Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

by Samuel Moyn

Though victims beyond our borders suffer even more, war abroad often leads to tyranny at home.

Of all the peoples in the annals of warfare, Americans are the ones who have invented a form of war righteously pursued as superior precisely for being more humane, and one tolerated by audiences for that very reason. It has also been Americans who are revealing—contrary to literature since Homer—that the most elemental face of war is not death. Instead, it is control by domination and surveillance, with mortality and even violence increasingly edited out.

We had made a moral choice to prioritize humane war, not a peaceful globe. Pondering this choice might help us avoid mistakes in our future.

The American way of war is more and more defined by a near complete immunity from harm for one side and unprecedented care when it comes to killing people on the other. It is informed by the standards of international law that constrain fighting. Most remarkably, America’s military operations have become more expansive in scope and perpetual in time by virtue of these very facts. And it is possible that this is only a stage in a continuing transition toward less and less brutality and death in wartime.

some point, today’s deterritorialized and endless war may mutate into an unprecedented new system: rule and surveillance by one or several powers across an astonishingly large arc of the world’s surface, patrolled by armed drones or paid visits by the Special Forces acting as quasi-permanent military police. Indeed, even if barely foreseeable today, our time has brought into view a possibility that we might greet with relief if it were not so unsettling, too: a future of war beyond killing.

Increasingly, we live without antiwar law. We fight war crimes but have forgotten the crime of war.

Americans were once among the most influential propagators of the millennialist Christian idea that war might end on this earth. They led the effort to impose international limits on making war.

Yet as the United States crossed the Rubicon in the mid-twentieth century to become the guarantor of global order, it began fighting wars in many more places than before. As it did so, America’s worldwide presence became as brutal as the imperial history from which the country itself emerged. For a while after 1945, the whole world became “Indian country” as the United States exported homegrown violence and adapted the no-holds-barred practices such as genocide and torture refined over centuries by European empires fighting counterinsurgent small wars or conventional big ones.

With high dudgeon on both sides, Americans had a torture debate. It diverted them from deliberating on the deeper choice they were making to ignore constraints on starting war in the first place.

He offered the most eloquent and thought-provoking reservations ever leveled against the attempt to “humanize” war, highlighting the moral risk of failing to combine the desire for less brutal war with skepticism toward war itself—since war routinely makes the world worse, no matter how humanely fought, and almost never better.

These stories first crystallized his belief that war itself is the moral evil to be concerned about, not the niceties of how it is fought.

About the ability of warring armies to agree to a moment of humanity during hostilities, the sketch is caustic. The humane treatment of the wounded does not interfere with the greater evil of war, Tolstoy reflects, let alone lead to peace.

The exhibition of humanity was little more than a pause amid death-dealing. Humanity might even make it worse.

As for Tolstoy, he went a different way, refining and elaborating his suspicion that making war humane only allowed it to break out more often or drag on endlessly.

For many proponents of a peace mobilization—Tolstoy not least—pacifism followed simply from taking Christianity seriously. A few transatlantic sects, such as Anabaptists, Mennonites, and Quakers, had for centuries understood refusal to take up arms as part of their faith.

Treating enemies better, he hoped, might prove a stepping-stone to turning the other cheek. “We must leave to war all its horrors, as the only way to open the eyes of those who order it and those who pay the price,” a Lyons doctor had complained of the Red Cross project of humanizing unnecessary evil. Moynier responded that such an objection, taken to an extreme, would imply the abolition of all army medical services, not merely the backup the Red Cross hoped to provide.

In his masterpiece, On War (1832), Clausewitz had warned against the “kind-hearted” fiction that a nation could wage a war “without too much bloodshed.” Not only was it useless, but morally reforming war could exacerbate its evil. “Mistakes which come from kindness are the very worst.”

Erected as one of its founding fathers later, Lieber was not really part of the tradition of making war humane. He condoned horrendous acts such as punishing civilians and denying quarter—which meant that, when enemies surrendered in hopes of avoiding death, you could kill them anyway. Instead, Lieber was an excellent example—like Clausewitz—of how those actually committed to intense war sometimes pretended to be friends of peace. For Lieber, anything necessary in war, more or less, ought to be legal; if there was such a thing as excess violence and suffering, it was because it was necessary to achieve victory, which hastened peace.

Already in 1864, Gustave Moynier called the Geneva Convention the path down “a slope where there is no stopping; the end of the road cannot be less than the condemnation of war in absolute terms.”

For Andrei’s main commitment is not to prediction but to truth and the risks of suppressing it. Prettification of evil is quite simply prevarication, and it could lead people to compromise with it. “Get rid of falsehood,” Andrei counsels, “and let war be war,” “the most horrible thing in life.” Soon Tolstoy devoted most of his energy to the different proposition that making war humane could court the risk of endless war, and above all cover up its horrors.

One of the many over the centuries who chose Christ over Christianity, Tolstoy adopted a vision of nonresistance so personal and totalistic that it bears little relationship to the faith most Christians have taken as their own.

