Perhaps it’s simpler: we’re just out the other side of the experiment with mass-media democracy, and mass-mobilization warfare. In other words, this is the West’s first fully post-liberal war. And in this new age, politicians have simply stopped feeling they need to give electorates an explanation.

The liberal order was supposed to be a global utopia of rules. Under this optimistic regime, states would avert open conflict by adhering to international norms — and even, latterly, spread the norms at gunpoint in order to globalize their adoption. Starmer’s stubborn adherence to this disintegrating raft of proceduralism has been greeted with Trumpian contempt. And perhaps we might also note that these rules are, themselves, a historical anomaly. Until the 20th century, leaders gave little thought to what ordinary people wanted, when weighing the necessity of conflict. For most of history before mass-casualty munitions, such decisions were seen as the preserve of specially educated elites.

But over the mass-broadcast age that began with radio, and continued until the digital revolution, it came to be accepted that the general public ought to have a say. In his account of the run-up to the Second World War, the historian AJP Taylor describes a dynamic in which “public opinion” became, for the first time, a meaningful factor for politicians in their decision-making, even on war. It’s not a coincidence that over the same era a new type of official communications — more colloquially, mass propaganda — also emerged, to shape “public opinion” in the desired direction.

This was genuinely necessary, for over the same industrial period, war itself also became a mass phenomenon: both mass-mobilization, and mass-casualty. If you’re going to ask all your citizens to mobilize either for combat or the war effort, you do need some form of general public consent. The climax of “total war” in this style came between 1914 and 1945: an orgy of industrialized weapons-manufacture, death, and destruction, that only ended with the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

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After this cataclysm, the world lived for decades in the comparative hush of Mutually Assured Destruction. Meanwhile, the broadcast-media legacy of “total war” entrenched a belief that electorates should be involved in any decision to fight. Especially in the USA after Vietnam and Watergate, the “third estate” came increasingly to understand itself as an indispensable component in the democratic settlement: both speaking truth to power, and at times cutting power back down to size.

In time, this also had a reciprocal effect on the way war itself came to be mediated. I vividly recall the considerable effort, after 9/11, to present the invasion of Iraq as legal and democratically mandated. By contrast, what feels strange about the current conflict in Iran is that it is just as real — real deaths, real refugees, real flames, real international economic chaos — but no one seems to have paid any attention to rules, or indeed “public opinion”, before embarking on it. And now here we are.

But perhaps this is fitting. Over the past two decades, both warfare and communications have mutated at warp speed. And one of the key characteristics of this revolution, which has happened through digital innovation, is a paradoxical mix of apparent decentralization covering real centralization. Think of the way social media “disintermediated” local newspapers in theory, in favor of “citizen journalism”, while in practice handing overall control to a handful of platforms and their oligarchs.

The same now seems to go, too, for war. Especially since the frenzy of drone innovation catalyzed by Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, combat has been “disintermediated” away from human-manned artillery or soldiers, toward partially or fully autonomous weapons. Since Trump’s “major combat operation” began, for example, the Gulf states surrounding Iran have undergone heavy attack by drones and guided missiles, most of which has been repelled by equally high-tech automated interceptor systems. All of this is controlled by a comparatively small battery of experts, and supplied by a small number of firms.

Meanwhile, the field of domestic war communications also feels increasingly swarm-like, computer-generated — and indifferent to interference by the masses. The White House X account broadcasts grainy explosion footage mixed with high-gloss edits drawn from video gaming, action movies, and (really) Spongebob Squarepants, adding to the sense of high-tech unreality with AI-animated “Founding Fathers” imagery. Blaze Media founder Glenn Beck, too, has trotted out his “George AI”, a CGI rendition of George Washington dressed as a tech bro and trained on data “writings from the founding era”, to explain the importance of what the White House trumpets as “peace through strength”.

