Preventive war and U.S. foreign policy

Security Studies

Volumn 16, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 1-31

  Trachtenberg, Marc ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 34247894044     PISSN: 09636412     EISSN: 15561852     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/09636410701304523     Document Type: Article

References (148)

1. George W. Bush, "Graduation Speech at West Point," 1 June 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/06/20020601-3.html
2. Vice President Dick Cheney, "Address to Veterans of Foreign Wars 103rd National Convention," 26 August 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/08/20020826.html
3. "The National Security Strategy of the United States of America" (with Bush introduction), September 2002, http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss.pdf.
4. The term "preemption" was used mainly by the Bush administration and its supporters. Many observers, however, especially in the academic world, strongly object to the use of the term "preemption" in this context. That term, they believe, should be reserved for cases where a country strikes in the belief it is about to be attacked; if no attack is viewed as imminent, they think the term "preventive war" should be used instead. But not everyone takes that view. Paul Schroeder, for example, a strong critic of the Bush strategy, has no problem referring to it as a strategy of preemption. See his "Iraq: The Case against Preemptive War," American Conservative (21 October 2002): 8-20.
5. In this article, when I use terms like "preemptive war" (in quotation marks), I will be referring to what most academic writers prefer to refer to as "preventive war." For an historian's analysis of the shifting and at times rather problematic relationship between these two very distinct concepts - a distinction that should not be obscured by the sort of language that is now sometimes used - see Hew Strachan, "Pre-emption and Prevention in Historical Perspective," in Preemption: Military Action and Moral Justification, ed. Henry Shue and David Rodin (Oxford University Press, 2007).
6. Karl-Heinz Kamp, "Preemption: Far from Forsaken," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (March-April 2005): 26. The author was security policy coordinator at the Konrad Adenauer Foundation in Berlin.
7. Note the title, for example, of one of Arthur Schlesinger's writings on the subject: "Seeking Out Monsters: By Committing Himself to Preventive War, George Bush Has Overturned Two Centuries of U.S. Thinking on Global Diplomacy," The Guardian (London), 19 October 2004.
8. See also his article "The Immorality of Preemptive War," New Perspectives Quarterly 19, no. 4 (Fall 2002),
9. and his book War and the American Presidency (New York: Norton, 2004), 21-23.
10. This sort of argument is by no means limited to politically active writers like Schlesinger. It is quite common in the more academic literature as well. For example, see, for example, Robert Pape, "Soft Balancing against the United States," International Security 30, no. 1 (Summer 2005): Esp. 7, 25-26, 28.
11. Charles Lambroschini and Alexandrine Bouilhet, "Donald Rumsfeld: 'La Guerre Préventif est aussi vieille que l'Histoire," Le Figaro, 10 February 2003
12. Rumsfeld interview with Bob Woodward, 23 October 2003, http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040419-secdef1362.html.
13. See Marc Trachtenberg, "A 'Wasting Asset': American Strategy and the Shifting Nuclear Balance, 1949-1954," in Marc Trachtenberg, History and Strategy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991, esp. 103-7, 118 n. 62.
14. For de Gaulle, see C.L. Sulzberger, The Last of the Giants (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 52.
15. See also Russell D. Buhite and William C. Hamel, "War for Peace: The Question of an American Preventive War against the Soviet Union, 1945-1955," Diplomatic History 14, no. 3 (Summer 1990),
16. and Steven Casey, "Selling NSC-68: The Truman Administration, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Mobilization, 1950-51," Diplomatic History 29, no. 4 (September 2005): 663-64, 675-76, 687-89.
17. Truman, desk note, June 1946, in Strictly Personal and Confidential: The Letters Harry Truman Never Mailed, ed. Monte Poen (Boston: Little Brown, 1982), 31. This was not the only time Truman fantasized about starting, or threatening to start, a nuclear war as a way of settling things with the Communists.
18. See also his journal entries from 1952 published in Barton Bernstein, "Truman's Secret Thoughts on Ending the Korean War," Foreign Service Journal (November 1980): 33, 44.