Along the way, Tolstoy became not only the most renowned pacifist in the world, and the best-known vegetarian, but also an idiosyncratic holy man who changed the spiritual face of the twentieth century. Tolstoy’s whole ethics drew substantially on the Christian vision Americans had developed for opposing slavery and war alike earlier in the nineteenth century. Very quickly after his conversion, and working on his own, Tolstoy centered his interpretation of Jesus’s message on the same passage that had inspired Ballou’s nonresistance ethics fifty years before—Matthew 5:39: “But I say unto you, do not resist an evildoer.”

debates around Tolstoy’s legacy, however, it has never been noted that he was concerned in pioneering and still-pertinent ways with how legally humanizing vile practices risked entrenching them. It did so in two fundamental ways. First, reformers came to tolerate an enduring evil when they chose to make it more humane. Second, their audiences risked fooling themselves: they came to believe that striking a blow against the cruelty of a practice made their continuing involvement in it noble.

He had once commented in his diary, “It’s true that slavery is an evil, but it is an extremely lovable one.” But shortly after, during his military service, he read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the bestseller of the nineteenth century (after the Bible). Soon Tolstoy—like Pierre Bezukhov in his greatest novel—was attempting to free his own serfs. In 1861, he helped administer the abolition of serfdom in his home province, shortly before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation called for an end to American slavery in the midst of the nation’s Civil War.

But in his activist phase, Tolstoy also referred much more specifically to the lessons that chattel slavery bore for the indictment of military violence. And his most explosive argument was to suggest that the very same compromises that reformers countenanced before gathering to abolish the practice were now being trotted out to rationalize the endurance of war. Humane slavery? That had been a sham. The idea of humane war was, too.

Everyone understood such “amelioration” to serve the long-term endurance of the slave economy. And activists worked to find reforms slavers would accept, urging legal reform to enforce limits on treatment, such as the 1826 Slave Code. In his epistle to the Corinthians, Paul recounted that he was given thirty-nine lashes by the Jews, and masters disciplining slaves through flogging were sometimes limited to that number as an upper limit for each day (or in each session).

Though struggling with each other, humanitarians and slaveholders shared the same goal: humane slavery.

With “inhumane treatment” of chattel property increasingly under a cloud, slavery emerged “more tolerable for the slaveowner and the abolitionist,” wrote one of America’s greatest historians of slavery. “Victories over brutality left the real enemy more entrenched than ever. As slavery became less brutal there was less reason why it should be abolished.” The compromises that “humanity” made with slavers along the way were profound.

Unlike many early vegetarians of the era, who were often linked to other kinds of counterculture but saw no connection between diet and war, Tolstoy constantly sustained Prince Andrei’s analogy between slaughtering animals and killing men. “As long as there are slaughterhouses there will always be battlefields,” he had remarked already the year before his decision to stop eating meat.

Tolstoy’s grim expedition revealed, however, that the amelioration of meat production primarily served to help its audiences manage their consciences, telling themselves they were better people while in fact they sponsored as much violence as ever, if not more.

There is little debate to be had over whether making animal slaughter humane helped raise consciousness over time, to the point of sparking a drive to abolish an atrocious practice altogether. And Tolstoy only glimpsed the early stages of the humanization of meat production. In the case of animals, humanization was clearly a path not to pacification but to much more violence. The slaughterhouse showed how “humanity” worked when its pursuit was entirely unrelated to an abolitionist goal.

He had a premonition of a fearful syndrome that had not yet come online. He understood that humanity in warfare, for all its virtues, opened up the possibility of a new vice—facilitating and legitimating war rather than controlling its outbreak or ending its continuation. Humanitarianism led advocates to compromise in pursuit of humane war and publics to feel good enough about themselves in the bargain to permit it to go on and on.

Today, Tolstoy is being proved right, and Walzer wrong: the humanization of America’s wars has become a part of the syndrome of their perpetuation, not a step beyond them.

Suttner’s worst fears were realized when it became evident that no constraints on the freedom to initiate hostilities were in the offing. Scandalously, delegates at the opulent House in the Woods, where the conference was held, moved sanctimoniously to Plan B: an agreement concluded with effusive pageantry and showy moralism to regulate how war is fought.

True, there was one breakthrough: the creation of a corps of judges called the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which still exists to this day. And the possibility was left open that future conferences might obligate states to submit themselves to that court’s arbitration on a compulsory basis. Yet

Suttner, refusing to be defeated, took a long view. A decade after the first conference in The Hague, she called it “an epoch-making date in the history of the world.” It marked “the first time, since history began to be written, that the representatives of governments come together to find a means for ‘securing a permanent, genuine peace’ for the world.”

Suttner died in summer 1914, mere days before the assassination of the heir to the Habsburg throne touched off World War I. On her passing, the editorialists of The Nation in New York City recalled Suttner’s novel Lay Down Your Arms as the most transformational call for peace the world had ever seen. “No other brief for peace has won so many converts or exercised so great an influence on all quarters of the globe.”