This is perhaps also the context in which to understand the recent standoff between Trump and Anthropic. The CEO of the AI firm, Dario Amodei, objected to his system being deployed by the US military to power fully autonomous weapons and domestic surveillance. Trump retaliated by threatening to designate Anthropic as a “supply chain risk”. Negotiations are ongoing; but the clear impression is of a US Department of War leaning full-tilt into the new high-tech arms race, and that will brook no dissent. Online, too, just as Amodei’s objections to the weaponization of Claude have been dismissed, so too have protests from Ben Stiller, over the use of his cinematic work for war propaganda. The White House “Epic Fury” movie edit is still live.

This indifference to older norms, and seeming preference for vibes-based comms over clear messaging, has prompted a cacophony of secondary debate. This now occupies everyone’s newsfeeds; meanwhile, the “major combat operation” rumbles on. And who knows: perhaps there really is a robust national-interest rationale for the attacks, from an American leadership perspective, and those in the know simply aren’t saying. But whatever prompted the attack, it’s clear that the broadcast-media machine is increasingly irrelevant to such decisions.

Much as heavy artillery now takes second place to nimbler, cheaper drone swarms, so has mass media been disintermediated by a maelstrom of CGI edits, AI propagandists, bot-farms, and “citizen journalism”. And perhaps that’s the point: the aim is not clear messaging but a debate so hyperreal that messaging as such is impossible. Above the din, meanwhile, the postwar fiction of “the people” having any kind of democratic say in warmaking has been quietly shelved.

In the premodern era, war was for elites, with ordinary peasants only mobilized in extremis. Of course, the consequences of war were frequently devastating for those peasants; but by and large such decisions were taken over their heads. We seem now to be approaching a post-industrial retread of the same dynamic, in which warmaking is once again an elite choice, and everyone just has to live with it.

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Some reports are now suggesting that Trump expected a quick operation, comparable with Venezuela, and not Iran’s determination to make it a regional war. And yet networked warfare will tend in that direction: the arrest of two self-radicalized “Islamic State” fighters in New York City last Saturday, for trying to detonate a nail-bomb at a Right-wing protest, is a harbinger of the vectors by which high-tech warfare, energized by memes, is likely to metastasize.

For the internet’s other core characteristic, along with centralizing real power, is dissolving physical distance. Social media platforms such as TikTok, Facebook and Instagram have become both advertising channels and organizational tools for the global people-trafficking industry; meanwhile studies suggest that the internet’s power to connect people instantly across distance inhibits migrants’ assimilation in host countries.

Scaled up, the picture this presents is of increasingly diffuse, unassimilated, intermingled, and digitally networked populations across the globe, who hold (putting it mildly) a range of views about any given war, in any given place. In such a world, where communications are instantaneous, and populations linked more by ideology or ethno-religious affinity than geography, every battlefield is also potentially everywhere.

So we’ve exited the age of utopian globalism. But not (as Trump seemed to promise) for a return to moderate nationalism. Even if (as we all now hope) Trump is planning to end the war soon, what’s emerging as the post-liberal new normal is instead a volatile, hypermobile, high-tech and radically post-democratic form of global networked tribalism — but with sleeper cells, and autonomous suicide drones. God help us all.

Yet the ceasefire, for now, is holding. And that means that a rare window of opportunity remains open — an opportunity for transformative diplomacy. After all, the devastating US-Israeli attacks and the retaliatory Iranian missile barrages showed both the power and the limitations of military action. There was no clear winner. But as the fog of that war recedes, a bigger prize could be on offer. If stability in the Middle East is truly the objective, the United States must seize this moment to broker a comprehensive diplomatic settlement with Iran.

To do so, it will need to recognize that the geopolitical landscape of the Middle East has shifted fundamentally. Ever since the 1979 revolution, dialogue between Washington and Tehran has been impeded by myths, biases, and outdated frameworks. Whether or not the West has noticed, though, the chances of rapprochement are becoming more favorable.

