Vital Interests: Sam, thanks for joining us today on the Vital Interests forum. We will discuss your forthcoming book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War due out this September. It's a very engaging read with good historical context providing the antecedents to the realities of war and peace in our current time that you want us to understand.

I'm going to start off with some quotes from your prologue that set the tone of the book. You state: “Of all the people in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane...The American way of war is more and more defined by a near complete immunity from harm for one side and unprecedented care when it comes to harming other people on the other side." These are statements that entice a reader to want to find out what you mean when you say America has invented a new form of war.

In the first chapter, you start off writing about Leo Tolstoy coming to grips with his experience as a soldier in the Crimean War that led to his becoming a major anti-war advocate. Can you tell us why the events and personalities of the mid to end of the 19th century are important to understanding contemporary attitudes to war and peace?

Samuel Moyn: The book is intended to be a selective but sweeping account of the rise of what we now call International Humanitarian Law, with an endpoint in what I think of as a disturbing present. We've had lots of debates during the War on Terror about American non-compliance with the laws of war, notably during George W. Bush's presidency. I want to spotlight some of the dark sides of compliance, which gives us a picture of an American state that, unlike all the other great powers in the annals of warfare, actually did comply to a remarkable extent with new norms around humane war.

My suggestion is that, while cause for some celebration, because humane is better than inhumane war, the results also legitimize a new form of endless war, which is harder to see, and harder to oppose. So, I look back at the very inception of the first international treaty around the laws of war in a humane spirit, the First Geneva Convention in 1864. I was surprised to find that in the 19th century there was much more lively debate than there has been in our time about whether making war humane is actually a good thing. I focus on Leo Tolstoy because while he was wrong for most of modern history about where the laws of war would lead, he turns out, I think, to be prophetic and right about this form of war that Americans have pioneered in our time. So his open worries about the possibility of humane war are worth a look from our current perspective.

VI: Tolstoy was not alone in his concerns about the horrors of war. There were deep societal misgivings in Europe and America about the fate of soldiers on the battlefield who were killed in massive numbers or wounded and left untreated to cruel deaths. It was the welfare of soldiers that prompted the convening of the First Geneva Convention and the founding of the Red Cross. Can you talk about how the brutality of war on soldiers then morphed into questions about the morality of war and its impact on all aspects of Western society?

Samuel Moyn: Absolutely. In the first couple of chapters I try to identify, let's say, three kinds of responses to modern warfare. One that should not be forgotten is the case for intensifying it and leaving it brutal. Tolstoy's character in War and Peace, Prince Andrei, was of that frame of mind. It was widely shared. Carl von Clausewitz, while he liked intense war for its own sake, also made the claim that it left us all better off to make war intense and not to make it humane. Interestingly, the American founder of the Laws of War, Francis Lieber, has mistakenly been tagged as a prophet of humane war.  But it was actually Clausewitzian assumptions that led to Lincoln's General Order 100, the so-called Lieber Code, that leaves war brutal. For this tradition, the more brutal the war, the quicker it will end and in the aggregate all will be better off. So that was one position and it was canonized in important theory and even in legal documents like Lieber's Code.

The second response to modern warfare is the humanizing response and it is associated with Geneva and the Red Cross. It was initially concerned with the protection of wounded soldiers who were left to bleed out because of no treatment, and of dead bodies that were abandoned to rot on the battlefield. There is the familiar story of Henry Dunant, a Swiss gentleman, horrified by what he saw on the battlefield of Solferino in Northern Italy, who was motivated to found what became the Red Cross and assisted in organizing the First Geneva Convention. The Red Cross did struggle, after 1864, to inject even more humanity in the laws of war in the late 19th century as the laws of war were being more and more formalized in treaties. I don't think, contrary to some, that the humanizing agenda was very successful for a long time, but it's been successful in our time and that's why I think we need to look back at its origins.

