Samuel Moyn - Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

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For Lily and Madeleine

I shall say no more about the Americans, for whatever the outcome of the present war, I have lost somewhat the hope of seeing on the earth a nation that is really free and lives without war. This spectacle is reserved for centuries far away

A.R.J. TURGOT, 1776

The lawyers clean up all details.

DON HENLEY, 1989

The sky is the same shade of blue, equally flawless in two towns separated by nine time zones, as the weddings begin at noon. The sun has cleansed the blemishes from the heavens, as if in answer to the prayers of the brides that bad weather not darken their special day. The guests arrive. The couples and their families, after the joyous ceremonies, wander toward the tents set up for the celebration. The festive meals unfold in parallel, until the sky changes.

In New Canaan, Connecticut, fancy waiters in tuxedos serve a menu featuring a high-end caterers best globally sourced fare: toasted tabouleh salad with crispy chickpeas, oven-roasted rainbow trout with orange reduction, passion fruit panna cotta, with gluten-free and vegan options for those who ask. The colors of the tablecloths perfectly match the wedding partys attire, and the tasteful centerpieces convey just the right amount of creativity without seeming obtrusive. The wedding planner has done her job well.

In Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, the festivities are down-market in comparison but homey and sweet. The mothers of the betrothed assist in the preparation of local favorites: lamb kebabs, rice, and firni, a milk custard scented with rose water. Despite the differences in culture and in wealth, at both celebrations there is an abundance of family joy in the ritual affirmation of the life cycle and the tender love of the couples.

The father of the bride in Connecticut, a corporate lawyer, has splurged on the latest in wedding videography, which includes fifteen minutes of aerial feed from a drone. The guests at the Afghan wedding have become inured to a far more sophisticated form of the same technology buzzing high above their heads, but none of them sought it out or sent it. Those attending the wedding in Connecticut, almost all Americans with a few foreign friends, had more to do with the intrusion. The reason is that one country, in an unprecedented era of interstate peace, has established a relationship of dominance over the other, reserving the right to kill even when it does not exercise it. War, far from disappearing, is transforming into such a relationship.

Endless war has become part of the way Americans live now, on par with their Evites and online wedding registries. Americas conflicts abroad remain brutal and deadly, but whats frightening about them is not only the injury or fatality they inflict. Its true that, for several years, Afghan weddings all too often ended in a funeral. A scandalous number of civilian deaths occurred when American counterterrorist strategy took advantage of the fact that nuptials drew senior terrorists from hiding. One might presume that the Connecticut wedding would make the New York Times Vows section. The death by drone of a terrorist at the wedding half a world away would appear on the front page.

But now imagine that nobody dies at the Afghan ceremony, though the nuptials are nevertheless punctuated by the macabre boom of a drone strike bringing justice on impact to a confirmed militant a mile away. The guests in the tent eat their meal not only relieved that the United States has stopped bombing weddings so frequently (which it has), but also painfully aware that they are subject to a new kind of rule. It still matters that their sky is not quite without blemish, and that they still hear booms. In a few years, other machines may inspire a similar disquiet. So-called autonomous weapons systemsrobot warriorsmay hold quarries for capture. Meanwhile, U.S. Special Forces may operate as a kind of global police, one that kills only when it faces too much resistance after inviting surrender.

In our time, swords have not been beaten into plowshares. They have been melted down for drones. Yet for all their faults, it is also true that drones are increasingly the cleanest mode of war ever conceived. They hover nearby and, when they attack, do so with painstaking real-time targeting in the name of precision and thus civilian care. Indeed, drones are symbolic of the fact that the United States made a clear choice to make war more humanean imperative shaped by intense, sustained pressure from diverse communities of activists and armed forces, with an eye on the acceptability of violence for different audiences. That imperative also affects emerging forms of cyberwarfare and the Special Forces that operated in more than three-quarters of the countries on the planet in a recent year (even if only to pass through on the way to their ultimate destination). Sometimes the choice to wage humane war is for the sake of ethics, sometimes it is for optics, and often it is both. It is never a matter of technological possibility alone.

Today, there are more and more legal obligations to make war more humane. Countries like the United States of America have agreed to obey those obligations, however permissively they interpret them and inadequately apply them in the field. Absolutely and relatively, fewer captives are mistreated and fewer civilians dieby farthan in the past. In Vietnam, civilians perished by the millions when directly targeted or collaterally killed by U.S. forces. (If one included events indirectly caused by regional Cold War policies a half century ago, the death count would have to include the Cambodian genocide and would probably exceed five million.) In Iraqeasily the most gruesome theater among recent U.S. warssome 200,000 civilians have lost their lives since 2003, most of them in civil war and disorder rather than because Americans bombed or shot at or near them. The very idea of more humane war may seem a contradiction in terms. The truth is that it has changed the face of one of the oldest practices in history.

The New Canaan bride works for a humanitarian organization that pressured her country to avoid excessive civilian casualties. She hopes to follow in the tradition of an uncle she has always admired, though he has been increasingly cantankerous and tiresome at family gatherings. An old man now, he preserves the memory of his protest against the Vietnam War as a noble act. She does not share his certainty that her generations wars are unjust. And she takes some solace in the knowledge that she has made the world a better place. The United States of America may not be the heaven on earth that the Congregationalist founders of her hometown dreamed of when they named it; but its ways in the world are certainly much improved since Vietnam.

As for her wedding guests, they all voted for Barack Obama in part because he promised to wage the ongoing hostilities with greater morality, compared with the war criminal who preceded him. As a hundred Aperol spritzes bob on trays across the grassy landscape, the guests grimace during the obligatory conversation about the coming election. They genuinely fear that their fellow voters could put a madman in power who will return American war to its not-so-distant brutal ways. A few months later, they might glower when he wins, convinced that they are not to blame for the results. Even so, they have not entirely forgotten that at their elite colleges they learned the classical wisdom that endless conflict and far-flung expansion distort the politics of republics, whatever the methods and style of the fighting. Though victims beyond our borders suffer even more, war abroad often leads to tyranny at home.