Within Iran, the culture has gradually transitioned from ideological fervor to pragmatic nationalism. Decades of economic sanctions and international isolation, combined with generational shifts among Iran’s youth and elites, have tempered the regime’s revolutionary zeal and increased the strategic emphasis on national interests. The Persian civilization, with its rich historical continuity, has reasserted itself, taming the isolationist and confrontational impulses that marked Iran as a pariah state in the late 20th century.

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More broadly, the Great Transition — that is, the end of a period of history marked by unchallenged American global dominance — has redirected American priorities and given the middle powers a better hand in negotiations. Despite taking serious damage from Israeli and US bombing during the 12-day war, Iran remains a civilizational state with a population of 90 million, regional reach, and historical longevity, marking it a resilient middle power. In that brief conflict, Iran launched strikes of its own, overwhelming Israeli and US defenses. The much-touted and expensive US THAAD and Israeli Arrow air defense system together shot down only 201 of Iran’s 574 ballistic missiles, depleting around a quarter of US global stockpiles in twelve days and costing US taxpayers $ 2 billion.

Those missiles will take years to replenish. It is another inconvenience of a conflict that distracts from America’s foremost strategic priority: competing with China. From the prism of national interest, the Middle East is no longer a priority for Washington. Successive US administrations — from Obama to Trump via Biden — have sought to reduce American military commitments in West Asia, reflecting a structural shift in US strategic priorities towards East Asia and China. This strategic retrenchment necessitates a sustainable regional balance. And this balance can be achieved not by isolating and excluding Iran, but by incorporating Tehran as a focal point of a new West Asian security order. Already, Iran has embraced its erstwhile rivals in the Persian Gulf, attempting, with the help of Saudi Arabia, to contain the rise of an expansionist, neo-Ottoman Turkey led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Traditional alliances, in other words, are in a state of flux due to changing regional and global dynamics.

Such geopolitical circumstances recall the diplomatic opportunities seized by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in the 1970s. Then, rapprochement with China fundamentally altered the global order, setting in motion a series of events that culminated in the end of the Cold War. President Trump, facing a similar historical juncture, now has the unique chance to reset and mend relations with Iran after 46 years of hostility, potentially reshaping the region’s security architecture for decades to come. It is already the case, as I have argued, that structural changes, and shared interests, have made improved US-Iran relations more likely. But proactive American diplomacy could accelerate this trajectory, allowing Trump to secure a significant legacy for himself: not just international recognition, but even the Nobel Peace Prize he so covets.

Nonetheless, considerable obstacles remain. Chief among them is Israel’s staunch opposition to US normalization with Iran. Note the timing of Israel’s surprise attack against Iran: 13 June, two days before a pivotal round of talks between Washington and Tehran, which analysts expected could result in a major breakthrough. While Tehran’s revolutionary ideological fervor has waned, Israel under Prime Minister Netanyahu has increasingly mirrored zealotry of the early Islamic Republic.

The Netanyahu government has adopted an ideological, Manichean worldview that defines security exclusively through confrontation and perpetual militarization. This worldview has shifted Israel away from the pragmatic and defensive policies championed by past Israeli leaders such as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin. It is a profound change. The United States’ unconditional support for Israel has been a major cause for the systematic radicalization of Israeli society, promoting hubris, recklessness, and overreach while protecting the country from the consequences of its unrestrained behavior. Within this strategic context, Netanyahu’s neoconservative approach — emphasizing Jewish exceptionalism, religious fundamentalism, and hegemonic expansion — has produced a state perpetually at war, undermining Israel’s long-term security and diplomatic flexibility in pursuit of the quixotic dream of turning Israel into a regional hegemon.

And it is hardly the case that Netanyahu has been, in that respect, successful. Despite repeated tactical victories, Israel’s leadership has failed to convert short-term military successes into lasting peace and regional stability. Rather, the new Israeli establishment uses the spectre of war as fuel for its existential threat narratives, spun to further securitize Israeli domestic politics. In becoming akin to ancient Assyria — an imperial state perpetually at war with its neighbors and driven by militant extremism — Israel risks strategic overstretch, exhausting its resources and threatening its future viability.

