John J. Mearsheimer, “The False Promise of Liberal Hegemony”

good afternoon welcome to the Whitney and Betty various studies apologies for the delay I think it's in everybody's comfortable interesting more comfort here my name is Noah Montero I'm the director of international security studies here the associate professor of political science it's my great pleasure to introduce professor John J Mira Shimer from the University of Chicago who happened to be my dissertation adviser back before the meteor came and killed all the dinosaurs this is the second of these three lectures here today all the lectures are on the topic of liberal dreams in international realities today's lecture will be titled the false promise of liberal hegemony and needs to be followed by tomorrow lecture at the same time in room 203 tomorrow notice to the changing room also upstairs but the other room tomorrow's lecture is titled the case for restraint and it will be followed by a reception we hope to see you here again tomorrow thank you thank you very much for the introduction Nuno and thank you again to Ian for inviting me to give the Stimpson lectures it's truly a pleasure to be here and it's also an honor to deliver these lectures at an August institution like Yale I also as a good Marxist in the Groucho Marx sense of the term and deeply humbled that so many people turned out to hear me talk that we had to change the venue so thank you very much I hope I can deliver a lecture that makes it all worth it as Nuno said tonight I'm going to talk about the false promise of liberal hegemony for those of you who were here on Monday night you know that what I did was I really talked about liberalism and didn't say much about foreign policy this is the first of my two talks tonight and tomorrow night that really do with the International dimension of liberalism the first talk was all about just sort of getting at the essence of liberalism the outline for tonight is that I'd like to start by defining what I mean by liberal head and explain to you why states pursue it then I'd like to explain when states pursue liberal hegemony so the first part will deal with the why the second part is when and then in the third part I want to talk about what it looks like in practice and then finally explain to you why it is prone to fail disastrously so the first part of the talk is on the subject of what is liberal hegemony just a few words about its policy relevance then what I really want to do is talk about its theoretical underpinnings with regard to its policy relevance I think almost everybody who studies IR in my world agrees that it has been the foreign policy of the United States since the Cold War ended that the United States has pursued liberal hegemony and for those who have any doubts the argument usually goes that it wasn't really true up until 2001 but clearly it was true after 2001 but most people agree that during the entire Cold War period it has been the foreign policy of choice and moreover it's a foreign policy that the American elite loves as I said the other night we sometimes refer to the American foreign policy establishment as the blob this has been roads as terminology Ben Rhodes who worked for Barack Obama the blob is deeply wedded to liberal hegemony and it includes both Republicans and Democrats there's this myth in the land mainly pervade by Republicans that Republicans and Democrats have very different views on foreign policy this is poppycock it's Tweedledee and Tweedledum right and they loved their they loved their liberal hegemony Donald Trump is an exception he ran against liberal hegemony and where he ends up remains to be seen but he ran against it now a little bit about the analytical foundation of liberal hegemony and this grows out of my discussion from last time as I said to you liberalism is at its root a political philosophy that focuses on the individual and places enormous emphasis on inalienable rights inalienable meaning they apply to everybody and they cannot be taken away and the point that I made last time and I'd like to emphasize again tonight is when you marry that sense of individualism with inalienable rights you get a Universalist ideology right and the point I made last time and make again here is that you is that liberal hegemony or even liberalism when it applies to foreign policy has this Universalist dimension that is of great importance and what it means in terms of a broad foreign policy goal is that you quickly become consumed with spreading liberal democracy across the globe that emphasis on inalienable rights which leads to universalism produces a foreign policy that emphasizes the spreading of liberal democracy and there are three reasons for that this really gets to the heart and soul of the argument and I'll unpack them all but just put them up in laundry lists fashion right now you want to spread democracy for three reasons one to protect human rights across the world 2 to cause international peace and three to protect liberalism at home and again all of this grows out of the emphasis on individualism and inalienable rights as I'll make clear as we go along here so let me start by talking about protecting human rights across the world the basic argument is that people who live in a far-off country are no different that people who live in your country borders actually don't matter very much rights are of great importance and everybody has rights and when the rights of non Americans are being threatened Americans have a responsibility to do everything they can to protect those people whose rights are being violated and of course the most important here important right here is the right to life if some foreign dictator is murdering large numbers of his or her people the United States has a responsibility it grows out of this universalism to protect the rights of those individuals that are being violated now this goes so far in the liberal discourse that you end up getting the argument that non liberal governments are in a state of aggression with their own people just think about that statement this is Michael Doyle mainstream prominent liberal international relations theorist at Columbia University it's basically saying non liberal government's no matter what they do non liberal governments are in a state of aggression with their own people what happens here is that you go from a situation