Then we get the pacifying agenda, the third category. It's not as if you couldn't struggle for both more humane war in the short-term and more peace in the long run, but some of the earliest advocates of peace worried about humane war - Tolstoy most radically, and he made two main claims. One was that peace advocates would compromise with militaries and states in order to get more humane war. He said, "Remember, there can be bad compromises, like the many decades' attempt to make slavery more humane rather than stop it.” And then Tolstoy looked out at the audience—not at advocates of reform, but at the audience or beneficiaries of war—and said, "Look at people who will regard humane war as making it legitimate." And he analogized this crew to people who think that the fact their food is slaughtered humanely makes them good enough people, even though it might actually lead to more animals dying. He says, "Don't pursue this mistake; instead, struggle for peace." And he advocated conscientious objection, which was hugely influential on American history, down to the Vietnam era when Tolstoy was republished and soldiers cited Tolstoy as part of their rationale for dropping out of the military or not serving in the first place when they were called up.

What I try to do in the book is narrate how the peace movement really surged in the late 19th century. It is usually pursued as a less radical version of peace than the kind one that Tolstoy advocated. And it was the height of irony that their campaigns for arbitration and pacifying institutions—eventually, the United Nations—actually led to American empowerment in the world order as a guarantor of peace at the end of World War II. This is paradoxical because America did supply some peace, but also is exempt from any constraints in its own war-making as a result of that fateful gift to the world that the peace movement made.

VI: On these debates about the humane conduct of war in the mid and late 19th century, were they also sparked by the increasing human cost of war because of the proliferation of really destructive weaponry - highly explosive field artillery due to the invention of TNT as well as remarkably increased firepower from machineguns and more accurate rifles? Contemporaneous with debates to humanize war were the debates on the abolition of slavery. Like those that might argue for disarmament rather than banning war, there were those who argued for amelioration rather than the absolute banning of slavery. Was this the same general approach - to try to ban or limit machineguns and pass laws for better treatment of slaves was the best one could expect since outlawing war or abolishing slavery was just too difficult an objective?

Samuel Moyn: There's clearly a technological side to the history I'm telling. The book doesn't conclude with armed drones because we're already engaged with the recent fracas in Israel-Palestine where autonomous weapons systems were deployed, not just imagined.

The amazing thing is that most reformers, before abolition became a serious and credible option did in fact work on ameliorating slavery—and most law passed about slavery in the modern period was actually about making it kinder and gentler. Historians debate what role that had, but I follow the great African-American scholar Winthrop Jordan, who says, "We can't deny that this campaign to ameliorate slavery gave it a new lease on life." Perhaps that was because of these two moves that Tolstoy identifies thinking about slavery: one, again, is the advocate’s compromise, working with the slavers to eke out reforms without challenging their property rights and the very practice of slavery; and second, for a broader audience, a more humane version of slavery, especially if you were enmeshed in the market that helped enable, which was more tolerable to many than that which involved no limits on violence.

Tolstoy's genius was to say, "What if those mistakes that stabilized the inhuman system of slavery in retrospect are ones that we ought to keep ourselves from repeating when we confront this new meliorist agenda proposing to make war more humane? What if we stabilize wars when, instead, we could stop some? What if we make it endless precisely because it's become so humane?" War didn't become humane in Tolstoy's life, and the 20th Century doesn’t exactly confirm his fears. For political and technological reasons, war got worse—less humane, not more—in expectation and execution. The questions Tolstoy asked were premature. And I want to suggest that we have to answer them now because they don't really apply until our time when technology actually does enable the humanization of warfare. War is still hell, but in part because some of it is more humane.

VI: One of the other aspects of the advancing technology of warfare and the complexity of weaponry is the increasing cost of maintaining a credible military. You have an interesting segment in the book about Nicholas II, Czar of Russia. He became an advocate for peace because there was an arms race going on in Europe and it was bankrupting Russia. Nicholas II called for a peace conference to bring nations together to work out their differences. He even supported the notion of binding arbitration, taking a practice from the world of commerce and bringing it into statecraft where a panel of judges can rule, "Okay. You're right, you're wrong, do this, do that," and everybody would say, "Okay, fine. We'll abide by that” and war is avoided. So economic realities and concerns for budgets have been great motivators for peace as well as the horrors of armed conflict?

Samuel Moyn: Absolutely. The economic context of this is key and it again cuts in different directions. It's debated as to exactly why Nicholas shockingly called this peace conference which didn't lead to a peace treaty but instead led to laws of war known as the Hague Regulations, as a kind of consolation prize. There were also a lot of economic imperatives, especially, eventually during the 20th Century around domestic lobbies in the United States and across the Atlantic that stood to make tons of money from war.

