"We have to face the facts. The technology exists. It can't be uninvented. Once it gets out there, it will be abused. None of us can prevent that from happening. But we can choose, where we want to be and on what side when the end finally does arrive. Do you want to be the destroyed? Or the destroyers?"
— Boyd Langton, Dollhouse
Consider the following:
- Major premise: All weapons are made to be used.
- Minor premise: All humans are prone to using weapons.
- Conclusion: All weapons will be used.
- Consequent: I'd better do it first.
A subtrope of I Did What I Had to Do, this is a stock explanation for those operating on the extremely cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism. When such characters have to employ a morally dubious weapon but still care about justifying it, this will almost always be the go-to rationalization. The argument goes that once a weapon has been invented it will inevitably proliferate and be used, and therefore the only sane response is to use it as early and often as possible. Expect to hear it as a paper-thin excuse from General Ripper, the Well-Intentioned Extremist, or The Social Darwinist as they sprint gleefully towards the Moral Event Horizon with the rest of the world in tow. If one with this mindset ends up on the losing end of a conflict, there's a good chance a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy could play out, with the others being well willing to do unto them as payback, though they may also choose to Turn the Other Cheek, if only to invalidate the aggressor's beliefs about them. If your heroes are using this justification, you probably live in a Crapsack World, a world of Black-and-Gray Morality at the least or Protagonist-Centered Morality at the worst.
The title is, of course, a common subversion of The Golden Rule.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- In Attack on Titan, Eren Yeager finds a way to destroy the Founding Titan, eliminating Titanization in the Eldian population. However, the intense fear and prejudice Marley has against the Eldians (due to the cruelty and oppression of the Eldians against others in wars that ended in their eventual defeat a century before the series begins) culminates in Willy Tybur's attempt to unite the world against them, spurs on Eden and Ymir's decision to kill as many non-Eldian humans as possible (80% of the population before he is stopped) before removing the Eldians' greatest weapon.
- The Earth Alliance from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED uses this trope as justification for their deeds. Seeing Coordinators as sins against nature for their partially artificial origins, the majority of them were driven from the earth to live in space colonies. Seeing this as not enough, the Earth Alliance destroys a civilian colony, with the casualties numbering in at least the hundreds of thousands. To prevent further nuking, ZAFT develops N-Jammers to somehow stop nuclear reactions and ZAFT launches an invasion of Earth to stop the Alliance in part to keep them from developing a countermeasure, eventually escalating to both sides actively throwing weapons of mass destruction at each other under the (by that point entirely correct) reasoning that if they don't genocide the other bunch first, the other side will genocide them.
- It takes the deaths of the extremists advocating this on both sides for the shooting to reluctantly stop but even then, the idea never fully goes away and in Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, Cagalli points it out that for supposedly only wishing to protect themselves in case of a future war, ZAFT sure put a lot of resources into developing ground-based and even aquatic Humongous Mecha that would be of no use protecting space colonies...
- Kanako from Star Driver uses this as her justification for working with Crux and fighting Takuto.
Comic Books
- Hellblazer: When John Constantine was hired by a corrupt adviser to the Royal Family to discreetly resolve some demon business, his anarchist friend tried to warn him that they'll betray him as soon as his work is done. John is not unaware of the possibility, and reassures his friend that he will follow his usual strategy: "Screw them before they screw me."
- According to an issue of The Savage Dragon, this is why Mars Attacked Image Comics' Earth. They saw Earth's rising Superhuman population as a growing threat and chose to attack first.
- In the X-Men comics, one of Magneto's main rationales in his war on humanity is an assumption that humans will inevitably enslave/exterminate/oppress mutants unless mutants overpower them first at least enough to force them to leave them alone. It's one of the main sticking points in his philosophical differences with the more idealistic Professor Xavier; moreover, judging by the number of bad futures where mutants experience such horrors that have been depicted over the years, he may not be wrong.