Omitting the annexation of Hawaii and the incorporation of the formerly Spanish Philippines, Suttner once again held out the United States as iconic. “America’s glory and grandeur,” she recorded, “consisted in having attained such proportions without a standing army, safe without defense, giving the world an example of peace.”

The trouble was, for a long time it had been difficult to imagine the prospect of the United States playing the role of peacemaker. It may have been the state most identified with peace, but that was only because of its refusal to traffic in war outside its hemisphere. Yet there was no denying that by 1914, in spite of its Civil War and resulting late start, America boasted perhaps the richest peace culture of any transatlantic state. In addition to commonalities with Western Europe, the country’s peace culture relied on two distinctive resources. The nation’s unreconstructed Christianity and geographical isolation meant that Americans—especially in the agrarian Midwest—could make up for their lack of exposure to the bloodbaths of European war with a fervency for the cause of peace that Europeans could not always match.

Indeed, as America’s empire expanded across the Pacific starting in 1898, the country stubbornly refused any version of arbitration that placed any check on its freedom to stay out of European war. Arbitration was a good thing for European states, given their usual internecine violence. But Americans drew up short if arbitration meant they might get drawn into wars, especially ones pitting European warmongers against one another.

American elites still pursued the broader project of making such treaties in the aftermath of this bitter experience. The Republican secretary of state and later New York senator Elihu Root was a fanatic for arbitration in order to keep the United States out of European wars. (He did not believe the concept should apply to the colonial pacification of his country’s new Philippines holdings.) Root even won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1912 for arbitration work. U.S. interest in international law exploded, with professional associations formed and new journals founded.

In spite—or as a reflection—of America’s traditions of keeping distance from European wars, an extraordinary flourishing of peace activism and sentiment occurred. Peace was a mainstream idea for Americans, who could not imagine themselves disrupting it (at least outside their own hemisphere).

Bryan didn’t stave off U.S. entry into World War I (in spite of trying). But from the earliest days of his stint as President Woodrow Wilson’s secretary of state in 1913–15, he concluded no fewer than thirty arbitration treaties between the United States and other countries, including the United Kingdom. As the Senate ratified treaty after treaty, Bryan distributed as souvenirs paperweights that had been created from War Department swords beaten into plowshares, inscribed with biblical peace promises. Notwithstanding the tsar’s good press for calling the peace conference in The Hague, no comparable politician ever emerged from Europe nor ascended so high.

Was it not realistic, he explained to his father, to do the same for the world—pushing it from loose confederation to strong federation—that the Constitution had done for the American states in 1787? An organization of polities under law was “the scheme of things which international law writers have thought, (not realized) for the past three hundred years,” and the world was “very much nearer that desideratum than appearances would lead one to believe.”

Perverse as it may seem to say so, World War I was also “the great war for peace.” The death of ten million soldiers and forty million civilians, at a price tag of $200 billion (more than $3 trillion by today’s reckoning), made the old warnings of the peace movement about the stakes of conflict seem both justified and prescient—once war fever passed. Over the course of its terrible four years of death, what had been a marginal agenda became central to national life everywhere and global diplomacy forever, beyond the wildest dreams of earlier generations of activists.

Ironically, in other words, the very failure of the peace movement to stave off World War I created the conditions for its eventual success. Many more European survivors of war, especially the victims of its worst depredations, were now ready to demand peace from their states. The overthrow of the Russian Empire and the birth of the Soviet Union portended a new equation. America’s entry into the war in 1917 in the name of what Wilson gravely called “peace without victory” did so even more.

Even during the war, peace agitation occurred. Forlorn socialists of every nation, in the minority within their own movement, indicted the patriotic response to the call to arms—and were normally thrown in jail for their trouble, from Eugene Debs in the United States to Rosa Luxemburg in Germany. As in no war before, war resistance became rife across the Atlantic, far transcending minor religious sects and calling...

Erich Maria Remarque’s later smash hit All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) unforgettably dramatized the human costs of World War I and cemented the case against militarism, though it by no means silenced clamor for another conflict. Milne’s own pacifist bestseller Peace with Honour (1934) didn’t either—especially since Milne, like so many other pacifists, was ultimately to support war to put Adolf Hitler down. But like never before and to this day, cycles of cynicism and weariness toward international war became familiar features of the moral culture of elites.

Supporters of European harmony were much less sure that they opposed the constant violence of empires, except if geopolitical jockeying threatened to engulf Europeans themselves in war. Indeed, some openly urged “white peace” for the sake of a more harmonious global rule over non-European populations. But a transatlantic ascendancy of peace was better than nothing.

The indefatigable and well-known feminist pacifist Lucia Ames Mead, a former piano teacher, had gotten her start before World War I with Suttner’s endorsement. She kept the presses rolling long after, insisting that if Americans had banned “man-selling” in law in the nineteenth century, it was going to be the turn of “man-killing” in the twentieth. (She was crushed to death in the Boston subway in 1936, saving her from seeing the short-term routing and long-term consecration of her work to come.)