 Good afternoon. I'm very pleased to welcome you to this IEEA seminar. We're delighted today to be joined by Professor Samuel Moyn, who will speak to us about his most recent book, Humane, How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. We'll speak for about 20 minutes, and then we'll proceed to question answers with our audience. You'll be able to join in the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen. Please feel free to send us your questions throughout the session, as they occur to you, and we'll come to them then once Professor Moyn has finished his presentation. A reminder that today's presentation and the Q&A are both on the record. Please do join in the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IEEA. A little more about Professor Samuel Moyn. He is the Henry Orlews Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School and also Professor of History at Yale University. He received a doctorate in Modern European History from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000, and a law degree from Harvard University in 2001. He's written several books in his fields of European Intellectual History and Human Rights History, and this most recent book, Humane, was published last year by Farah Stress and Jiru, and he has presented the Karla Lectures at Oxford University earlier this year, which are available online on the subject of cultural liberals and fascinating lectures they all do. Wide-ranging and deep-thinking man. Over to you, Sam. Thank you very much. Well, thank you to Professor Hardman and to the organizers of this event. I, you know, will present this recent book until, you know, no more than 25 minutes after the hour and hope to engage you all. So I'll just share some slides to that end and maybe having a problem now that I have to fix somehow from Zoom. And really hoping to engage, you know, any criticism or skepticism you might have of the arguments I'm going to try to make. So in 1945, the Allies staged the Nuremberg Trials, and they were thinking about what's most important when it comes to regulating war. And unlike subsequent generations, they said aggression. Robert Jackson, the U.S. Supreme Court Justice who took leave to service the U.S. prosecutor, said aggression is the supreme crime starting an illegal war. And actually the Russians than the Soviets were completely on board in spite of their, you know, collusion with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and carving up Poland between them. It's not that aggression was the only problem in war and the Allies in 1945-6 also charged war crimes and crimes against humanity, a novel charge. But they said aggression is like the gateway crime that's most important to control. Why? Well, it was a gateway crime first and foremost because if you start an illegal war, you're enormously likely to start killing people illegally, including civilians. But the Allies still made atrocity subsidiary as the problem to solve in war. For a series of other reasons, if you start an aggressive war illegally, there's so much you can do that is illegal in war. First, you can kill combatants in any number. Second, you can kill civilians just not too many. Today, there's a limit. But at the time and even now the limits aren't very serious and a lot of civilian death can occur that doesn't count as a war crime. And then there's the matter of misplaced resources. If an illegal war starts, the state starting it and suffering it will have to spend lots of money on things that, you know, they might not have chosen as budgetary priorities. Finally, aggressive war can lead to entirely legal but grievous destabilization. Think of the fact that in the last generation in places like Iraq or Libya invaded by my country in coalition. Probably more people have died not because the United States or its allies shot at them, but because others did because of destabilization and ruin. And so for all of these reasons, not to mention just how tough it is to get brutality and war regulated. Our ancestors said aggression is what counts now my thesis in the new book is that we lost that priority, and we began concerning ourselves, more or less exclusively with making war less brutal. And I think there have been some consequences to that mistake that are visible now. In the last few weeks as you know, there's a new aggressive war. Amazingly in his irate rant before commencing his own illegal war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin came out as a friend of the prohibition of aggression. And he points to a record of Western war, especially Western war in the Middle East but starting in Southeast Europe in 1999. And says, well, look at the record in of that the West boast now of fighting illegal wars. He concludes this part of his rant saying, look, the West disregards international law. It's most sacrosanct principle and has for a generation or more. And the trouble of course is that two wrongs don't make a right but it's it's extraordinary that that record could justify in this, you know, outrageous rant. All of the examples that Putin cited of disregard, not so much for rules prohibiting brutality and war, but prohibiting starting illegal wars, whether you want to talk about the bombing of Belgrade in 1999, or the illegal war in Iraq or in Libya in 2011, the choice to exceed the humanitarian mandate that's the UN Security Council had voted to engage in regime change. I wrote humane the new book because I was struck years before by a kind of embrace of this new pattern, where aggression, illegal intervention as such was not so problematic. But in compensation of people, whether activists or politicians began to give a lot of attention to brutality and war, let's say instead. And I'm really, you know, interested in humane and telling a long story that culminates in Barack Obama who came to Oslo in 2009 when as a first year president of my country he won