Preemption Today

Abstract: The doctrine of preemption was the official military doctrine of the George W. Bush administration. In subsequent presidencies it ceased to figure explicitly in official national security policy statements of the US government, while on the other hand it came to feature explicitly in contemporary NATO strategy. This article argues that the logic of preemption has not only continued to operate implicitly in US military practice, but that it has also moved into the domestic realm, where expresses itself in emergent variations of expanding reach. After summarizing the concept of the “operative logic” of preemption, the article discusses a number of spheres, military and domestic, in the US and elsewhere, where the logic of preemption operates. It attempts to encapsulate how each iteration recast the formula for preemption. The examples discussed include drone counterinsurgency warfare, the Chinese surveillance state’s recentering on pre-crime, the social discourse of safety in North America, conspiracy thinking as wielded by the MAGA movement, and AI machine learning systems.