Nuclear Armed Gorillas

The importance of strength in international relations

Studying the past is a political act. How can it not be? As historians and archaeologists, we are concerned with all of human culture. Politics is a big part of that.

This leads many historians to develop slightly arrhythmic political opinions. The hosts of the Rest is History are good examples. Tom Holland’s obsession with Christianity leads to a sort of philosophical progressive liberalism. Dominic Sandbrook’s concern with 20th-century popular culture leads to a jocular tory-ism.

My own historical biases and interests also inform my political beliefs.

One of those is that international relations exist in a state of nature.

A state of nature is a philosophical concept from the Enlightenment. It is a thought exercise about what humans were like in an imagined past before government or complex society. There were two broad schools of thought. Hobbes argued that in a state of nature, the life of humans was “nasty, brutish and short”. Rousseau had a more optimistic view, arguing that hum…