where you can use your military forces to intervene in different countries when there are gross violations of individual rights and fix the problem and then leave you go from that more modest policy to one where you decide that the best way to protect rights is to turn another country into a liberal democracy because once it's a liberal democracy the individual rights which are privileged in liberalism are protected by definition so if you have a planet that is filled with nothing but liberal democracies the problem of gross violations of human rights is simply taken off the table if you merely just act like a fire department and you only intervene in those situations where you see rights being violated you fix it and then you get out you don't ultimately solve the problem so what this emphasis on protecting rights does especially when it's taken in the form that Michael Doyle lays out it leads to the belief that what you want to do is populate the planet with liberal democracies second reason to spread liberal democracy it leads to international peace virtually everybody in this audience I'm sure knows all about Democratic peace theory Democratic peace theory is based on the basic liberal template involving rights and tolerance right it's the whole idea that people across the planet have a set of inalienable rights and that they tend to respect the rights of other individuals right and that leads to international peace right if you can spread democracy across the planet in other words you create a world of all democracies they're not going to fight against each other because people respect the rights of people in other countries and they're tolerant the tolerance grows out of that emphasis on inalienable rights as I talked about last time this is basic democratic peace theory and this the basic liberal logic that underpins it moreover it solves the twin problems of nuclear proliferation and terrorism but if you have peace you don't need nuclear weapons there's no need for global but for nuclear weapons in a world where there's nothing but liberal democracies and terrorism is certainly not going to be a problem because in the liberal story liberal states never engage in terrorism it's always non liberal States so the idea is to create a world where they're just liberal democracies and this is the rationale for invading Iraq sometimes people will say to me John how can you say that invading Iraq was based on a liberal theory well the invasion of Iraq and the Bush Doctrine more generally as I made clear as we go along here was based on the assumption that if you could go into Iraq go into Iran go into Syria you could turn them greater Middle East into a sea of democracies you could turn them into a sea of democracies cause peace there would be no nuclear proliferation and there would be no terrorism that's what they thought would be the end result this is why the Bush administration thought that al-qaeda itself was not the problem al-qaeda was part of the problem but rogue states in the Middle East rogue states meaning non-democracies that don't dance to America's tune have to be turned into liberal democracies so once that happens then you turn the Middle East into his own of peace and oh by the way this is exactly what happened in Europe according to the liberal story why do we have peace in Europe because it's filled with liberal democracies and I'll talk more about this in the context of NATO expansion they don't fight each other you don't get terrorism you don't get nuclear proliferation third oh me yeah just on the business of international peace but you also see in the literature on liberal democracy is a cause of peace there's a tremendous emphasis on the word community especially international community you surely have all heard the word international community many times international community is very much a liberal term think about the opposite of international its national when the journal journal International Security was created there was a huge debate about whether to call it national security or international security and they called the International Security right international right and it's the international community giving you the sense that there are really no meaningful borders among the states that exist in that community those borders are very porous we talked about the transatlantic community we talked about the European community the EC we went from the European stealing coal community to the European community to the European Union right but the European community we talk about security communities Karl Deutsch is famous term Woodrow Wilson used to talk about communities of power right and of course in these communities you're not going to have any war that's the basic argument third reason the spread liberal democracy is to protect liberalism at home the fact is that virtually every liberal theorists understands that you're not going to convince every single person in a liberal society that liberalism is the ideal political system and there's always a danger on the home front that there'll be a group that is powerful and will attempt to overthrow the liberal order and what really scares liberals is the thought that that group on the home front will form an alliance with a foreign country and that foreign country will help fuel revolution at home okay so if you live in a world of all liberal democracies that problem is taken off the table that's reflected in Woodrow Wilson's famous words he went before Congress on April 2nd 1917 to ask for a declaration of war against Germany and that's where he made his famous remarks that his aim was to help create a world that could be made safe for democracy a world that could be made safe for democracy because he understood that liberal democracy sometimes exists in a tenuous state it's to give you two other examples of this the United States and the Red Scare is after both World War one and during the early Cold War was the basic fear here the basic fear was that there were communists in the United States and those communists would ally with a communist state like the Soviet Union and the end result of that would be trouble if not revolution on the home front so if you can create a situation when you turn the Soviet Union into a liberal democracy you turn communist China into a liberal democracy you just take that problem right off the table