Twenty Years After Dumas comes out on the side of the monarchy in general, or at least the text often praises the "idea" of benevolent royalty. His musketeers are valiant and just in their efforts to protect young Louis XIV and the doomed Charles I from their attackers. The action begins during the regency of Queen Anne of Austria (term 1643–1651), with Cardinal Mazarin as First Minister. D'Artagnan, who seemed to have a promising career ahead of him at the end of "The Three Musketeers", has for twenty years remained a lieutenant, and seems unlikely to progress despite his ambition and the debt
The Twenty Years' Crisis of trends in the discipline, edited by Michael Cox, Tim Dunne, and Ken Booth, who write that "many of the arguments and dilemmas in Carr's "The Twenty Years' Crisis" are relevant to the theory and practice of international politics today", praising the book as "one of the few books in the 80 years of the discipline which leave us nowhere to hide". The response to Carr has not been, however, entirely positive. Caitlin Blaxton criticized Carr's moral stance in the work as "disturbing". Scholars have also criticized Carr for his presentation of the so-called realist-idealist conflict. According to Peter Wilson,