Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 416 pp. $30.00.

IT IS a hoary military cliché that at any given time generals are always prepared to fight and win the most recent of their countries’ past wars. But it comes as something of a shock when, in his new book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn, a historian and a professor of law at Yale who is one of America’s most distinguished thinkers on human rights, the laws of war, and more generally on international justice, in many ways seems to perpetrate the very same mistake. Moyn argues that for most of its history the American tradition of warfare has been a particularly cruel one (the stark title of part one of Humane is “Brutality”). But then, he goes on to argue, in the 1970s there was a great leap forward (Moyn actually used the expression in an exchange about Humane with his Yale colleague John Fabian Witt) in the legal regulation of combat itself. It was the United States, Moyn insists (rightly in my view), that drove the movement for this virtually unprecedented humanization of the laws of war.

For Moyn, this began with the reconsideration that took place in the later part of the 1970s of how America had fought the Vietnam War, and not just by the war’s opponents but within government and perhaps most importantly within the U.S. military itself. This led to brutality beginning to give way to a new and, at least in its self-conception, a far more humane doctrine of war and warfighting. As Moyn puts it, “from the ashes of Hanoi and the darkness of My Lai, the possibility of humane war would come into view.” On the face of things, that would seem to be very good news both for the United States and for the world. On one level, Moyn does not disagree. To the contrary, he is at pains to concede that when compared with Vietnam or Korea, let alone the genocidal wars against the native peoples of the American continent, or the United States’ imperial wars in the Philippines and Central America, the U.S. military’s decision to shift to a less sanguinary war-fighting doctrine, one codified in U.S. military and civilian law but also in international law accepted by the United States, has been an improvement. At the same time, he rejects the view that this humanization of war should give rise to even the most guarded degree of optimism. “Humane war,” Moyn warns at the very end of the book, “is another version of the slavery of our times.” And far from being a “utopia,” “humane war” may turn out to be no more than “dystopian in a new fashion.”

On one level, Moyn’s argument will surprise no one who has read his work over the past twenty years, during which he has become a major intellectual figure on the American Left, at a time of the Left’s resurgence in mainstream U.S. politics. His most important books have been in the service of debunking various contemporary utopias. In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, published in 2010 to great controversy but even greater critical acclaim, Moyn pushed back hard against the conventional wisdom (at least in the Global North and Latin America) that the contemporary human rights movement was the culmination of centuries of progress in the making of a more humane world. This line of filiation goes at least as far back as the anti-slavery movement in late eighteenth-century Britain, through the creation of the Red Cross movement, and the first radical limitations on what armies were allowed to do, and more proximately in the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent promulgation of the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In Moyn’s account, partisans of this new human rights utopia—one of his bolder arguments is his dating its rise back only to the 1970s in the United States—assumed that they could usher in a world in which it would finally be possible to do away with some of the most commonly-held assumptions about international relations. The most important of these, conventionally described as the Westphalian Order, holds that states have the right to do more or less as they like within their own borders. But through both activism and law, the belief within the human rights movement that it was being replaced by a developing body of international human rights law that would, in extremis, supersede national law and bring rulers to account for how they treated their own citizens, not just how they acted internationally.

MOYN WAS more than skeptical. His overarching claim in The Last Utopia was that the human rights movement had arisen largely because of the moral vacuum that had been created by the failure of socialism, the disappointments of decolonization, and the hollowness of the early promise of a new and more just world order that in 1945 many expected could be anchored in the United Nations system. Socialism, decolonization, the UN: these, Moyn insisted, had been collective aspirations for a better future for the world, promising “emancipation from capital and empire.” Human rights, on the other hand, were “minimal, individual and fundamentally moral.” In short, human rights was an ideal doctrine for a liberal capitalist world and since its inception in the 1970s had come to serve as capitalism’s moral warrant. By implication, Moyn seemed to be calling for the restoration of these collectivist visions and promises, though in The Last Utopia he did not quite come out and say so. But in his subsequent book, Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World, published in 2018, he had either moved quite a bit further to the left or simply thought it necessary to be more explicit about his political radicalism. “Human Rights,” he wrote, were “both a breakthrough of conscience and an immense reversal.” However good its intentions had been, the human rights movement’s Faustian bargain with neo-liberalism had “left the world more humane but enduringly unequal...”

