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The issue of nuclear proliferation is one of the most vital issues as it reflects a form of dealing in the field of international relations. Therefore, the Middle East region has taken great interest in reducing the levels of nuclear armament and acquiring nuclear power within the strategic framework of the international and regional powers. The establishment of a nuclear-weapon-free zone in the Middle East region is currently one of the most important international and regional arrangements for controlling the levels of nuclear proliferation and attempting to build a state of stability and balance. In the Middle East and the world. The importance of the research comes from the fact that it deals with an important and vital issue: the issue of nuclear proliferation and its implications for the equation of the strategic balance in the Middle East after the events of September 11, 2001, which gained great importance in the post-cold war era. And to achieve some kind of stability and balance within the framework of the international and regional environment, especially in the Middle East, which has increased the importance of efforts in this regard the proliferation of nuclear weapons to new countries, it is possible to obtain nuclear technology by enhancing levels The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has become one of the most important facts for the post-Cold War era. At a time when only five countries possessed nuclear weapons (the United States, Russia, China, France and Britain) , As well as the possibility of other countries such as India, Pakistan and Israel, which suggests that the post-Cold War era has seen a widening of the circle of States possessing or manufacturing such weapons (Pakistan, North Korea and Iran) The emergence of regional tensions as in the case of William Middle East. Thus, the issue of non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction has become a central issue in the context of the post-Cold War American strategy, especially after the events of September 11, 2001, as a result of the convictions that there is an interrelationship between the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the global fight against terrorism. In keeping with this, the research started from the premise that the continuity of the Middle East countries in seeking to acquire nuclear capabilities is in itself an essential brake or determinant of the establishment of a zone free of weapons of mass destruction, as well as the lack of guarantees to establish security among countries The Middle East, which is reflected negatively on the regional and international security approaches to the Middle East, and of course lead to the adoption of their respective security policies against each other within the framework of the growing levels of nuclear weapons to achieve some kind of balance towards the nuclear capabilities of each of these countries And then more nuclear armament policies in the region, as a result can not promote positive security perceptions that are based on the employment of enablers of smart power, which is reflected negatively on the strategic balance in the territory of the Middle East equation. Keywords: nuclear proliferation, the Middle East, strategic balance, the events of September 11, 2001, regional and international security, doctrine of preemptive war, preemptive war, nuclear deterrence, strategic perception, terrorism, nuclear power Nuclear proliferation.

The Next Great War, Cold Peace, or Mutual Gain?Richard N. Rosecrance and Steven E. Miller, eds. The Next Great War? The Roots of World War I and the Risk of U.S.-China Conflict. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014.Aaron L. Friedberg. A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. New York: W. W. Norton, 2011.Wang Jisi and Kenneth G. Lieberthal. "Addressing U.S.-China Strategic Distrust," Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, John L. Thornton China Center Monograph Series, No. 4 (March 2012), www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2012 /3/30-us-china-lieberthal/0330_china_lieberthal .pdf.Thomas J. Christensen. The China Challenge: Shaping the Choices of a Rising Power. New York: W. W. Norton, 2015.Henry M. Paulson. Dealing with China: An Insider Unmasks the New Economic Superpower. New York: Hachette, 2015.Jeffrey Lewis. Paper Tigers: China's Nuclear Posture. London: International Institute for Strategic Studies and Routledge, 2014.Lyle J. Goldstein. Meeting China Halfway: How to Defuse the Emerging US-China Rivalry. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2015.Morton Abramowitz and Stephen Bosworth. Chasing the Sun: Rethinking East Asian Policy. New York: The Century Foundation, 2006.A CENTURY AFTER THE BEGINNING OF WORLD WAR I IN 1914, SOME observers are asking whether China and the United States are destined to fight for hegemony, as did Germany and Great Britain in 1914 and, more than two millennia earlier, Sparta and Athens. Other analysts question whether anything-including these wars-is inevitable in human affairs. These issues give rise to competing hypotheses and answers as well as to still more questions. Whether readers agree or disagree with the works reviewed here, each deserves attention for its contribution to fathoming and shaping the alternative futures open to China, the United States, and indeed all humanity.The future relationship between China and the United States is one of the mega-changes and mega-challenges of our age. China's rise is the geopolitical equivalent of the melting polar ice caps: gradual change on a massive scale that can suddenly lead to dramatic turns of events. Were there factors contributing to the Great War that suggest lessons for Sino-US relations today? Fourteen authors address these questions in The Next Great War? None of these chapters purports to provide the entire picture or even a definitive facet. Still, each embodies a deep analysis rich in heuristics that can spark further research on Sino-US relations, though most of the chapters debate the origins of World War I. Taken together, the essays provide a broad catalog of the many factors that produced the guns of August 1914 and that could conduce to other wars. The factors are wide ranging, from familiar doctrines about the shifting balance of power to the mental and emotional qualities of leaders and the cult of the offensive espoused by many strategists.Graham Allison's chapter argues that China and the United States must work to escape the "Thucydides Trap"-the "dangers that can arise when a rising power challenges a ruling power-as Athens did Sparta . . . and as Germany did Britain a century ago." Describing the interactions of Athens and Sparta and other Greek city-states, Thucydides asserted, "It was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made the [Peloponnesian] war inevitable." Some of the events described by Thucydides in The Peloponnesian War do not square with the inevitability thesis. Still, the sentence quoted has spawned a theory of hegemonic war, a theory dear to structural realists. They typically predict that rising powers will seek to deliver a quietus to a weakening hegemon, or that the hegemon will wage a preventive or preemptive war against challengers before it becomes too late.A similar "trap" has often recurred, according to Allison: "In twelve of sixteen cases in the past 500 years when a rising power challenged a ruling power, the outcome was war. …

