In June 1994 President Clinton was briefed by General John Shalikashvili, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Secretary of Defense William Perry on the situation in Korea. The US had grown increasingly concerned with North Korea's nuclear weapons programme, and the administration had come to believe ‘that such a development would create intolerable risks’. The Chairman and the Secretary presented Clinton with options for how to reinforce US troops in South Korea in order to repulse an attack from the North if the US bombed nuclear facilities in North Korea. The President was about to make his choices and issue the relevant orders when the meeting was interrupted by a message from former President Jimmy Carter that he had been able to broker a deal with the North Korean leadership. North Korea would stop its nuclear weapons programme in exchange for aid and negotiations with the United States.

Had Clinton authorised the use of armed force against North Korea, then doctrines of preventive or pre-emptive defence would probably have dominated the strategic debate from 1994 onwards. The regular bombing of Iraq and what were believed to be al-Qaeda facilities in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, as well as the 1999 air campaign against Serbia, would have been seen as examples of a new pre-emptive defence doctrine, and we would have been debating whether such a doctrine was the appropriate answer to the threats of a globalising world.