Abstract/Summary

On 22 April 1999, the British Prime Minister Tony Blair addressed the Economic Club of Chicago, a gathering of leading US businessmen, in a speech that would publicise the ‘Blair Doctrine’ (which evokes other famous pronouncements on war and peace such as the ‘Truman Doctrine’ or the ‘Weinberger Doctrine’). Blair presented a series of conditions that should be fulfilled for his (or any) government to decide to resort to the use of force in international relations. It transpired soon that the key passage setting out the conditions was a verbatim transcription of a paper written for the British Government by a leading British academic strategist, Lawrence Freedman, who held the Chair in War Studies at King’s College London. While Tony Blair has long been out of government, and his own record of applying what should be called the ‘Freedman Doctrine’ is much debated, the Doctrine lives on, rightly so, as we shall see. This paper seeks to contextualise it in the larger tradition of thinking about Just War.