This article describes the nature, origins and consequences of the epistemological crisis at the heart of contemporary counterterrorism. The epistemological crisis of counterterrorism is an identifiable epistemic posture towards knowledge about, as well as a way of acting towards, the terrorist threat. It manifests itself discursively in the manner in which officials, scholars, pundits and others speak about the threat of terrorism, and the way counterterrorism and security practitioners then act in pursuit of security against that threat. The article argues that many of the bizarre counterterrorist practices regularly observed in many Western countries, as well as costly and counterproductive counterterrorist practices such as preemptive war, targeted killings, mass surveillance, torture, control orders and de-radicalisation programmes, among others, are neither anomalous nor irrational in the context of the new paradigm. Rather, they flow logically and directly from the particular paranoid logic, which ...

Bush’s Iraq War, as Henriksen describes, is the apogee in America’s cycles of international engagement since the Cold War. Bush defied allies along with others in going to war without UN approval. This war, pretexted on the notion that Iraq possessed chemical and nuclear weapons, sees implementation of a preemptive war strategy to prevent mega-death weapons being used. The Pentagon quickly defeats Hussein’s armies before stumbling into an insurgency and sectarian conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. The White House turns to its second rationale for invasion when it finds no weapons of mass destruction. It embraces democracy promotion with a Wilsonian fervor not only in Iraq but also in the Republic of Georgia, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan Lebanon while intervening militarily in Liberia and Haiti to save democracy.

Author(s): Pilecki, A; Muro, JM; Hammack, PL; Clemons, CM | Abstract: We analyzed speeches made by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama to reveal how each president justified post-9/11 U.S. counterterrorism policy. Our analysis revealed that both Bush and Obama delegitimized terrorists by distinguishing them from other legitimate political categories, by emphasizing the morally condemnable and apolitically motivated form of violence they inflict. This vilification facilitated the portrayal of terrorism as a problem transcending national interest. U.S. counterterrorism strategies were thus justified as a necessary and rational solution to the scope and severity of the terrorist threat. This study illustrates how the "complex discursive accomplishment" of moral exclusion (Tileagǎ, 2007) emerges within presidential rhetoric to frame the relations among groups and legitimizing particular actions, namely, harsh antiterror measures (e.g., indefinite detention, preemptive war, and torture). Our study also illustrates the similarities between how Bush and Obama have talked about terrorism, thus indicating the overall naturalization of a "war on terrorism" discourse following the 9/11 attacks. © 2014 American Psychological Association.

This article explains a shift in American culture and politics through an examination of the ‘Vietnam Trope’, a culture structure that conditioned debates on the use of US military power. Specifically, the trope indexes competing explanations in hermeneutically dissimilar narratives: (1) a liberal/neoconservative iteration depicting a progressive foreign policy and (2) a realist/radical articulation that doubts the ability of the US power to shape the world. The ‘Vietnam’ trope captured and organized the anxieties of American military officials and policymakers who confronted a world transformed by ‘the Vietnam War’ and the events of ‘the Sixties’. In the 1980s and 1990s, the trope provided the cultural logic that facilitated the eventual rehabilitation of US military power so that, by the new millennium, preemptive war and protracted global counterinsurgency became possible. Bringing the cultural methods of trope analysis to the historical sociology of hegemony, this article shows that cultural structures are both responses to specific historical moments and the systems of meaning that help shape future outcomes. Empirically, this trope analysis is based on a reading of the shifting uses of the expression ‘Vietnam Syndrome’ in the New York Times and an analysis of the evolution of historical scholarship on ‘the Second Indochina War’.