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The first Trump administration, motivated partly by its desire to “solve” the Middle East and finally extricate the US by bolstering Israeli power, attempted to form an anti-Iran regional bloc, via the Abraham Accords, that brought Israel together with the Sunni Arab states. Although they brought some level of diplomatic normalization to US allies in the region, the Accords ultimately fell short of addressing the region’s structural imbalances. Iran remains an indispensable regional power, possessing civilizational continuity, a substantial population, significant indigenous technological and industrial capacity, and the resolve to assert its interests. Its exclusion from the regional order perpetuates instability, undermining American strategic objectives and increasing regional insecurity.

Recognizing this, Washington must now pivot towards a diplomatic strategy that integrates Iran within a broader regional security framework. Tehran, pragmatically recognizing the limits of confrontation, has indicated openness to diplomacy that respects its sovereignty, dignity, and core strategic interests. Despite their rhetorical and performative chants against Israel and Western hegemony, Iranian leaders have signaled a willingness to quietly abandon aggressive strategic postures, including dissolving the expensive and geopolitically contentious “axis of resistance” in the Levant and Eastern Mediterranean — forsaking its regional allies and proxies like the Hezbollah and the Yemeni Houthis. In exchange, Tehran seeks political normalization based on the full recognition of its sovereignty, including its right to domestic enrichment and conventional military capabilities, and economic reintegration with Washington and its regional allies.

This emerging diplomatic consensus could take the form of a comprehensive Perso-Abraham Accord, ending entrenched hostility between Iran and Israel and redefining regional security through mutual recognition, diplomatic normalization, and shared economic interests. Such an accord would significantly reduce the US military footprint in the Middle East, aligning with America’s broader strategic reorientation towards Asia. Simultaneously, it would curtail the ambitions of regional powers such as Turkey, whose neo-Ottoman expansionism has alarmed Arab states and Israel alike.

For such an accord to materialize, however, the United States must practice strategic empathy and prioritize sustained diplomatic engagement over coercion. Rather than continuing a counterproductive cycle of sanctions and intimidation, Washington could offer tangible incentives, such as American investment in Iran’s civilian nuclear technology. These incentives would be accompanied by stringent monitoring mechanisms managed through US firms and a regional consortium, whose inspections would replace those of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which Iran now views with suspicion. This approach would simultaneously demonstrate US goodwill and ensure transparency in Iran’s nuclear activities, effectively addressing international proliferation concerns.

Equally critical is the role of Israel, which must acknowledge the strategic folly of perpetual confrontation and sabotage. A reset in regional relations offers Israel a unique opportunity to redefine its security through diplomacy rather than continuous militarization. The alternative — a perpetuation of escalation cycles — not only incentivizes Iran to nuclearize as a means of deterrence, but also risks embroiling the region in a broader war. It is a war that neither Washington nor Tehran desires, and one Israel itself cannot ultimately afford.

Looking at the bigger picture, the recent conflict between Israel and Iran, despite its immediate devastation, has clarified a crucial geopolitical reality: military force alone cannot secure lasting peace or dismantle Iran’s nuclear program permanently. The Prussian strategist Carl von Clausewitz famously wrote that “war is a continuation of politics by other means.” War is never an end in itself, but must have clear strategic objectives that advance core state interests. The Twelve-Day War, and the shaky ceasefire that has followed, have done the opposite. They have destabilized the region, pushed Iran closer into the Chinese orbit, and further entangled the United States in Middle Eastern quagmires — all while signaling to Iran that if it wants to avoid the harrowing fates of Libya and Syria, then it must try to end the Israeli monopoly on nuclear weapons.

