April 21, 2022 41The national reluctance to scruti-
nize the aims of war reflects the aura
of sanctity surrounding them. For well
over a century American warmakers
tried to hallow military ambition with
moral significance. With the fall of the
Soviet Union, policymakers’ realiza-
tion that the US was “the world’s only
super power” encouraged them to make
even more grandiose assertions of righ-
teousness. Humanitarianism became
the default justification for US mili-
tary action abroad— including the war
on terror, which was billed in part as
a crusade to save Muslim women and
democratize the Middle East. To live
up to their moral pretenses, military
interventions had to be conducted hu-
manely as well, reinforcing claims for
the humanitarian purpose of the con-
flict and drawing public attention away
from other motives.
A major one, often exposed by
muckrakers but rarely mentioned by
policymakers, is economic. Wars make
a lot of people very rich. Moyn men-
tions this issue just once in passing,
but it is difficult to overestimate its im-
portance. When the cold war ended in
1991, an army of lobbyists remained in
Washington to urge the continuation of
enormous defense budgets. The claim
that the new military goal was to res-
cue innocent victims abroad provided
a moral gloss for sustaining spending
at cold war levels. Humanitarian war
could be good business, as has long
been evident in the balance sheets of
weapons vendors as well as the bank
accounts of military contractors and
counterterrorism consultants. It also
resonated with the exceptionalist faith
that America was “the indispensable
nation,” as Madeleine Albright, Bill
Clinton’s secretary of state, announced;
we were destined to have a redemptive
part in global history.
While Moyn scants the economic
question, he does recognize that the
hubris of the world- savers deserves to
be confronted. And that, he believes,
is not going happen as long as political
conversation remains fixed on abuses
of war rather than how to avoid or end
it. Rebranding the war on terror as hu-
mane has buried the essential question:
Why are we waging it at all?Moyn’s historical account begins
with Henry Dunant, the Swiss gentle-
man who founded the Red Cross. Like
most people in the 1860s, Dunant ac-
cepted war as an inevitable feature of
the human condition, but he wanted
the wounded to be cared for humanely.
He won the first Nobel Peace Prize in- At that point he was an old man,
and his handlers did their best to blur
the boundaries between his advocacy
of humane war and outright pacifism,
which by then had become by far the
more popular view.
Perhaps the chief force for legitimat-
ing pacifism was Bertha von Suttner’s
novel of 1889, Lay Down Your Arms,
which became the Uncle Tom’s Cabin
of the antiwar movement. Suddenly
the dead and wounded were no lon-
ger faraway, faceless figures but “the
husbands, sons, and brothers of mod-
ern women no longer resigned to their
losses,” as Moyn writes. The book sold
more than 200,000 copies in German,
was translated into sixteen languages,
and changed how people reflected on
war and peace (Suttner herself won
the Peace Prize in 1905). “For the first
time,” Moyn observes, “the inevita-
bility of war in human affairs was not
taken for granted.”
Yet both the peace movement and
the push to regulate war were mostly
confined to hostilities among “civi-
lized” white Christian nations. What
few restrictions there were on whether
and how wars were fought remained
profoundly racialized. There were
no prohibitions against mass murder
of “uncivilized” people and no legal
ways to constrain colonial wars, which
took place within empires and there-
fore constituted internal, not inter-
national conflict— counterinsurgency
combat against rebellious subjects.
For the United States, that meant
killing and kidnapping the indigenous
inhabitants of North America. The
Civil War was an exception; the colo-
nizers fought white people like them-
selves. The Union Army rules of war
were based on the code of conduct
devised by Francis Lieber, a Prussian
émigré to America. Following Clause-
witz’s dictum that brutal wars were
best, the Lieber Code allowed anyone
deemed a partisan to be shot on sight.
Moyn might also have mentioned that
the Civil War left 50,000 civilians
dead, most of them Southern victims
of the Union’s scorched- earth cam-
paigns that laid waste to wide swaths
of the countryside— Philip Sheridan’s
Shenandoah Valley campaign, Wil-
liam Tecumseh Sherman’s march from
Atlanta to the sea. After the Southern
surrender, such tactics were broadened
and intensified in the mop- up opera-
tion against the Plains Indians. In 1873,
when the Modoc leader Kintpuash, in
California, tricked General Edward
Canby into a meeting, then killed him,
Sherman sanctioned the “utter exter-
mination” of the Modoc tribe.
Exterminationist tactics worked well
i n i mp er i a l wa r s when one side p o s s e s s e d
technological supremacy and the other
was deemed less than human. When
Adna Chaffee arrived in the Philippine
Islands in 1901, fresh from putting down
the Boxer Rebellion against “foreign
devils” in China, he announced, “Mur-
der is almost a natural instinct with the
Asiatic, who respects only the power of
might.... Human life all over the East
is cheap.” This racism animated the sup-
pression of Asian insurgencies from the
Filipino uprising of the early 1900s to
the Vietnam War.
The Great War brought new horrors
to the fore— not only the spectacle of
soldiers slaughtering one another at
close range with modern weapons but
new ways of inflicting pain on civilian
populations. The “most gross moral
wrongdoing” of the World War I era,
Moyn believes, was not the German
atrocities in Belgium but the British
blockade of the Continent. It was en-
tirely legal under international law and
left half a million civilians dead from
starvation, without arousing wide-
spread humanitarian protest. This
history needs to be remembered amid
the current American obsession with
economic sanctions as the humane al-
ternative to military force. After the
Versailles Treaty, the postwar peace
movement flourished as never before;
antiwar activists like the US politi-
cal scientist Quincy Wright sought
enduring structures of international
arbitration, and others sought sim-
ply to outlaw war, as in the Kellogg-
Briand Pact of 1928. Mere dreams, it
turned out.Militarists’ aspirations fared better.
