Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

The effort to make warfare more “civilized” has sapped energy from the peace movement and led to America’s “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to this provocative history from Yale law professor Moyn (Not Enough). Highlighting Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s belief that “making war more humane only allowed it to break out more often or drag on endlessly,” Moyn points out that many of the international laws established in the 19th century failed because they “didn’t apply or were ignored when it came to counterinsurgent and colonial war.” After WWII, the threat of U.S. air power helped to maintain peace in Europe, even as America went to war in Asia. The revelation of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam “added fuel to the fire of America’s last major peace movement,” while public outrage over the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq only “diverted [Americans] from deliberating on the deeper choice they were making to ignore constraints on starting war in the first place.” Moyn also sheds light on the rise of drone warfare and “targeted killings” during the Obama administration. Unfortunately, he doesn’t fully wrestle with the differences between wars of aggression and those of self-defense, which somewhat undermines his case. The result is a stimulating yet inconclusive rethink of what it means to regulate war. (Sept.)