That these works now appear under the Verso imprint is not irony, but dialectic: a conservative indictment of empire, published by the left.
On 2 April 2025, the White House announced a raft of new tariffs on Chinese, Indian and Brazilian exports, branded, without irony, as “Liberation Day.” Global markets dipped. The EU prepared retaliatory measures. In London, the pound rose slightly on the rumour that Britain had been quietly exempted. There was, for a few hours, something almost ceremonial in the choreography of the reaction: the imperial core performing its roles in a drama that should, by rights, be over. The spectacle—of unilateral action disguised as strategy, of an international order held together by threat and precedent rather than principle—felt eerily familiar. We have been here before. Or perhaps, as Paul W. Schroeder might argue, we never really left.
Schroeder, a historian of diplomacy and a conservative realist, was not of the left. He admired Metternich more than Marx and distrusted utopians of all stripes, a disposition that makes his writing a revealing counterpoint to liberal mythologies of order and progressive fantasies of perpetual peace. But what he shared with historical materialism was a systemic imagination: the sense that international order is not the result of moral will or national character, but of structures, of alliances, balances, agreements, and the slow accretion of custom. His concern, in two volumes newly published by Verso—America’s Fatal Leap and Stealing Horses to Great Applause, both introduced by Perry Anderson—is with what happens when those structures erode. The answer, in Schroeder’s view, is always the same: disaster, cloaked in the language of destiny.
America’s Fatal Leap is a collection of essays spanning the post–Cold War period, from the Gulf War to the eve of Trump. The title essay, written in 2002, remains its fulcrum: a prescient indictment of US foreign policy after 1991, which he characterises not as hegemonic management, but as a revolutionary break from diplomacy itself. Stealing Horses, published posthumously, is a deeper and more complex excavation of the collapse of the Vienna system and the origins of the First World War. The two books, taken together, offer a theory of systemic collapse from opposite ends of the timeline: the long decay of 1815–1914, and the rapid unravelling of 1989–2003. If Schroeder was right, the problem is not just America or Austria, Bush or Bethmann Hollweg, but the game itself.
What collapsed in 1914, Schroeder argues, was not simply diplomacy, but the logic that had sustained diplomacy. The Vienna system, born of the Napoleonic aftermath, created an order where great powers accepted limits on their behaviour in exchange for general stability. That order held—unevenly, imperfectly—for nearly a century. But by the 1890s, the ethos of the system had given way to a new one: imperial competition, Weltpolitik, the pursuit of absolute gains. Once the logic of mutual restraint was replaced by a logic of existential rivalry, war became not only possible but rational. As Schroeder put it, “The incentives structure of the European international system was so warped by imperialist competition as systematically to reward conduct subversive of stability and peace and to penalize conduct designed to uphold them.” (Stealing Horses to Great Applause, p. 54)
“The game itself was to blame,” he wrote of 1914. That line could be repurposed for the entire post–Cold War order.
His reading of the American century, particularly after 1991, follows the same trajectory in reverse. The Cold War had at least imposed a kind of order: bipolarity, containment, and the institutionalisation of diplomacy through the UN, NATO and Bretton Woods. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States began what Schroeder calls its “fatal leap”—from a restrained hegemon to an unbound empire. In place of diplomacy: diktat. In place of rules: exceptions. Kosovo, Iraq, the endless war on terror—all, for Schroeder, are symptoms of a revolutionary power no longer accountable to the very order it claimed to lead. “It was imperialism,” he wrote, “not in the pejorative leftist sense, but in the simple sense of ‘the exercise of final authority and decision-making power by one government over another government or community foreign to itself’.” (America’s Fatal Leap, p. 23)
Several of the essays in Fatal Leap feel more relevant now than when they were first published. “The Case against Preemptive War” dismantles the Bush Doctrine with clarity and precision. “The War Bin Laden Wanted” captures the perverse dynamic by which imperial overreaction amplifies, rather than defeats, its enemies. “Victory in this war against terrorism,” Schroeder warned, “will unfailingly commit us to an even more direct and intrusive hegemony than before… Americans had less to fear from the patent fanaticism of their enemies than their own latent variety of it… not because we are worse… but because we are so immensely more powerful.” (America’s Fatal Leap, p. 283) “Mirror, Mirror on the War” and “Open Fire” dissect the euphemistic language of liberal imperialism. “International Order and Its Current Enemies” remains the most prescient: a systemic theory of collapse that indicts not rogue actors but great powers behaving as if they are above the system that legitimises them. Its warnings apply just as much to the bombing of Gaza and the war in Ukraine as they did to Fallujah and Baghdad. Schroeder offers no ready-made answers to Russia’s revanchism or Israel’s permanent state of exception, but he equips us with the tools to see them not as aberrations, but as logical extensions of a system that has lost its capacity for self-limitation. Moscow’s attack on Ukraine, justified in the idiom of historical destiny and grievance, recalls the great power pretensions of a decayed balance; Israel’s campaign in Gaza, couched in existential terms and prosecuted without constraint, mirrors the imperial prerogative Schroeder described—rule without reciprocity, force without law. China, meanwhile, inhabits the contradictions Schroeder laid bare: rising within a decaying order, benefitting from global trade while building a regional architecture designed to bypass it. It exploits what remains of the system’s norms without being bound by them. NATO, on the other hand, continues to operate as if the Cold War never ended—expanding its remit, asserting its necessity, unable to reconcile its own institutional inertia with a world it no longer stabilises. Schroeder observed that “hegemony is compatible with equilibrium… Empire tends by nature toward exclusive, final control and cannot be shared.” (America’s Fatal Leap, p. 220) Both NATO and China, in their different ways, respond to a world no longer capable of absorbing contradiction through diplomacy. They act in the space left by the collapse of restraint.