There were some in the late 19th and early 20th Century, notably a Pole named Ivan Bloch who projected that war would become obsolete precisely because commerce would make it nonsensical. However, we also begin to see the perception that commercial interests, or some of them, stand to gain precisely from the persistence of war. This was even before the so-called military-industrial complex came about. Many of the American debates about why intervention in World War I occurred, and then whether to enter World War II, bore in part on arms makers and their influence in American politics, and whether that was a bad thing.

VI: That brings us to the early 20th Century and World War I. Here is a brutal and intractable conflict which blows out of the water all previous attempts to regulate the conduct of war. All treaties were aggregated, all ideas about making war more humane were forgotten - the carnage was severe with an unprecedented 20 million deaths just about equally divided between military personnel and civilians. What impact did this have on ideas about the inhumanity of war?

Samuel Moyn: It's worth mentioning you also have the first shadow of aerial bombardment, which I emphasize in part because the sky for Tolstoy represents the space of justice in War and Peace. In the 20th Century it's the reverse and it's the place from which inhumane war comes, with the massive air attacks of WWII. But then in our century, humane war arrives, symbolically in the form of armed drones.

World War I is so interesting because it's not clear which agenda, the humanizing or the pacifying agenda, it challenges more. It seems like both are invalidated by the carnage. And it's amazing, in retrospect, that partisans of either making war humane or ending war picked themselves up, dusted themselves off, and proceeded to hard work.

It was really the peaceniks who gained the most traction, and here's why. World War I was the culmination of a period in which you had white men killing white men across the Atlantic, with a lot of white women who were the main force behind a reinvigorated peace movement having lost their husbands, sons, and brothers. In the period after World War I, you do have a massive commitment to institutionalizing peace, rather than a prominent attempt to make war more humane which does seem ridiculous after the horrors.

Now I focus on an American lawyer named Quincy Wright who's a representative of what you could call the old internationalist school in this era. He thinks in terms of arbitration or some other treaty mechanism to give the sovereign equals in states some kind of higher judge to bring about an end of war – peace through law. That's what Wright thinks internationalism is going to be about, but in the end World War II puts America in a position of first among equals or really a global hegemon that does bring about a  peace across the Atlantic, one that makes the world wars something of the past.

But there are two consequential dark sides. One is that American wars can't be illegal. The second is that America — though it had strayed beyond its borders for sure and I have a section on the Philippines’ counterinsurgency — adopts a global war posture. Peace comes. But it is one for Europeans, specifically, or Whites in general, and it unleashes America to do the kind of dirty work that the European empires have been doing for centuries across a global color line. After World War II, America undertook policing that boundary, violently so.

VI: After committing America to fight in Europe in “the war to end all wars”, at the conclusion of fighting Woodrow Wilson proposed his famous Fourteen Points which presented his visions for an international world order that offered a roadmap for a lasting peace. The League of Nations would offer a mechanism for collective security. The entangling alliances, colonial competition, and arms race that dragged European countries into a devastating war would be replaced by free trade, national sovereignty for former colonies, and disarmament. But Wilson’s new world order vision was not well received back home. Was this because the peace movement was in disarray and the isolationists saw any US involvement in global affairs as dangerous for American interests?

Samuel Moyn: For sure. After Wilson departs the stage, the Senate fails to ratify America into the League of Nations. There are people wary of an internationalism that would commit the United States to intervene anywhere. Actually, some of them are quite happy with things like the Kellogg–Briand Pact—which it turns out doesn't really commit the United States to police anywhere else. Some of those we call “isolationist” love the Kellogg-Briand Pact because it seems to place constraints on others, but not on Americans themselves.

The same is true after World War II. There's a contentious debate about whether the United States should enter World War II, and that requires a big reorientation. But many of the old so-called isolationists like Robert Taft vote for the UN Charter because it's like the Kellogg-Briand Pact and allows the United States to do anything while being committed to nothing. They think that their old ideology, and their right of hemispheric policing, have been preserved. They can still have the Monroe Doctrine, keeping Europeans out of the Americas, and if Americans venture beyond that, no one can stop them, but also no one can force them.

