New security challenges

Aiden Warren

"This book examines US recourse to military force in the post-9/11 era. In particular, it evaluates the extent to which the Bush and Obama administrations viewed legitimizing the greater use-of-force as a necessary solution to thwart the security threat presented by global terrorist networks and WMD proliferation. The Bush administration's use-of-force policy centered on advocating preemptive self-defence options, which were really preventive in nature. For example, it is argued that they responded to potential long-term threats based on ambiguous evidence. Central to this cloaking of preventive options in the more legitimate language of preemptive self-defence was an expanded notion of what counts as an imminent threat. Despite the Obama administration's avowal to multilateralism and professed US adherence to global norms, it did not expressly reject his predecessor's reasoning on...