HUMANE

An interview with Samuel Moyn on the project of making war less brutal.

We have launched an issue focused on grasping the extent and the history of U.S. foreign intervention — how does the U.S. conceive of its role in the world, what has it done to maintain that role, and what has or hasn’t changed over time. A new foreign policy consensus seems to be rapidly emerging, and, per usual, the most helpful thing to do is to slow down and try to understand the context of the moment we are in. This is our sixth interview of the series.

This interview with Samuel Moyn, Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and author of several books including Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War and Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times, was conducted by franknews and condensed for clarity.

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Would you mind starting by introducing yourself?

I'm Samuel Moyn. I currently teach at Yale Law School, I write history mainly. For about a decade I was very interested in writing critical histories of international norms like human rights. Humane is about the body of norms and law that are supposed to make war less brutal.

How did you end up coming to this book specifically? What in your work led you here?

I think it was mainly my experience of the legal debates around the War on Terror during Barack Obama's presidency. What I mainly did is try to think about where that project of making war less brutal had come from, and how it could become possible for Obama to institutionalize it in our time.

When trying to thing about where this comes from – the book went back further than I expected, to humanist movements of the 1800s. It might be helpful to give a little bit of context as to the history of this movement.

It’s interesting because most people have thought that the ideal of making war less brutal is much older. My intervention is to register the importance of the middle of the 19th century, when there was the first Geneva Convention that promised to take care of wounded soldiers on battlefields.

But these humanist movements didn't have much success until our time. And I try to figure out why not just the militaries, but activists, lawyers, and the public weren’t so interested in this project of making war humane, until something changed to make Barack Obama's proposals seem like common sense.

And what do you identify as having changed?

There was a big change in the 1960s and 70s. Before then, most of the law around war was intentionally more brutal. I think the biggest thing that changed is that the world was decolonized. All the places that had been the theaters of brutal war where European empires were fighting got a voice in international relations and law. And then Americans lost Vietnam. The My Lai massacre led to new energy, including within the military, to make war fighting less brutal for the people to really be able to feel that the violence that meted out in their name was moral. America was wracked by a peace movement, really the last big one in our history. A moral form of war became a new priority. Americans before had celebrated the bombing of civilians and the leveling of cities. Something changed in American’s outlook and that set up the conditions for the credibility of this whole project of making war less brutal.

You have this line at the beginning of the book that I really liked that the most elemental face of the war isn't death, but it's control by domination and surveillance – which is what this “humane” war is, essentially.

Americans have embraced not an end to war - though many Americans back in the day had advocated such a thing and even justified the uses of their might on a global stage as a kind of "for the sake of peace." But then the endless wars they come to fight don't seem like they're possible to stop.

Barack Obama, in his Nobel Peace Prize address, says, “I'm not bringing peace. People are too evil for that.” His new goal, a more believable one, is control and domination, and the achievement of strategic ends and self-defense with less violence than before. And what does that say about us? I think what it says about us is that we are less willing to give up our desire for control than we are our desire to inflict bodily harm.

That might answer my question but I was going ask – It's more humane, we don't know what's going on, and how much of it is like the belief that America needs to be the world's police?

It’s definitely the first. We constantly hear people are dying, things are going south, and the process is endlessly creating terrorists, not ending terror. My book attempts to figure out, given that the declared goal is safety, why we continue to be the world's policeman, thinking control could benefit ourselves, not just the world, when that doesn't seem to be happening. My answer is that people are willing to say, “at least the violence is not that messy.” And if we have an empire, it’s not like the old ones that were intentionally brutal.

Pete Hegseth, our current Secretary of Defense, wrote a book with a chapter essentially calling to make war brutal again, but my book is not about him – it’s about the liberals who said, “let’s keep war on the condition that it’s humane.”

And do you think people in charge, the liberals, Obama, bought what they were selling?

It’s clear that what Obama cared most about in reinventing the war on terror after Bush was what Bush also came to care about: the American body bags coming home. Both presidents recognized that the real way to insulate the war on terror from skepticism was to stop the killing of Americans. Bush began the withdrawal from the Middle Eastern theater and was the first real drone president.

