The more 'humane' the war, the longer it lasts

Yale professor Samuel Moyn, in a major Oxford lecture, argued that the West's drive to fight 'cleaner' wars is perpetuating them.

Oxford’s academic year has come to an end. The prime minister of the UK has announced his resignation. I believe it is time for some marking - of graduate students and of the Labour Party both.

While my colleagues and I sit down to read exam papers, I doubt Starmer, his cabinet, and the broader party will attempt any soul-searching about their clumsy budget management, which rightly angered pensioners, and was compounded by disability benefit cuts.

And then there was Starmer’s timid stance towards the warmongering Israeli government, and how his intransigence, as an international lawyer no less, in refusing to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide, cost him and his party. He just does not get this, does he?

Because that refusal was not merely a political miscalculation. It was a symptom of something deeper: a habit of mind, widespread among Western liberal leaders, of substituting legal proceduralism for moral clarity when it comes to war. It is what some scholars call the ‘juridifi…