the Nobel Peace Prize to defend the new configuration, the one that's the opposite of the one in Nuremberg. She says, look, I can't follow someone I'd like to cite Martin Luther King, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. I'm at the head of the greatest arms superpower in world history. What I can promise you as a peace prize winner is that I will use American power less brutally than before, not just all of my predecessors, but my immediate predecessor George W. Bush whose war was generally debated as we'll see, not in terms of its its illegality as such, but the the illegality of the way it was fought, notably George W. Bush's decision to turn to torture. Amazingly, not King, but someone named only do know was the predecessor Obama most identified with and named check in his Nobel Peace Prize address he had won the Nobel Peace Prize. The first one in 1901 and had committed to at first a very fledgling cause, not stopping war but keeping it from devolving into the worst brutality and Obama in a sense epitomized this new tilt where we focus on that problem. Even though the wars that become sanitized may also become protracted. As the war on terror became under Obama's watch so it's really to think about this problem that you know the book engages in a kind of long history of the desire to make war more humane instead of not having unworthy or illegal wars and I start out actually with Leo Tolstoy, the great Russian novelist who was simultaneously. I think a profound critic of the very man Obama later cited all you do know the founder of the Red Cross and the sponsor of the first of many Geneva conventions the first was in 1864. Tolstoy makes a series of points that I think are telling. One is very, I think common and other domains amongst activists who think about the death penalty just for example that if you make a practice that's violent, like the death penalty or war less flagrantly brutal. At least some people are going to be prepared to tolerate it more than before. And so there's a risk that you incur and humanizing violence that you perpetuate it. It's really hard to like argue that that could never happen. And Tolstoy argued that it would if do not was successful. And he actually uses some interesting comparisons not to the death penalty but to other violent practices to let's say predict that humanizing war might have some risks involved that we need to, you know, control or manage. His first comparison is to slavery since after all before Tolstoy wrote in the 1860s. You know at the time of the first Geneva Convention, the most prominent campaign amongst activists was to make chattel slavery less cruel. And, you know Tolstoy basically argues that there was a risk in doing so which was very kind of clear after abolitionism had come, not just in my country but the Russian Empire where serfdom was abolished in the 1860s to and Tolstoy said that now it's clear that making slavery less cruel actually strengthened the property rights that slave owners claimed in human property, because it made slavery less offensive to at least more people. The question was, what to say about this risk in the new project of the 1860s of making warfare less brutal and less controversial Tolstoy also introduced a kind of more, let's say controversial and analogy between making war humane and making the slaughter of non human animals humane and he says look at all the people out there who are for less cruel ways of killing their meat. And they think that makes them good people when they go on eating other animals and you know Tolstoy became a very famous, not just pacifist but vegetarian so he's thought meat eating was wrong and his trouble was that merely making the killing of animals more humane could legitimate slaughter and by analogy he worried that the same would occur if do not project gain traction and warfare was significantly humanized. So, you know, it's not like Tolstoy was necessarily going to be right and actually at the time do not mean successor. Another Swiss gentleman leading the Red Cross named Gustav Monnier said no it's the other way around. Actually, if we humanize war, it will be the first step towards ending it and the question is, which of these, you know, guesses turned out to be right in the question. Well, the rest of humane pursues that question. And first I try to show that Tolstoy was just way too early. He kind of foresaw some difficulties that the project of let's say merely controlling brutality and war would court. But it wasn't as if those worries were worth taking seriously for a long time for a few reasons. First, if we track the history of international law. After the 1860s. There are there are two things we have to say first there were big peace movements that were far more prominent than do not project for a long time. They didn't succeed until the 20th century at least in transatlantic warfare but they did set the priorities that became the priorities of Nuremberg. But let's say more important was that when we look at the attempt to regulate the conduct of war. It remains really brutal and and the project of making it less so doesn't gain much traction for about a century. And so the Geneva Convention of 1864 turns out to be not very representative of the rest of international law which is mainly about letting militaries fight ruthlessly. And that was especially true in most war which was global imperial war, in which even rules on paper were not deemed applicable to non Christians and non whites. And so, since these wars were so. So, nasty, there was no risk that their humanity would entrench them. Finally, even in transatlantic war, even to the extent there were constraints on what you could do in war like who you could shoot at what you could do to prisoners of war. Those constraints were just set aside in big wars, notably World War one and two. And so the in a sense Tolstoy was like a prophet of a