A better path to regional stability lies through strategic diplomacy, respect for mutual interests, and the careful incorporation of Iran into a renewed regional security architecture. The time is ripe for such a diplomatic reset, a comprehensive agreement that could not only redefine relations between the US and Iran, but also fundamentally reshape the broader region. Donald Trump, uniquely positioned by history and circumstance, holds the key to this transformative opportunity to midwife the birth of a new Middle East. Choosing diplomacy over perpetual conflict could become the defining act of his presidency, establishing a legacy of statesmanship and peacemaking that not only resonates with his base but also reverberates far beyond his tenure in office.

A Cambridge classicist turned diplomat, whose experience negotiating the 1919 Paris Peace Conferences disenchanted him with international politics, Carr laid out in The Twenty Years Crisis how the well-meaning illusions of liberal idealists had set Europe on the path to war. The “Utopians” had imported the precepts of Benthamite liberalism into the domain of International Relations, deluding themselves as to how the struggle between the world’s “haves” and have-nots” worked against a stable equilibrium. As Carr wrote, “The breakdown of the 1930s was too overwhelming to be explained merely in terms of individual action or inaction. Its downfall involved the bankruptcy of the postulates on which it was based” because “the principles themselves were false or inapplicable”. Then as now, “much comment on international affairs was rendered tedious and sterile by incessant girding at a reality which refused to conform to utopian prescriptions”. 

Both Britain in its moment of global hegemony and then its supplanter the United States had confused their own political and economic dominance with the good of all mankind, “clothing [their] own interest in the guise of a universal interest for the purpose of imposing it on the rest of the world”, yet “as soon as the attempt is made to apply these supposedly abstract principles to a concrete political situation, they are revealed as the transparent disguises of selfish vested interests”. Then, like the liberal dinosaurs who still dominate foreign policy discourse, “the utopian, faced by the collapse of standards whose interested character he has failed to penetrate, takes refuge in condemnation of a reality which refuses to conform to these standards”. 

There are two distinct, if overlapping, arguments here, both of which can rightly be made against our own Utopians. First, that the Idealists, for reasons inherent in Anglo-Saxon political culture, imposed the philosophically false precepts of 19th-century liberalism on the real world as it actually exists, and stood back in bewildered horror at the chaos that ensued. The second is that the idealist prescriptions of the Utopians masked naked self-interest, whether through cynicism or lack of self-awareness. In just the same way, there has always been a tension, in Realist critiques of US foreign policy, between criticising idealism for frittering away real-world power in pursuit of ideological delusions, and in deploying its stated values only cynically, shrouding its pursuit of naked power politics in a moral cloak.

As a result of his savage excoriation of liberal Utopianism, Carr has since been framed as one of the founding fathers of the Realist school of International Relations, which aims to deal with the world of foreign affairs as it is, and not as we may wish it to be. For as Carr lamented, “in contemporary British and American politics, the most powerful influence has been wielded by those more utopian statesmen who are sincerely convinced that policy is deduced from ethical principles, not ethical principles from policy. The Realist’s task, by contrast, “is to bring down the whole cardboard structure of utopian thought by exposing the hollowness of the material out of which it is built”. One of the first dedicated professors of the new discipline of International Relations, Carr, along with his American analogue Hans Morgenthau, has therefore since been framed as a central protagonist in the “first great debate” between Idealists and Realists, ever since the introductory fare of every IR undergraduate.

As American power surged following the Cold War, within the academy the intellectual pendulum swung away from the Realists towards Idealists who saw in the Pax Americana the opportunity to steer global politics towards an earthly paradise. Their ideas, in vulgarised form, have entranced our rulers ever since. As the great American Realist John J. Mearsheimer warned in his 2004 E.H. Carr memorial lecture: “Carr… would be appalled by the almost complete absence of realists and the near total dominance of Idealists in the contemporary British academy. In fact, it is difficult to imagine any British university hiring a young scholar today who makes arguments like those found in The Twenty Years’ Crisis.” 

