Wednesday, February 18, 2004
History of Preemption
Aside from his vocal opposition to slavery in the House and its gag order against speaking against slavery in the years before the Civil War, John Quincy Adams, Monroe's Secretary of State, formulated a policy of preemption that was quite similar to that of Bush, as Rich Lowry writes:
As an aside: Hmmm...is rampant illigal immigration from Mexico a threat to national security? I think we'll all know the answer to that after the next batch of succesful terrorists slip through our porous southern border with a third world country.
UPDATE: Here's another piece on preemption and American Grand Strategy. Here at the UofC, we have an IR class titled that. I think I may take it the next time it's offered.
This is the message of an important new book by the preeminent Yale Cold War historian John Lewis Gaddis. In Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, he links Sept. 11 to another assault on the nation's capital, the British attack on Washington on Aug. 24, 1814, which left the White House in flames. In response, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams devised a national-security policy that depended on tools, Gaddis writes, that "sound surprisingly relevant in the aftermath of Sept. 11: They were preemption, unilateralism and hegemony."
Prior to the British raid in the War of 1812, America had tended toward a "duck and cover" foreign policy. Thomas Jefferson responded to the threat to American maritime rights during the Napoleonic Wars by refusing to trade. (Problem solved!) August 1814 exposed the folly of trying to hide, and brought out another American tendency. As Gaddis puts it, "Americans have generally responded to threats  and particularly to surprise attacks  by taking the offensive, by becoming more conspicuous, by confronting, neutralizing and, if possible, overwhelming the sources of danger rather than fleeing from them."
Centuries before anyone heard of Paul Wolfowitz, Adams realized the danger of what we now call "rogue states" on the perimeter of the United States. They could provide sanctuary to bandits, or a foothold for hostile European powers. So they couldn't be tolerated. As Adams demanded of the Spanish when they controlled Florida, they could either properly police it or "cede to the United States a province ... which is in fact a derelict, open to the occupancy of every enemy, civilized or savage, of the United States." Echoes of President Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein.
As an aside: Hmmm...is rampant illigal immigration from Mexico a threat to national security? I think we'll all know the answer to that after the next batch of succesful terrorists slip through our porous southern border with a third world country.
UPDATE: Here's another piece on preemption and American Grand Strategy. Here at the UofC, we have an IR class titled that. I think I may take it the next time it's offered.
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