and think about the problem today from China and Russia's point of view with China and Russia today fear is the liberal groups in individuals inside those countries who are unhappy with the likes of Vladimir Putin will Alai with the United States to undermine the regime you go to Moscow today you go to Beijing today they are really worried about regime change hard as that may to be believed that may be to believe regime change instigated by the United States in an alliance with liberal forces inside their own countries and again if the United States was not a liberal country this problem would be taken off the table so the underpinnings of liberal hegemony emphasis on individualism plus and alia Beloit's gives it a powerful Universalist impulse and that impulse leads to a foreign policy committed to spreading liberal democracy around the world old for those three reasons when the states pursue liberal agenda this is the second big question my argument is it depends largely on the structure of the system it depends largely on whether or not the system is bipolar multi polar or unipolar if it's bipolar or multi polar in other words there are if there are two or more great powers in the system States cannot pursue their blue jimminy they have to act according to balance of power logic and in a minute I'm going to explain to you why that is completely consistent with liberal theory but just for now understand that my argument is when there are two or more great powers each of those great powers has to worry about the other great power and therefore has to worry about the balance of power and has to act according to balance of power logic in the unipolar system where there is a single great power a single great power this is the United States of course when the cold war ends you could pursue liberal Gemma T because you don't have to worry about the balance of power because there is effectively no balance of power you are Godzilla and you are free to do pretty much what you want and you understand what's happening here if you're Godzilla and you have this liberal impulse hardwired into you you know what you're going to do you're going to try and create democracy all over the world I'll say more about that in a second but unipolarity is where you get liberal hegemony and as I said this is consistent with the liberal formula for dealing with conflict remember what I said last time liberalism at its root is a theory of conflict liberals assume do you have individuals and those individuals cannot agree on first principles in all cases and sometimes the disagreement over first principles is so powerful that people want to kill each other and that is why you need the Nightwatchman state there's no liberal theorist who says you don't need a state the three-part solution or formula for preventing conflict is number one inalienable rights if everybody has rights and everybody has the right to life I'm not gonna be a lot of killing if you can convince people that furthermore there's going to be a lot of tolerance so purveying the norm of Tolerance is very important in the liberal story but all liberals understand that emphasizing rights and emphasizing tolerance those two things together is not enough you need a night watchman state think about the state of nature liberals start in the state of nature where individuals are constantly in a situation with its potential for conflict and death and what they do is they form a social contract and the social contract involves a higher authority so you need that higher authority there's no higher authority in international politics there is no world state there's no social contract despite all this talk about community therefore if you're surrounded by other great powers you have no choice but to compete with them according to liberal logic because according to liberal logic without the Nightwatchman state you are back in the state of nature the state of nature is Antarctic it's not high Arctic the reason you form a state a social contract is to get out of Anarchy but you don't have that in international politics and for that reason when there are other great powers in the system you have to compete with them and you can't pursue liberal hegemony but if you're in unipolarity the imbalance is so great between Godzilla and all of the minions the Godzilla is free to pursue liberal hegemony that's the basic argument they take this one step further you know Montero as you know has written the seminal book on unipolarity and he says in that book that the Unipol has three options if you think about it these make perfect sense first of all the Unipol can go home because it's so powerful and secure that it doesn't have to sweat what's going on in the rest of the world you just go home you won we won the Cold War we're Godzilla let's go home who's gonna threaten us and if the minions want to fight among themselves who cares that's one possibility second is you can stay involved abroad and use the power you have to maintain the status quo or number three you can stay involved abroad and use that power to do social engineering on a grand scale that number three is what Uncle Sam did because Uncle Sam has this liberal impulse hardwired into it and and of course how does the capability in terms of raw power and as I pointed out to you last time social engineering is at the heart of modern liberalism modern liberalism is all about social engineering and modern liberals have great confidence in social engineering so when you put the distribution of power this liberal DNA which involves this Universalist impulse and your belief in social engineering you're off to the races and that's exactly what happened after 1989 talk a little bit about liberal hegemony and action you get as I just said you get a super ambitious foreign policy you also get a heavily militarized foreign policy the United States is a militaristic state it's really quite remarkable I'll talk more about this as we go along we're addicted to war and these are liberal driven Wars I'll talk a little bit about this tomorrow me and my realest friends have been against almost every one of these wars and it's my liberal friends who are pushing these Wars I have some liberal friends who have never seen a war they didn't want to fight we have a highly militarized foreign policy the United States is forth seven separate wars since the Cold War