Me too! It strikes me as very believable: Wolfe likes his civilization, his comforts and luxuries, and it's pretty clear he's seen enough to know that you don't get those things without the kind of stabilising influence and infrastructure that a functioning government provides. As you say, he makes a distinction between him not enjoying something and that something being actually a bad thing.

And I am really interested that everyone else seems to have read the ending differently than I did. As I just said above, I completely read it as Archie going "Of course you did that for political reasons!" and then "I'm not sure I believe it was just for Phoebe Gunther's sake, but if that was part of it, good for you."

And I also feel very sorry for Fritz, reading this!