Essay renamed:

“He called it ‘a suit of armour around the world.’ The attempt resulted in the birth of Ultron, a malevolent and powerful AI program bent on fulfilling Stark’s ‘peace in our time’ injunction by destroying humanity, giving it the peace of the grave. As Tacitus said of the Roman Empire, Ultron would ‘make a desolation and call it peace.’”

“The antipathy toward preventive war expressed in this line surely stems from the character’s bad experience with it in Winter Soldier. SHIELD’s own response to the New York attack was Project Insight, a surveillance and assassination drone warfare program meant to, in the words of SHIELD director Nick Fury, ‘neutralize a lot of threats before they even happen.’ From the moment he learned of it, Captain America denounced it as ‘holding a gun at everyone on Earth and calling it protection.’ And he was barely able to dismantle it before it could assassinate scores of peaceful dissidents.”

“Another example of preventive war is President Obama’s real-life drone warfare program. In Pakistan and Yemen, Obama’s “Predators” and “Reapers” sow terror and reap death in the name of neutralizing future terror threats. Many of the program’s identified targets, selected for assassination every week from the “Disposition Matrix” kill list and authorized by Obama every Tuesday morning (“Terror Tuesdays”), have never been implicated in an attack. Still more targets have never even been identified. Victims of “signature strikes” are marked for death simply based on their visual profile, location, and behavioral pattern. And “double-tap strikes” annihilate whoever comes to the aid of the initial strike. Many strikes are botched, hitting the wrong people, like the infamous one that hit a wedding party in Yemen and the recent one that killed an American and an Italian hostage in Pakistan.”