aggression

In politics, an unprovoked attack often involving an escalating series of threats aimed at intimidating an opponent. The actions of Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, leading to World War II, were considered to be aggressive. The invasion of Kuwait by Iraq 1990 was condemned as an act of aggression.

The term was first used officially in the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, which speaks of ‘the aggression of Germany’. It was incorporated in the covenant of the League of Nations, member states undertaking ‘to respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all members’.

In 1944 the Dumbarton Oaks Conference produced a plan that, unlike the ‘call to repentance’ of the covenant, invoked no principles, but contained practical arrangements for restraining an aggressor. The conference looked to a Security Council to decide whether the conduct of a nation amounted to aggression and to shoulder the burden of keeping the peace. These proposals were incorporated in the following year in the charter of the United Nations and have since been put to the test in the cases of Korea, the Congo (Léopoldville‐Kinshasa), the conflicts between the Arabs and Israelis in the Middle East, and the Turkish invasion of Cyprus in 1974.