OPINION:
Aggressive self-defense. It is part of the law of nature. It is muscular. It is frugal. It guarantees safety. It celebrates the philosophical crown jewels of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
It should be the foreign policy of the United States.
We should resort to war in response to actual or imminent attacks on the United States which threaten our sovereignty, inflict mass civilian casualties or cripple key infrastructure. No other dangers or injuries should provoke us to abandon peace. They should be addressed by extraterritorial application of the criminal law or the lesser sanctions of boycotts, embargoes, asset freezes or otherwise.
Of all exercises of power, war is the most worrisome. It legalizes what is ordinarily first-degree murder. It concentrates virtually limitless power in the executive to kill, to detain, to spy and to conduct secret government with no congressional or judicial checks. As Cicero observed 2,000 years ago, “In times of war, the law falls silent.” That is why the Founding Fathers delimited war to circumstances that satisfied a high threshold of national danger. The Constitution thus speaks of suspending the Great Writ of habeas corpus only in cases of “rebellion or invasion.” Then-Secretary of State John Quincy Adams elaborated in his Juy 4, 1821 address to Congress that the United States had repudiated imperial ambitions to influence events abroad except by example because war — whether victorious or not — pulverizes liberty:
“She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force … .”
Aggressive self-defense does not mean sitting idle until an attack such as Pearl Harbor awakens a response. It means constructing invincible defense systems — including ballistic missile defenses — to deter aggression and to diminish the liklihood that an attack will succeed. It means policing our shores with submarines. It means maintaining an army capable of destroying any invader. It means upgrading our nuclear arsenal to threaten incineration of any aggessor. It means gathering intelligence abroad to identify credible war dangers and to adjust self-defense strategies accordingly. It means infiltrating the ranks of credible enemies to sow dissension or internecine conflict. It means innovative methods to defend against cyber-attacks that could inflict mass damage to our infrastructure or occasion mass civilian casualties.
With such defenses and retaliatory capability, the probability of foreign aggression against the United States would approach zero. Moreover, espirit de corps within the military would peak with a foreign policy of aggressive self-defense because the task of every soldier would be to defend their friends and families. None would be asking why they were risking that last full measure of devotion for Afghanis, Iraqis, Syrians, Vietnamese or other foreigners with no allegiance to the United States and characteristically opposed to our form of government.
Aggressive self-defense would also diminish foreign threats. We would not inflame other nations or nonstate actors against us by going abroad in search of monsters to destroy or by deploying troops in foreign lands to fortify oppressive rulers. We cannot kill thousands in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Pakistan and Syria without provoking a desire for revenge. We cannot support tyrannical and corrupt foreign leaders such as former Afghan President Hamid Karzai without incurring the wrath of all their enemies. It is stupid to incur such risks when aggressive self-defense can prevent convulsions abroad from migrating to the United States.
Aggressive self-defense is frugal — a star attraction when the nation groans under $17 trillion in debt. It is estimated that our gratuitous warring in Afghanistan and Iraq alone since 2001 will cost a staggering $4-6 trillion, or as much as one-third of our entire national debt. Retired Adm. Mike Mullen, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has identified the debt as one of the five greatest threats confronting the United States today.
A foreign policy of aggressive self-defense is urgent. Since the end of the Cold War, our strutting on the international stage as world leader engaged in perpetual global pre-emptive warfare has proven calamitous. It has made us less safe despite the staggering cost in manpower and resources. Those are not the words of Code Pink. In 2012, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Martin Dempsey fretted that “we are living in the most dangerous time in my lifetime.”
It is time to jettison the foreign policy that has manufactured that unprecedented danger in favor of aggressive self-defense.
Bruce Fein is a former associate deputy attorney general and general counsel of the Federal Communications Commission under President Reagan. He is author of “American Empire Before the Fall and Constitutional Peril: The Life and Death Struggle for Our Constitution and Democracy (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
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