19. See Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, 109-11, 112, n. 41.
20. Paul Nitze to Dean Acheson, 12 January 1953, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States [FRUS], 1952-54 series, 2: 205.
21. Dean Acheson to Harry Truman, 28 May 1953, box 30, folder 391, and Acheson memorandum of conversation, 23 June 1953, box 68, folder 172, both in Dean Acheson Papers, Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.
22. Dwight Eisenhower to John Dulles, 8 September 1953, FRUS 1952-54, 2: 461. Emphasis in original text.
23. "Discussion at the 204th Meeting of the National Security Council, Thursday, June 24, 1954," in Dwight D. Eisenhower Papers as President of the United States (Ann Whitman File), 11-12, box 5, Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, and also on the Declassified Documents Reference System website (Record Number CK3100224086).
24. Victor Naumann in meeting with Alexander von Hoyos, 1 July 1914, in July 1914: The Outbreak of the First World War, Selected Documents, ed. Imanuel Geiss (New York: Scribner's, 1967), 66.
25. See Trachtenberg, History and Strategy, esp. 132, 136-37, 148-49.
26. Paul Schroeder, for example, refers to the "very bold offensive policy" that Russia had been pursuing before 1914, a characterization that strikes me as right on target. Paul Schroeder, "Embedded Counterfactuals and World War I as an Unavoidable War," in Systems, Stability, and Statecraft: Essays on the International History of Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave MacmHllan, 2004), 186. Also at: http://www2.hu-berlin.de/gesint/lehre/ 2002_2003/counterfact/schroeder_wk1.pdf. One key episode was Russia's sponsorship of the Balkan League in 1912. When the Russians showed the treaty establishing the League to French prime minister Raymond Poincaré, the French leader remarked that it "contained the seeds not only of a war against Turkey, but of a war against Austria as well."
27. Poincaré notes of meeting with Russian foreign minister Sergei Dmitrievich Sazonov, August 1912, in Documents diplomatiques français (1871-1914), 3rd series, 3: 34.
28. For key evidence on Russia's Balkan policy at the time, see Barbara Jelavich, Russia's Balkan Entanglements, 1806-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 246-47
29. Bernadotte Schmitt, The Coming of the War, 1914, 2 vols. (New York: Scribner's, 1930), 1: 135
30. and Luigi Albertini, The Origins of the War of 1914, 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1952-57), 1: 375, 486.
31. David Sanger, "Bush to Formalize a Defense Policy of Hitting First," New York Times, 17 June 2002.
32. Sorensen, letter to the editor, New York Times, 1 July 2002.
33. Schlesinger, "The Immorality of Preemptive War." ExCom is the Executive Committee of the National Security Council.
34. Bruce Ackerman, "But What's the Legal Case for Preemption?" Washington Post, 18 August 2002.
35. See William Burr and Jeffrey Richelson, "Whether to 'Strangle the Baby in the Cradle': The United States and the Chinese Nuclear Program, 1960-64," International Security 25, no. 3 (Winter 2000/2001)
36. The authors were quoting from the record of a 10 January 1963 meeting in which National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy discussed Kennedy's views on the question.
37. All this is fairly well known by now. The Burr and Richelson article cited in the previous footnote is by far the best study of the question. See also the earlier article by Gordon Chang, "JFK, China, and the Bomb," Journal of American History 74, no. 4 (March 1988): 1287-1310,
38. and note the evidence cited in Marc Trachtenberg, A Constructed Peace: The Making of the European Settlement, 1945-1963 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 385-86.
39. For documents relating to the Burr and Richelson article, see http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB38/.
40. Burr and Richelson, "'Strangle the Baby,"' 55.
41. On the question of a possible Soviet attack on the Chinese nuclear facilities during the latter period, see Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979), 183-86
42. Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982), 233
43. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1994), 722-23
44. Raymond Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan (Washington: Brookings, 1985), 208-10
45. Rosemary Foot, The Practice of Power: U.S. Relations with China since 1949 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 190
46. and esp. William Burr, ed., The Kissinger Transcripts: The Top-Secret Talks with Beijing and Moscow (New York: New Press, 1998), 126, 142-44, 183.
