A Plague On All of Their Houses

THE END OF HONOUR: FROM ABSURDITY TO GLOBAL THUGGERY

By Virginia Stephens, Madrid, 4^th March 2026

History, as Paul Kennedy observed in the pages that mapped the rise and fall of the great powers, does not announce its turning points with fanfare. It discloses them, reluctantly, through the accumulated weight of institutional decay, strategic overreach, and, most damningly, the erosion of the codes of conduct that once constrained even the most ruthless of statecraft. Martyn Jones, in this sprawling, ferocious, and occasionally magnificent polemic, has written something that Kennedy’s tradition demands we take seriously: a diagnosis of civilisational decline rooted not in balance-of-payments deficits or military overextension alone, but in the collapse of honour as an operational principle of governance.

The book’s central thesis is audacious in its simplicity and devastating in its elaboration. Jones contends that the Western political order, led by an American grand strategy of base protection, acquisition, and coercive alliance-building, has, since the Reagan revolution, accelerated through the Bush years and into the Trumpian grotesque, systematically dismantled the ethical infrastructure that once gave liberal democracy its moral authority. Honour, in Jones’s treatment, is not a sentimental relic. It is a strategic asset. Its loss is not merely a cultural misfortune; it is a geopolitical catastrophe.

The Architecture of Decline

Martin van Creveld has long argued that the legitimacy of the state, and by extension its capacity to wage war and sustain peace, rests ultimately on the perceived justice of its behaviour. A commander who lies to his troops forfeits their discipline; a state that lies to its allies forfeits its alliances. Jones applies this iron logic to the entire post-Cold War settlement with forensic, if occasionally baroque, precision. His account of neoliberalism’s philosophical underpinnings, the neo-conservative seizure of American foreign policy apparatus, and the subsequent weaponisation of postmodern language, in which war became liberation, occupation became democracy-building, and torture became enhanced interrogation, reads as a kind of strategic autopsy.

The chapters on the Iraq War are particularly instructive. Jones dissects the Bush administration’s manipulation of intelligence with the cold precision of a staff officer examining a failed operation: the terrain was misread, the logistics of legitimacy were ignored, and the exit strategy from moral credibility was never drawn up. One is reminded of Patton’s maxim that a good plan executed violently now is better than a perfect plan next week, except that Washington’s plan was neither good nor perfect, merely violent and profitable for the right contractors. Jones is at his most incisive here, documenting how the language of honour was not abandoned but rebranded: sovereignty became a conditional franchise, international law an inconvenient footnote.

Strengths and Structural Challenges

The book’s range is formidable. Jones marshals Kant and Lao Tzu, Thomas More and Joschka Fischer, Tony Benn and Patrick Henry, in service of a philosophical argument that transcends party affiliation. His gallery of honourable politicians, figures who prioritised moral obligation over political survival, functions as a kind of tribunal, silently indicting the present age by contrast. The chapter on Fischer’s Munich rebuke of Rumsfeld is worth the price of admission alone: a single sentence… Excuse me, I am not convinced, deployed against the full weight of imperial certainty.

Churchill, who understood better than most that a nation’s credibility was its most durable strategic reserve, would have recognised the central warning here: that a great power which routinely deceives its allies, manipulates its public, and subordinates international norms to commercial interest is engaged in a form of slow self-demolition far more consequential than any military defeat. Jones draws this line with energy. What he sometimes lacks is Churchill’s architectural discipline, the capacity to subordinate every argument to a single, irresistible strategic conclusion.

The Financial Times reader, accustomed to sober cost-benefit rigour, will find Jones’s style at times ungoverned. The prose lurches between scholarly analysis and satirical broadside with a velocity that can disorient. References to Trump as “Agent Orange” and Musk as a “Bond villain with broadband” are undeniably entertaining, but they test the patience of those who prefer their geopolitical criticism without the garnish. Jones himself concedes he has failed in his ambition for restraint, and this candour, at least, is a form of the honour he otherwise mourns.

Strategic Verdict

Yet these are tactical complaints about a work of genuine strategic importance. Jones’s identification of honour as a load-bearing pillar of international order, not a decorative flourish but a functional necessity, is both original and urgent. In an era when disinformation is a diplomatic instrument, when treaty obligations are renegotiated on social media, and when the question of who controls the narrative has displaced the question of who commands the facts, his argument carries the weight of prophecy. The means, he insists with Kantian stubbornness, are never neutral. You cannot build a durable order on systematic deception. The structure will hold until, suddenly and catastrophically, it will not.

Kennedy’s great insight in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers was that material overextension precedes imperial collapse by a generation, long enough for policymakers to convince themselves the problem is manageable, too short to be corrected without upheaval. Jones suggests a parallel dynamic in the moral domain: the erosion of honour is gradual, almost imperceptible, until the moment when no ally trusts your word, no institution commands respect, and no democratic compact retains its legitimacy. At that point, what remains is precisely what the book’s subtitle promises: not merely absurdity but global thuggery, the reduction of international relations to the unmediated contest of power stripped of all ethical pretence.

This is an important book for an important moment. Its author is a thinker of broad sympathies and genuine passion, writing with the urgency of a man who has watched the patient deteriorate for twenty-five years and fears the prognosis is terminal. It deserves to be read not only by those who share Jones’s politics, which are left of centre and unapologetically Welsh in their roots, but also by every serious student of international order, democratic governance, and the long-term costs of strategic dishonesty.

We noticed, Jones tells us in his closing pages, is the most we can promise our grandchildren. It may be. But to notice clearly, to document precisely, and to demand that leaders be held accountable to something beyond electoral calculus, that, too, is a form of honour. And if this unruly, combustible, vital book helps restore that demand to the centre of political discourse, it will have done its duty.