ended and it's been war at war for two out of every three years since 1980 on it this is remarkable coming back to Nuno's template I thought we won the Cold War we could go home and relax we're so powerful but no no no that's not what we did and we did it for liberal reasons liberal hegemony action to cases just talk a little bit about NATO expansion as you know when the Cold War ended shortly thereafter in the Clinton administration they began to talk about expanding NATO and does that make clear as we go along here this is the one of the principal causes of the conflict with Russia over Ukraine the first expansion was in 1999 we brought in Poland Hungary and the Czech Republic the second expansion was in 2004 we brought in the Baltic States Romania Slovenia Slovakia so forth and so on and then after 2008 we were talking about bringing in Ukraine and Georgia now when things blew up after the February 22nd 2014 coup in Ukraine when things blow up between us and the Russians they took Crimea so forth and so on everybody said the Russians are a threat to overrun Eastern Europe the whole purpose of NATO expansion was to contain Russia and thank goodness we were actually moving further in for into Eastern Europe that's simply not true that's simply not true there's no evidence to support that argument we were moving NATO eastward in large part as an element in a liberal strategy that was designed to take this security community in the deutschen sense of the term we had created in Western Europe during the Cold War and move it eastward it included not only spreading NATO it included spreading the European Union and promoting democracy you all remember the orange revolution in Ukraine and you remember the Rose Revolution in Georgia this was all designed to take this security community and move it eastward Michael McFaul who I've debated on this issue of the Ukraine crisis who was the US ambassador to Russia from 2012 to right before the 2014 coup says that I told Putin on numerous occasions and I told his lieutenants on numerous occasions that NATO expansion was not a threat to Russia and he genuinely believed that Barack Obama has said the same thing he genuinely believed it these people who were pushing NATO expansion did not believe in realpolitik and containment in fact they said that anyone who believes in realpolitik in containment and that includes yours truly is a seventeenth-century person that's right we're dinosaurs that world has gone away with the end of the Cold War so NATO expansion was not motivated by realist logic and by the way virtually all the realists were opposed to NATO expansion and said this is not going to have a happy ending and George Kennan gave a famous interview to Thomas Friedman of the New York Times who wrote it up and Kennedy said exactly that this is unnecessary and it's good a link to big trouble and surprise of surprises it led to a war in August 2008 between Russia and Georgia and in 2014 who ended up with a war between Russia and Ukraine over Ukraine right but it was not driven by realist logic bush doctrine you know a lot of people will say what's going on in the Middle East or the greater Middle East is that we are pursuing the American national interest in a realpolitik kind of way and just disguising our behavior with liberal rhetoric in fact if you look at what the Bush administration said that's not true and as I explained to you about the Iraq case we went into Iraq for the purpose of turning it into a liberal democracy because we saw that as part of a story where there would be no more war in the Middle East once we got beyond Iraq we got Syria involved and Iran involved if we democratize the entire place it would all lead to peace love and dope and it would take terrorism and nuclear proliferation off the table that was the basic view here of what we were up to of course it all crashed and burned but but that was the initial intention and by the way it was a remarkably ambitious foreign policy I can think of no case in American history where we pursued a foreign policy that was as ambitious and foolish is this the idea that we were going to democratize the Middle East region of the world that had hardly any history of democracy at the end of a rifle barrel really remarkable and of course who opposed that war mainly realest some liberals did much to their credit but mainly realists why is liberal hegemony doomed reason number one social engineering and foreign countries is an extremely difficult Enterprise under the best of circumstances and these social engineering in one's own country is especially difficult but the idea that we can go into a foreign country we can go into a foreign country where most of the people don't speak the language don't understand the culture knock off the regime right and therefore create a lot of chaos and then create order out of that chaos and not just order out of that chaos but create liberal democracy or even just democracy this is a pipe dream and using the US military for that I spent 10 years of my life in the US military I went to West Point the US military the US Army is ground forces that we have they're good at breaking things they're good at killing people they're giant killing machines the idea that you could take the US Army and send it into Iraq and that it is going to be able to do nation building or state building in a sophisticated way it's not going to happen I can guarantee you you want to send him up against Saddam's army in the middle of the desert in 1991 right you want to do that that's Bambi versus Godzilla right that's what the US Army or the US Marines are good at doing right but you start talking about taking the American military putting it at a place like Vietnam putting in a place like Afghanistan and letting it do social engineering not gonna work right I don't care if you bring in experts is not gonna work anyway and if it does work it's gonna take you a heck of a long time but there are three other reasons it's not gonna work second is nationalism is a remarkably powerful force you've heard me say that on more than one occasion between the last lecture and this one and it causes the target state to resist foreign intervention I won't go into a long song and dance about what nationalism is all about I'd love to do that but let me just say self-determination and sovereignty are at the heart of nationalism the