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.

Forming an Anti-Revolutionary Alliance

Schroeder’s major work was The Transformation of European Politics 1763–1848, which he published in 1994. His first book, The Axis Alliance and Japanese-American Relations 1941 (1958), based on his master’s thesis, was a study of the two Pacific hegemons and the lead-up to the attack on Pearl Harbor. This was followed up by Metternich’s Diplomacy at Its Zenith, 1820–1823 (1962) and Austria, Great Britain, and the Crimean War (1972). The Transformation of European Politics, a monumental work of over 900 pages, would be his last monograph. Schroeder would spend the next decade and a half, until his death in 2020, writing essays and articles intervening in scholarly and political debates.

Many historians and social scientists examine wars as exceptions or catastrophes, breakdowns whose origins must be studied to prevent them in the future. Schroeder’s insight was to flip this commonplace stance on its head. For him, the question was not why did wars occur, but rather, why did peace persist? War, he argued, was in fact the natural state of relations between states. It was the condition to which state relations tend in the absence of any countervailing force. It is peace that is unnatural.