47. See also the documents in the National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book on "The Sino-Soviet Border War, 1969," http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB49/.
48. Those documents are discussed in William Burr, "Sino-American Relations, 1969: The Sino-Soviet Border War and Steps Toward Rapprochement," Cold War History 1, no. 3 (April 2001).
49. On this last point, it is often argued that the actions the United States took were legal because they had been authorized by the Organization of American States. But under the U.N. Charter, regional organizations like the OAS do not have the authority "to operate as the Security Council's surrogate." See David Rivkin and Darin Bartram, "The Law on the Road to Baghdad," National Review Online, 28 August 2002. Art. 53 of the Charter is quite explicit in this regard: "no enforcement action shall be taken under regional arrangements or by regional agencies without the authorization of the Security Council." (The single exception to this rule had to do with actions taken against the Axis powers in the "transitional" period immediately following the signing of the Charter.) Putting textual analysis aside and just applying the test of logic, it is hard to see why the fact that an action is taken by a group of states would in itself make that action any more legal than if it had been taken by a single state. Would Warsaw Pact authorization have made the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 any more legal than it would otherwise have been? Would an Arab attack on Israel be any more legal if it were authorized by the Arab League than it would be in the absence of such authorization? Finally, since it is American policy that is being assessed here, it is important to remember that the U.S. government would have taken action - that is, it would have done things in much the same way - even if it had not gotten OAS support. The decision to go to the OAS was made only after the assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs had given his strong assurance that the United States would be able to get what it wanted from that body.
50. See the record of a top-level meeting, 19 October 1962, FRUS 1961-63, 11: 117-18.
51. The administration was determined to act no matter what the OAS did. When Kennedy, for example, was asked whether "a blockade would be legal if the OAS did not support it," he "answered that it probably would not; however we would proceed anyway." Kennedy meeting with Congressional leadership, 24 October 1962, ibid., 160.
52. See Arthur Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy and His Times (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978), 507.
53. Transcript of 16 October 1962 meetings, in The Kennedy Tapes: Inside the White House During the Cuban Missile Crisis, ed. Ernest May and Philip Zelikow (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 66, 99, 100-101.
54. Ibid., 115, 121, 143, 149.
55. Fifth ExCom meeting, 25 October 1962, FRUS 1961-63, 11:208.
56. Seventh ExCom meeting, 27 October 1962, ibid., 256.
57. Abram Chayes, The Cuban Missile Crisis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 63.
58. See Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 699-700. Article 2 of the U.N. Charter prohibited the use of force for purposes inconsistent with the "Purposes of the United Nations," one of which was defined in Art. 1 as the "prevention and removal of threats to the peace." The use of the phrase "threat to peace" in the president's speech thus had a certain resonance in the international law context: It suggested that the United States had the right under the Charter to use force in this case.
59. On the related issue of what those Charter provisions meant at the time they were being drafted - that is, for the point that they were interpreted as allowing the U.S. government to take whatever action it felt was necessary to "prevent aggression" - see Marc Trachtenberg, "The Iraq Crisis and the Future of the Western Alliance," in The Atlantic Alliance Under Stress, ed. David M. Andrews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 218-20. That article is also available at http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/trachtenberg/useur/ iraqcrisis(fin13rev).doc.
60. Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, A Thousand Days (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), 823-24. This was clearly an argument for the legitimacy of preventive military action, but - and this shows just how much people's views on this issue have changed over the years - Schlesinger evidently saw nothing wrong with it when he wrote that book forty years ago.
61. Acheson-de Gaulle meeting, 22 October 1962, FRUS 1961-63, 11: 166. The German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer (who Acheson saw the day after he met with de Gaulle on that same mission to Europe), was contemptuous of the idea that the United States had no right under international law to impose even a blockade, and in fact actually urged the United States to invade Cuba.
62. See Hans-Peter Schwarz, Adenauer: Der Staatsmann, 1952-1967 (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1991), 771-73,
63. and Dowling to Rusk, 24 October 1962 (on Acheson's meeting with Adenauer on 23 October), available online through subscribing libraries in the Digital National Security Archive's Cuban Missile Crisis collection, http://nsarchive.chadwyck.com/nsaindexhome.htm, item number CC01224. One leading Senator - J. William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - made a comment about the blockade that is also worth quoting in this context. "It won't be legal," he told Kennedy at the height of the crisis. "I'm not making the arguments for 'legal.' This is self-defense."