During the past 30 years, numerous works have emerged about the 1940 invasion of Norway. The most recent that comes to mind is Hitler's PreEmptive War: The Battle for Norway, 1940 by Henrik O. Lund...

Traditional interpretations of politics among nuclear-weapons states—as epitomized by Schelling’s theory of deterrence through mutually-assured destruction—are less useful in today’s proliferation environment than they were during the Cold War’s superpower rivalry. As regionally-important states begin to pursue nuclear weapons, they do so in an environment that is shaped by the preferences and behaviors of the great powers. Using an elaboration on Powell’s bargaining model of conflict, this article shows that nuclear proliferation radically alters the future distribution of power, introducing a commitment problem vis-à-vis conventionally-stronger neighbors. This explains the occurrence of preemptive war in cases of attempted nuclearization, although the empirical paucity of such bargaining failures requires the shadow of great-power intervention in understanding the relations of second-tier states.

n spite of the conventional wisdom that the wars have been widely replaced by intra-state conflicts when it comes to their frequency and the death-toll, the latest surveys and the empirical data demonstrate a different picture. War remains a highly relevant form of use of force in the international relations, while the only novelty is the new ways of its legitimization. In this context, this paper aims at their identification and deconstruction, as well as clarifying of the justification of the new ways of waging wars via use of new rhetoric for the old substance and the so-called ethical foreign policy. Legality of use of force thus becomes one of the collateral damages, so the international law faces a real risk of overall marginalization.Key words: legitimacy, just war theory, self-defence, preemptive war, war on terrorism, interventions, democratic wars

This essay explores Confucian views on war as seen in the Spring and Autumn Annals. The interpretation is based mainly on the Gongyang Zhuan, supplemented by other authoritative sources in the Gongyang tradition, such as Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BCE) and He Xiu (129-182). The Spring and Autumn Annals contains three components: facts, words, and principles. This essay explicates the principles for going to war and the principles for conducting a war. The Confucian perspective sheds light on war against enemies of civilization, conditions for waging a preemptive war, punitive expedition, as well as the use of weapons of mass destruction. The Confucian views as presented here are realistic and pragmatic in nature but are also compatible with the humanistic concern of Confucianism. This essay ends with a summary of the salient and sophisticated features of the Confucian views on war.

My intention is not to simply evoke Schmitt's critique of Kant's ideas concerning preemptive war and the unjust enemy - as we all know, these ideas were not Kant's nor is their critique original; after all, both Kant and Schmitt are simply brilliant compilers in international law - rather, I want to preliminarily demonstrate that every project concerning the constitution of an empire, league of nations or world government (or world governance) implies a paradoxical existence of an ambiguous 'exterior' (outside, without). It seems that the existence (or nonexistence) of something 'outside' of the world or 'outside' of borderless sovereignty, is a precondition for any theory of empire. .

Within thirteen years, the United States engaged in two military actions against Iraq, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Although the principal countries were the same in both conflicts, the context was quite different from one to the other. In confronting Saddam Hussein's regime, George H.W. Bush championed a "new world order" based on the principles of international law, whereas George W. Bush promoted unilateralism and preemptive war. This article utilizes an ethical framework to assess the decision-making that accompanied the two Iraq wars. Questions concerning the legitimacy of force and the legality of anticipatory military action within the UN Charter system are discussed, with specific reference to virtue-based, principles-based, and consequence-based ethics. The conclusion highlights the implications of these concerns for the UN and for multilateral cooperation.

