No discourse on war emerges out of a vacuum: it gains resonance as a consequence of its constitutive ideals, preconceptions and values fitting with the structure of key social imaginaries. The theme of this chapter — agency — is itself a theme of liberal thought with its lead motifs of inter alia liberty, freedom of choice, equality among men before the law and so on. The subjects of liberalism, agency and internationalism constitute an amalgamation of strands that have been alluded to in previous chapters: here we zoom in on the relationship between law, politics, war and policing — a four-way relationship that constitutes the backbone of the metaphorical understanding of war as policing. The first part of the chapter will discuss how a liberal heritage can be seen to inform the contemporary discourse on war as "order-creating". The eschewing of strong foundations in moral and ethical reasoning has thus not forged an abandonment of ideological claims, as is sometimes inferred, but rather new ways of expressing and justifying such claims.