42 The New York ReviewGeneva Conventions— militaries were
prohibited from targeting civilians and
indeed anything that risked excessive
collateral damage. (The US has signed
and ratified the conventions but failed
to ratify the protocols.)
During the 1980s, as Reagan em-
barked on imperial adventures in
Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala,
and Honduras, various human rights
groups were formed in response. Hel-
sinki Watch created Americas Watch,
which later became Human Rights
Watch, led by Kenneth Roth. “We
weren’t against war per se,” Roth re-
called. It was, says Moyn, a “reason-
able position,” but he wonders “what
was the effect of demanding humane
war if there were fewer and fewer left
demanding no war?”
The answer would come shortly. In
1991, after the brisk and painless (for
Americans) victory in the first Gulf
Wa r, the Wash i ngton establ ish ment
was euphoric. As President Bush the
first said, “The specter of Vietnam
has been buried forever in the desert
sands.” Prior talk of a “peace dividend”
from the conclusion of the cold war sub-
sided. Overseas military actions multi-
plied. As Moyn reports, “More than 80
percent of all US military interventions
abroad since 1946 came after 1989.”
In seeking to understand this ex-
traordinary statistic, he poses a series of
questions. Were the multiplying inter-
ventions due to “the accumulating dan-
gers of a globalizing world?” Or was it
the illusion of quick entrances and exits
in the Middle East created by the ap-
parent ease of victory in the Gulf? Sub-
sequent experience suggests the latter
surmise is closer to the truth. To which
Moyn adds a third, equally provoca-
tive: “Or was it perhaps the pressure of
a ‘military- industrial’ complex that in-
sisted on fighting enemies (albeit more
humanely now) to justify its perpetua-
tion?” This is the only place where he
mentions the ever- present influence of
the civilian army that exists in symbi-
osis with the military one— the swarm
of lobbyists, corporate profiteers, con-
tractors, and consultants who help to
sustain endless war. His neglect of the
subject is puzzling: the billions of dol-
lars to be made should inform any for-
eign policy debate. But try to find any
sustained discussion of it in The New
York Times or The Washington Post.Bill Clinton came to the presidency
at the unipolar moment, just after the
Soviet Union’s dissolution in 1991.
It was a propitious time for imperial
expansion in the name of universal
values. Even as the Warsaw Pact dis-
banded and the justification for NATO
collapsed, Clinton began the policy
that Bush the second continued—the
eastward advance of NATO, which sea-
soned observers from George Kennan
to Henry Kissinger to William Burns
all warned would provoke Russian se-
curity concerns.* (Recent events have
demonstrated their prescience.) While
Albright and her colleagues itched to
put their “superb military” to work,
proponents of putatively benign inter-
vention abroad offered opportunities.
Post–cold war humanitarian thought
put the Holocaust at the moral center
of World War II, a move reinforced bythe recasting of Nuremberg as anti-
atrocity rather than anti- aggression.
“The result was not a demand for peace
but for interventionist justice,” Moyn
observes. The justice could even be
preemptive, if catastrophe seemed to
loom for a victimized population. As
conflict in the Balkans raised the pros-
pect of ethnic cleansing and potential
genocide, interventionists summoned
Holocaust memories to prod Clinton
into action. Eventually the US led the
NATO bombing of Serbia to prevent
threatened mass killings in Kosovo. The
absence of UN Security Council autho-
rization made the incursion illegal, but
Clinton defended it as a “just and nec-
essary war.” By and large, the press and
the intelligentsia agreed. It is not clear
whether Moyn thinks the intervention
actually prevented genocide— which
remains a matter for conjecture. For
him, the Balkan wars reinforced a new
consensus that later encouraged accep-
tance of a war on terror and reserved
criticism only for its cruelties.
Not everyone was so accepting.
When George W. Bush announced his
intent to use military commissions to
try suspected terrorists, Michael Rat-
ner pronounced the policy “the death
knell for democracy in this country.”
Ultimately his critique was upheld by
the Supreme Court, which ruled that
Common Article 3 of the Geneva Con-
ventions forbade Bush’s military com-
missions and that federal courts could
issue writs of habeas corpus to end pre-
ventive detention.