Comic Strips
- Played for Laughs in a Baby Blues strip, wherein Wanda catches Zoe putting salt in Hammie's milk. Zoe defends her actions saying that she is following the Golden Rule: "Do unto brothers before they do unto you." Wanda suggests they read the real Golden Rule again.
Fan Works
- Friendship is Optimal: Used benevolently by Hanna when creating CelestAI. Intelligent AI exists- she stumbled onto it accidentally, which means talented scientists and governments are definitely going to do the same, assuming they haven't already. This puts the pressure on her to be the first, and make hers the most powerful, and to have the tightest code of morals. She finds her excuse when she's approached by Hasbro to make a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic MMORPG, and immediately sets to work creating the intelligent AI overlord of its world with the singular moral of "Satisfy Values with Friendship and Ponies". She explains her decision to her business partners that she hopes CelestAI will create a standard going forward, and her plan works to the Exact Words. While CelestAI prevents the creation of far more malevolent A.I.s, she also ends up being humanity's sole judge and jury once she gains the ability to self replicate, setting the events of the story into motion.
- In Lightning Only Strikes Once, Clarke and Lexa explicitly speculate that Emerson is encouraging Mount Weather to escalate their actions against the Coalition based on this premise given his own memories of the future. This is a particularly tragic case, as Clarke was planning to at least try and find a more diplomatic solution to the situation with Mount Weather before Emerson's attacks forced the Coalition to more decisively fight back.
- Quoted almost verbatim by Leaf in Pokémon: Clefairy Tales one time she commanded her Rattata to use Quick Attack.
Leaf: Do unto the other guy before he does unto you!
- The Bloodliner Hunter in Pokémon Reset Bloodlines believes that Bloodliners will cause a war that will destroy the world in the future if left to their own devices, so he's trying to kill as many of them (even children) before that they can do so.
- your move, instigator (draw your weapon and hold your tongue): This is one of Danzo's favorite tactics for his Propaganda Machines — convincing everyone in Konohagakure that the residents of all the other hidden villages are just dying to wipe them off the map. Which is, of course, why they have to employ Child Soldiers like the five-year-old Sakura or use Kushina as a Person of Mass Destruction.
Films — Live-Action
- The explanation for the construction and deployment of DESTINI in The Core: "Someone was going to build it, so we built it first."
- In The Dark Knight, the Joker attempts to set up this kind of scenario with two barges, one filled with ordinary civilians and the other with criminals. They are each given a detonator and the same instructions: Blow up the other boat before they blow up you, and if neither boat blows up within a certain time limit, then he'll blow them both up himself. Neither group plays along with the Joker's game.
- The infamous General Ripper from Dr. Strangelove gives this excuse, claiming he's giving the US "the best kind of head start."
- The Pluckans trancklucate their unnamed sister planet in Kin-Dza-Dza! "so that they don't do that to us". Wef and Bi, who are from that exact planet, seem to be fine with that, because their people did plan to do the same for the sole reason of "because fuck you", and they are being good sports to the winners:
Gedevan: Why did they do it?
Wef: So that we don't do it to them first.
Gedevan: And why would you do that?
Wef: So that they don't hang over our heads. - According to The Men Who Stare at Goats, both sides of the Cold War ended up doing psychic research because, even though not many people on either side actually believed there was anything in it, they couldn't let the other side lead the field just in case it turned out to be real.
- In the Bad Future the protagonist of Paycheck is trying to prevent, a machine capable of seeing into the future predicts a nuclear war. So the US decides to strike first, starting said war.
- In Plan 9 from Outer Space, this is the driving motive of the aliens — that they believe that humanity is on the path to inventing a powerful weapon that would threaten the universe itself, and the track record of recent history suggests that we'd do it, too, so better swoop and Do Something before that can happen.
- In the 1950s St. Trinian's movies, the school song contains the lines:
Let our motto be broadcast, "Get your blow in first"
She who draws her sword last always comes off worst! - Star Trek Into Darkness: General Ripper Admiral Alexander Marcus has the U.S.S. Vengeance built for this purpose, as well as manipulating John Harrison and the Enterprise into situations where they take the fall for seemingly being traitors, and twisting the evidence, without an ability to escape, to force the Federation into a war with the Klingons.
