The twenty-first century already offers us many opportunities for observing that human beings in general, like the Bourbons, have learned nothing and forgotten nothing. Far from the new century being a century that would turn its back on the violence and conflict that had disfigured its predecessor, the twenty-first century has indulged itself in major violence even more quickly and, in ironic counterpoint to the reality of a globalizing world, in a geographically far more varied way, than the previous century did.

This, many will doubtless say, is only to be expected, at least in international politics. For is not international relations the world of ‘recurrence and repetition’, where Hobbes’s famous twins ‘force and fraud’ hold ultimate sway? And there is, indeed, something to that, as we shall see, though not quite what most people think there is. But the persistence of conflict in international relations is not the subject of this book per se; rather I am concerned to trace what I take to be a foolish – and harmful – trajectory in world politics that, I suggest, makes the relative persistence of conflict worse than it need be, and might otherwise be.