64. Kennedy meeting with Congressional leadership, 22 October 1962, in May and Zelikow, Kennedy Tapes, 272 (punctuation changed slightly).
65. Fulbright, incidentally, later published a book on American foreign policy called The Arrogance of Power (New York: Random House, 1966). Acheson's own views on the general issue of the role of legal norms and moral principles in international politics are also worth noting in this context. He was notoriously contemptuous of the United Nations and of international law in general. International politics in his view was a jungle "where the judgment of nature upon error is death"; in such a world, countries like the United States could not afford to play the game according to legal rules.
66. See Dean Acheson to Harry Truman, 4 December 1956, Acheson Papers, Sterling Memorial Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and Robert Beisner, "Wrong from the Beginning," Weekly Standard 8, no. 26 (17 March 2003).
67. Note esp. Acheson's comments on the issue of whether U.S. policy during the missile crisis was legal in the Proceedings of the American Society of International Law, 1963, 13-15.
68. Home to Foreign Office, 2 October 1962, FO 371/163581, British National Archives, Kew, quoted in Trachtenberg, Constructed Peace, 351. The evidence supporting the interpretation outlined in this paragraph is presented in chapter 8 of that book.
69. Record of 19 October meeting in May and Zelikow, Kennedy Tapes, 176.
70. Record of 16 October meeting in May and Zelikow, Kennedy Tapes, 90.
71. See Ashton B. Carter and William J. Perry, Preventive Defense: A New Security Strategy for America (Washington: Brookings, 1999), 126. Perry was Secretary of Defense at the time of the crisis; Carter was then a top Pentagon official.
72. R. Jeffrey Smith, "Perry Sharply Warns North Korea," Washington Post, 31 March 1994.
73. Joel Wit, Daniel Poneman and Robert Gallucci, Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis (Washington: Brooking Institution Press, 2004), 55. Gallucci was the chief American negotiator on this issue.
74. Don Oberdorfer, The Two Koreas: A Contemporary History (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison- Wesley, 1997), 295.
75. Ibid., 323.
76. See also the polling data cited in Leon Sigal, Disarming Strangers: Nuclear Diplomacy with North Korea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 302-303 n. 36.
77. Wit, Poneman and Gallucci, Going Critical, 28.
78. Brent Scowcroft and Arnold Kanter, "Korea: Time for Action," Washington Post, 15 June 1994. Scowcroft had been National Security Advisor under presidents George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford; Kanter had been deeply involved with the North Korean question as a key State Department official during the Bush administration.
79. See also Sigal, Disarming Strangers, 81-82, 153-54, and esp. 162-63.
80. Wit, Poneman and Gallucci, Going Critical, 188.
81. Carter and Perry, Preventive Defense, 131. At the time, it was believed that North Korea might have already built (and hidden) one or two nuclear weapons.
82. Oberdorfer, Two Koreas, 306.
83. Carter and Perry, Preventive Defense, 128, 131
84. Wit, Poneman and Gallucci, Going Critical, 210-11, 220, 244.
85. For Ashton Carter's interest in this sort of option even prior to taking office, see Henry Sokolski, Best of Intentions: America's Campaign against Strategic Weapons Proliferation (Westport: Praeger, 2001), 90-92, and the sources cited there.
86. See also Sigal, Disarming Strangers, 59-60, referring to a paper written for Carter by Philip Zelikow, a holdover from the Bush administration, recommending an attack on the North Korean nuclear facilities.
87. Wit, Poneman and Gallucci, Going Critical, 406.
88. Ibid., 220.
89. Gallucci et al. characterize the initial U.S. position as follows: "The Americans' objective was somehow to nudge the North Koreans back toward full NPT compliance, or at least to buy time while a more enduring solution was sought. And it had to be done without making any substantive concessions." Ibid., 55
90. see also 73, 97. According to Oberdorfer, Gallucci privately "characterized his initial negotiating posture as, 'If they do everything we want, we send them a box of oranges."' Oberdorfer, Two Koreas, 291.