This important account of the causes of the U.S. war with Iraq rests on newspapers, magazines, internet sites, secondary materials, and both published and unpublished primary sources. Lloyd C. Gardner, Professor Emeritus of History at Rutgers University, places events in historical context rather than simply attributing this unexpectedly lengthy conflict to the personal motivations and miscalculations of President George W. Bush. Many historians believe it too early for meaningful assessments, yet journalists such as Thomas E. Ricks in Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (2006) and The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008 (2009), and Bob Woodward in Plan of Attack (2004); State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III (2006); and The War Within: A Secret White House History, 2006-2008 (2008), have written the first drafts of this history (all sharply critical). A few historians too have dared to tread into this minefield, preparing early examinations that are also strikingly negative. George C. Herring has offered a highly critical analysis in his survey, From Colony to Superpower: U.S. Foreign Relations since 1776 (2008); and Hal Brands, in From Berlin to Baghdad: America's Search for Purpose in the Post-Cold War World (2008), has examined the period from the end of the Cold War to Baghdad, seeing a generally consistent strategy that nonetheless raises questions about its moral simplicity and denigrating impact on America's reputation. Gardner has expanded this coverage not only in years but by including a philosophical and expansionist base that relates the Vietnam War to the war in Iraq. His well-reasoned and hard-hitting work presents a deeply troubling analysis that sets the bar high for those wishing to defend the Bush administration's preemptive war in Iraq. Gardner shows that Bush supported a war in Iraq from the outset of his presidency and not as a result of 9/11; and he explains the neoconservative mindset for a New World Order resting on a laissez-faire system that fostered a free-market economy. The Cold War realism of containment, the neocons argued, was a defeatist policy that must give way to an aggressive "liberation"

Two countries top almost everyone's list of nations that are most important to the United States. One has been a rapidly ascendant power for more than twenty years. The other has only recently begun to recover from the collapse of its empire. One is important because of its size and fast-growing economic and military power. The other's importance is based on its impressive nuclear arsenal, huge petroleum assets, and strategic location. These countries are China and Russia.The United States pursues its relationship with both countries in a bilateral fashion. However, the status of Russia and China's relationship with one another has the ability to dramatically impact the United States' relations with both countries. For example, the Nixon-era cooperation between China and the United States occurred in part because of China's fear of war with the much stronger Soviet Union. By the late 1990s, improved Sino-Russian relations led to a common diplomatic front against a variety of U.S. interests.An Uneasy AllianceA few years later, Russia's move toward the United States after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was, to some degree, encouraged by Russia's interest in hedging its bets should relations with China sour. By 2007, however, the United States' preemptive war in Iraq and American support of the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine deeply alarmed Russia's national security establishment, which fears further American political or military action in the former Soviet republics-territories in which Russia wishes to be the dominant foreign power. Russia has sought to counteract this trend by drawing closer to China to offset U.S. unpredictability and "meddling" in former Soviet territory, which many Russians view as their backyard.1 Nevertheless, however bold the Sino-Russian pronouncements on the need for a multipolar world may be, the countries' interaction in other areas reflects caution, if not deep-seated distrust. This wariness will continue to mitigate the intensity of Russia's cooperation with China in opposition to U.S. interests.In formulating U.S. policy toward both countries, it is indispensable to know how the Sino-Russian relationship will evolve-and why.Over the last decade, cooperation between Russia and China has increased dramatically. It now includes military sales, joint military research and development, common diplomatic positions (e.g., Chechnya, Taiwan, U.S. missile defense), nonmilitary trade, and the settlement of border issues. To a large extent, this cooperation was formally codified in the July 16, 2001, Russia-China Treaty on Good-Neighborliness and Friendly Cooperation.2As in previous treaties, (e.g., the 1689 Treaty of Nerchinsk, the 1858 Treaty of Aigun, and the 1860 Treaty of Beijing), this agreement between China and Russia was driven primarily by a mutual need for:(1) Peace on the border. As long as a Sino-American conflict over Taiwan remains a possibility, China does not want to commit the resources necessary to protect its 3,645 km (2,264 mile) border with Russia. For Russia, after the Soviet Union's collapse, Moscow had neither the money nor the desire to station large numbers of troops along its border with China; and(2) Increased trade. In the 1990s, Russia was the only country willing and able to supply China with the sophisticated military equipment and technology it coveted. Additionally, China's shortages of lumber, various ores, and petroleum products were filled through Russian production. This was fully compatible with cash-starved Russia's need to keep key industries, such as aircrafts and lumber, viable through the sale of resources and arms to China.These reasons do not completely explain the rationale for the treaty, however. According to Alexander Yakovlev, a China expert from the Russian Academy of Sciences: "Diplomats know any such treaty is always signed with a clear understanding about who is the real adversary. …

In this essay, Denike assesses the appropriation of international human rights by humanitarian law and policy of “security states.” She maps representations of the perpetrators and victims of “tyranny” and “terror,” and their role in providing a “just cause” for the U.S.-led “war on terror.” By examining narratives of progress and human rights heroism Denike shows how human rights discourses, when used together with the pretense of self-defense and preemptive war, do the opposite of what they claim—entrenching the sovereignty of Western imperialist states while eroding the conditions necessary for the recognition of the human rights of others.

