping operations on only two occasions (Korea and the Congo). Since then, it has authorized force 17 times. Even in the case of the Iraq war, the Bush administration has maintained that force was authorized by previous Security Council resolutions.

Yet states have not always been able to count on the council to make timely decisions. It acted late in the case of the former Yugoslavia, ineffectively in response to Darfur and not at all during the genocide in Rwanda. It has refused to take up North Korea's noncompliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and it wants no part in deciding Iran's compliance. None of the proposed reforms are likely to improve this record soon.