International politics is deeply hostile to democratic intervention. At least part of the reason for this is that stability rather than equality or justice is the guiding norm of international relations. The figurative smoke-filled rooms in which peace is settled and wars planned have little relation to either parliaments or protests. It is unsurprising, then, that by temperament, if not political orientation, some of the most perceptive writers on the history of international relations have been conservatives. Of these, the late historian Paul Schroeder was exemplary for his ability to offer insights that could dislodge misconceptions held by both the Right and the Left.

A self-proclaimed conservative, Schroeder hoped in his youth to become a Lutheran pastor but abandoned this idea when he was twenty-seven. Instead of taking up the cloth, he opted for the life of a scholar, becoming a historian of the European international system and, in his later years, a fierce critic of the hubris of neoconservative foreign policy under George W. Bush. America’s Fatal Leap: 1991–2016, a collection of his essays published by Verso this year, compiles writing originally published in American Conservative, a magazine founded by Pat Buchanan. Verso has released the book alongside Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered, a kaleidoscopic set of essays on the European state system in the century leading up to and during the Great War. In Stealing Horses, Schroeder set out to offer a structural view of the international state system and to criticize prior misconceptions of the causes of World War I; America’s Fatal Leap, in contrast, used the conceptual framework of nineteenth-century great power politics to analyse the hubris of post–Cold War US politics.