Thus, it turned out that Moyn was not, in fact, a critic of utopias in general, only of neoliberal ones. For his call in Not Enough was for those concerned with human rights and justice to end “the accommodating relationship they have had with market fundamentalism and unequal outcomes,” and return to an earlier utopia. “It is time,” he wrote, echoing the celebrated rallying cry of Rosa Luxemburg, “…to relearn the older and grander choice between socialism and barbarism, and time to elevate to the global project it has rarely been but must become.” 

In Humane, Moyn sets out in a direction that is both congruent with what he set out in those earlier books, but that at the same time appears to me to be in important ways incompatible with them. “Jacobin Legacy” is the title of the first chapter of Not Enough, and Moyn still seems at least partly inspired by what could be called his Neo-Jacobinism. Nor has he jettisoned his most original and powerful claim, which has been that while various reforms—human rights, philanthropy—may seem like progress, either they aren’t advances at all, or else they are woefully insufficient ones both in moral and in political terms. In Moyn’s new book, he applies the same lens to efforts undertaken both by governments—above all, the United States—and national militaries to radically reduce both the human toll and the physical destructiveness of warfighting through transformations in tactics, technology, and the role of both international and military law. For Moyn, these developments now are a huge obstacle to getting closer to what is for him the only morally acceptable outcome: all but abolishing war. 

Moyn avers that he is not a complete pacifist, and in Humane he clearly wanted to leave open a very narrow exception to his general demand that war be abolished. But even his neopacifism seems at odds with his earlier Neo-Jacobinism. After all, historically neither socialism nor decolonization were exactly nonviolent affairs, nor was revolutionary violence the rare exception to a nonviolent norm. And since Moyn obviously knows this, one can only wonder whether he did not want to address such inconvenient historical facts in Humane or whether he really has come to believe that virtually all the morally licit wars have already been fought and that thus, presumably, for the first time in human history, in the words of the great Gospel song “Down By the Riverside,” “We ain’t gonna study war no more.”

Obviously, there is no great Jacobin, Socialist, or anti-colonial hero whom Moyn could appeal to as the moral model for how to think about war. After all, all of them, from St. Just to Luxemburg, from Denmark Vesey to the Algerian FLN, believed revolutionary violence to be both unavoidable and necessary. In theory, Moyn might have turned to Mahatma Gandhi as a model but perhaps that did not sit well with Moyn’s socialism. But the figure Moyn does turn to in Humane seems like a far more perverse choice. He takes as his model for how to think morally about the nature of war none other than great nineteenth-century Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, to whom the first chapter of Humane is devoted. Moyn does acknowledge that his moral role model “went too far, and like many prophets spoke too soon.” By this, he presumably is referring to Tolstoy’s insistence on the inseparability of his pacifism from his very un-Jacobian anarchism and his Christian faith. Nonetheless, Moyn describes Tolstoy as having offered the “most eloquent and thought-provoking reservations ever leveled against the attempt to ‘humanize’ war, highlighting the moral risk of failing to combine the desire for less brutal war with skepticism toward war itself.” Again, Moyn himself is not quite prepared to endorse Tolstoy’s absolutist insistence that “war is never for a good cause,” but he comes very close when he writes that “it almost always isn’t.”

If Moyn insists that Tolstoy was the “greatest critic of the original hope to make warfare civilized,” he is also at pains to point out that these efforts largely failed. Indeed, much of the first section of Humane, which, again, is starkly titled “Brutality,” is in part a detailed and authoritative account of how various European and latterly American activists tried in the nineteenth and first part of the twentieth centuries to humanize war. Moyn also focuses a good deal of attention both on the Red Cross movement and on its founder, Henri Dunant, whose repeated public and private assertions that his ultimate goal was not regulating war but rather opening the road to world peace, Moyn is not willing to take at face value. But regardless of whether he is correct in his assessment of Dunant, Moyn is on firm ground when he argues that at least part of the reason European powers were so willing to accept the Red Cross Movement in particular, and the subsequent international legal covenants and conventions that codified the laws of war, was their fear that the growing brutality of war would threaten its very legitimacy. But for the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century antiwar activists in Europe and the United States whose struggles Moyn narrates with verve and (obvious) sympathy, it was simply morally unconscionable to “humanize an institution they could and should have eradicated.”