Elements of a Marxist theory of imperialism can help explain current U. S. foreign policy as a hegemonic imperialist project. Contrary to the American decline thesis, after the col- lapse of the Soviet bloc the United States managed to retain its hegemonic position in the imperialist chain. This was based on an imperialist strategy that combined full implementation of neoliberal policies and capitalist restructuring of production with increased emphasis on military interventionism, first in the form of "humanitarian" interventions and now as a pre-emptive "war on terror." Despite the many contradictions facing the United States, especially after the invasion of Iraq, American hegemony remains unchallenged, especially since no other capitalist state is willing to openly contest American supremacy.

While Michael Walzer's distinction between preemptive and preventive wars offers important categories for current reflection upon the Bush Doctrine and the invasion of Iraq, it is often treated as a modern distinction without antecedent in the classical Christian just war tradition. This paper argues to the contrary that within Augustine's corpus there are passages in which he speaks about the use of violence in situations that we would classify today as preemptive and preventive military action. While I do not claim that Augustine makes an explicit distinction between the two types of war (such would be anachronistic), I will argue that based on examinations of De libero arbitrio I.v.11–12 and De civitate Dei I.30 Augustine's discussions of hypothetical cases or actual wars in history provide insights helpful for contemporary reflection on preemptive and preventive wars.

The preemptive war in Iraq is a contentious element in U.S. foreign policy and a source of political and ethical debate both at home and abroad. This commentary examines the war from two different ethical perspectives: obligationism and relativism. Four topic areas are analyzed: governance and conflict resolution, ethics and public affairs, just and unjust war, and international relations. Nonviolence is shown to be an alternative to preemption that satisfies the ethical requirements of both views. A perspective on governance and public affairs is offered that differs from the culture of violence and suggests that political conflicts can be resolved without war.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, scholars in the field of rhetorical studies presented presidential war rhetoric as a genre of public discourse. More recently, some have questioned the genre's continued relevance given the current challenges of U.S. warfare. This essay examines whether preemption conducted in the context of the war on terror alters or reinforces the conventional substantive and stylistic expectations of war rhetoric. Analyzing the public communication strategies of the Bush administration on Iraq and the Reagan administration on the bombing of Libya, it demonstrates that despite changes in the situational exigencies, the nation's leadership uses a heavy reliance on strategic misrepresentation to maintain compliance with the genre's expectations.

This is the author's PDF version of an article published in Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics© 2007.

The historical study of early America has immediate urgency in a world where the US depends upon republican rhetoric and ideology to advance its imperial ambitions in the Middle East. In the days following the invasion of Iraq, having discovered no weapons of mass destruction and having lost their justification for preemptive war, US officials embraced the patriotic doctrine that a constitutional republic could be planted in Iraq and a new civil society be made to flower, inevitably tracing their reasons back to the American Revolution. Once passed through such a historical filter, armed militias, widespread terror, and the onset of civil war was said to be little different from America's own perilous passage through the Constitutional Convention. Judging by the many historians and political scientists who have enlisted in this war effort, such a rationale is not merely presidential agitprop. These soldier-scholars, many holding advanced degrees, and affiliated with universities, NGOs, the US military, and several branches of the federal government, have played key roles in writing the Iraqi Constitution, in brokering political compromises, and in disseminating official American messages about appropriate political behavior. Much has been written about the US failure to plan for the aftermath of Shock and Awe, considerably less-especially in academia-about scholars who rushed in to turn theory into practice. The lack of any comprehensive plan inadvertently opened a door for scholars who suddenly had the opportunity to implement "democratization" in the Middle East. In a region untouched by The Federalist Papers and seemingly uninterested in and even perhaps

Selective targeting (or targeted killing) of terrorist leaders is a legitimate mode of operation and part of a state's counterterrorism, anticipatory, self-defense activities that are designed to prevent the continuation of terrorism. Paradoxically, this counterterrorism measure is the best way of preserving the military ethical conventions of “purity of arms.” The concept refers to moral rules advocating the exercise of restraint and compassion in the course of a confrontation with the enemy. The “purity of arms” concept is debated extensively in democracies. Selective targeting of terrorist activists is a measure designed to hurt the real enemy while minimizing civilian casualties. Terrorist leaders and planners are targeted and an attempt is made, trying to avoid so far as possible, “collateral damage” that often accompanies any general military offensive. Customary international law permits targeting the enemy, provided that the criteria of necessity and proportionality of the attack are maintained. T...

