Talk:Caroline test

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Okay, so I'll poke the sleeping bear. - One of the rationales for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the War in Afghanistan (2001–present) by the United States was that of preemptive defense. (I'm sure there have been other examples in the past as well.) Has there been any discussion (WP:Notable and in WP:Reliable Sources, of course) of how the Caroline test applies (or not) to these situations? - Basically I'm wondering if a "how the Caroline test has been applied to various international conflicts throughout the years" section in the article is warranted. -- 174.21.233.249 (talk) 16:05, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

The American Society of International Law Presidential Task Force on Terrorism published an interesting paper in 2002, "The Myth of Preemptive Self-Defense", by Mary Ellen O'Connell. It briefly mentions the Caroline doctrine of 1842 and the Caroline case. harlan (talk) 16:33, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

References

If there are reliable, published sources (or even just one really good one) that apply the Caroline test to a particular conflict, I would say that should be included. For conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan where there is likely to be an oversupply of such sources, I would suggest starting with better sources, i.e. those published in scholarly journals or written by well-qualified authors before moving down to newspaper staff writers. Savidan 16:47, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

The ASIL source (above) and Gathii, James Thuo, Assessing Claims of a New Doctrine of Preemptive War Under the Doctrine of Sources. Osgoode Hall Law Journal, Vol. 43, No. 1, pp. 1-34, 2005. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=716346 both say that Israel's first strike flunks the test. Gathii wrote: "The closest case that might have, but is now regarded as not having met the Caroline test, was Israel's first strike against Egypt in 1967. Few regarded it as a good example of a permissible anticipatory attack under the Caroline test, especially after it became clear following the attack that there was no overwhelming threat that justified the attack to ensure Israel's survival. Many States criticized the attack, which made it clear that the attack would not serve as a precedent to legitimize “a general right of anticipatory self defense.”" O'Connell wrote "Commentators have defended Israel’s attack on Egypt in 1967 on the same logic. Israel stated that it had convincing intelligence that Egypt would attack and that Egyptian preparations were underway. We now know that Israel acted on less than convincing evidence. Thus, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war does not provide an actual example of lawful anticipatory self-defense." harlan (talk) 20:52, 29 August 2010 (UTC)

250 years?

A scholar in the article is quoted as saying, "Thus the destruction of an insignificant ship in what one scholar has called a 'comic opera affair' in the early 19th century nonetheless led to the establishment of a principle of international life that would govern, at least in theory, the use of force for over 250 years." But 1840 was less than 200 years ago. Did this guy just do math wrong, or if not then what is he referring to? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:441:8300:486B:B450:9346:6005:E214 (talk) 00:38, 30 April 2016 (UTC)

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Operation Barbarossa

Operation Barbarossa was also a preemptive strike against the threat of an imminent Soviet invasion (Plan Groza). Should be added to the text. 109.77.158.216 (talk) 00:08, 4 November 2022 (UTC)

The Caroline Test

I have recently finished writing an article on the role of Niagara County, New York's in the Patriot War. I would like to make a few comments about some of items in this article. 1.) The Caroline did not go over the falls. It grounded in the rapids above the brink of the falls and burned to the water line. All of the accounts which say it went over the falls are fabrications or errors. 2.) Amos Durfee was an African-American stagecoach driver who was only staying on the Caroline for the night. 3.) Alexander McLeod was a Deputy Sheriff and was not involved with the attack on the Caroline. He was included in the list of those indicted by the Niagara County Grand Jury because of an incident in Upper Canada (now Ontario) where he tried to return as escaped slave to the United States. This resulted in Canada's first race riot. The slave escaped but two other black men were killed. McLeod also helped to transport rebel prisoners to Kingston for trial. At his trial in Utica, New York in October of 1841, it was obvious that the rebels and their supporters made up the account of McLeod bragging about being involved in the attack. It took the jury twenty-eight minutes to find him not guilty. Facts about the Caroline attack may be found in The Avalon Project of the Yale Law School: The Caroline Affair. It lists the Congressional Documents about the incident. The Trial of Alexander McLeod for the Murder of Amos Durfee is available at Internet Archives. Dr. Stuart Scott's To the Outskirts of Habitable Creation: Canadians and American Transported to Tasmania in the 1840s'" has a lot of information about the attack on the Caroline.It was published by iUniverse in 2004. 72.88.113.38 (talk) 03:18, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

