Next year will mark the 230th anniversary of Immanuel Kant’s celebrated essay on “Perpetual Peace” (1795). The great German philosopher put forward a set of guiding principles to achieve perpetual peace among the nations of his day. As we grapple with a world at war, and indeed at dire risk of nuclear Armageddon, we should build on Kant’s approach for our own time. An updated set of principles should be considered at the United Nations Summit of the Future in September.

Kant was fully aware that his proposals would face the skepticism of “practical” politicians:

Nonetheless, as historian Mark Mazower noted in his magisterial account of global governance, Kant’s was a “text that would intermittently influence generations of thinkers about world government down to our own day,” helping to lay the groundwork for the United Nations and international law on human rights, the conduct of war, and arms control.

Kant’s core proposals centered on three ideas. First, he rejected standing armies. Standing armies “incessantly menace other states by their readiness to appear at all times prepared for war.” In this, Kant anticipated by a century and a half the famous warning by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower of the dangers of a military-industrial complex. Second, Kant called for non-interference in the internal affairs of other nations. In this, Kant inveighed against the kind of covert operations that the U.S. has used relentlessly to topple foreign governments. Third, Kant called for a “federation of free states,” which in our time became the United Nations, a “federation” of 193 states pledged to operate under the U.N. Charter.

Kant put great hopes on republicanism as opposed to one-person rule as a check on war-making. Kant reasoned that a single ruler would readily succumb to the temptation of war:

By contrast, according to Kant:

Kant was far too optimistic about the ability of public opinion to constrain war-making. Both the Athenian and Roman republics were notoriously belligerent. Britain was the 19th century’s leading democracy, but perhaps its most belligerent power. For decades, the U.S. has engaged in non-stop wars of choice and violent overthrows of foreign governments.

There are at least three reasons why Kant got this wrong. First, even in democracies, the choice to launch wars almost always lies with a small elite group who are in fact largely insulated from public opinion. Second, and equally important, public opinion is relatively easy to manipulate through propaganda to stir the public backing for war. Third, the public can be insulated in the short term from the high costs of war by financing war through debt rather than taxation, and by relying on contractors, paid recruits, and foreign fighters rather than conscription.

Kant’s core ideas on perpetual peace helped move the world toward international law, human rights, and the decent conduct in war (such as the Geneva Conventions) in the 20th century. Yet despite the innovations in global institutions, the world remains dreadfully far from peace. According to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, we are 90 seconds to midnight, closer to nuclear war than at any time since the clock’s introduction in 1947.

The global apparatus of the U.N. and international law has arguably prevented a third world war to date. U.N. Secretary-General U Thant, for example, played a vital role in peacefully resolving the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Yet the U.N.-based structures are fragile and in need of an urgent upgrade.

For this reason, I urge that we formulate and adopt a new set of principles based on four key geopolitical realities of our time.

First, we are living with the nuclear Sword of Damocles over our heads. President John F. Kennedy put it eloquently 60 years ago in his famous Peace Speech, when he declared:

Second, we have arrived at true multipolarity. For the first since the 19th century, Asia has overtaken the West in economic output. We are long past the Cold War era in which the U.S. and Soviet Union dominated, or the “unipolar moment” claimed by the U.S. after the demise of........

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