..as this article ingeniously argues, the Westphalian system never existed in the first place. It was mostly American theorists making up “the Westphalian system” because the idea of international law made Americans feel better. The real world was always about bandits, terrorists, anarchists, mercenaries, and naked exercises of cynical power, and if we could get our heads around that, we wouldn’t have to sweat a New Dark Age because we wouldn’t be able to tell it from common reality.