FOR ALL my criticism of Humane, and I do think it the worst book by a brilliant mind I have read in a decade, Moyn has performed a great historical service in bringing to life opponents of the movement to “humanize” war. One of the most notable of these was the doughty Austrian peace campaigner, Bertha von Suttner, whose pamphlet “Lay Down Your Arms” Tolstoy hoped would prefigure the abolition of war as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had prefigured the abolition of slavery. For Moyn, Suttner is a key figure because, he argues, “[she] and her fellow peace activists ushered in a new moral order in which politicians would at least have to pay lip service to the idea of peace, even as they wage war.” On that Moyn seems on very solid ground. But then he goes further by making an argument that is at least highly debatable, but which Moyn takes as fact, and on which the argument of Humane rests: Suttner and her fellow peace activists, he states, “were the true seers of our world today, one in which war is deemed immoral and illegal, with infuriating but narrowing exceptions.”

Moyn is both a historian and a professor of law, and I can only assume that what he is alluding to here with such absolute certainty is the fact that, indeed, from the United Nations Charter forward, the developments in international humanitarian law have made many if not most wars illegal. But as Moyn himself chronicles in Humane, this hardly seems to have prevented all the wars that have occurred between the time Suttner won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905 and the 1970s with the advent of the doctrine of humane war. Indeed, Moyn’s evocations of the horrors of genocidal imperial conquest, colonial wars, the rise of indiscriminate saturation bombing (first tried out, as Moyn rightly underscores, in colonial wars such as the British in Iraq and the Italians in Ethiopia) are simultaneously anguishing to read and utterly convincing. Surely, Moyn the historian is on to something Moyn the legal scholar is not. Unfortunately, it is Moyn the utopian who animates Humane. At times, Moyn seems to be aware of this. At the end of the section on Tolstoy with which Moyn begins the book, he quotes from Just and Unjust Wars by the political theorist Michael Walzer to the effect that the humanizing of the rules of war is the first step toward peace. To which Moyn replies, “Sometimes, sometimes not.” He is not wrong to do so; He is mistaken, however, in not seeming to have taken on board that the same thing can be said of Humane.

The subtitle of Humane is “How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.” And Moyn’s thesis depends on whether or not he is justified in claiming that the United States was ever committed to peace in the sense of seeking to end war itself. Yes, the heroes of his book—Moyn includes a beautiful quote from Martin Luther King, Jr. decrying the continued existence of war—believed that war not only should but could be annulled. And, again, if all Moyn means to argue is that the direction of international humanitarian law was not toward humanizing war, but making more and more types of war illegal, then yes, the United States abandoned the commitments to this aspect of international law that it had made since the end of World War II and, after 9/11, chose to fight a large number of wars, including, obviously, Afghanistan and Iraq. But on Moyn’s own account of America’s wars after the Vietnam War ended, above all in Central America, there was never a peace for the United States to abandon even if this meant Washington would have to defy the relevant corpus of international law. Moyn is correct when he shows in great and penetrating detail how, post-Vietnam, the military was increasingly interested in the concept and modalities of “humane” war. But that is common knowledge and, in anatomizing it, Moyn is largely telling us, at least those of us with even a passing familiarity of military affairs, nothing that we don’t already in know, at least in outline.

In any case, for one of the best-known contemporary critics of utopia, this is, well, awfully utopian. This would have been fine had Moyn applied the same probing lens to his own utopian hopes as he does to dismantling those of those who believe that there is about as much chance of abolishing war as there is of achieving personal immortality. Interestingly, a profound and unapologetic utopianism marks the work of a number of the most interesting contemporary scholars writing about war and atrocity. A. Dirk Moses’ fascinating study, The Problem of Genocide: Permanent Security and the Language of Oppression is, like Humane, a work of impeccable scholarship. But in his conclusion, Moses calls for the wholesale revaluation of international law that, among other things, would bar states from “attempt[ing] to dominate regions.” And Moyn seems genuinely to think that if humane war can be revealed as an existential danger to world peace, then what will follow will be the perpetual peace the United States supposedly abandoned.