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Similarly, in his excellent 2019 work The New Twenty Years Crisis, the British IR scholar Philip Cunliffe applies Carr’s merciless dissection of liberal idealism to the delusions of our own rulers. He observes that, in the United States “the hard task of clearing the liberal-utopian undergrowth has largely been undertaken by strong-armed American realists” like Mearsheimer “who have hacked away at the dense foliage of liberal idealism”, which inspired America’s Middle Eastern interventions . In Britain, however, the reason “the political science that Carr sought to establish — realism — has been allowed to wither”. Just as Britain’s political leaders now commit us to the last-ditch defence of an American global order in whose strategic thinking they have no say, so has the British IR academy, like the Utopian pundits of the Thirties, committed itself to providing intellectual cover for this doomed and delusional project.

Today, however, Carr’s work is undergoing a reassessment within the British IR academy in which he remained, for the duration of his life, a neglected prophet. There is something ironic in Carr’s centrality to IR theory: Carr himself had no great love for the discipline he helped found, declaring that the supposed “science of international relations” was merely an intellectual “rag-bag” and a “fiasco”, grumbling that: “Whatever my share in starting this business, I do not know that I am particularly proud of it.” Carr was, fundamentally, a historian whose understanding of international order came from the close, humane observation of human affairs that was, in earlier times, the natural product of a British Classical education. Yet his scepticism of IR’s intellectual value is, I would suggest, more than an amusing biographical quirk. For contained within The Thirty Years Crisis, largely neglected due to the blistering force of his intellectual demolition of liberal Idealism, is an underappreciated dissection of the failings of IR Realism, downplayed by those who claim his mantle for their own.

The failings of liberal idealism are, just as in the Thirties, clear to see: we inhabit the mess the Utopians have created, and are once again on the path to global war. Yet, at least in the vulgarised form IR Realism has adopted in policy discourse, the discipline has overcorrected away from the Utopians’ illusory dreams of global harmony towards a meek subjection to the claims of naked power, which often gives the sense of relishing its own amorality for pure shock value. Yet this is a tendency Carr himself both foresaw and warned against, the neglected half of his masterwork being what we could call a “Critique of Pure Realism”.

As Carr warned: “Where utopianism has become a hollow and intolerable sham… the realist performs an indispensable service in unmasking it. But pure realism can offer nothing but a naked struggle for power which makes any kind of international society impossible.” Indeed, Carr observed “it is an unreal kind of realism which ignores the element of morality in any world order”, as “an international order cannot be based on power alone, for the simple reason that mankind will in the long run always revolt against naked power”. For Carr, the cold power-politics of the Realists is morally unsatisfying, and thus will ultimately fail to provide order, as the human spirit will naturally rebel against it. His value therefore lies in showing that pure Realism, by ignoring the moral considerations underpinning IR, was in a literal sense unrealistic, and no less illusory than the follies of the Idealists.

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Yet popular understandings of IR veer between an amoral caricature of Realism indistinguishable from a fawning worship of brute power, and a hysterical, expeditionary Idealism increasingly unmoored from realpolitik — which in the current context means the hard reality of the West’s dwindling power. Just as the struggle for supremacy within the academy between Realists and Idealists obscures these tensions within Carr’s work, many prominent IR Realists today find themselves making moral judgments of their own as they cast their cold eye on world affairs. Realists who view Ukraine’s struggle against Russian domination as a delusional folly of an Idealist West cannot resist making moral claims where their own consciences intrude. For Cunliffe, Nato intervention in Yugoslavia and Libya, like the invasion of Iraq, was not just folly but morally wrong in itself, through violating the rights of small nations of which Carr himself was largely dismissive. Similarly, Mearsheimer observes that Israel’s war on Gaza is a “crime against humanity that serves no meaningful military purpose”, yet claims that even if it were effective, it would be hard to view it as anything other than an outrage. As Mearsheimer states, he wishes “to be on record so that when historians look back on this moral calamity, they will see that some Americans were on the right side of history.” 

