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threat posed by terrorists and rogue states armed with weapons of mass destruction cannot be handled by an outdated and poorly enforced nonproliferation regime.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.

DISARMING ROGUES

The Bush administration has proclaimed a doctrine of unilateral preemption as a core part of its National Security Strategy. The limits of this approach are demonstrated daily in Iraq, where the United States is bearing the burden for security, reconstruction, and reform essentially on its own. Yet the world cannot afford to look the other way when faced with the prospect, as in Iraq, of a brutal ruler acquiring nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction (WMD). Addressing this danger requires a different strategy, one that maximizes the chances of early and effective collective action. In this regard, and in comparison to the changes that are taking place in the area of intervention for the purposes of humanitarian protection, the biggest problem with the Bush preemption strategy may be that it does not go far enough.

In the name of protecting state sovereignty, international law traditionally prohibited states from intervening in one another's affairs, with military force or otherwise. But members of the human rights and humanitarian protection communities came to realize that, in light of the humanitarian catastrophes of the 1990s, from famine to genocide to ethnic cleansing, those principles will not do. The world could no longer sit and wait, reacting only when a crisis caused massive human suffering or spilled across borders, posing more conventional threats to international peace and security. As a result, in late 2001, an international commission of legal practitioners and scholars, responding to a challenge from the UN secretary-general, proposed a new doctrine, which they called "The Responsibility to Protect." This far-reaching principle holds that today un member states have a responsibility to protect the lives, liberty, and basic human rights of their citizens, and that if they fail or are unable to carry it out, the international community has a responsibility to step in.

We propose a corollary principle in the field of global security: a collective "duty to prevent" nations run by rulers without internal checks on their power from acquiring or using WMD. For many years, a small but determined group of regimes has pursued proliferation in spite of -- and, to a certain extent, without breaking -- the international rules barring such activity. Some of these nations cooperate with one another, trading missile technology for uranium-enrichment know-how, for example. Their cooperation, dangerous in itself, also creates incentives for others to develop a nuclear capacity in response. These regimes can also provide a ready source of weapons and technology to individuals and terrorists. The threat is gravest when the states pursuing WMD are closed societies headed by rulers who menace their own citizens as much as they do their neighbors and potential adversaries.

Such threats demand a global response. Like the responsibility to protect, the duty to prevent begins from the premise that the rules now governing the use of force, devised in 1945 and embedded in the UN Charter, are inadequate. Both new principles respond to a growing recognition, born of logic and experience, that in the twenty-first century maintaining global peace and security requires states to be proactive rather than reactive. And both recognize that un members have responsibilities as well as rights.

The duty to prevent has three critical features. First, it seeks to control not only the proliferation of WMD but also people who possess them. Second, it emphasizes prevention, calling on the international community to act early in order to be effective and develop a menu of potential measures aimed at particular governments -- especially measures that can be taken well short of any use of force. Third, the duty to prevent should be exercised collectively, through a global or regional organization.

OLD RULES, NEW THREATS

We live in a world of old rules and new threats. This period did not begin on September 11, 2001. Before then, politicians and public figures were already lacing their millennium speeches with calls for a new global financial architecture, new definitions of national self-interest and humanitarian intervention, and new ways of organizing international institutions. They recognized that the existing rules and institutions created to address the economic, political, and security problems of the last century were inadequate for solving a new generation of threats to world order: failed states; regional economic crises; sovereign bankruptcies; the spread of HIV/AIDS and other new viruses; global warming; the rise of global criminal networks; and trafficking in arms, money, women, workers, and drugs.

Although the worst threats to the international order in the 1990s arose from internal conflicts -- civil wars, ethnic bloodletting, and resurgent nationalism -- the cardinal doctrines of the post-1945 order apply to wars between nations, not within them. The UN Charter binds states only to refrain from the use or threat of force in "their international relations" and explicitly protects their "domestic jurisdiction" from outside interference. And a broad doctrine prohibiting intervention in a state's internal affairs is well established in customary law.