91. For the view in important non-governmental circles, see Wit, Poneman and Gallucci, Going Critical, 236-38 (for reaction to the Carter trip), and 335-39 (reaction to the Agreed Framework).
92. Carter and Perry, Preventive Defense, 142; "National Security Strategy of the United States of America," 14.
93. On the counterproliferation strategy, see also James J. Wirtz, "Counterproliferation, Conventional Counterforce and Nuclear War," Journal of Strategic Studies 23, no. 1 (March 2000). The mere coining of the term counterproliferation reflected the belief that the old nonproliferation policy was too passive and that a far more active policy needed to be adopted.
94. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, The Administration's Missile Defense Program and the ABM Treaty: Hearings, 107th Cong., 1st sess. 24 July 2001, 88, http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/ useftp.cgi?IPaddress=162.140.64.21&filename=74505.pdf&directory=/ diskc/wais/data/107_senate_hearings.
95. Ashton Carter and William Perry, "Back to the Brink," Washington Post, 20 October 2002.
96. Walter Slocombe, "Force, Pre-emption and Legitimacy," Survival 45, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 125. In a footnote appended to this passage, Slocombe says that the fact that countries like North Korea and Iraq were in breach of their obligations under the NPT provided a legal basis for action. "It is certainly arguable," he writes, "that other states are entitled to resort to force to compel compliance with such obligations." Slocombe simply ignores the fact that North Korea, under the terms of the treaty itself, had the right to withdraw from the NPT regime.
97. For the policy of the four other permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, see the references in the entries for China, Russia, France and Britain in the index to Wit, Poneman and Gallucci, Going Critical. Note esp., for China, 154-55, 198-99, 208-9; for Russia, 156, 197, 209; and for Britain and France, characterized here as "nonproliferation hawks," 153, 156, 158, 194.
98. On Chinese policy at the climax of the crisis, see also Oberdorfer, Two Koreas, 320-21.
99. For more information, pointing in the same general direction, on Chinese policy on this issue more recently, see Denny Roy, "China's Reaction to American Predominance," Survival 45, no. 3 (Autumn 2003): 63, 67,
100. and Alastair Iain Johnston, "Is China a Status Quo Power?" International Security 27, no. 4 (Spring 2003): 40-41 and esp. n. 84, plus, the sources cited in those passages. Note also what Johnston says here about the Chinese more generally "not trying as hard" as they might to balance against the United States (39), a view shared by most commentators, including Roy.
101. See Thomas Christensen's contribution to Strategic Asia 2001-02: Power and Purpose, ed. Richard Ellings and Aaron Friedberg (Seattle: National Bureau of Asian Research, 2001), 48.
102. See "Putin's Folly," The Economist (U.S. edition), 21 September 2002.
103. I touch on some of these issues in an essay called "Intervention in Historical Perspective," in Emerging Norms of Justified Intervention ed. Carl Kaysen and Laura Reed (Cambridge, Mass, 1993), http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/trachtenberg/cv/INTERVEN.doc. The tradition I am alluding to here has been an important (although by no means the dominant) element in great power political thinking for centuries. One associates it in particular with Castlereagh and Metternich - with the Congress of Vienna and the Concert of Europe. But it was also a major element in Roosevelt's thinking during the Second World War. Roosevelt, in fact, originally wanted a post-war international order in which the "Four Policemen" - America, Russia, Britain and China - would keep everyone else (including countries like France) disarmed, a proposal the Soviets were quick to accept. This proposal for the "enforced disarmament of our enemies and, indeed, some of our friends after the war," as Roosevelt put it, scarcely corresponded to the idea of an international order based on the "sovereign equality of all states."
104. See Roosevelt-Molotov meetings, 29 May and 1 June 1942, FRUS 1942, 3: 568-69, 573, 580. In our own day, this idea of an at least semi-cooperative great power-dominated political system is associated above all with political figures like Henry Kissinger, who of course began his scholarly career with a dissertation on the Vienna settlement.
