It is challenging and frustrating to read in this book about the efforts nations have put into making war more palatable.
For most people, the idea of a ‘humane’ war is a contradiction in terms, particularly now as we watch Putin’s aggressive war in Ukraine unfold. Samuel Moyn quotes the Prussian general and military theorist Carl von Clausewitz: ‘The fact that slaughter is a horrifying spectacle must make us take war more seriously.’
Clausewitz also warned that laws on the…