people in a nation-state the nation itself and the leaders who run a state they want to determine for themselves what their domestic politics look like and they want to determine for themselves what their foreign policy looks like this is what sovereignty is all about and they don't want a foreign country whether it's the United States or the Soviet Union going into Afghanistan or Britain going into Afghanistan or France going into Vietnam these people don't want foreigners running their politics they don't want foreigners occupying their country and who can blame them as I point out here think about the u.s. outrage over claims that the Russians interfered in the 2016 election apparently from reading the newspapers this drives Americans crazy the idea that the Russians interfered in our elections well we interfere in elections all over the planet we interfere in the politics of states all over the planet we think we have a god-given right to go into any country violent sovereignty if it's done for just purposes which means promoting liberal democracy we have a rich history of it as you know but as my mother taught me when I was a little boy what's good for the goose is good for the gander if we if we're jealous gods when it comes to our sovereignty don't you think that people in other countries I'm going to feel the same way don't you think the Vietnamese after World War two we're gonna want the French out and then when the Americans replaced the French don't you think they're gonna want us out they are do you think the Afghani czar happy about costs being there you think that this is a long-term solution but you may believe we can do the necessary social engineering to fix the problem getting back to my first point don't bet on it you understand that Afghanistan is the longest war in American history and we have now spent quite a bit more money on fixing Afghanistan than we spent with the Marshall Plan and look at the results not pretty reason number three individual rights this whole concept of Analia below verse old if you sort of look around the world at surveys and you look at a number of historical cases what you see is that people generally think rights are important but they don't privilege them to the extent that the theory says they should and people will often sacrifice rights for stability there's a lot of survey data that shows that this is true today in the Middle East hardly surprising if you lived in one of those countries would you that the United States has helped Trek would you be interested first and foremost in creating liberal democracy or would you be interested first and foremost and creating some stability I think the answer is quite clear go to Russia today right first time I ever went to Russia I talked to all sorts of people about this issue how do you think about liberal democracy liberal democracy means one thing to them the 1990s tried that been there and it was a total disaster thank God we have Putin if he's not a Liberal Democrat and he is a semi authoritarian leader more power to them that's the answer you hear most of the time can you blame them but what this means is that liberal democracy is not always an easy sell it's not like you're going abroad and everybody's out there just demanding liberal democracy oh my god this is the most important political system in the world and if we can just get it we'll live happily ever after this is not to say that there aren't many places where they would prefer liberal democracy over some semi authoritarian system there are cases like that but the point is it's not an easy sell and then finally some states actually act to balance against the unipole they act according to realist logic this certainly has been true with China and Russia and also with Iran and North Korea I'm going to talk a little bit more about NATO expansion in a second the Russians view NATO expansion from a purely realpolitik point of view this balance of power politics yeah idea that the United States can take a military alliance that was a mortal enemy of the Soviet Union and March it up to Russia's doorstep and make Ukraine and Georgia part of the West it not going to happen they'll tell you that it is not going to happen for balance of power reasons and all you have to do was talk about the Chinese about the presence of the American military in East Asia it bothers them greatly they do not like the idea of us being on their doorstep and they'll tell you behind closed doors they intend to push us eventually out beyond the first island chain and then out beyond the second island chain and I don't blame them one bit but I'm just telling you if you're interested in selling liberal hegemony to major powers in the system like Russia and China you ought to understand that there are real limits to what you can do and then of course you have minor powers like Iran and North Korea look at what North Korea is doing today people say oh what North Korea is doing today is crazy they're irrational Kim jong-un we've never seen anybody this crazy the thought of him having nuclear weapons is horrified I'd make a case that what Kim jong-un is doing is very reasonable if I were Kim jong-un I have nuclear weapons and I'd never ever get rid of them never why because the United States is running around the world knocking you off regimes that's what liberal hegemony is all about that means if you're not a liberal hegemonic state think about what Michael Doyle said you could be in the crosshairs and how do you prevent regime change the best way to do this have nuclear weapons we don't like that for understandable reasons but from their point of view it makes them initely good sense Iran I've said in public on a number of the Cajuns if I was the Iranian National Security Advisor they'd already have nuclear weapons and I can guarantee you that if they had nuclear weapons the Americans and the Israelis would not be threatening them very simple but the point that I'm trying to make to you here is that some states resist not all of them but some some were foolish like Colonel Qaddafi we promised Colonel Qaddafi that if he gave up his WMD programs we'd leave Malone you know where he is now he's six feet under six feet under very foolish bottom line here bottom line here is if you can balance balance and some figure that out so anyway my basic argument is that liberal agenda is doomed because