Nowhere in Humane does Moyn make clear on what empirical grounds he bases this prediction, for surely some are required when one is making the case for why “humane war” is unacceptable. If it is just that Moyn hopes for this, he should have said so; After all, hope is a metaphysical category and both should not and cannot be falsified in the same sense that optimism, which is an empirical one, can be. Or if his argument is, finally, another expression of the old Kantian claim that what ought to be can be made to be, he should have declared that straightforwardly. In Just and Unjust Wars, Walzer speculated that it was not the regulation of war but rather ungoverned violence that would make criticism of war all but impossible—a line that Moyn himself cites in Humane, but never addresses satisfactorily. And yet surely a return to less humane war is far more likely than war’s abolition, no evidence that the world stands at the threshold of Immanuel Kant’s vision of Perpetual Peace. To the contrary, after decades of decline, the number of wars and their lethality have both begun to increase. And given the existential crisis that anthropogenic climate change is going to produce in the poor world, the most rational expectation is that the number of wars will continue its ascent.

Moyn’s horror at the realities of drone warfare is not misplaced. And his apprehensions about autonomous weapons systems may also be justified. But the final sentences of Humane that insist, “Perhaps the best way to think about ‘violence’ is metaphorically, occurring when ‘those in high places vaunt their power’ even when they inflict no pain,” and that, “brought to its logical conclusion, humane war may become increasingly safe for all concerned—which is also what makes it objectionable.” This brought back to me the memory of a particular day I spent in besieged Sarajevo in the late winter of 1992. I was walking down a residential street where the buildings were high enough so that one was safe from the snipers on the hills above us. But tall buildings cannot protect you from a mortar shell, and a block ahead of me, I heard one explode. The people around me and I threw ourselves to the ground, hiding behind car axles—said to afford the most protection—while we waited to see if a second shell would fall. After ten minutes, it was clear the danger had passed and several of us ran up to the site of the explosion. And there was the body of a teenager that had, quite literally, been blown to bits. Well, I picked up some of those bits, including a nose, and along with others put them in a plastic bag that a neighbor had brought down from his apartment. So, no, sorry, the best way to think about violence is not metaphorically, not then, not now, not ever.

THE U.S. defeat in Afghanistan concentrates the mind wonderfully, as the saying goes. For that country has been one of the central theaters in which the humane war Moyn finds so threatening has played out. Early in the book, Moyn even set out a kind of parable of the terrors of humane war in which he contrasts a peaceful wedding in New Canaan, Connecticut, with a wedding in Kandahar whose attendees are cut to pieces in a drone strike. But while there will undoubtedly be more drone strikes in Afghanistan, and in Iraq, and in a number of the other battle spaces of the Long War, the wars of choice in which the paradigm of humane war has dominated, and whose future so alarms Moyn, are unlikely to increase. And there will be no further open-ended wars of choice, with both drones and democracy-building, not least because the American people will not put up with them.

Another way to put this is that the endless war Moyn so fears wasn’t endless at all, it was just very, very long. This is not to say the future is brighter than Moyn thinks it is; Quite the reverse, it is likely to be darker. Moyn would have done well to look more closely at what is happening inside the U.S. military, most notably at what the senior leadership of the U.S. Navy is focused on. For them, interstate warfare is back, and counterinsurgency is, to borrow a line from Leonard Cohen, a shining artifact of the past. Instead, these blue water admirals are focused on the Taiwan Strait and on war with North Korea. In their eyes, rightly in my view, the Middle East has become a sideshow. This does not mean the U.S. military will repudiate its acceptance of a more humane interpretation of what is permissible in war. Nor does, again, it mean the drone strikes will end, or counterterrorism will become irrelevant to military and civilian planners. But while Moyn has been looking in the rearview mirror rather than ahead through the windshield, the military center of gravity has shifted to Asia. And there, it is not his sanitized war that is on the horizon; To the contrary, it is war in all its traditional brutality and inhumanity that looms ahead of us.

David Rieff is the author of At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; The Reproach of Hunger: Food, Justice and Money in the Twenty-First Century; and, most recently, In Praise of Forgetting: Historical Memory and Its Ironies.

Image: Reuters.