Moyn’s central insight is that the quest for humane war, whether by deploying smarter weaponry or making new rules, has obscured the more basic task of opposing war itself: “Increasingly we live without antiwar law. We fight war crimes but have forgotten the crime of war.” In tracing the efforts to humanize war, Moyn casts new light on much of the surrounding historical landscape—not only peace movements and the divisions within them but also the assumptions of the warmakers themselves.
Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides. A vainglorious narrative of modern US diplomatic and military history is embedded in our conventional wisdom: a struggle between prescient “internationalists” and ostrichlike “isolationists,” until the shock of Pearl Harbor awakens the reluctant giant to the responsibilities of global leadership, first in World War II, then in the cold war. (The Soviet Union’s crucial role in defeating Hitler is omitted.) US ascendancy is complete, in this view, with the collapse of Soviet communism and the rise of a unipolar world order in the 1990s. But there the upbeat story ends: even the most committed triumphalist finds it difficult to assimilate the troubling denouement of the September 11 attacks and the permanent state of emergency that followed.
Moyn probes the legal and ethical issues surrounding the war on terror, but he also assays the century and a half of US history that preceded it. The notion of humane war would have been alien and baffling to most Americans for much of that period. “America’s default way of war—honed in the imperial encounter with native peoples and lasting into the twentieth century across the globe—recognized no limits,” Moyn writes. He records the consequences in sobering detail, ranging from the extermination of Native American tribes to the torching of Vietnamese villages. During the Pax Americana following World War II the whole world, in effect, became “Indian country” (as many GIs referred to Vietnam).
But his most original and incisive contribution to historical understanding is taking seriously the possibility of peace—or at least the avoidance of war—as a primary goal of foreign policy. This leads him to dispute, for instance, the frequent dismissal of isolationists as shortsighted or xenophobic rather than people of good faith with an attachment to traditional American ideas of neutrality and a principled aversion to war. Moyn is neither a pacifist nor an isolationist, but he believes war must always be the genuine last resort, not merely the rhetorical one.