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In standard policy framework of the past, Skillen says, preemptive action sought to disarm the means by which a country was intending harm. The proposed plans of the Bush administration speak of "regime change." Skillen says this is similar to comparing neutralizing hostile tanks posed on the border to wiping out a government.

"With respect to the longstanding authority of a state to take preemptive action to defend itself against obvious plans of an enemy to attack, the new policy goes way beyond it," he says. "To claim the right to be able to end a regime compared to defending one's own country against a regime's ability to inflict violence is something new and has to be debated. I don't see how it can be justified on the older terms."

The strategy also poses serious questions of the United States' role in the world at large and within the U.N. Security Council. He says that fears of the U.S. acting as an empirical authority may be legitimate.

"It looks to me like there are elements in this strategy document that imply that the U.S. is now going to look at the whole world and make sure that no power can stand in its way and it will take preemptive action as necessary," Skillen said. "These would then have to be the terms on which the U.N., if it has any operational authority in the future, would have to operate under. Other nations would, in that case, have to assume that there is a single government, that of the United States, that claims a kind of ultimate international authority to decide the direction in which the whole globe would have to go."

Todd Hertz is assistant online editor for Christianity Today.

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September (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46