reality that didn't exist yet. A genuine attempt that went beyond a few provisions and treaties to make warfare more humane that changed. And it's really with this change that I want to conclude. I think the big changes in the 1970s. There are these humble new documents called the additional protocols to the Geneva Convention, past then, and they they really are a quantum leap. It compared even to the prior, still good Geneva conventions of 1949, let alone the history of regulating war before then. These documents are significant because decolonization has happened. And what that means is that the victims of brutal European warfare for centuries actually get a say in what what the constraints on war fighting are. At the same time and connected to this fact, West Europeans are finally giving up empire after centuries and they're willing to go along with this humanizing campaign. Amazingly, it's only in these documents 1977 that it's clearly stated that you cannot shoot at a civilian. And even more important, there's a constraint placed on how many civilians you're allowed to kill when shooting at combatants or bombing them. And that's significant because you know that of the history of air war in the middle of the 20th century and the case of my country and the Pacific Theater and World War two, or in Korea or Vietnam. And then there are some other actors who kind of enter the scene after Vietnam anti war politics across the Atlantic are are dying a slow death, but new groups of humanitarians emerge alongside the longstanding. Red Cross groups like Human Rights Watch, which, like most human rights groups commit to never say anything about the justice or legality of starting wars, but are committed to monitoring whether atrocities take place in violation of the new so called international humanitarian law, which governs hostilities, even the United States military. As I say self humanizes it has recognized few constraints in the name of humanity before Vietnam, and the warriors honor is redefined. And the US military wants to fight more humanely after the disaster, public relations disaster as well as a moral disaster of the Milai massacre. So I think that in a sense the dais cast before 911 a good example of that is the first Gulf War, which is simultaneously the first international war that Human Rights Watch monitors for violations of the laws of war and reports to the public on what those violations are, and the first war in which military lawyers help pick targets to ensure that no violations are committed. Well that sets up, you know I think what's happened in our lifetime, because there were two wars on terror as as I would, you know, kind of in retrospect. The first George W Bush invaded two countries Afghanistan and Iraq with lots of troops heavy footprint war, and also allowed brutality in the form of torture. Then there was the new form of the war on terror which is in a certain way ongoing, and still allowed light footprint war and no footprint war light footprint war refers to the massive turn to special forces small teams of those who visit to kill. And we can see, for example, and in the first image on the slide, just how far flung that kind of warfare became which with those teams touching ground in 70% of the countries of the world in Obama's last. Last year and 80% in Donald Trump's administration and then more kind of notoriously there was no footprint war, which you know concerns the rise of armed drones and other kinds of aerial aerial killing. And you know there's a lot to say in terms of military history about this succession of two forms. What Ivan tried to show in the book is that the second form was humanized rhetorically and really it was going to be different than bushes war, not the scope, which was much bigger, many more countries involved, and in the kinds of methods use not heavy footprint but light and no footprint, but in the way it would be fought in the promised and actually in some ways delivered more humanity of the campaigns and you know this is the Nuremberg reversal, more war, less concern about keeping war itself and bounds more humanity as the highest aim, no torture and limitations imposed on civilian casualties. I promise this outcome. That's what he said, not just in that extraordinary Nobel Peace Prize address, that's what he would bring endless humane war with no attention really to what what the rules constraining whether war breaks out are, but no lack of attention, which would define the war for good to how brutally you can fight these wars. And amazingly he gave his other kind of, you know, marquee address on the war on terror four years later, once the drone program became widely known and even though he reflected on the cost not just for the world but for his own country of an endless war footing. He mainly was there to promise that the new targeted killings program that he had so extraordinarily expanded would be a caring one. He was heckled actually by an anti war activist but he said, you know, she's right to be worried about endless war but it's we have to fight it and the good news is that it will be fought in a caring humane way. So that's where we're left and I think it's not that I know that Putin wouldn't have invaded. If you know the West hadn't fought so many illegal wars of its own but it would, it wouldn't have been possible for him to give that extenuating speech. And I take from this, the lesson that we should return to Nuremberg's priorities. It's always more important to control force than to merely pick up the pieces or attempt to do so. That's a noble cause. But Tolstoy was right. We've lived through a period in which I think he was proved right that that noble cause comes with risks. When we purify war, we make it easier to fight. And the question is how we pivot beyond this mistake and reversal for our future. So I'll stop there and look forward to engaging in debate with you all.