This paper argues that citizens should be wary of a policy of Reformed Preemption such as is found in the National Security Strategy of the United States. This policy is too permissive with regard to the use of force and it suffers from epistemological difficulties. The war in Iraq is examined in an effort to see how the new policy of Reformed Preemption will be employed in practice. This case shows us two risks of the new policy: it permits wars even when the threats are vague and merely potential; and it allows for disproportionate use of force.

This report looks at major trends shown by Israel9s March 2006 elections, despite the lowest voter turnout in the country9s history (fueled by disgust at corruption). Most important, the resounding defeat of the Likud and the Right in favor of the ““center”” confirmed a shift in political culture away from the Greater Israel ideology and permanent preemptive war against terrorism (i.e., the Palestinians) and the emergence of a broad consensus on unilateral separation (not peace), seen as the guarantor of security and normalcy. Also discussed are the early hopes raised by Amir Peretz9s election as Labor party head (and his subsequent domestication), the return of a certain discourse of social justice after years of uncontested neo-liberalism, and the durability of the ““community”” or ethnic vote. The letter ends with a look at coalition politics in Israel and the formation of the new government.

This essay makes three claims about preventive war, which is demarcated from preemptive war and is part of a broader class of ‘anticipatory’ wars. Anticipatory wars, but especially preventive war, are ‘hard cases’ for traditional Just War theory; other puzzles for this tradition include nuclear deterrence, humanitarian intervention, and provability a priori of the success of Tit-for-Tat. First, and despite strong assertions to the contrary, it is far from clear that preventive war is absolutely prohibited in traditional Just War Theory, and it is also dubious that it is in all cases ‘clearly illegal’. Second, the morality of both preemptive and preventive wars is shown to turn on epistemological considerations: on what degree and kind of justification the primary metaphysical facts of threat can be reasonably believed. Third, an argument is made that whatever epistemic threshold is held to be necessary, some preventive wars will exceed it, and that this is more likely with advancing technologies ...

Translated by Jim Bonk

The war against Iraq unleashed in March 2003 spawned an attempt to silence the protest movement by accusing it of anti-Americanism. This essay argues that the theory according to which right-wing anti-Americanism and left-wing anti-Americanism coincide is a myth. A new issue appears now, a paradox that characterizes the United States, where democracy developed within the white community concomitantly with the enslavement of blacks and the deportation of American Indians. In the American “Herrenvolk democracy,” a line of demarcation between whites and people of color fosters the development of relations based on equality within the white community. Furthermore, U.S. history is marked by the fundamentalist tendency to transform the Judeo-Christian tradition into a sort of national religion that consecrates the exceptionalism of the American people and the sacred mission with which they are entrusted (“Manifest Destiny”). Europe is unable thoroughly to comprehend the American mixture of religious and moral fervor, on the one hand, and overt pursuit of political, economic, and military world domination, on the other. But it is this mixture, or rather this explosive combination, this peculiar fundamentalism, that constitutes the greatest threat to world peace today.

In the post-Cold War era, two potentially serious strategic debates—over the development and deployment of a US-based missile defense and the use of preemptive war to counter proliferation threats—reflect fundamental, long-standing disagreements over NATO's strategic doctrine, and particularly beliefs concerning the definition of vital interests and the most appropriate strategies and instruments for preserving those interests. This article evaluates the threat these debates really pose to NATO by comparing them to Cold War-era deterrence debates. It suggests the conditions under which such disputes are likely to be most disruptive to the alliance, and it prescribes how member states can handle them to limit permanent damage.

Examination of newly available declassified US national security documents reveals that both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson actively considered preventive and preemptive war against China because of China's progress in developing nuclear weapons. This study yields significant conclusions for the broader historiography of the period and also for contemporary theoretical and policy debates. From the perspective of history, it is suggested that China's nuclear weapons program may be a neglected factor in explaining the US decision to fight the Vietnam War. Regarding international relations theory, the case suggests that asymmetric nuclear rivalries may be particularly prone to instability. The implications of this hypothesis for the contemporary debate about missile defense and US–China relations are explored.