social engineering is wickedly difficult nationalism causes significant resistance individuals right individual rights matter but not that much and it should be number for realism remains a key factor for some states some states talk a little bit about the Ukraine crisis as I said you before NATO expansion EU expansion and spreading democracy were all about all about enlarging the security community that existed in Western Europe and there was even thoughts of eventually bringing the Russians in it was not balance of power politics but what happened is that after the April 2008 NATO summit in Bucharest where we said that Georgia and Ukraine would become part of NATO you had shortly thereafter in August 2008 a war over Georgia and then in 2014 you had the war over Ukraine 2008 April 2008 look at the communique that was issued after the Bucharest NATO summit it said that Georgia and Ukraine will become part of NATO and you have wars involving both of those countries and the Russians have no intention of letting either Georgia or Ukraine become part of the West they'll wreck both those countries before they let it happen this basic geopolitics and what's happened to Putin Putin's standing has gone up significantly why basic nationalism nationalism at home factors driving the Russian behavior realism 101 nationalism and stability over rights that's the Russian story it's why you so hard to sell liberal democracy in Russia the last consideration and why the Ukraine crisis happened first point and second point about nationalism is why Putin is so popular talk a little bit about the Bush Doctrine there are five countries that were the main targets of regime change we actually use military force in Afghanistan Iraq and Libya in the case of Syria we provided huge amounts of money and training to the rebels we were deeply committed to overthrowing the government in Damascus the Assad government if you read the newspapers in the United States what you see is people constantly beating Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over the head for not doing anything to get rid of the regime in Damascus this is simply wrong we did not intervene with our own military forces in any meaningful way but we were behind we were behind the insurgency in a major way we were deeply committed to regime change in Syria and we were also involved in regime change in Egypt we helped get rid of Mubarak and then when the Muslim Brotherhood won a democratic election we helped usher that leader Mohamed Morsi out of power when the Egyptian people the United States became disenchanted with Morsi but if you just sort of look at those five cases Afghanistan is a disaster zone Iraq another disaster zone Libya another disaster zone Syria another disaster zone and although we had a brief interregnum where we had liberal democracy or democracy in Egypt that lasted about a year and now we're back to where we have a thug in power who we're comfortable supporting right this is an abysmal track rate think of all the death and destruction in the Middle East since 2001 it's really stunning really stunning this is all in my opinion this is all due to local factors plus in a really big way liberal hegemony the United States has played a key role in almost all of those cases Egypt is the only possible exception and causing a huge amount of murder and ma'am right local factors mattered I don't deny that but the United States played it is enormous ly important wrong Bush Doctrine why did it fail difficulty of doing social engineering social engineering in Iraq social engineering in Afghanistan good luck so I think I said in the Q&A period last time when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 virtually all of my colleagues in the National Security community were at gas they said oh my god the Soviets around the March this is terrible right we've been weakened 1970s thought that my view was exactly the opposite the Soviets invading Afghanistan was the best news the United States could have had they just jumped into a giant quagmire it's like us going into Vietnam one needs to go to China in the early 2000s I used to tell the Chinese what you really want to do is tell the Americans that they have to win the war on terror you're counting on them to win the war on terror and they have to stay in Afghanistan Iraq till they win the war on right that'll be forever right and meanwhile you sit on the sidelines and just continue to get richer and richer last thing you want to do if your China is end up in Vietnam or Afghanistan or Iraq these are places you want to stay out of for the reasons I said difficulty of doing social engineering nationalism and the fact that most people certainly at this point in time privilege stability over rights bottom line liberal hegemony leads to one failure after another and this is one of the reasons ladies and gentlemen that Donald Trump is president the United States he explicitly challenged almost every aspect of liberal hegemony during the 2016 campaign almost every aspect how it all turns out with him I don't know but there's a great deal of disenchantment in the body populace in this country the elites as I told you they love liberal hegemony but the body politic not so clear a lot of disenchantment and I believe that this contributed I don't think it was the main reason by any means but I think this contributed to the election of Donald Trump let me conclude with one final point which I think is of great significance I think that liberal hegemony undermines liberalism at home it threatens core American values because America becomes a militarized state you get this huge national security state and especially when you're fighting a global war on terror and you think you definitely have to monitor what people in the society are doing you have to turn the National Security Agency loose two monitors peoples monitor people's emails and telephone conversations and so forth and so on so I think that founding fathers understood James Madison in particular no nation can preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare and we live in a country that's engaged in continual warfare and it's engaged in continual warfare because we have decided to pursue a policy of liberal hegemony and that was not necessary as Nuno said when you're in unipolarity you have three choices three very different choices three stark