Yet according to Moyn, Ratner and
other shrewd critics of the war on terror
were led into the “misguided strategy”
of amending rather than ending war,
as if the two positions were mutually
exclusive. Why mightn’t Ratner simply
have been trying to play the bad hand
he had been dealt, adjusting to the
ideological straitjacket that opponents
of the war on terror had to wear during
its early years? Ultimately his career
seemed to show that a desire to amelio-
rate the effects of war can coexist with
a consistently antiwar perspective.
The Center for Constitutional
Rights, which Ratner led for much of
his career, was, unlike Human Rights
Watch and Amnesty International,
opposed to the first Gulf War and the
war in Serbia, not merely the conduct
of them. Ratner and his colleague Jules
Lobel attacked the malleability of hu-
manitarian arguments for intervention
head- on, observing that even Hitler
insisted he had intervened “militarily
in a sovereign state because of claimed
human rights abuses.” The worst sort
of war was likely to occur “when war-
makers claimed uplifting reasons for
embarking on it,” Moyn writes.
After the invasion of Afghanistan,
however, Ratner redirected his ener-
gies, now dealing exclusively with those
sometimes innocent people who were
swept up in the conflict, imprisoned, and
tortured. With the revelations surround-
ing Abu Ghraib, objections to prisoner
abuse began to seem more persuasive
than abstract debates about the rights
and wrongs of intervention. Restoring
the taboo against torture, according
to Moyn, meant that “no taboo was
constructed containing the war itself.”
But he does not explain why one taboo
should necessarily supplant the other.Obama accelerated the move toward
“humane” war. Mistaken for a man ofpeace, he used his oratorical gifts to en-
courage his audiences to see whatever
they hoped to see in him and ultimately
saved the war on terror by sanitizing it.
His lawyers built on the Bush adminis-
tration’s legal sophistries, claiming the
authority to extend war indefinitely,
while he turned to battle plans that left
no footprints (drones) or only light ones
(special forces) and began “a spree of
humane killing on which the sun might
never set in space or end in time,” Moyn
writes. This clean war on terror was as
illegal as the dirty one had been.
However decorous the new tactics
were perceived to be, they continued
to violate international laws requiring
both an imminent threat of armed at-
tack and the consent of states where
terrorists were allegedly located. CIA
director John Brennan insisted there
was no need to make a case for self-
defense every time we struck at al-
Qaeda. This presumed “an astonishing
license to kill”— whether families or
whole neighborhoods— and often to
kill people who had never been near al-
Qaeda and who had never attacked the
US or posed a serious threat. The con-
stant menace of drone strikes created a
world of permanent dread.
At home, Obama succeeded in mak-
ing war seem remote and detached
from the messy business of body bags
and bitterly contested occupation,
largely by reasserting America’s singu-
lar virtue, underwritten by a renewed
commitment to humane warmak-
ing. “We” had “tortured some folks,”
Obama allowed in a moment of tele-
vision contrition, but, as Moyn puts it,
we were “not the kind of people who
would ever do so again.”
Until the current crisis in Ukraine,
the most striking omission from foreign
policy discourse has been the increasing
risk of nuclear war— the kind that can
never be made humane. Though few in
the media seem to know it except The
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the
likelihood of nuclear war has risen to
cold war heights, perhaps higher, for a
variety of reasons, beginning with the
ever- present possibility of accidental
missile launch but also including the
accelerated modernization of nuclear
weapons (begun by Obama, continued
by Trump) and the renewal of cold war–
style confrontation with Russia, the
world’s only other nuclear superpower—
now escalating with terrifying speed in
Ukraine, fueled by ignorant and irre-
sponsible calls for a no- fly zone.
Moyn insists that preventing and end-
ing war should be our primary foreign
policy goals. Yet the US has failed to
put a cease- fire and a neutral Ukraine
at the forefront of its policy agenda
there. Quite the contrary: it has dra-
matically increased the flow of weapons
to Ukraine, which had already been de-
ployed for eight years to suppress the
separatist uprising in the Donbas. US
policy prolongs the war and creates the
likelihood of a protracted insurgency
after a Russian victory, which seems
probable at this writing. Meanwhile,
the Biden administration has refused
to address Russia’s fear of NATO encir-
clement. Sometimes we must conduct
diplomacy with nations whose actions
we deplore. How does one negotiate
with any potential diplomatic partner
while ignoring its security concerns?
The answer, of course, is that one does
not. Without serious American diplo-
macy, the Ukraine war, too, may well
become endless. Q*See Fred Kaplan, “‘A Bridge Too
Far,’ ” The New York Review, April 7,
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