Schroeder gives the lie to the idea that American dominance failed by accident. It failed because it refused limits.
Schroeder’s conservatism is not our conservatism. He believed in order, hierarchy, diplomacy among elites. His touchstones are Bismarck and Castlereagh. But there is a dialectical intelligence in his work that cuts deeper than most liberal theorising. Like a good Marxist, he understands that systems contain their own contradictions—particularly the contradiction between hegemonic stability and imperial compulsion, between the need for restraint and the temptation of dominance.—that what stabilises them also corrodes them, that restraint must be maintained or it will be replaced by catastrophe. In this he is less a Cold Warrior than a tragic theorist of modern order. The revolution, in his schema, is always imperial.
What makes these two books sing in counterpoint is that one begins with collapse and the other ends in it. Stealing Horses tells us how the game was once played: how a diplomatic system built after 1815 held peace in place for a century, until it was undone by the return of naked power politics. Fatal Leap tells us how a system that might have been made to last was instead dismantled by its dominant player. Between the two, a single argument: power without restraint is not stability, but suicide. Or as Schroeder phrased it, reflecting on the perversity of imperial norms, “Some men steal horses to great applause, while others are hanged for looking over the fence… This result was not incidental, accidental, or unintended, but regular, structural, and intentional.” (Stealing Horses to Great Applause, p. 7)
That these books now appear from Verso, with Anderson’s introductions framing Schroeder as a kind of fellow traveller in system critique, reflects a broader shift in left publishing—towards the recognition that some of the sharpest diagnoses of imperial decline now come from outside the traditional Marxist canon. It is not ironic but dialectical. The left does not need to adopt Schroeder’s nostalgia for Metternich to recognise the value of his diagnosis. The question is not whether balance-of-power diplomacy can be revived, but whether the unravelling he charts can be halted. Today’s world, of sanctions regimes and permanent war, algorithmic enforcement and decaying multilateralism, suggests it cannot.
But Schroeder never gave up on the possibility that history might teach. And here the question for the contemporary left asserts itself more sharply. If we can no longer rely on hegemonic stability, and cannot wish back the balance-of-power diplomacy of another era, what remains is the task of naming the contradictions and organising against them. The unipolar order is finished, but its mechanisms of control persist: through financial discipline, military architecture, technological surveillance, and affective management. Schroeder’s work, for all its distance from Marxism, helps clarify what must be dismantled: not merely empire, but the ideological cover that allows empire to imagine itself as peacekeeper, or worse, as victim.
Yet in thinking through strategy, the left must also guard against its own temptations. There is a long-standing tendency, particularly in moments of imperial crisis, to romanticise diplomacy or mistake multipolarity for liberation. But diplomacy without transformation is merely managed decline; and too often, the reflex to support “the enemy of my enemy” turns critique into campism. Schroeder reminds us, not in ideological terms but structural ones, that empire is not undone by its rivals, it is often reproduced by them.
This is what makes formations like BRICS+ so ambivalent. Though sometimes invoked as a counterweight to Western hegemony, they remain committed to the logics of state sovereignty, capitalist development, and geopolitical prestige. China may challenge American dominance, but not the system that makes dominance possible. What we are witnessing is not a rupture with imperialism, but a realignment within its global architecture—a reshuffling of the chairs around a table that is itself collapsing. The challenge for the left is not to take sides within this decayed order, but to reject its terms entirely.
What would it mean to take up Schroeder’s warning as strategy rather than lament? First, to build solidarity not on shared values, but shared exposure to the violence of system failure. Second, to insist that diplomacy without justice is not peace, but suspension. Third, to recognise that restraint will not be restored from above. It must be imposed from below: through pressure, refusal, sabotage, and the patient construction of alternatives. In Britain and the US, the actions of Palestine Action—targeting arms manufacturers and transport infrastructure complicit in the genocide in Gaza—offer one such model. Their tactics may scandalise liberal sensibilities, but they reveal the material seams of the imperial machine: where bombs are made, how they move, and who profits from their delivery. They do what Schroeder, in his way, also did: they map the system. And then they intervene. For the left, the lesson is clear. The game is rigged. The board must be overturned.
That arc from 1991 to Trump, from restraint to ruin, is not unfamiliar. But few have charted it with such clarity. And fewer still have managed to see, in the collapse of empire, the echo of an earlier fall, and the outline of something worse to come.
Postscript: After the Leap
Schroeder’s diagnosis is complete. But what is to be done? If we accept his premise—that the international system has become structurally unreformable, and that attempts at enforcement only hasten collapse, then the task for the contemporary left is to think not in terms of repair, but rupture. The challenge is to develop forms of political action that neither lapse into nostalgia for a functioning multilateralism nor mistake every crack in the wall for a breach in the system.
What Schroeder could not offer and what the left must now provide, is a theory of transformation under conditions of systemic decay. This means reading the violence of Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, and the Sahel not as a sequence of crises, but as symptoms of the same exhausted logic. It means understanding NATO not as a guarantor of security but as a structure whose survival depends on the permanent reproduction of threat. It means recognising China’s rise not as alternative modernity, but as an attempt to inherit the terms of a game no longer viable.
Above all, it means abandoning the fantasy that empire can be humanised. Schroeder reminds us, in the language of statecraft, what Marxists have long known: systems do not collapse when they are challenged, but when they can no longer reproduce themselves. If we are serious about building something beyond this moment, we must start where he left off: not with the preservation of order, but with its abolition.
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