The rise of American dominance in the postwar era coincided with appeals for a more humane kind of war. Human rights conventions and international law courts were established with the aim of making war more ethical. But how successful have they been? And what if efforts to make war less violent have in fact made it more common?

According to Yale professor Samuel Moyn, the rise of ‘humane war’ in the second half of the twentieth century undermined the anti-war efforts of previous eras and instead shifted the focus to simply opposing war crimes. In August 2022 Moyn came to Intelligence Squared to discuss the themes of his book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. He will argue that armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. And discussing American wars from Vietnam to Iraq, he will claim that as wars have become more humane, they have also become endless.