A Plague On All of Their Houses

THE END OF HONOUR: FROM ABSURDITY TO GLOBAL THUGGERY

By Vanessa Bell, Madrid, 4^th March 2026

In Martyn Jones’s The End of Honour: From Absurdity to Global Thuggery, a sprawling and impassioned jeremiad against the moral rot at the heart of contemporary geopolitics, the author diagnoses a profound crisis in the Western liberal order. Published in 2025, the book posits honour not as a quaint Victorian relic but as an indispensable strategic asset, the ethical scaffolding that once underpinned alliances, restrained imperial overreach, and lent credibility to diplomatic endeavours. Its erosion, Jones argues, has precipitated a descent into what he terms “global thuggery”: a world where power is exercised through naked coercion, transactional extortion, and the commodification of international relations into protection rackets. Drawing on an eclectic pantheon of thinkers, from Kant and Lao Tzu to Martin van Creveld and Paul Kennedy, Jones traces this decline from the triumphalism of the post-Cold War era, through the neoconservative adventurism of the Bush administration, to the brazen populism of Trump and his unlikely bedfellows, such as Elon Musk, whom Jones caricatures as a “Bond villain with broadband” fusing Silicon Valley libertarianism with demagogic excess.

The narrative is non-linear, a “collage of collapse” that leaps across ideological battlefields, dissecting the unholy trinity of neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and postmodernism, the latter dismissed as a “convenient smokescreen” for jettisoning universal truths in favour of expedient “messaging discipline.” Central to Jones’s indictment is the 2003 Iraq invasion, portrayed as a catastrophic failure of legitimacy, where intelligence was manipulated, torture rebranded as “enhanced interrogation,” and war sold as liberation. This episode exemplifies the broader hollowing out of democratic institutions, replaced by a “theology of managerialism” and a “moronic embrace of the void,” where honour yields to self-interest and strategy devolves into survivalist predation. Extending his gaze to transatlantic ties, asymmetric threats like systemic racism and water privatisation, and the spectre of authoritarian resurgence, Jones warns of a tilting world order buckling under its own duplicity. Appendices debunking foreign interference myths and cataloguing honourable politicians, from Golda Meir and Willy Brandt to Tony Benn and José Mujica, serve as poignant counterpoints, underscoring what has been lost.

Jones’s prose is ferocious and occasionally magnificent, propelled by genuine passion and a prophetic urgency that resonates in our current moment, March 2026, with whispers of Trump’s potential return and Musk’s influence looming large. His critique of American hegemony as a “geopolitical shakedown,” where shared values mask raw power plays, echoes Kennedy’s warnings of imperial overstretch, now compounded by moral exhaustion. Yet this vitality comes at a cost: the book’s structure lacks architectural discipline, lurching between scholarly rigour and satirical broadsides, Trump as “Agent Orange,” Biden-Harris derided as “Zionist fluffers”, that risk alienating readers beyond Jones’s left-of-centre milieu. Such excesses, while enlivening, betray an ungoverned style that subordinates precision to polemic, and the left-leaning dedications (to Benn, Mujica, and even Karl Marx) invite charges of bias, oversimplifying complex geopolitical fault lines like Zionism.

For all its clinical despair and spiralling anxiety, The End of Honour remains a vital, if unsettling, intervention, a “whispered dare” to confront the cognitive collapse afflicting global leadership. Jones offers no facile remedies, but his meticulous “catalogue of the stupid” compels us to notice, document, and demand accountability. In an age where disinformation reigns and think-tank apparatchiks peddle strategic bullshit, this book stands as a reminder that politics, at its best, can still aspire to liberation. Essential reading for diplomats, strategists, and anyone navigating the ruins of the liberal order, it affirms that honour’s reclamation may yet avert catastrophe.