105. On the idea of China as part of a kind of concert system, a system in which the nonproliferation regime would play a central role, see Carter and Perry, Preventive Defense, 119-22.
106. See also Susan L. Shirk, "Asia-Pacific Regional Security: Balance of Power or Concert of Powers?" in Regional Orders: Building Security in a New World, ed. David Lake and Patrick Morgan (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1997).
107. Note esp. Shirk's argument that the "North Korean nuclear threat" might be "a catalytic event for an emerging cooperation among the Asia-Pacific powers that could evolve into a concert of powers" (246; see also 262-65). Note also the two articles on contemporary Chinese foreign policy cited in n. 55 above - and especially Roy's prediction (in one of those articles) that "as China becomes a great power with an interest in responsible management of international politics, its desire to prevent the spread of WMD will likely grow" (65). One comes across this sort of theme quite a bit in recent years in articles written by specialists in Chinese foreign policy. To take just one example: "Chinese strategists," according to Evan Medeiros and M. Taylor Fravel in an article called "China's New Diplomacy" published in Foreign Affairs in November-December 2003, "increasingly see their interests as more akin to major powers and less associated with those of developing nations."
108. Finally, for a brief survey of the development of Chinese policy on the proliferation issue that supports this general interpretation, see Weixing Hu, "Nuclear Nonproliferation," in Yong Deng and Fei-Ling Wang, In the Eyes of the Dragon: China Views the World (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999).
109. The argument I make in this section is developed in much greater detail in the fourth chapter of my book The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
110. For the claim that America at this time "asked only to be left alone," see A.J.P. Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War (New York: Atheneum, 1961), 278.
111. Note also Randall Schweller's use of that passage from the Taylor book in his article "Bandwagoning for Profit: Bringing the Revisionist State Back In," International Security 19, no. 1 (Summer 1994): 94-95.
112. Admiral Harold Stark to Admiral Thomas Hart, 28 August 1941, U.S. Congress, Hearings Before the Joint Committee on the Investigation of the Pearl Harbor Attack [PHA], Part 16, 2451 (Washington: GPO, 1946).
113. Winston Churchill's account to the British cabinet, 19 August 1941, quoted in David Reynolds, The Creation of the Anglo-American Alliance, 1937-41: A Study in Competitive Co-operation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 214.
114. Quoted in Patrick Hearden, Roosevelt Confronts Hitler: America's Entry intoWorld War II (DeKalb, Illinois: Northern Illinois University Press, 1987), 211. It was in fact because he understood what the embargo meant that he had earlier opposed it so fiercely.
115. See, for example, Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979; paperback edition, 1981), 273-75.
116. Note also Roosevelt's well-known confrontation with Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes on the issue in June 1941. The documents were published in The Secret Diary of Harold L. Ickes,. 3 vols. (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954-55), 3: 553-60.
117. The argument about the president losing control of policy was laid out independently by Jonathan Utley and Irvine Anderson. See Jonathan Utley, Going to War with Japan, 1937-1941 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985);
118. Jonathan Utley, "Upstairs, Downstairs at Foggy Bottom: Oil Exports and Japan, 1940-41," Prologue 8 (Spring 1976): 17-28
119. Irvine Anderson, "The 1941 De Facto Embargo on Oil to Japan: A Bureaucratic Reflex," Pacific Historical Review 44 (1975): 201-31
120. and Irvine Anderson, The Standard Vacuum Oil Company and United States East Asian Policy, 1933-1941 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
121. The Utley-Anderson argument has been accepted by a number of major scholars. See, for example, Reynolds, Anglo-American Alliance, 235-36
122. Akira Iriye, The Origins of the Second World War in Asia and the Pacific (London: Longman, 1987), 150
123. Dallek, Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 275.
124. For the counter-argument, quite compelling in my view, see Waldo Heinrichs, Threshold of War: Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Entry into World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 141-42, 246-47.
