1. Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare

2. Rides upon sleep; a drunken soldiery

3. Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,

4. To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free;

5. The night can sweat with terror as before

6. We pieced our thoughts into philosophy,

7. And planned to bring the world under a rule,

8. Who are but weasels fighting in a hole.

9. Yeats, ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’

The renaissance of the just war tradition in the second half of the twentieth century was, as I remarked in the previous chapter, as much a feature of reactions to the political world as to intellectual inquiry on its own, World War Two, Vietnam and so on. And in the 1980s and, especially, the 1990s a still different set of ‘events’ – the Gulf War, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, 9/11 and after – produced reflections crucial both to contemporary thinking about international relations and the role of modern states in international relations and to the understanding and deployment of the just war tradition. In this chapter and the next, therefore, I want to offer an interpretation and at least a provisional assessment of where the entwining of teleocratic conceptions of politics and the modern just war tradition has led us. Although I shall certainly engage in some criticism of the arguments I will discuss, that criticism will be largely ‘immanent’: I will save the more general assessment of why I see it as so problematic and what, if anything, can be done about it for the Epilogue.