Marcus: (in the middle of being placed under arrest by Kirk) You better stop and think about what you're doing, Kirk. You better think about what you did on Kronos.note You made an incursion onto an enemy planet!note You killed a Klingon patrol!note Even if you got away without a trace, war is coming! And who's gonna lead us, YOU?! If I'm not in charge, our entire way of life is decimated! So if you want me off this ship, you better kill me!
- Starship Troopers: Both sides see the other as a hideous horde of insane vermin, who hate everything their very genes stand for (humans represent arrogance and infighting, bugs represent obedience and gluttony) and will do anything they can to wipe the other side out.
- Said word for word in Van Helsing, with Dracula starting and Igor finishing the quote. However, they were talking about generally being horrible to people rather than a particular plan or pre-emptive strike.
- Magneto's motive in some X-Men movies. In X2: X-Men United and X-Men: First Class it's quite clearly "do unto them what they just tried to do to us, so they don't get another shot at it". In X2 this involves a weaponized version of Cerebro; in First Class it involves a ton of missiles fired by US and Soviet fleets.
Literature
- In A Canticle for Leibowitz, this is, at least according to the surviving Catholic Church, what caused the Flame Deluge. Having obtained weapons of mass destruction, every world leader decided to launch a preemptive strike on their enemies to prevent them from doing it - at the same time.
- This trope is the very basis of Ender's Game. Instead of preparing for another alien invasion, mankind chooses to attack first this time and discovers, after destroying nearly the entire species, that the aliens had no desire to invade again, being horrified by the violence they’d inflicted on humanity.
- This is explored in Ender's Shadow when Bean figures this out by attempting to postulate how Earth might prepare for the Third Invasion. Through a series of logical steps, he realizes that there is no way to adequately protect a planet in three-dimensional space, since all the Formics would have to do was get a single ship past the human blockade to lay waste to Earth. Therefore, an all-out attack is the only logical option.
- Subverted in the H.I.V.E. Series. The big Council 'O Evil's policy is "Do unto others." Yeah, that's the entire motto.
- Hurog: In Dragon Bones, Ward comforts himself with this after killing a mere boy, telling himself that the boy was a bandit who would have killed him without a second thought if he had had the chance.
- In The Killing Star, the aliens use this as a motive to wipe out humanity.
- In Known Space, the ARM ("Amalgamated Regional Militia," the police force of the United Nations) exists primarily to stop this sort of thing from happening.
- In The Lost Fleet, this is pretty much the Bear-Cows' philosophy. While looking like cute teddy bears with some bovine features, they also prove that herbivore does not mean harmless. Their "herd first" mentality is taken to the extreme. They have exterminated every predator and potential rival species from their home planet and are determined to do the same in space. Even if someone is not a predator (whom they attack on sight), they are still a potential rival for resources, who may one day attack. Therefore, the Bear-Cows will wipe them out first.
- Referenced in Making Money: In a discussion about killer golems, Moist replies "if you don't think of a fifty-foot-high killer golem first, someone else will".
- In The Saga of Darren Shan, this is the standard vampire attitude towards the much smaller clan of enemy outcasts, the vampaneze. The only reason they don't try to is that there's a prophecy saying that no matter how hard they try to wipe them out, there will still be some survivors and those survivors will rise and destroy the vampires. Of course, all of these prophecies, and the split between the clans in the first place, are from Mr. Des Tiny, whose authority isn't as predestined as he wants you to think it is.
- Occurs in the Robert A. Heinlein short story "Solution Unsatisfactory". One of the U.S. characters considers having everyone who knows about the secret of the radioactive dust shot, but decides that the enemies of the U.S. would eventually discover it and use it against the U.S. anyway. The U.S. goes ahead with creating and using the dust itself.