Another prominent American Realist, the strategist Elbridge Colby, who has long warned against Washington’s bogging itself down in Ukraine and the Middle East as a distraction from the looming contest with China, takes the opposite position. Colby argues that the Gaza war requires US backing, and that America should be willing to “defer more to Israel’s judgment about how best to manage its security challenges”. This is a position he is most unwilling to take regarding Ukraine. Right or wrong as any of these particular stances may be, they are all moral value judgments, rather than the cold-eyed weighing of power balances which Carr’s Realist heirs profess to expound. Just as Idealists couch naked power politics in dubious moral claims, so do Realists, when it comes to it, find themselves taking moral stances informed by Idealist principles. 

This observation is not an attempted “gotcha”, or accusation of hypocrisy: both Mearsheimer and Cunliffe are alive, within their analysis of Carr’s work, to the moral factors that will always undercut pure Realism, even if they understate their importance. Instead, the observation is that in its circular transatlantic journey, Carr’s Realist tradition has over-emphasised the cold logic of power while underemphasising the natural sense of right and justice that still, despite it all, plays upon the affairs of man. The dispute within the academy has in a few short years been firmly won: the Idealists have led us to catastrophe, and we are soon to find ourselves humbled by the iron laws of power governing international affairs. Yet even still, now that the Realists have won the battle, we would do well not to throw out the ethical baby with the liberal-imperialist bathwater. 

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There is a danger, as theory transmutes into policy, that IR realism becomes a more sophisticated version of the vulgar anti-Western self-hatred of the younger Left. Multipolarity, by itself, is no more likely to bring global harmony than European decolonisation brought what we now call the Global South peace and prosperity. One can believe that the invasions of Iraq and of Ukraine are both wrong for precisely the same reasons, just as one can condemn the grossly disproportionate conduct of the Gaza War while also condemning Hamas’s war crimes against Israeli civilians. Carr himself noted that British and American claims that their rule was more humane and driven by local consent than that of their German and Japanese rivals — though cynical and self-serving — were also true in an objective sense. Writing in 2019, Cunliffe was entirely correct to lambast the expeditionary liberalism that destabilised the world order, yet it is a marker of how swiftly the global order has changed that the focus of his polemic is a system that already seems of only historical interest. The US is no longer searching the world for new monsters to slay, but desperately trying to preserve the remnants of its order for those desirous to live under it. The de-escalatory meekness of its responsive use of military force is startling. Realists are in danger of tilting at windmills that have already fallen into ruin. 

The issue at hand is no longer to impose liberalism on other societies by force, but to preserve what was humane about it, in some form, for ourselves. It is fanciful that the Europe that will emerge from the trials ahead will be the world of oppressive liberal hegemony we rail against: critics of runaway liberalism, including myself, may have cause to dread the hard world whose dawning we have so long proclaimed. Is this liberal idealism sneaking in through the back door? In so far as Carr’s conception of the basis of international morality seems to echo liberalism, it is through liberalism’s own self-obscured Christian inheritance. In essence, our task is to rescue what liberalism best preserved of this — as Carr put it, to “ascertain what can be saved from the ruins”. Perhaps here again morality cloaks self-interest — now the West is weak, we throw ourselves back onto the better angels of human nature. 

Through his rejection of IR as a science, Carr is liberated from its sterile determinism. Things, he believes, can yet be better than they are. Whether or not this is true — and the failure of Carr’s chosen projects justly provokes scepticism here — his understanding that we believe this should be so, and that it is morally unsatisfactory to believe otherwise, is worth holding onto. For if the Idealist fallacy is that things are other than they are, the Realist fallacy is that things cannot be so. By not replicating their errors in turn, the Realists may still navigate a path out of the jungle. As Carr observes: “Political science is the science not only of what is, but of what ought to be.”