125. The British records of the Argentia meeting in early August also show that Roosevelt and Welles had decided to take a very hard line on the question of oil deliveries to Japan. See esp. extract from record of a meeting between the Prime Minister and President Roosevelt on 11 August 1941, FO 371/27909, and Cadogan minute of meeting with Welles, 20 August 1941, FO 371/27977, British Foreign Office Japan Correspondence, 1941-1945 (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1978), microfilm publication, series for 1941, reels 7 and 15 respectively.
126. Australian Minister to the United States R.G. Casey to Australian Department of External Affairs, 14 November 1941, Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Documents on Australian Foreign Policy, 1937-49 5: 197.
127. Admiral Harold Stark to Admiral Husband Kimmel, 7 November 1941, PHA, Part 16, 2220.
128. Harold Stark to Charles Cooke, 31 July 1941, PHA, Part 16, 2175. One should note the timing here - that is, the fact that Stark put the point to the president so soon after the Soviet Union was invaded - and also the point that he chose to mention that fact in his letter. This suggests that he was already analyzing the situation along the lines which the military leadership (as will be seen) were to take in the "Victory Program," the key document to be discussed in the next paragraph. But the argument about the implications of the German attack on the Soviet Union was not the only factor here, and Stark, it should be noted, had been thinking for some time in terms of getting America into the war as quickly as possible, well before the possibility of a German conquest of the USSR had become an issue. He summed up what his thinking had been in a memorandum he sent to the Secretary of State on 8 October: "I have assumed for the past two years that our country would not let Great Britain fall; that ultimately in order to prevent this we would have to enter the war and as noted above I have long felt and have stated that the sooner we get in the better."
129. Ibid., 2217.
130. The official title of this document, dated 11 September 1941, was "Joint Board Estimate of United States Over-All Production Requirements." It was signed by Stark and by Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall. A copy was published in American War Plans, 1919-1941, ed. Steven Ross, vol. 5 (New York: Garland, 1992).
131. The main study appears on 160-89, but the document also included an "Estimate of Army Ground Forces," published here on 190-201. Extensive quotations from the Victory Program also appear in Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper, 1948), 410-18.
132. Victory Program (Garland edition), 163, 165, 168-69, 193-94.
133. Announcement of Proclamation of an Unlimited National Emergency, Radio Address, 27 May 1941, The Public Papers and Addresses of Franklin D. Roosevelt, comp. Samuel Rosenman, vol. 10 (for 1941) (New York: Harper, 1942), 189.
134. Labor Day Radio Address, 1 September 1941, ibid., 367.
135. Fireside Chat on National Defense," 11 September 1941, ibid., 388-90. Former Secretary of State George Shultz also used the rattlesnake metaphor in his article calling for action against Iraq; "Act Now," Washington Post, 6 September 2002.
136. George Kennan, comment on three papers on Allied leadership in World War II, including one by Robert Dallek on Roosevelt, in Survey 21, nos. 1-2 (Winter-Spring 1975): 30.
137. Ibid.
138. Note also his discussion of this issue in George Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 83-84.
139. In modern times, this argument goes back to Hobbes, but today it figures prominently in the writings of a number of leading international relations theorists. See esp. Robert Jervis, "Cooperation under the Security Dilemma," World Politics 30, no. 2 (January 1978);
140. Kenneth Waltz, "The Origins of War in Neorealist Theory," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18, no. 4 (Spring 1988), 619-20
141. and John Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: Norton, 2001), esp. 3, 21, 34.
142. See esp. Stephen Van Evera, Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), esp. chap. four;
143. and Dale Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000).
144. For the key document, see John C. G. Röhl, "Admiral von Müller and the Approach of War, 1911-1914," Historical Journal 12, no. 4 (December 1969): Esp. 661.
145. This is what Schlesinger, for example, seems to argue in "The Immorality of Preemptive War."
146. See Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), esp. 346-48 (309-11 in the Bantam paperback edition). Note also the theme of the volume: "How the English-speaking peoples, through their unwisdom, carelessness, and good nature allowed the wicked to rearm"- the clear implication being that the "wicked" should not have been allowed to do so.
147. Kennedy meeting with Congressional leadership, 22 October 1962, FRUS 1961-63, 11: 160-61
148. and May and Zelikow, Kennedy Tapes, 271-72.