The internationalism that emerged at the end of World War II is not the one that the fans of earlier internationalism believed in either. In an ironic way, the isolationists retain the upper hand because, as I tried to show, Quincy Wright doesn't see his dreams come true and America is never formally committed to international peace, except when it episodically intervenes as a matter of choice. By the time of the Vietnam War, internationalists like Wright were very concerned that America could become the aggressor in the international system, and yet there's no architecture to stop it. To an extent we should more honestly acknowledge, internationalism remains something of a dream in our own day, rather a real phenomenon that Donald Trump suddenly threatened.

VI: In the interwar years was the peace movement, the passivists, sidelined by other pressing social and political issues? Women in Europe and the United States advocated for voting rights and protections for industrial workers. Was there a feeling that other causes could produce more practical and immediate results than the long struggle for world peace?

Samuel Moyn: I would put it differently, that they provide a lot of legitimacy to states talking about how to bring peace. But states end up bringing peace on their own terms. Pacifism had a huge sway during the interwar period, even greater than before World War I. The debate is really about what it's going to take to achieve less war: what the institutional mechanism is, and whether states will submit to it.

In retrospect, we can see these peace-mongers as well-meaning, but they also allow for the UN Charter, which is really a great power policing order, to be mistaken as peace in our time. It was the peace movement of, by, and for Whites, headed by people like Andrew Carnegie, that got what it wanted in 1945. Meanwhile, others struggled in the Global South to indict the hypocrisies of ongoing war across the global color line—and to create a more robustly peaceful order. There hasn't been a great power war across the Atlantic, thanks to Pax Americana. The peace movement made that possible in its glories, but also in its shortcomings.

VI: Was the goal of the peace movement still to outlaw war, or was it what the UN Charter ended up focusing on, limiting the use of force, creating sanctions for aggression?

Samuel Moyn: I tried to portray a differentiated peace movement. Almost everyone in it, unlike Tolstoy, conceded to states the right of self-defense. The trouble is, once you've done that, you can describe anything as self-defense. But when the peace movement was stronger than now, it insisted that there be some way of restraining all kinds of powers — the weak, but also the strong. It's there that the UN Charter, I think, shows its greatest limits, since it allows for the condemnation of the aggression of the unpopular and weak, but the strong can always veto any claim that they're the aggressor.

The peace movement enjoyed a real pyrrhic victory in 1945, I would say, at least if we're concerned about the kinds of wars we've had in our time with great powers so prominently involved in interventions without really any limits—by decreasing limits since 1989, in fact, that few have complained about as we have targeted the inhumanity of war, not its incidence.

VI: This is immediately put to the test because even before the cessation of hostilities, the Soviet Union was aggressively staking out its sphere of influence in Europe and laying the groundwork for the Cold War, an ideological struggle between the West and the Soviet Union. Given this transformation of hostilities from armed conflict to conflicting ideologies, where we were fighting global communism around the world and the Soviets were fighting against global capitalism, how did that change the concept of armed conflict? Didn’t this ideological struggle also have a significant impact on the peace movement because many of those advocating for world peace were sympathetic to socialist and left-wing causes?

Samuel Moyn: Peace really did become the preserve of the far left—but we cannot forget the far right. It’s true that the Cold War made it very difficult for Americans and Westerners in general to champion peace. In part, this was because the Soviets tried to own that value, claiming to stand for peace in the international system, and intervening only “locally,” not with the scores of direct global interventions that the Americans conducted over the years.

More broadly, it was very difficult to think that peace could be more important than the basic ideological choice in the Cold War, since the real question was whether it was peace on American or Soviet terms. You saw that right away in the Korean War when the communist Kim Il-Sung crossed the 38th parallel in clear violation of the UN Charter. Because of the providential absence of the Soviet UN representative in the Security Council (he was stuck on Long Island), the United States gets a resolution passed to cite North Korea for aggression, thus justifying American intervention. The trouble is that once Douglas MacArthur has pushed the North Koreans back to the parallel, he decides to go for more.