choices and we decided to do massive social engineering at the end of a rifle barrel we tried to create a planet that's filled with liberal democracies and it failed and that's where we are today thank you I'll be happy to take questions his question was how did I overcome the temptation to become a member of the State Department it was very simple it's the way I'm constitutionally wired I hate Authority it's why I love being an academic as some of you have heard me say I went to West Point as an undergraduate and I really hated it I'm very thankful I went there because I learned all sorts of important lessons but I always tell people that I actually hated going to West Point and I hated the military because I hate guns I hate sleeping in the woods I hate shaving I hate uniforms but most importantly I hate Authority so academia was the ideal place for me and there was no hope that I could function in a meaningful way in the State Department because I'd have to take orders from somebody religion in this dynamic his question is could I say something about the role of religion I downplay religion in my story obviously which is what prompted your question if I were to talk about religion I would embed it in the discussion of nationalism okay and my argument is that when you begin to sort of unpack the concept of nationalism and get it its essence you have to talk about culture right well all these nations have particular cultures and cultures are all about different practices and beliefs okay so one set of beliefs that you can have involve religion Sam Huntington has written a book called who are we that argues that the United States at its root is a white anglo-saxon Protestant country and that has not changed in any fundamental way and he's talking about nationalism and he's taking that argument about Protestantism and he is integrating it into nationalism right if you were to look at a country like Iran it's obvious that when you talk about Iranian nationalism you have to incorporate religion into it okay now I think where the real conflict comes up the intellectual conflict comes up on this issue is that there are a lot of people who believe that religion transcends boundaries and matters in very important ways so to go to another book that Sam Huntington wrote which is the clash of civilizations right when he talked about Islam versus Christianity right this Western civilization that where Christianity really matters in this Islamic civilization religion is of great importance right and the fault lines in his story in that book involve religion I don't think that theory of his explains how the world works hardly at all because I view the world as based on the system of nation-states I made this point to you folks in the previous lecture if you look at the planet looks differently you look at Western Europe where you look at Europe in 1450 right look at a map of Europe in 1450 they're due she's principalities empires city-states wide assortment of different kinds of political orders there are no states today if you look at the entire planet it's populated by nothing but nation-states nothing but nation-states nationalism is an incredibly powerful force so I subordinate religion to nationalism right and when I hear you know about how in the Middle East we have this Islamic force that's arrayed against us you know I said we went in to rescue Kuwait which was an Islamic country that was invaded by Iraq which is a Lama country between 1980 and 1988 Iran in Iraq for this incredibly bloody war Saudi Arabia and Iran today are both Islamic countries then you could say Shia versus Sunni final point to you is you should look at the literature on the 30 Years War 1618 to 1648 there's a book out from Harvard University Press by Peter Wilson very interesting book and the question you should ask yourself when you read the book is how much of the 30 Years War which is you know in the aftermath of the Reformation and where you would expect religion to really matter big time how much of the conflict is driven by religion and how much of it is driven by basic balance of power politics it's actually surprising how little religion matters in my opinion I don't want to be so foolish as to say religion didn't matter at all and in fact this is a case where if religion was going to matter this is the place you would expect it to matter right but in fact religion often times in the story gets subordinated to just good old-fashioned balance of power politics so all this is to say I kind of downplay the importance of religion okay let me repeat your question for everybody and you correct me or fill in the blanks if I don't exactly red represent your question he's basically challenging me on the point that NATO expansion caused the Russian reaction over Georgia and over Ukraine and he's saying that there's evidence before 2008 which is the key point that we both agree on before 2008 there was evidence of Russian aggression he said for example there's the case of Chechnya right and he said there's evidence that the Russians had plans to invade Crimea and Ukraine before the 2008 crisis and Georgia before the 2008 crisis okay I disagree with you and here's why first of all Chechnya is inside rusha it's not outside so that's not evidence of aggression secondly I've spent an enormous amount of time trying to find evidence that the Russians had contingency plans for taking Crimea before February 22nd 2014 I can find no evidence yes what we're talking about after 1990 I just I think there's no evidence of Russian aggression and just if you look at the deployment of Russian forces in the western districts of Russia there are hardly any military forces there in February of 2014 and in fact if you look at the Russian case and by the way if you go to Russia today you'll find the same thing the Russians do not want an arms race with the West they do not want an arms race with the United States and they don't want an arms race with the United States because they understand that we've got the Soviet Union into trouble was that the Soviet Union spent much too much money on defense and not enough money on refurbishing the economy and this is a country that is in economic trouble it's a giant gas station they understand that they have to modernize the arm modernize the economy and that involves spending lots of money and you can't do that if you're fighting