Preventive War and the Political Costs of War Initiation: What if the Allies Had Attacked Nazi Germany in the mid-1930s?

Despite the failures of a preventive war strategy in the case of Iraq, preventive military action has not been fully discredited in wider policy and political circles. The 2006 National Security Strategy reiterates the Bush administration’s commitment to the preventive war option in principle, while a number of military analysts, think tank pundits, and presidential candidates from each major party, continue to treat preventive war as a viable strategic option to address future power shifts. This is particularly evident in the debate over how to address Iran’s nuclear program, reflected in the insistence of many policymakers, analysts, and political leaders that “all options” â€" including preventive attack â€" must remain “on the table.” Given this enduring interest in preventive war, scholars must continue to critically examine the difficult calculus involved in thinking through this policy choice.This paper argues that a severe shortfall in most analyses of the preventive war option is created by heavy emphasis on raw military variables in calculations of likely costs and benefits of launching a preventive war. Short shrift is given to another dimension of preventive war that is at least as important, and in some cases more important, than the military dimensions: the political costs of initiating war in the absence of overt aggression by the target state. Previous studies have noted two types of political costs of initiating preventive war. The need to generate and sustain domestic political support for preventive war in the absence of overt aggression or a clearly imminent threat from the target state can be an insurmountable obstacle to executing the option, or perhaps politically debilitating in the long run. At the international level, initiating preventive war without broad multilateral support can have a costly ripple effect across many issue areas. Yet there is a third type of cost that has not been developed in the preventive war literature, a cost that follows from the political effects of preventive war within the domestic political system of the target state. The likely domestic response within the target state to what its leaders can portray as unprovoked aggression will be nationalist hostility and support for revanchist armed conflict. To the degree that the goals of a preventive attack include a more stable post-conflict order and acceptance of the status quo by the target state, this backlash must be treated as a potentially severe cost of the preventive war option itself, an effect that ultimately negates the rationale for conducting the preventive attack in the first place.To explore this political cost, the paper presents a counterfactual study of what is perhaps the critical, and certainly the most widely cited, case of a power shift that did not, yet which many assert should have, motivated a preventive war in response: the rise of German power in the mid-1930s. Building on a recent burst of interest in counterfactual analysis among international relations scholars, the paper demonstrates that, despite being unorthodox methodologically, it is an essential method for studying any preventive war, either proposed or actual, both historical and in the future. And using the logic developed in the paper on the political effects of preventive war within the target state, the case study advances the provocative claim that a preventive war against Germany in the mid-1930s would not have allowed the Allies to avoid the horrendous costs of the war in Europe that the Nazi regime eventually unleashed. Moreover, an allied preventive war would have rendered the goal of creating a more progressive international order that included Germany as a status quo power extremely unlikely. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]