The result is three years of war. Really, I think it is the most brutal war on some measures in the 20th Century. Even though it's in the direct aftermath of the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which we know and love (and America announced it would follow before formally ratifying in 1955), abuses were rife and the aerial toll of the war, in particular, was just horrendous. So you're right. The Cold War does make peace evanescent. But again, in this longer history I'm telling, it doesn't make transatlantic or White peace evanescent.

We can argue that the nuclear standoff in the European situation makes a transatlantic peace faulty, but it was real compared to what happened in Korea and Vietnam. The global ideological war really was visited on peoples of color across the world. The Cold War maintained that tradition, and it remains active through our time.

VI: The Cold War brought with it the message that we were fighting global communism in a struggle to preserve democratic and Christian values. Didn’t this introduce to the American public the reality of an endless war against the godless communists? George Kennan gave us the theory of necessary containment and the domino effect of country after country falling to communist dictators unless freedom-loving countries, meaning the US, took a stand. 

Samuel Moyn: You're right. I probably could've done more justice to the kind of rhetoric that the Cold War generated. I think it's not fair to say it was the first endless war that Americans fought because I do have a section on war against Native peoples. And we shouldn't forget the Philippines. 

But you're completely right that, in the succession of American enemies, communism is before terrorism. It is an ideological foe, and in an even clearer way. Still, one of my emphases is that we should ponder the fact that America didn't go a different way after 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet foe. America’s national security posture didn't pivot after the Cold War. Indeed, as I try to show, there were a lot of continuities after 1989.

VI: This Cold War, this global struggle against communism, finds its culmination in Vietnam. Here is a war which in the end totally engulfs the American public. It divided the country, revived the peace movement, and raised questions about the conduct of the military. The repercussions were substantial and continue to this day because this was a war that America lost in a humiliating way. From the beginning there were ethical and moral questions about American involvement in what had been an internal struggle of the Vietnamese people seeking independence from French colonial control. The antiwar movement made it clear that the United States got entangled in something they never should have been in, and our involvement cascaded from one mistake to another as was brought to light by the Pentagon Papers and other exposés. How did losing an unpopular and, perhaps immoral war, fought in an inhumane manner that took the lives of close to 50,000 American soldiers and millions of Vietnamese combatants and civilians, impact the attitude of Americans to what had been the limitless use of force by the United States?

Samuel Moyn: It is a fascinating event. In the broader sense, you're absolutely right that compared to Korea just 15 years before, in part because of generational change and values changes, it is really different in the way that Americans experienced it and debated it. There's little debate about the morality or legality of the Korean War. But when Vietnam came, as I emphasize, in the early years starting with the big escalation in the mid-60s, most attention was not on American atrocities. Compared to after 9/11, there's almost no mention of the Geneva Convention in public discourse—in part because Secretary of State Dean Rusk, unlike John Yoo, agrees that in the conduct of military operations in Vietnam the Geneva Convention is to be followed to the letter.

Instead, international lawyers—at first very few, but then in increasing numbers—are concerned that American military involvement in Vietnam is an aggressive war. After all, Americans had staged a trial for Nazis at Nuremberg in 1945-46, which centered on aggression in the international system. Even though the UN Security Council would never allow America to be put in the dock, there's a metaphorical debate across the world about what happens when America is the aggressor. Now, after My Lai, you might think this emphasis changes. My Lai is revealed in 1969, but what I try to argue is that it was radically different from the revelations in March 2004 of Abu Ghraib and American torture and so forth. During the Vietnam period, in which there had been antiwar politics, concern about atrocity adds fuel to the fire and helps bring the war which has been denounced as aggressive for years to an end.

The later atrocities lead, on the contrary, in a different and perhaps opposite direction. Instead of increasing sentiments for ending a war, our concern for atrocity ends up helping to remove the bug from the program of endless war. We can attest to the reality that the Global War on Terror has definitely not ended. So my concern in focusing on Vietnam is principally to look at how different it was in argument and outcome. I also try to show that, because of the ethics of honor it involves but also the public relations hit that it took, the US military engaged in something extraordinary, which I call self-humanization. It signs up for fighting humanely, something I believe no great power military had ever done. It’s easier for West Europeans to moralize war, because decolonization is over and they increasingly have no one to fight, accepting American protection as they have. They might light the path to humane war, but I document Americans going down it, since they combine global war and humane standards for the first time.