Yet I think liberals, including Obama, also believed you couldn’t give a self-interested reason for war. Both of his major addresses on the war on terror, the Nobel address and the drone address at the National Defense University in 2013, focused on how the war is full of care and concern for those in harm’s way, even those who are not Americans.

What role do international institutions, the UN, etc, play in the story. I also read a more recent piece you wrote about how Trump could make the multilateral system promote peace. I'm curious about how you think about that in the context of this conversation.

Well, it's complicated. One of the most amazing facts about the Trump administrations is that they adopted the rules for targeted killing that Obama introduced. Those rules, or policies or guidelines rather, are notable because they go beyond what the law requires. They state that if you take a strike, you must believe no harm will come to any innocent person. That goes far beyond international law, which only requires that the military benefits of the strike outweigh the collateral harm.

Trump, like in many other areas, is caught up in dynamics he can't repudiate. At the same time, he's a different figure. He ran as a peace candidate, arguably the first to do so in a broad sense, rather than just in opposition to the Iraq War like Obama. In his second inaugural address, Trump made a remarkable statement: that he wants to be judged not only by the battles Americans win, but by those they don't have to fight, and the wars the country avoids.

Of course, he's no isolationist; he orders strikes regularly. I'm hardly romanticizing him. But if you simply compared the number of Americans and non-Americans who died under recent presidents, he might have the lowest total. I hate Trump, but it's a complicated picture. He's caught up in the framework of humane war, but in some ways, almost in spite of himself, he tries to think beyond it – for better and for worse.

Do you think that there's a way for these institutions to gain relevance again? Or do you think the US has done too much damage?

I'm a critic of international institutions and law, but also have a reformist attitude towards them because there's no alternative, really, to fixing and redeeming international them. I think it's only fair to note that we'll miss them when they're gone, because a lot of what they're doing is uncontroversially worthwhile. I appreciate youthful skepticism and I've been part of it in raising questions about the efficacy and the evasions of some of these things, but it wasn't a call for simply abolishing internationalism. On the contrary, we need a progressive internationalism that's about fairness and justice on a global scale.

Do you think a political campaign on that ethos could work? Obviously anti-war sentiments across Trump and Obama work, but could a progressive internationalism have legs?

One of the points of my book is that there was an older American internationalism that had been very big, especially in the years prior to World War I, in between the world wars, and then again around Vietnam, that was basically about peace. We've lost that ambition.

I've done other work in prior books on the third world agenda for economic justice on a global scale. In the end there's no escaping those campaigns and getting the details right. And Americans were deeply involved in the first for peace and ought to be involved in the second for justice on economic terms.

Do you think because we're not in Vietnam and, for example, my friends aren’t the ones getting drafted to go to war, there's a lack of anger or urgency that would prevent that sort of movement from happening?

For sure. I have a passage in the book on the abolition of the draft and the rise of the so-called all-volunteer force. Some people are much more convinced than I am that that was really the pivotal moment - because it meant that you weren't forcing people against their will to fight for their country. The problem with that thesis is that current forms of war often don't require the exposure of Americans to harm, and that's not just true of drones, but of the new kind of killer robots, which are not even piloted: they're algorithmically run. And AI has had a big role in the Israeli campaign in Gaza.

And I just don't believe that the only reason people have cared about war is because of the risk to themselves or their loved ones. I mean, that did account for a lot of the peace movement, which was mainly women concerned about their husbands sons and brothers; but I just think we act not just in the name of narrow self-interest, but in the name of high ideals. And so we await moments in which ideals like peace and justice gain more traction.

The question is: how do you counteract the sense of moral immunity from the events we see done for our sake and in our name? It's our government. For a couple of centuries, people have been pointing out that distant wars are harder for us to think we're involved in, even though we're paying for them and we provide the support for the politicians who declare them and run them. And when the politicians assure us that the violence in our name is humane, it's inviting us to tune out or pat ourselves on the back for some kind of moral reform of war. We need to use our tools which involve agitation and media and writing to try to get people back to a sense of moral responsibility for their actions.