Point of Attack Preventive War, International Law, and Global Welfare

The world today is overwhelmed by wars between nations and within nations, wars that have dominated American politics for quite some time. Point of Attack calls for a new understanding of the grounds for war. In this book John Yoo argues that the new threats to international security come not from war between the great powers, but from the internal collapse of states, terrorist groups, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, and destabilizing regional powers. In Point of Attack he rejects the widely-accepted framework built on the U.N. Charter and replaces it with a new system consisting of defensive, pre-emptive, or preventive measures to encourage wars that advance global welfare. Yoo concludes with an analysis of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, failed states, and the current challenges posed by Libya, Syria, North Korea, and Iran.

John Yoo is the Emanuel S. Heller Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. As a Justice Department official, John Yoo advised the Bush administration on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. He served as general counsel of the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee and as a law clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas of the U.S. Supreme Court and Judge Laurence Silberman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Professor Yoo is the author of more than 75 law journal articles and a regular contributor to major American editorial pages. He is co-author (with Julian Ku) of Taming Globalization: International Law, the U.S. Constitution, and the New World Order (Oxford University Press, 2012).