Regulation of Preventive and Preemptive Force in the United Nations Charter: A Search for Original Intent

This article was completed just before the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 and was motivated in part by the publication in 2002 of National Security Strategy of the U.S.A., which conflated preventive and preemptive uses of force. The article differentiates the two concepts and asks whether the drafters of the United Nations Charter intended to make either of them permissible under the Charter regime. The article is different from others on the topic in its extensive use of the minutes of the U.S. delegation that participated in drafting the Charter. These minutes are highly informative but were not published in the Foreign Relations of the United States series until 1967 and seem to have been little used previously in discussions about the meaning of the Charter's use of force provisions.