The United Nations-based structures are fragile and in need of an urgent upgrade; we should consider this one at the U.N. Summit of the Future in September.

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:

The practical politician assumes the attitude of looking down with great self-satisfaction on the political theorist as a pedant whose empty ideas in no way threaten the security of the state, inasmuch as the state must proceed on empirical principles; so the theorist is allowed to play his game without interference from the worldly-wise statesman.

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:

…a declaration of war is the easiest thing in the world to decide upon, because war does not require of the ruler, who is the proprietor and not a member of the state, the least sacrifice of the pleasures of his table, the chase, his country houses, his court functions,........

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