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Pre-emptive strike, or more accurately, pre-emptive war is a commonly recognized tool of international relations. War is a dirty, nasty, and almost always barbaric tool of foreign relations. It is generally accepted that a defensive war, where one has been attacked, is always morally and legally justified. Unfortunately, it also means that citizens of your country have to die, parts of your country have to be damaged or destroyed, and your enemy gets to decide where and when the first battle is fought before you can respond to the attacker. Pre-emptive war allows all of that to be avoided.

The big problem with pre-emptive warfare is justifying the first pre-emptive strike. If you can convince everyone that your attack was, in fact, pre-emptive, then you have a moral or legal war. Unfortunately, your enemy is not usually going to send you a polite letter saying that they are going to attack you next month. You have to rely on intelligence information to determine that the enemy is planning on attacking you. Intelligence is never complete, seldom clear, and never meets the standards of legal proof. Furthermore, intelligence information is always open to interpretation.

A successful pre-emptive strike will stop the enemy's plan for attack and provide irrefutable proof that the enemy was intending to conduct an attack on your country, legally and morally justifying your attack. Very few pre-emptive strikes reach that level of success. An unsuccessful pre-emptive strick will give your enemy a legal reason to conduct an attack on your country, provoke dissension at home, and unite significant portions of the international community against you. Too many pre-emptive strikes have met this standard.

While pre-emptive stikes are a legitimate tool of international relations, they have many draw backs that must be effectively evaluated and dealt with before such a strike can successfully be carried out. Unfortunately, when a countries intelligence service provides reasonable evidence of a planned attack by one's enemies, the common immediate reaction is to pretalliate, react before the enemy can fulfill their intended plans.

Learn more about this author, Patrick Coyle.
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