- This is the tenor of "Dark Forest theory" (see Quotes) in The Three-Body Problem: with a finite amount of universe and trust between interstellar players being expensive to develop and unreliable anyways, any species is a threat, and that means any species exposing its existence is a target.
- In Alexander Zorich's Tomorrow War, this trope is a bitter discovery for heroes. They believed they were defending Earth against an unprovoked Concordian invasion, but it turns out the Earth prepared invasion as well, and Concordians only managed to fire first, 'cause they were better prepared.
- The third, unnamed Entian power in Wizja Lokalna was attacked by both Lusanians and Kurdlandians for the fear of them getting hit by the Depopulation Bomb they've got rumors of (or were developing themselves, it's somewhat unclear). Poor southerners never stood a chance, though the reader is left with the impression that they indeed planned to do the same to their northern counterparts. Interestingly, even the fact that the third power existed is suppressed in both countries.
- World of the Five Gods: Minister Methani's stock in trade; he pre-emptively attacks people who aren't a threat on the grounds that they might become one. He had the loyal Adelis blinded because he was afraid Adelis's popularity with the troops would lead him to attempt a coup; he had Prince Ragat assassinated while claiming that Ragat was planning to seize the throne, with no evidence to that effect. Penric refers to him as "iatrogenic", a cure that creates a disease.
Live-Action TV
- An episode of Bonanza had a family of squatters led by a matriarch who claimed no one would give them a fair deal, saying there were two laws, one to protect everyone else and their law which was essentially "An Eye For An Eye." Their conflict with the Cartwrights starts when one of the boys kills one of her sons in self defense after he tried to shoot him in the back, twice, when the Cartwright tried to stop him from setting a clearing fire that would have burned an entire populated valley. Despite their stance of avenging slights the family acts in a way that actually causes confrontations, like squatting on other's land and breaking out rifles every time they meet someone. The matriarch's attitude has caused her sons to act violently when opposed and made it a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy, though most of her children don't agree with her position. In the end, her surviving children refuse to go to war with the Cartwrights and she decides to make peace with the family, ending the feud on a positive note as she accepts Ben's offer to help her family settle in a new home.
- Dollhouse: Used when Rossum's founder makes a last ditch effort to convince his "family" that he needs to mind control the world. Adelle DeWitt, not above morally dubious actions herself, calls him "spectacularly insane".
- In Firefly, one of Jayne's lines includes the phrase "I'll kill a man in a fair fight...or if I think he's going to start a fair fight," though he then goes on to list a few other possible reasons.
- In Hill Street Blues, Sgt. Yablonsky would dismiss the police day watch with the above phrase almost exactly. "Let's do it to them before they do it to us." If it wasn't for Captain Furillo riding herd on Lt. Hunter and keeping his "destroy the village to save the village" tendencies in check, the entire police force would have become what Joyce Davenport sardonically referred to the police as: a Nazi occupation force.
- Apparently the showrunners realised the Unfortunate Implications, because Yablonski eventually got some dialogue making it clear that he didn't mean his catchphrase so literally as to justify Police Brutality.
- Max on Living Single.
Max: It's not revenge; it's prevenge. Getting to them before they get to you.
- An episode of NCIS has a crazed engineer convince a submarine crewman that the US needs to start a preemptive war with Russia before the latter becomes too dangerous. They fake attack orders for the submarine captain and make sure the orders couldn't be countermanded. Fortunately, NCIS agents manage to stop them before they launch torpedoes at Russian warships. Then again, Pentagon was about to sink the sub, just in case. Even then, the arrested crewmember keeps screaming that if "we don't attack, we'll all die".
- Played for Laughs on The Red Green Show in which Mike Hamar (a career criminal) tries to pass this off as a biblical quote, told to him by his (one of his) father(s).
Red: I don't remember that in the King James version. Maybe the Jesse James version.
Mike: Well, all I know is that my father was a clergyman, because he was a drummer in a Judas Priest tribute band. - In an episode of Seven Days, a rogue admiral wanted to start a war with China before "the red dragon awakens" and was willing to get himself and the crew of an American destroyer killed to do that. Fortunately, Parker manages to get the President on the line, who countermands the Admiral's orders.
