Have efforts to make war more ethical — to ban torture and limit civilian casualties — only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? That is the controversial argument Professor Samuel Moyn makes in his new book Humane. Moyn, a professor at Yale University and Non-Resident Fellow at the Quincy Institute, looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. Humane is the story of how America went off to fight and never came back, and how armed combat was transformed from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless, he argues.
This summer marked the fifth anniversary of the ruling by a tribunal convened by the U.N. Commission on the Law of the Sea in response to a case submitted by the Philippines against the People’s Republic of China. To note the occasion, U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken reiterated the claim that China was “threatening freedom of navigation” and urged Beijing to “reassure the international community that it is committed to the rules-based maritime order.”
Blinken’s charge raises more questions than it answers: What is the rules-based maritime order? How can the United States best work with countries throughout the Indo-Pacific region to strengthen and improve that order? Is it possible to work with rather than against China in bolstering the rules-based maritime order, and if so, how? In a recent QI report — “Promoting Peace and Stability in the Maritime Order Amid China’s Rise” — Rachel Esplin Odell addresses these questions, laying out a strategy of military restraint and diplomatic engagement in the Indo-Pacific that reduces security tensions, enhances crisis management, and builds a more inclusive maritime order in the region and beyond.
A distinguished group of maritime security experts, including Mike Mochizuki, Bec Strating, Gregory Polling, Shuxian Luo, and Michael D. Swaine, will discuss the report and offer their own recommendations.
