Abstract

Writing this review a few weeks into a mindless, catastrophic return to inter-state war in Europe, the initial impulse is to contrast that debacle with the high-tech manoeuverings with which Moyn concludes his book. If there is to be war at all, let it be “clean,” and let the innocents escape the wrath of unhinged belligerents. And if it cannot be “clean,” then at least garner the means to punish those for their use of illegitimate violence. In the current circumstances this feels like a legitimate position, but it is not what the book is encouraging us to think. Instead it begins with a somewhat sentimental prologue that does not really spell out what the goal is. We eventually read that its “an antiwar history of the laws of armed conflict in the American experience” (7). Using author Leo Tolstoy as initial guide, the focus gradually comes into view—instead of war being rejected, it has been made humane. And the humaneness is a sham. Instead of investing everything in securing peace, the United States adapted war to its own technological means and ideological ends, expanding its concept of “self-defense” and making it limitless in time and space. As Marilyn Young reminded us ten years ago, we are often, if not always, thinking of war.1

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