Where is it mentioned that Durfee was African-American? LeftAlberta1968 (talk) 00:12, 15 August 2023 (UTC)

Article 52

The UN charter states "Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security." I have corrected the quotation to match the charter, removing presumed editorial "amendments". See https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text Humpster (talk) 03:58, 24 November 2024 (UTC)

Check quote

The article opens with this formulation: "instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." My source is not perfect but I think Daniel Webster's 1837 language did not include the first "and" or the last comma. Can someone please check and, if appropriate, correct that? Thanks. Sullidav (talk) 11:57, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

The article quotes Webster twice, rather redundantly. Here is one source:

https://archive.org/details/diplomaticoffici01webs/page/110/mode/1up

It agrees with the Webster quotations in the article. Bear in mind anything but the original letter might incur errors or editing.

You are correct that the opening paragraph does not exactly match Webster. Should it?

The article is about a principle, not about what Webster said. If the opening of the article is quoting something, that source should be stated. However, it isn't a quotation. The paragraph refers to the Nuremberg trials of the Second World War. So the opening should match whatever is stated there, or the UN charter rather than what Webster said.

I wasn't able to find it in the UN charter. If you can discover a modern legal (i.e UN or international) statement of the principal, that should govern the article. At the same time, the article needs a little rewriting to reduce Webster to a single quotation. Until there is a source for the opening paragraph, there is no justification for changing it.

Humpster (talk) 20:30, 18 May 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for all this.

It's definitely not in the UN Charter.

This language from Webster (in correspondence with Ashburton, though in your source it's a letter to Fox) is widely seen as the source of the principle, at least in the English-speaking world.

Example 1 - This 2017 speech by the then-UK Attorney General included, "The principles of the modern law on imminence are almost universally accepted as having their origins in the diplomatic correspondence of 1842 following the Caroline Incident five years earlier, to which I have already referred. . . . Imminence was described in the Caroline case as a threatened attack which was ‘instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.’".

Example 2 - Here the then-Australian Attorney General said in 2017, "Since the date they were penned in 1841, the words of the then US Secretary of State Daniel Webster to his British counterpart Lord Ashburton have become canonical. Secretary Webster wrote that a State claiming self-defence would have to show that the: ‘necessity of self‑defence was instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation …, and that the [State’s] force, even supposing the necessity of the moment authorized them to enter the territories of the United States at all, did nothing unreasonable or excessive; since the act, justified by the necessity of self-defence, must be limited by that necessity, and kept clearly within it.’"

Example 3 - Here is former UK Foreign Office Legal Adviser Daniel Bethlehem, who has written a respected article about the topic, in 2017: "The jus ad bellum concept of imminence has always posed challenges. The Caroline standard of “a necessity of self-defence, instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation” sits uneasily with virtually every circumstance other than the 1837 incident that it addressed."

I suspect that most or all U.S. textbooks on international law similarly cite this language as the original, defining source of the principle. The textbook I have at hand (Weiner, Hollis, Keitner) does.

Finally, the importance of Webster's language is why the principle is referred to by the name of this article, the Caroline test.

So in my view, the quotation in the lede of the article should stay, even though it's from a longer quotation in the article body. It should be credited to Webster, and it should be corrected if it's wrong as I believe (and as the quotes above and the quote in the article body also indicate; but on the other hand see Caroline affair which quotes the same version as this article's lede). But if different reliable sources give different versions of the Webster language, the article should note both versions. Sullidav (talk) 03:04, 19 May 2025 (UTC)