Among the most fantastic were those
involving air war, which became a
go- to gambit for pacifying anticolonial
resistance across the globe. Gas bombs,
a particular favorite of Winston Chur-
chill, promised to perform “an almost
bloodless surgery,” a British interna-
tional lawyer said. The fantasy of sur-
gical precision has survived down to the
present, but not everyone cared about
it. In 1927 the strategist Elbridge Colby,
whose son William became director of
the CIA, predicted a new age of total war
where “there were no non- combatants.”
That war arrived soon enough. After
Pearl Harbor the American pursuit
of global military supremacy “dealt as
humbling a defeat to internationalist
visions of peace through law, especially
the dream of arbitration, as to ‘isola-tion,’” Moyn writes. From World War
II forward, in much public discourse,
“internationalism” became little more
than a euphemism for a commitment to
maintaining the Pax Americana.On September 1, 1939, when the
Germans began bombing unarmed ci-
vilians in Warsaw, they “shocked the
conscience of humanity,” according
to Franklin Roosevelt. By 1944 the
Americans and the British were ignit-
ing firestorms in cities across Germany.
One US officer worried that it would
“convince the Germans that we are the
barbarians they say we are.” The war in
the Pacific was a race war for the Amer-
icans as the war in Europe was for the
Germans. Even before the incineration
of Japanese cities began, the GI skull
collections and the nonchalant execu-
tions of civilians including women and
children made it clear that the Pacific
theater “was ‘Indian country’ all over
again,” as Moyn observes. There were
plenty of good reasons for The New
York Times to conclude, in 1944, that
war could not be made humane— “it
can only be abolished.” The task was
to end the dirty business in a way that
ensured “no city shall ever be bombed
again.”
What was astonishing was that any-
one still thought that goal was reach-
able. During the run- up to the war,
pacifism had been tarred with the brush
of “appeasement” and almost vanished
altogether during the fighting. Wright
and other champions of arbitration nev-
ertheless labored to keep international
law involved in creating a peacefulpostwar world. Peacemakers, they ar-
gued, had to create the means for iden-
tifying and punishing aggressors. This
was the background to the Nuremberg
trials— they put perpetrators on trial
for starting an aggressive war, not for
committing war crimes. War was the
crime. There were attempts to protect
civilians and prohibit torture in Com-
mon Article 3 of the Geneva Con-
ventions of 1949, but after the atomic
bomb, as one international lawyer said,
“the humanitarian Conventions read
like hypocritical nonsense.”
Meanwhile the high purpose of the
United Nations was redefined away
from enforcing international law to im-
plicitly ratifying the domination of the
world by two rivalrous superpowers. If
you were a permanent member of the
Security Council, as both the US and
USSR were (and the US and Russia of
course are), you you could veto any res-
olution that labeled you an aggressor. If
you were a country that made the rules,
then you could make a rules- based order
work for you, as the US demonstrated
by repeatedly violating the sovereignty
of other nations— Iran, Guatemala,
Congo, Chile... — throughout the cold
war without ever being held to account.
One brief exception to this narrative
of acquiescence was what Moyn calls
“a period of clarity in the early 1970s,
when many people, far more than ever
since, were prepared to see government
officials and US citizens themselves as
potential and actual evildoers.” People
were not uniquely virtuous, in other
words, merely because they were Amer-
icans. In “that crystalline moment of
insight,” doubts about how US soldiers
conducted themselves in Vietnam were
linked to larger disagreements about
whether they should be there at all, as
well as an even larger skepticism about
whether and when (if ever) foreign wars
served US interests. Peace was briefly
seen as a legitimate policy goal.
This became apparent when the
uncovering of the My Lai massacre
intensified demands to end the US
presence in Vietnam and not merely to
reform military practice. Critics of the
war saw the incident as a natural con-
sequence of the joint US–South Viet-
namese military strategy that included
bombing the North Vietnamese “back
to the Stone Age,” as General Curtis
LeMay recommended; torturing and
killing prisoners; imprisoning political
opponents of the South Vietnamese
government in “tiger cages”; and as-
sassinating civilians suspected of Viet
Cong sympathies. Invoking rules of
war or international law amid such sys-
tematic violations seemed grotesquely
inadequate. For antiwar activists, from
the legal scholar Richard Falk to Mar-
tin Luther King Jr., the war itself, as
Falk put it, was “an all- embracing war
crime.”
But that “crystalline moment” soon
ended. After the Vietnam debacle,
anti war sentiments softened and slid to-
ward civilizing the methods of fighting.
Telford Taylor, counsel for the prosecu-
tion at Nuremberg, provided historical
legitimacy in Nuremberg and Vietnam
(1970) by framing the trials as a judg-
ment against atrocities, not aggression.
This was a fallacious reinterpretation,
in Moyn’s view, but it created a heroic
lineage for humane war. At about the
same time, the Swiss jurist Jean Pictet
was conjuring what he called “inter-
national humanitarian law” by draft-
ing two additional protocols to theHenry Dunant, circa 1859Süddeutsche Zeitung Photo/AlamyLears 40 42 .indd 41 3 / 23 / 22 3 : 58 PM