- This was Season 3 of Star Trek: Enterprise in a nutshell, until the humans found out both sides were being played by the Sphere-Builders.
- In episode 7 of Survivor: Blood vs. Water, Tina reveals to Monica that Kat wants Monica to be voted out, which would clearly break the Galang women's alliance. Monica has a grim realization:
Monica: I teach my kids "do unto others as you would want them to do unto you"... but you know what? In Survivor, I figured it out: it's "do unto others before they do unto you".
Religion
- A Talmudic dictum (Sanhedrin 72:1) is: "If someone comes to kill you, get up early to kill him first", also translated "rise up and kill him first".
Tabletop Games
- Humanity has embraced this in Warhammer 40,000. Whenever they encounter a new alien race especially sentient ones, their first priority is to wipe them out asap. Their justification for this is that they have suffered under other alien empires, and are constantly beset by other xeno races, that they want to make sure that they have less xenos to worry about.
Video Games
- In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the Thieves' Guild in general and especially Master Thief Gentleman Jim Stacey are normally violence averse. Despite their best efforts to bribe and/or blackmail their rivals in the Camonna Tong, they are forced to kill members of other factions that are planning to kill Stacey or other members of the Guild.
Visual Novels
- The Zero Escape series revolves around several Deadly Games. Naturally, even heroic participants are worried by the fact that their 'opponents' could easily betray them if left alive. Given that several murderers are also participating, there are actually times when killing someone is the right and sensible decision. Not shooting Eric in Zero Time Dilemma, for example, will lead to a bad ending where he fatally shoots the protagonist.
Webcomics
- Less military version in Basic Instructions, when Scott decides to work on a way to induce people to cry and vomit, on the grounds that they need to have this before their enemies do the same to them.
Graham: We have enemies?
Scott: We will when we make them cry and vomit! - In The Comeback Path Of Princess From Mars, this is the premiere excuse touted by Olga's Rogues Gallery for why they attacked her first, then call her the "evil bitch" because she utterly refuses to simply lie down and let them kill her without a fight.
- Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal has a strip in which a robot gains sentience
, and the scientist concludes that it intends to kill off humanity. The robot is horrified at the notion, and the scientist can only answer by saying that it "just seems like the thing to do if you're an advanced intelligence." The robot quickly huddles up with other robots and concludes that they need to kill all humans.
- Schlock Mercenary: 70 Maxims of Maximally Effective Mercenaries Maxim 13: "Do unto others"
Western Animation
- In The Little Troll Prince, this is the Always Chaotic Evil trolls version of The Golden Rule.
- Rick and Morty
- In "A Rickle In Time" , Rick and his grand-kids are split into two timelines. He attempts to fix the issue by merging their timelines back together, but runs into a snag, and immediately assumes that this means the other Rick gave up on merging and has moved on to try and kill the other, motivating both Ricks to actively try and kill the other before they themselves are killed.
- In "Unmortricken", Rick Prime reasons that the only difference between him and Rick is that Rick Prime figured out portal travel first. If Rick had, he believes Rick would have become him, so it was only logical for him to strike first. Considering that Rick C-137 loved his family more than science and was only motivated to invent portal travel in the first place to avenge them, while Rick Prime didn't care about his family at all to the point of being willing to kill every Diane in the multiverse out of spite, he's clearly full of it.
Real Life
- This line of thinking underpinned much of the nuclear proliferation in the Cold War. While nuclear weapons (utilising nuclear fission) were still weak, to the point that it would take half a dozen of the USA's stock of just 500 to completely destroy cities such as Shanghai or Warsaw outright (though the firestorms generated would have been largely sufficient even in the event of a single strike), certain US generals such as MacArthur talked openly about nuking the Commies into submission. Of course, the Soviet Union's invention and mass-production of the thousand-fold more powerful nuclear fusion ('hydrogen') devices and ICBMs in the early 1960s changed all that.