VI: You're saying one of the consequences of Vietnam was that the American military pivoted toward adopting some legal constraints on the use of force? Jean Pictet, another Swiss gentleman who worked for the International Committee of the Red Cross, combined the ideas about the laws of armed conflict and the conduct of hostilities into a field that was termed International Humanitarian Law (IHL) which became a significant focus of study and practice of international lawyers. You state that military lawyers, Judge Advocate General officers (JAGs), took on IHL principles as they played an increasingly important role in US military strategy and tactics.

Samuel Moyn: The '70s are a big period. I was born then, but I have, in many books, tried to look closely at why it was so pivotal. I find it crucial in this story, too, for a few reasons. One is that the Swiss do finally gain control over the laws of war and make them more humane. I don't think that the content of the laws of war, especially when it comes to air war, really made, even on paper, war more humane—and the military ignored it anyway. What I call the “grand mutation” in content and practice happens with shocking recency.

The '70s are key in part because the content becomes more humane. There's finally a distinction between combatant and non-combatant and there are new rules about proportionality in attacks, including air strikes. There's also Jean Pictet’s rebranding of the whole field as if the point of the laws of war is to make war humane—which had been deeply false, but it became more true, thanks to his fiction. Finally, you get Americans in the mix. Two groups, humanitarians and militaries, are dancing the same dance starting in this period.

The humanitarians are not an anti-war movement, but they begin to monitor wars for violations of international humanitarian law. You even have the military, especially the Judge Advocate General lawyers, get involved in the conduct of war. The First Gulf War is an amazing event because these two forces converge. It's the first international war that Human Rights Watch monitors for compliance with international humanitarian law. And military lawyers help pick targets for the first time to make sure American war is “humane.”

VI: When you say they “monitor”, did the US military allow Human Rights Watch observers to go along with their forward forces? Were they embedded?

Samuel Moyn: No they weren't embedded—although interestingly, when Human Rights Watch decided it was going to do this, it went to the Pentagon and asked for help with IHL from the military because it was a human rights organization that had to make a choice whether to get involved with war and learn what that might mean. So you have this convergence that I think would have deeply troubled Tolstoy because it's is exactly the kind of compromise with humane slavery that he indicted and worried about. Finally, it's happening, as humanitarians and militaries bicker not about whether war happens but how it is fought.

VI: It's interesting about humanitarian intent and monitoring but during the First Gulf War, there was a controversial air strike that obliterated a convoy of withdrawing Iraqi forces and civilians that were leaving Kuwait, having said, "We're finished. We surrender." This was a significant inhumane attack, bordering on a war crime, but nobody talked about it and I am not sure if Human Rights Watch ever reported on it?

Samuel Moyn: I'm with you in general. The first response I get to my arguments are either that war can't become humane by definition or that Americans aren't taking IHL seriously. I guess it depends on what change you think is interesting. You can always locate the remaining inhumanity. Of course, the problem with the war on terror, from many perspectives, is its inhumanity. I just want to focus on the fact that even if all that's true, with change over time, we get unprecedented concern with and legitimation through international humanitarian law and it's being followed to an unprecedented extent, even if we think that it's inadequate or it's being ignored too often.

VI: During these times the US military is involved in limited tactical actions as well as supporting proxy wars, but then you have a dominant strategic war preparation which focuses on nextgen nuclear weaponry, more capable hypersonic ICBMs and maintaining Cold War notions of first strike readiness and mutual assured destruction (appropriately labelled MAD). There are international treaties and agreements like the new START with Russia that do try to introduce some degree of arms control and nuclear non-proliferation. These strategic realities re-enforce ideas of endless war but how do they support the movement to make war more humane? After all, isn't there the constant threat from so-called weapons of mass destruction?

Samuel Moyn: Well, sure. Going back to our earlier discussion, it would be unfair to say that control of force just dies. I think you're right that the way it remained alive is in part through the non-proliferation agenda. That is not exactly about limiting the recourse to force, but trying to take certain kinds of weapons off the table. We can talk about how far that succeeded. I think it succeeded more with some reduction of nuclear weapons, but especially with the kinds of weapons that America didn't plan to use any longer.

