Why Leaders Choose War

Jonathan Renshon is a doctoral student in the Government department at Harvard University, focusing on international security issues. He holds a master's degree in international relations from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has served on the editorial board of the Millennium Journal of International Relations.

The old American way of war, in which problems abroad were avoided until they spilled over and directly threatened American security interests, has been superseded by the new Bush doctrine of preventive attack. Renshon, writing while still in the PhD program at Harvard, uses the lens of political psychology to examine five historical cases of prevention. These include American war planning from 1946 to 1954; British action in the 1956 Suez Crisis; Israel's bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981; Indian preventive war planning from 1982 to 2002; and America's preventive war plan against Iraq in 2003. Renshon's theory of psychological motivations highlights six factors thought to influence the preventive war decision, including declining relative power, bad faith image of the adversary, a conviction that war is inevitable, the perception that there is a brief window of opportunity in which to act, a situation that appears to favor a first strike, and black-and-white thinking. These are filtered through the psychology, beliefs, and judgments of individual leaders, supplemented by discussions of governing constraints, personal dynamics including risk tolerance, and state reputation. Ultimately, Renshon argues the most profitable manner in which to understand preventive war is through a detailed psychological examination of individual leaders. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.

• Foreword by Alexander L. GeorgePrefacePreventive War: An IntroductionPreventing What? The Suez Canal CrisisIsrael's Preventive Strike Against IraqHow Real Was Dr. Strangelove? American Preventive War Thinking Post World War IITo the Brink… India and Pakistan's Nuclear StandoffPreventive War as a Grand Strategy? George W. Bush and "Operation Iraqi Freedom"Preventive War in PerspectiveEpilogue: Preventive War in the Age of Terrorism and Rogue StatesNotesBibliographyIndex