The ramifications of this shift became apparent in the post-9/11 era. In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical-to ban torture and limit civilian casualties-have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force, from the nineteenth-century struggle to make war less lethal to the eventual shift from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. The United States exercises dominion everywhere. It hardly matters who's president or whether liberals or conservatives operate the levers of power. With little debate or discussion, the United States carries out military operations around the globe. In the years since 9/11, we have entered an age of endless war. A prominent historian exposes the dark side of making war more humane.
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