You're entirely right that, from the late 19th century, the laws of war are about prohibiting different kinds of increasingly lethal weapons. You're surely correct that this proceeds after World War II. It never, obviously, abolishes nuclear weapons. There is a famous International Court of Justice decision on nuclear weapons that can't bring itself to say that they are per se indiscriminate and therefore illegal under law of war principles. But I focus elsewhere than this important story because I'm anticipating what happens under Bush and Obama, which becomes principally a story about detention and, later in response to debates about detention, aerial killing.

There, the 1970s make a huge difference because of this new rule around proportionality, namely that if the likely collateral damage you cause outweighs the military advantage, you anticipate, you can't strike. That is totally novel because it would have ruled out lots of things in the past, notably the air war in Europe and Japan during World War II, and lots of things before.

VI: Wasn't the military's answer to restriction due to rules of proportionality the development of extremely precise weapons that they could then use to destroy a building but not a whole neighborhood?

Samuel Moyn: Absolutely. I tried to show that from the beginning of airpower, there was a team that said, "This will make war humane," even as there was another team that said, "No, the whole point of airpower is to bomb civilians." The first team only gets the upper hand after Vietnam.

VI: And terror - because the predominant casualties of aerial bombing are civilians.

Samuel Moyn: Yes certainly - terror was a big part of it. I do try to show consistently, with the best historians, that all of this type of air power was pioneered on Brown people in the colonies. But, for all of the faults of drones, they do allow for some level of precision that does finally make humane war credible in a way it really never has been. The same is true of teched-up special forces who began to operate in an unprecedented number of places during the Obama and Trump years. Otherwise, the forces among humanitarians and militaries and their well-meaning audience I study would be far less interesting. They would be useful idiots for the continuation of the same old carnage, rather than ethical pioneers of a frightening new reality of humane control. 

VI: Let's move forward to the post-9/11 times. 9/11 was a horrendous attack on the homeland by terrorists, non-state actors, enemy combatants - whatever the language that the Bush administration came up with to call them. Lawyers went to work immediately to figure out "Okay, what kind of attack is this and what is the appropriate response?" With little delay or much input for the lawyers, the Bush administration got congressional authorization to wage a “Global War on Terror”  and attacked Afghanistan, which was seen to be okay. Then the US pivoted to undertake a full-scale invasion of Iraq. This blatant American aggression was based on dubious accounts of yellowcake uranium from Africa, aluminum tubing used for centrifuges. mobile biological weapons labs, and famously Condoleezza Rice at the UN stating, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."

I recently had a conversation with Mark Hibbs on how the IAEA’s inspection and verification role in controlling nuclear weapons proliferation is being severely eroded because of growing distrust between authoritarian states like China and Russia and the United States. Peace does not seem to be on any horizon and this idea of endless wars predicated on ideological struggles seems destined to be our future.

How does that play into a new insecurity - not only fear of global terrorism but also great powers competition which is already being called a new Cold War?

Samuel Moyn: Let me say a couple of things about my account of the war on terror before thinking about more of the future and the coming Cold War with China and so forth. The basic point of my book is to insist that the central failure of the war on terror was, first and foremost, the failure to control force on the international stage. This does bode ill for the future and there were some reasons for this.

VI: Was one that the United States wanted to exact revenge for the 9/11 attacks and there was no other power or international entity that was going to deny this use of force?

Samuel Moyn: For sure, without any checks. The UN Charter regime did not allow them, as we have discussed. After 9/11, I also want to place the focus on how the humanization of the war played in. First, you have some people who rank it as the most important item on the agenda, instead of the control of force. Then you have the state gaining legitimation from saying that, if the wars are humane (though endless), they are morally upright.

It's for this reason that I'm intending to have a very heretical or subversive take on John Yoo. For me, he's significant because he had to deny the relevance of IHL and other standards to American War, which had not been necessary before. He's like a testament to the strength of the expectations around humane war. Almost like at the last minute, he tried to lift them. Now, of course, he also messed with the UN Charter, but those memos didn't get attention - they weren't deemed toxic. Barack Obama didn't order them ripped up, and they remain good to this day.

