Samuel Moyn

Political theorist

Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has been met with near-universal censure in the west, and rightly so. But is the invasion also being used to rehabilitate failed ideas about how the world works? Samuel Moyn, a professor of history and jurisprudence at Yale and author of last year’s Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, argues that the worst possible response to the crisis would be to set Russia up as the great adversary of our time. Why not focus on repairing our own democracies, rather than lapsing into Cold War-era certainties which were questionable even when they were coined?