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Is Preventative War Beneficial?

How many wars throughout human history were preventable?

From the standpoint of logic, perhaps every one of them — because one side or another could have chosen a more peaceful or strategically-sensible path.

But how often should one nation jump in to cut off another’s aggression when its unclear what the result could be? Great Britain and France, for example, seriously contemplated engaging with Germany as early as 1936 but didn’t. Could action then have limited Hitler’s genocide and World War II?

Scott Silverstone, however, isn’t sure preventive war would have been the correct path to save millions of lives.

Silverstone is a professor at West Point and author of the book "From Hitler’s Germany to Saddam’s Iraq: The Enduring False Promise of Preventive War." He joined The Show to talk about it.

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Steve Goldstein was a host at KJZZ from 1997 to 2022.