A Duty to Prevent

Lee Feinstein and Anne-Marie Slaughter

From Foreign Affairs, January/February 2004

Summary:  The unprecedented threat posed by terrorists and rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction cannot be handled by an outdated and poorly enforced nonproliferation regime. The international community has a duty to prevent security disasters as well as humanitarian ones -- even at the price of violating sovereignty.

Lee Feinstein is Acting Director of the Washington Program of the Council on Foreign Relations. Anne-Marie Slaughter is Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and President of the American Society of International Law.

A SAFER WORLD

Humanitarian protection is emerging as a guiding principle for the international community. In the same vein, we propose a duty to prevent, as a principle that would guide not only the Security Council in its decision-making but also national governments in shaping their foreign policy priorities. Accepting this principle would require the United States to accept that specific criteria be met before preventive action of various types would be authorized. At the same time, the principle addresses many of the problems raised by the approach being advanced by other nations to deal with WMD.

The international legal rules governing nonproliferation, as well as those determining sovereign rights over a given population and territory, are evolving. Nations are interpreting old rules in new ways and trying out new practices in response to new threats. It is impossible to predict when and how a new international consensus will emerge, but now is the time to elaborate new principles that could structure a broad legal regime.

Ours is not a radical proposal. It simply extrapolates from recent developments in the law of intervention for humanitarian purposes -- an area in which over the course of the 1990s old rules proved counter-productive at best, murderous at worst. The responsibility to protect is based on a collective obligation to avoid the needless slaughter or severe mistreatment of human beings anywhere -- an obligation that stems from both moral principle and national interest. The corollary duty to prevent governments without internal checks from developing WMD capacity addresses the same threat from another source: the prospect of mass murder through the use of WMD, which have a destructive potential far beyond the control of any attacker.

In a world in which such governments can get access to the most devastating weapons and make them available to terrorists, we must take action. We are operating under a set of rules governing the use of force that were framed for a very different world, one of sovereign states, conventional armies, and noninterference in a government's treatment of its own citizens. These rules can continue to serve us well only if they are revised and updated to meet a new set of threats. Accepting a collective duty to prevent is the first step toward sustained self-protection in a new and dangerous era.