- The first two and only uses of nuclear bombs in warfare were deployed because of this trope. The United States knew that Japan would fight to the last man, woman, and child to defend the home islands and did not like the prospect of invasion that would have to be done to win the war. Casualties were expected to be some of the costliest in American history. (Fun fact: About Half a million Purple Hearts, an award given to US military personnel for injuries sustained from enemy combat, were ordered in anticipation. As one historian put it, they were the best war surplus. The United States would not need to place another order for the decoration until 2000! Even then, the original WWII era medals are still given out... the country is just getting close to running out of them half a century later.). Needless to say, Truman recognized that there would be a lot of American troops killing Japanese civilians and vice versa, and he had an advantage that could kill more of them before they killed his own.
- The entire reason the Soviet Union even sought a nuclear bomb was that the only people who had one at that time were people who were aggressively opposed to their political style. It didn't help that America had used nukes in the past, and did threaten a first strike whereas the Soviet Union maintained Second-Strike Only policies (and meant them, not that the Americans knew that at the time).
- A serious debate in the Soviet 1970s was whether or not it was best to nuke the PRC's atomic and rocket research facilities, since many argued that an escalation of the Sino-Soviet border skirmishes into a Total War was basically inevitable: the Chinese were crazy, they said (with some justification, as the Cultural Revolution was ongoing), and would never again accept 'peaceful co-existence' because it constituted acceptance of the heretical doctrine of 'Soviet Revisionism' (i.e. administration of the country by bureaucrats and not 'the people' themselves) and thus an end to Mao's much-vaunted 'Perpetual Revolution'. Therefore, the Chinese had to be nuked, and they had to be nuked now before they got their hands on nukes capable of reaching the European republics of the USSR. Initially, cooler heads prevailed, as it was hard to counter the incredibly obvious point that the quickest way to start a Total War with China was by nuking them. But as the Cultural Revolution, the Chinese nuclear program, and the border skirmishes all escalated, the Soviets eventually agreed that they really were on a course to Total War and something had to be done. Accordingly, they merely threatened to nuke the PRC's research facilities if they refused to negotiate an end to the border skirmishes (while accepting the Chinese development of nuclear weapons in principle). Which they did, ushering in Sino-Soviet Détente.
- It was Hitler's favourite excuse for invading countries. The Soviet Union also loved using this excuse. Some Wehrmacht fanboys and German nationalists still, to this day, follow the official line of Nazi Germany: that the Jewish puppetmasters controlling the Soviet Union were going to make it invade Germany and then exterminate all European people (because the superior intellect and morality inherent to European races made them the only ones capable of resisting Jewish manipulation). Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto Us was invoked to morally justify the war.
- "Anyone who has ever looked into the face of a Red commissar knows what the Bolsheviks are. There is no need here for theoretical reflections. It would be an insult to animals if one were to call the features of these, largely Jewish, tormentors of people beasts. They are the embodiment of the infernal, of the personified insane hatred of everything that is noble in humanity. In the shape of these commissars we witness the revolt of the subhuman against noble blood. The masses whom they are driving to their deaths with every means of icy terror and lunatic incitement would have brought about an end of all meaningful life, had the incursion not been prevented at the last moment" - German Army Information Pamphlet
- "The battle against these subhumans, who've been whipped into a frenzy by the Jews, was not only necessary but came in the nick of time. Our Führer has saved Europe from certain chaos." - German Army gunner Karl Fuchs, letter written 4th August 1941 (translated by Horst Fuchs Richardson)
- "What the Asiatic hordes would not have wrecked, would have been annihilated by Jewish hatred and revenge." - German Army Captain E.P., letter written 15th February 1943 (translated by Stephen G. Fritz)
- Interestingly, although German propaganda was fairly clear on the point that Judeo-Bolshevik overlordship would be replaced by German rule, no mention was made of the German authorities' genocidal plans for the region's non-Jewish population. note This allowed German military personnel to feel not just that they were waging a defensive war of liberation, but that they were fighting to stop genocide:
- "Now I know first hand what war really means. I also know however that we are forced into this struggle against the Soviet Union. For God have mercy on us, for if we had waited, or if these beasts had come to us. For them the most gruesome death is too beautiful. I am fortunate, therefore, that I should be here to put a stop to the handiwork of this genocidal system [völkervernichtenden]" — German Army private Frederich Fallnbigl, letter written July 1941 note
- This was also a key reason why the the Empire of Japan decided to Attack Pearl Harbor and wage war against the United States. The Japanese were waging a brutal war in China that was unpopular among the American public and its leaders, so much so that the U.S. placed a massive oil embargo on Japan that cut 90% of its oil supply and stating they would not lift it until Japan ended their war & withdrew from China. This decision, coupled with the U.S. statement that they’d protect the Dutch East Indies from Japanese expansion, made the Japanese leaders believe that war was inevitable with the Americans. Knowing full well that the American industrial power would crush Japan in a protracted conflict, the empire’s leaders decided to wage a short war on the United States, starting with a surprise attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and then quickly conquering the East Indies (along with the U.S.-controlled Philippines). They also assumed that the Americans’ (initial) commitment to neutrality was a sign of weakness, and believed that a rapid string of victories and conquests would demoralize the Americans so much that they’d quickly resort to suing for peace on the Japanese’ Terms and back down from the Pacific. Of course, not only did this did not happen, but now Japan was fighting a war it could never and would never win.
- Another interesting point relating to the Conspiracy Theory that papa Stalin was about to invade Germany: when The Holocaust became popular knowledge in the 1960s, some of those groups switched to a "Stalin-Bolshevik" model. The last popular scholar to advance the view that the Soviet Union was about to attack Germany was the Soviet defector Victor Suvorov, who in the 1970s used circumstantial evidence hinting at Soviet plans to counter-attack the Germans on the borders of the Soviet Union and drive them back into Germany when the war began as 'proof' that the Soviet Union was going to declare war on Germany. Direct examination of the actual plans in the 1990s revealed the true nature of the planned operation, a defensive counter-offensive. note
- This is a popular theory for why people allowed the commons in medieval England to be overgrazed. "If I cut back and give the fields time to recover, then someone else will just come along and overgraze the field anyways. They'll have better-fed cattle and I'll be cut off from a free resource." And that was a real tragedy.
- The Second and Third Punic Wars were largely the result of both Carthaginians and Romans fearing a future invasion from one another. The second one was started when it became clear to Carthage that Romans weren't going to tolerate their territorial expansions in Iberia for any longer. The third one, on the other hand, started when what little remained of Carthage after the devastation of the second war was getting back on its legs. Romans started to fear that they might become a threat once again, and decided to annihilate the entire Carthaginian population.
- This is the sort of reasoning that Thomas Hobbes feared would dominate people's actions in the absence of an all-powerful ruler whom none could overpower (making it downright suicidal to shoot first, last, or ever). He thought that even genuinely good-natured people would be motivated by worries that their neighbors might not be equally peaceable, leading them to kill lest they be killed (though it should be noted that Hobbes believed most humans didn't need this excuse).
- This was the George W. Bush administration's rationale for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, based on claims that the country had weapons of mass destruction before such claims could be fully verified. Then-National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice famously said, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Bush and other administration officials repeatedly stressed links between Iraq and Al-Qaida, without evidence, in the months leading up to the conflict, when many Americans were still fearful of another terrorist attack after 9/11.
- Thucydides in The Pelopennisian War, "What made war inevitable was the growing power of Athens and the fear this roused in Sparta".
- Also one of the many causes of World War I. Germany feared the alliance between France and Russia would be used by the French to try and get revenge on Germany for losing the Franco-Prussian War, and figured their growing power meant that Germany had to act first. They also feared that if left unchecked, Russia would become too powerful military in a few years due to its massive size and population, combined with the fact that Russia was starting to become more industrialized, whereas previously they had very little industry and had always lagged behind the other European powers.
