Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War.

• Author: Rieff, David

Samuel Moyn, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux). 416 pp. $30.00.

It is a hoary military cliche that at any given time generals are always prepared to fight and win the most recent of their countries' past wars. But it comes as something of a shock when, in his new book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn, a historian and a professor of law at Yale who is one of America's most distinguished thinkers on human rights, the laws of war, and more generally on international justice, in many ways seems to perpetrate the very same mistake. Moyn argues that for most of its history the American tradition of warfare has been a particularly cruel one (the stark title of part one of Humane is "Brutality"). But then, he goes on to argue, in the 1970s there was a great leap forward (Moyn actually used the expression in an exchange about Humane with his Yale colleague John Fabian Witt) in the legal regulation of combat itself. It was the United States, Moyn insists (rightly in my view), that drove the movement for this virtually unprecedented humanization of the laws of war.

For Moyn, this began with the reconsideration that took place in the later part of the 1970s of how America had fought the Vietnam War, and not just by the war's opponents but within government and perhaps most importantly within the U.S. military itself. This led to brutality beginning to give way to a new and, at least in its self-conception, a far more humane doctrine of war and warfighting. As Moyn puts it, "from the ashes of Hanoi and the darkness of My Lai, the possibility of humane war would come into view." On the face of things, that would seem to be very good news both for the United States and for the world. On one level, Moyn does not disagree. To the contrary, he is at pains to concede that when compared with Vietnam or Korea, let alone the genocidal wars against the native peoples of the American continent, or the United States' imperial wars in the Philippines and Central America, the U.S. military's decision to shift to a less sanguinary war-fighting doctrine, one codified in U.S. military and civilian law but also in international law accepted by the United States, has been an improvement. At the same time, he rejects the view that this humanization of war should give rise to even the most guarded degree of optimism. "Humane war," Moyn warns at the very end of the book, "is another version of the slavery of our times." And far from being a "utopia," "humane war" may turn out to be no more than "dystopian in a new fashion."

On one level, Moyn's argument will surprise no one who has read his work over the past twenty years, during which he has become a major intellectual figure on the American Left, at a time of the Left's resurgence in mainstream U.S. politics. His most important books have been in the service of debunking various contemporary Utopias. In The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History, published in 2010 to great controversy but even greater critical acclaim, Moyn pushed back hard against the conventional wisdom (at least in the Global North and Latin America) that the contemporary human rights movement was the culmination of centuries of progress in the making of a more humane world. This line of filiation goes at least as far back as the anti-slavery movement in late eighteenth-century Britain, through the creation of the Red Cross movement, and the first radical limitations on what armies were allowed to do, and more proximately in the Nuremberg Trials and the subsequent promulgation of the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In Moyn's account, partisans of this new human rights Utopia--one of his bolder arguments is his dating its rise back only to the 1970s in the United States--assumed that they could usher in a world in which it would finally be possible to do away with some of the most commonly-held assumptions about international relations. The most important of these, conventionally described as the Westphalian Order, holds that states have the right to do more or less as they like within their own borders. But through both activism and law, the belief within the human rights movement that it was being replaced by a developing body of international human rights law that would, in extremis, supersede...