Books, Arts & Manners

Can Modern War Be Just? by James Turner Johnson (Yale, 215 pp., $24.50)

Back in 1928, with the slaughter of World War I still weighing heavily upon the world’s collective consciousness, some 62 nations put their names to the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing “recourse to war for the solution of international controversies.” Although today the agreement is spoken of as the fruit of an almost criminal naïveté, those who said as much at the time were likely to be derided as cranky spoilsports. Little more than a decade later, alas, the spoilsports had their day, as these same earnest nations ushered in the most destructive war the world has ever known.

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William McGurn

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Can Modern War Be Just? by James Turner Johnson (Yale, 215 pp., $24.50)

Back in 1928, with the slaughter of World War I still weighing heavily upon the world’s collective consciousness, some 62 nations put their names to the Kellogg-Briand Pact outlawing “recourse to war for the solution of international controversies.” Although today the agreement is spoken of as the fruit of an almost criminal naïveté, those who said as much at the time were likely to be derided as cranky spoilsports. Little more than a decade later, alas, the spoilsports had their day, as these same earnest nations ushered in the most destructive war the world has ever known.