The world of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is one in which institutions persist while conviction quietly drains from them. Haydon’s remark captures something unsettling about the late Cold War moment—and perhaps about the present as well. Liberal capitalism continued to function, but it struggled to explain what it ultimately stood for beyond prosperity and stability. Beneath the ideological drama of the Cold War lay a darker possibility: that both systems had already begun to exhaust themselves. Liberal capitalism increasingly struggles to justify itself except through comparison with its enemies, while its enemies offer little more than more brutal forms of domination.