Then I focus on John Yoo's opponents, who I think were lured honorably into a demand that America follow the rules of war. But that had the paradoxical effect of legitimating the results. Obama claimed lots of times that he had no choice but to fight this war, but at least it was clean and humane. In fact, he provided a shout-out to Henry Dunant, the Red Cross founder, in his Nobel Peace Prize address in 2009. And Obama made the same argument at the National Defense University, his main address about drone warfare.

Now, facing the future, you're right that we could be heading into an era of rising belligerency, or at least rising tension characteristic of the Cold War era. The war on terror’s relaxation of the rules concerning force—a relaxation that America has sponsored—leaves a very troubling legacy in this regard. Any great power can claim that it has its terrorists. And of course, China is already doing that internally. Chinese treatment of the Uighurs is justified in war on terror terms.

VI: And the Russians have always had people sent to the gulags because they were labelled subversives and a threat to the nation.

Samuel Moyn: Of course. I guess the interesting question about the future is whether it will be fair for the Chinese to ask why they should follow rules containing war if America never did. It is also interesting to wonder whether any coming conflict will be humane or not. Maybe it's so existential that all of the expectations around the conduct of hostilities that reformers and militaries have built up are thrown out the window; and, far more forcefully than during the war on terror, Americans will start crying for blood, instead of demanding humane warfare. I don't know, but it's possible. Yet I think that the expectation that war be fought humanely is entrenched enough that even the Chinese—or their robots—will have to follow the rules.

VI: When futurists talk about the coming reality of awesome autonomous weapons - swarms of armed drones and robot armies capable of great destruction - this does in some respect support your notion of more humane wars since human soldiers will no longer be on the battlefield although certainly civilians more often than not will be the new targets. There have always been arms races to produce more lethal weapons that cause more casualties as well as a global arms bazaar where all categories of weapons can be acquired. Annually billions of dollars’ worth of sophisticated weapons are developed and sold by the United States and other Western Powers to their “friends” with Russia and China selling to other countries to gain influence and support. 

Without a doubt we can say that the world is armed to the teeth as it has never been before. Much of this weaponry in the hands of autocratic leaders who have no qualms about using  force against their own people as well as insurgents pledged to disruption. This offers a picture of a very unstable world where armed conflict is a norm. With no hegemon able to maintain a peaceful world order, what are the prospects for limiting wars or establishing anything that can be characterized as peace?

Samuel Moyn: Right. Your litany just leaves me idealistic for the peaceniks I try to dramatize. They surged in the world's biggest day of peace activism right before the Iraq War. Other than that, in my lifetime, they have been peripheral. Yet, I try to show they really mattered in Vietnam and above all, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Their work not only didn't get fully done, but it helped to leave behind new problems. As we have discussed, “American peace” involves a lot of global war (very much including when America is responsible for the tools of war that others use through the arms trade). I think we need to move beyond our obsession with making war humane, to revive peace and pick it up and take it as far as we can in the future.

VI: Where do you see these movements coming from? Are they going to be grassroots like the “Ban the Bomb” protests in the '50s or the “Give Peace a Chance” offshoot from the counterculture movement of the '60s and ‘70s? Do you see the kind of global social solidarity advocating for peace that is now focusing on climate change challenges? 

Samuel Moyn: I do and I think there are signs of it already in recent political campaigns. I emphasize that not just Barack Obama but even Donald Trump too campaigned as anti-war candidates. (Each also became an endless war president.) There’s clearly some emerging constituency, especially the younger you get, for an America with a different national security posture. It's early days, though, for a peace agenda; and it will require all comers and some compromise. It has so far to go that we can't guess the exact form it will take.

VI: Sam, we are coming to the end of our time and like to end our conversations on a positive note. I do hope that you're right, that there is a movement which understands the dangerous realities of our times and will come together to rein in endless war and initiate a new global peace agenda. Your book certainly provides the needed historical perspective that has shaped contemporary attitudes to peace and clearly demonstrates how waging more humane war is not the answer. I am sure Leo Tolstoy would highly recommend it.

Samuel Moyn: Thank you, John.

Samuel Moyn is Henry R. Luce Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and a Professor of History at Yale University. He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. His most recent books are Christian Human Rights (2015), based on Mellon Distinguished Lectures at the University of Pennsylvania in fall 2014, and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His newest book is Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021). Over the years he has written in venues such as Boston Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dissent, The Nation, The New Republic, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal.