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H-Diplo|Jervis Forum Review 145: Thompson on Schroeder, _America's Fatal Leap, 1991–2016_
The Jervis Forum
H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum
Review 145
Paul W. Schroeder. America’s Fatal Leap, 1991–2016. Verso, 2025. ISBN: 9781804295762.
29 October 2025 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/R-145 | Website:rjissf.org
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John A. Thompson, University of Cambridge
When Paul W. Schroeder died in December 2020 at the age of ninety-three, a chorus of scholars paid tribute to his stature as a historian of European international politics who combined detailed knowledge of the course of events from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries with an original analytic perspective on the character of the behavior involved.[1] It was the latter characteristic that made Schroeder’s writings of more interest than those of most historians to political scientists, with whose work and theories (notably neo-realism) Schroeder also engaged, albeit in a generally skeptical manner. In his later years, Schroeder made several contributions to public debate on current issues in United States foreign policy. This volume is a collection of such pieces, all of which were published in the quarter-century following the end of the Cold War.[2]This period was the heyday of “unipolarity” when America’s global primacy was unchallenged and a presupposition of these essays is that the decisions of US policymakers were no longer constrained or shaped by the perceived requirements of a geopolitical contest.[3] When writing on current events, Shroeder often made it clear that he did so as a historian, drawing upon his wide and deep historical knowledge, and so these essays further illuminate his scholarly work, and the values that underlay it, as well as expressing his sometimes passionate feelings about the actions of the United States at the time he was writing.
Articles which are written at the time have the virtue of re-capturing the mood and context in which actions were taken more directly than do retrospective narratives.[4]In this case, they also demonstrate, as Perry Anderson points out in his perceptive introduction, that Schroeder’s thinking about American foreign policy “was not static” (viii). Thus, Part I of this collection shows how fully he shared the hopes in the early 1990s that “a new world order” could be established following the end of the Cold War (21). Interestingly, this led him to deplore the 1991 Gulf War as “a just, unnecessary war” (3). He agreed that President Saddam Hussein’s takeover of Kuwait could not be allowed to stand, but argued that this objective could have been achieved, if more slowly, by economic sanctions that cut Iraq off from contact with the outside world. Such a course of action would have had benefits that extended beyond this one case: “Saddam’s aggression presented us with a great opportunity to prove the preeminence of economics, the uselessness of military victory, and the effectiveness of world consensus and international law” (9-10).
In 1994, Schroeder developed this argument, suggesting that there was an opportunity to create a “new world order” that would be “the climax of a long historical development stretching back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (26). But it was part of “the special contribution of historians” to point out that previous attempts to establish order “through collectively enforcing international law against violators” had failed because
making international politics into a confrontation between alleged lawbreakers and supposed enforcers of the law runs counter to the core of the international system…the coexistence of independent states in juridically coordinate rather than superordinate and subordinate relations with each other, each claiming sovereignty, and demanding recognition of that sovereignty from the others (26-27).
However, Schroeder argued, a solution to this dilemma had been made possible through the development in the later twentieth century of “durable international alliances and associations of a new kind, directed not simply against common dangers, but also for common constructive purposes,” with the World Trade Organization and the European Union being prime examples (31).
The benefits of inclusion in such organizations, and the potential penalty of exclusion from them, constituted a form of international pressure, the efficacy of which had been shown in several post-World War II developments including the conversion of Germany and Japan into peaceful democracies, the progressive integration of western Europe and the largely non-violent dismantling of European colonial empires. Whereas coercion through the use of military force generated resistance and resentment, “the improved effectiveness, broader applicability, and greater durability of these nonforcible mechanisms of association and exclusion make it no longer utopian to hope and work for their indefinite duration and extension” (36). Schroeder observed that it was important that this new world order not be burdened with unrealistic expectations but still argued that “the principal hopes and chances for durable, general, relative peace in the world…rest now on a world order operating primarily by association-exclusion rather than deterrence-compellence” (44).
Schroeder described his viewpoint as a conservative one, a designation accepted by Anderson (52, viii), but these essays make it clear that he was not the sort of conservative who sees the character of interstate relations as essentially unchanging, whether because of the anarchic structure of the system or simply human nature. By contrast, Schroeder stated that “in practice I cannot make sense of the history of international politics and the international system without using the notion of progress in it” (257). He pointed out that much of modern international relations, notably with regard to trade and travel, had “been brought under the governance of international treaties, conventions, common practices, and institutions to enforce generally accepted rules” (90). Even with regard to interstate conflict, Schroeder affirmed his belief that the history was “a record of a long, painful, costly, and uneven process of learning—learning how to combine peace with reasonable security and some measure of justice, how to conceive of a viable international system, and how to define and build a tolerable world order” (258, 4).
This was the central theme of Schroeder’s major work, The Transformation of European Politics, which, as Anderson observes, had been completed shortly before he wrote these hopeful essays on what he saw as the emergent new world order in the early 1990s (ix).[5] The centrepiece of the book was the 1814–1815 Congress of Vienna and the establishment there of a Concert of Europe, which Schroeder saw as the only previous international association that “had succeeded for a time in keeping its great-power members and lesser states in line, not primarily by military force and threats, but by the prospect of exclusion from the Concert and the European family of states with its benefits and privileges” (35). In 2001, he cited a recent book by German scholars that claimed that there had been thirty-three instances between 1862 and 1914 in which great-power conflict loomed and was de-escalated and controlled by normative rules and practices, generally under the aegis of the European Concert (60-61).[6]
Holding up the post-1815 Vienna system as an exemplary model illustrated the way in which Schneider’s perspective was a conservative one. In more than one of these essays, he states unequivocally that “in international affairs order takes priority over justice” because “international peace and justice are impossible and unthinkable without international order in the way liberty is unthinkable without law or good health without a sound physiological system” (110). His judgment on the events of 1914 reflected this view: “It does not matter how justified or unjustified Serbia’s grievances and claims were or how sacred its pan-Serbian cause. One simply cannot allow a small power to get away with repeated challenges and provocations without inviting a violent reaction sooner or later” (64-67, 109-110).
The optimism Schroeder expressed in the early 1990s did not survive the terrorist attacks of September 9, 2001—or more precisely the response to those attacks of President George W. Bush’s administration. Part II of this book is composed of the twelve essays that Schroeder wrote on this subject and its ramifications in the following years and published mostly in journals of a conservative character.[7] Again, in expressing his deeply-felt opposition to the statements and acts of the Bush administration, Schroeder drew upon his wide-ranging historical knowledge, often in an imaginative and strikingly original way. He was quick, for example, to point out the flaws in the common comparison of 9/11 with the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, arguing that the Sarajevo assassination in 1914 was a more apt analogy despite the huge disparity between the position of Austria-Hungary then and that of the United States in 2001 “as easily the most powerful country in the world,…boasting a vast array of allies and friends, and facing no major threat…except (putatively) that of terrorism” (50). The parallel between the two situations, however, was that in both cases the terrorists could achieve their objectives only through the reaction they provoked from their enemy. Bush’s immediate declaration of a global war on terror had given al-Qaeda “just what they wanted but could not achieve on their own: an international stature as a formidable enemy of the United States and the Western world that their actual deeds and power do not deserve, and the open wider war they want” (57, also 132-144).
The early talk in Washington of following the overthrow of the Taliban with that of Saddam Hussein deepened and widened Schroeder’s concern because of its implications for America’s relationship with the international system. In October 2002, he made it clear that an invasion of Iraq did not meet any of the criteria that might justify a preemptive war and “would represent and promote dangerous, lawless international behavior” that “would violate and weaken the two basic principles which, developed over the past five centuries…have enabled the international system to work and peace to grow in our own time” (89). These “central principles” were “the right of all states to be recognized and treated as independent, and the simultaneous and corresponding need and requirement for states to become part of associations for common purposes and to follow the rules” (77). To “realists” who questioned the importance of “so abstract and nebulous a thing as the international system,” Schroeder responded that it was “no more abstract really than the physical environment or the rules and practices that constitute our civil society” (62). An unprovoked attack on Iraq “would be an imperialist war…because there is no defensible definition of imperialism that would not fix that label upon it” (92).
A few years later, as the United States battled with an insurgency in Iraq, Schroeder described the 2003 invasion as “a fatal leap” from hegemony to empire (212). In an interesting essay, he defined and elaborated the difference between the two concepts, characteristically focusing on their different relationships to “the modern international system (usually called, somewhat misleadingly, the Westphalian system)” (217). Because the system rested on the premise that states were “juridically equal in status,” whatever their differences in size and power, empire was “not compatible with” it (217-218). By contrast, hegemony, defined as “the possession and exercise of clear, acknowledged leadership and influence…within a community of units not under a single authority” was not only compatible with such a system but historically had often played an essential role in establishing and maintaining one—as the United States had done after 1945 (215-221). But “in order to be stable, any hegemony has at least to be perceived as natural, invulnerable and tolerable, if not wholly benign” (68). Schroeder argued that for this reason, the aspiration to establish American hegemony in the Middle East was unrealistic: “we do not belong there in the same way as we belong in the Western Hemisphere, the Atlantic, central and eastern Europe, and the Pacific” (70). The tacit recognition here of the importance of culture and ideology in international relations is striking because of its comparative rarity in Schroeder’s writings, which, for the most part, work within the same rationalistic framework as the neo-realist theories of which he was so critical.
The most personal, and moving, feature of these essays is the way they record the evolution of Schroeder’s feelings and thoughts about his own country and its relationship to the international system. Even at the peak of his optimism in 1994, he feared that “calling on Americans to accept this version of the NWO [New World Order] and lead it (for who else can?) means calling for a United States different from the existing one” (47). But he reassured himself that the long-term commitments made by the United States since 1945 “demonstrate the public’s ability, sensibly led and instructed, to understand the central realities of international politics, gird itself for the long term, and wait patiently for results” (16-17). This sanguine view did not survive the reaction to 9/11, and by 2004 Schroeder had concluded that “an immediate danger to the emergent international order” lay in “the current international stance, policies, and actions of the US government, reflecting the attitudes and outlook of a large segment of the American people” (116).
By 2004, shocked by the abusive treatment of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, he asked, “What must it mean if good, loyal, religious family-values conservatives—the segment that George W. Bush overwhelmingly commands and that this journal appeals to—find even this degrading spectacle something they can swallow?” (124).[8] In one of his most original uses of historical analogy, he compared the scandal to the Dreyfus Affair in France at the turn of the twentieth century, the parallel being that, like the French Army at that time, the Bush administration claimed justification for acting illegally. The fact that it encountered little domestic opposition in doing so suggested that “most Americans still seem to believe that anything done at home or abroad supposedly to make them safer from terrorists is fine regardless of legal niceties” (178-179). This was “not a hate-America rant by a scholar angered that the American public fails to meet his ivory-tower expectations”; rather, it was
a painful, disillusioned reflection from someone long convinced that the American public was by and large growing up and changing for the better also in international politics, who now, near the end of his career and life, grows less confident of that progress toward maturity (206).
Yet Schroeder’s was too demanding an intelligence to rest content with this clichéd analogy with an individual’s growing up, and he sought a more specific explanation for America’s “extravagant understanding of its right of self-defense” (177). In a substantial historical essay, published in 2012, he pointed to “America’s comparatively easy acquisition of independence and subsequent expansion,” which had required “only a modest military exertion and mediocre military performance” (252). While accepting the generally recognized part played in this good fortune by “the natural material conditions with which Americans had to work,” Schroeder argued that the lack of an external threat from which the young republic also benefited owed much to “the European creation of a working international system in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”; it was due to this that “by the time the USA was born there was an international order to join” (255-265). As a beneficiary of, but not a contributor to, international order until the mid-twentieth century, the United States had been a “rentier” state, and as such had developed a sense of entitlement to its privileged position (xxii).
In urging his countrymen to follow the path of hegemony rather than that of empire, Schroeder winningly admitted that he did so “probably with the incurable optimism of the incorrigible rationalist” (233). I never met Paul Schroeder, but reading these essays makes it easy to understand why so many of those who knew him regarded him not only with great respect but also with affection.
John A. Thompson is an Emeritus Reader in American History and an Emeritus Fellow of St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge. His principal research interests have been American liberalism and US foreign policy. His publications include Reformers and War: American Progressive Publicists and the First World War (Cambridge University Press, 1987), Woodrow Wilson (Longman, 2002), A Sense of Power: The Roots of America’s Global Role (Cornell University Press, 2015), and numerous articles and book chapters.
[1] See, for example, H-Diplo|RJISSF Forum, “The Importance of Paul Schroeder’s Scholarship to the Fields of International Relations and Diplomatic History,” 10 September 2021, https://issforum.org/forums/28.
[2] This volume is one of two posthumous collections of Schroeder’s writings published in 2025 by Verso with introductions by Perry Anderson. The other collection, of Schroeder’s articles on the origins of the First World War, is entitled Stealing Horses to Great Applause: The Origins of the First World War Reconsidered.
[3] Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment,” Foreign Affairs, 1 January 1990, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1990-01-01/unipolar-moment
[4] For another example, covering much the same period as this volume, see Michael Cox, Agonies of Empire: American Power from Clinton to Biden (Bristol University Press, 2022); H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable on Cox, Agonies of Empire, 30 December 2024, https://issforum.org/roundtables/h-diplo-rjissf-roundtable-16-20-on-cox-agonies-of-empire.
[5] Paul W. Schroeder, The Transformation of European Politics, 1763–1848 (Clarendon Press, 1994).
[6] Jost Dulffer, Martin Kröger, and Rolf-Harald Wippich, Vermiedenee Kriege: Deeskalation von Konflikten der Grossmåchte zwischen Krimkriegund Erstem Weltkrieg, 1865–1914 (De Gruyter, 1997).
[7] Specifically, The National Interest, The American Conservative, and The American Interest.
[8] This essay was originally published in The American Conservative. Schroeder, “For Shame,” The American Conservative, 7 June 2004, https://www.theamericanconservative.com/for-shame/.
