I’m not usually given to listening to Marxists, let alone quoting them, but I shall make an exception for Leon Trotsky. His phrase “you may not be interested in war; but war is interested in you” is known the world over. It has been adapted a thousand different ways. At its core, though, is the understanding that one cannot bury one’s head in the sand when it comes to world affairs. Trotsky’s own end proved as much.

Despite thousands of years of international relations theory and practice, though, and despite how interconnected our world now is, it has felt to me that the field has been poorly served by political leaders in recent decades. The end of the Cold War, in particular, led some analysts to become untethered from the timeless lessons of Thucydides.

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, specifically through the Melian Dialogue between the powerful Athenians and the weak city of Melos, he describes how the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must. That states might follow their own interests in this way has been considered perfectly normal until very recently.

In much of the West, however, there have been sincere (though, in my view, naive) attempts to replace this analysis with an alternative global system of participation in multilateral, and even supranational bodies.

From these organisations have flowed ideas that sound very appealing at Georgetown cocktail parties, Brussels plenaries and university lecture halls.