wars with the West furthermore I believe the Russians especially Putin are very sophisticated strategists and they understand full well that the last thing they want to do is invade a country in Eastern Europe and occupy it it would be the height of foolishness right I often say to people if you really want to wreck Russia what you ought to do is encourage them to invade a couple countries in Eastern Europe let's see how that works out not very well or if you don't like that you can have them invade Afghanistan again they can go in and take over for us right I think the Russians understand this that that expansion this is this is the power of nationalism you know I've made the argument on a number of occasions the two principle blocks against military aggression today are number one nuclear weapons and number two nationalism nationalism makes it very hard to conquer countries especially if you have to occupy and I think the Russians fully understand this I'll just say one final point on this Russia is a declining great power largely for demographic reasons but also for economic reasons just look at the demographic print the projected demographic curves big trouble big trouble on the horizon interventions and secondly you said that nationalism but we've seen that national entities such as themselves do not so for example we could see NATO major expansion eastwards you could see it as an expansion sovereign spy okay you have to be shorter I'll take your second point just quickly my argument which I did not expand on just because of time is that states care greatly about their own sovereignty but great powers especially violate the sovereignty of other countries all the time okay pardon oh it's not only liberal hegemony that behaves that way that may be true but nevertheless if you're going to pursue a policy of liberal hegemony you want to understand that when you invade other countries you're going to bump up against nationalism that was my point but you're absolutely right I mean we went into Vietnam a remarkably foolish decision right because we believed in the domino theory which is a sort of a misguided realist view of the world we didn't go in there for purposes of promoting liberal democracy but still it happened there what was your first point again about values yeah well I think the most powerful point you made it's the most difficult for me to deal with is your point that we actually made liberal democracy work in West Germany during the Cold War and again as I said in the talk we created this zone of liberal democracies in Western Europe and then your other point was South Korea were eventually in South Korea took quite a while we got a liberal democracy and just make a couple points just stick to Western Europe first of all we were an occupier in Western Europe especially in Germany but we were an occupier in large part because there was this thing there called the Soviet threat that the West Europeans feared greatly the Americans feared greatly and the West Europeans wanted us there to protect them that's point number one point number two is just to take Germany Germany actually had a rich history of democracy right vimar Germany was a liberal democracy and there's a whole literature that argues that Germany was a democracy a liberal democracy before World War one now that's a disputed claim but there are people who make that argument so it was not that difficult given that Germany had been destroyed number one given the fact that Germany needed us to protect them against the Soviet Union or at least they thought they did and number three that they had a history of democracy for us to make it work there right so there are circumstances where it can be made to work very unusual circumstances but what happens in the cases that we're talking about is you get the United States invading countries that have hardly any history of democracy don't face external threats except from us right and it therefore becomes very difficult yes yeah in countries that are lacking in the history Liberal Democratic history and where there's a really high level of internecine violence Iraq Syria maybe to a lesser extent Burma these days what would your theories say about whether it would be better or worse for those countries to maintain their territorial integrity or to split apart I don't have anything to say about that in my theories so to speak I mean I have views on those subjects no I mean not not as part of the argument that I'm making up here I mean I I had all sorts of views and wrote about this in the 1990s with regard to Yugoslavia but we'd really get off the trail if I started talking about that and I'm not sure I could remember everything I said at the time well the Japanese case is similar to the German case first of all Japan was destroyed much the way Germany was destroyed one cannot underestimate the extent to which these two countries were destroyed you know in the Japanese case we were fire bombing Japanese cities starting on March 10th 1945 and we killed more people the first night we firebomb Tokyo than were killed in either Hiroshima or Nagasaki we're burning Japanese cities to the ground an incredibly rapid pace and then we drop two nuclear weapons on them and there were very few Japanese cities left that that weren't wrecked and and they had suffered a devastating defeat in the war lots of Japanese had died so this was a wrecked country and they did believe they too faced the Soviet threat and you want to remember that in those days people believed when North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25th 1950 that North Korea was a Soviet proxy and people believed in the domino theory foolish as it was and the Japanese therefore were very nervous and of course they were very nervous about the Chinese as well because the Chinese and the North Koreans and the Soviets and the North Vietnamese were all seen as part of a seamless web these were people who did not appreciate the importance of nationalism okay and so that he had that but also Japan did have a period where it was a liberal democracy and that was mainly in the 1920s I don't think it was as progressive as Germany was by more Germany but nevertheless I think the basic ingredients were there the other case that's raised by the way against me sometimes are the Eastern European revolutions in 1989 right because there you got democracy and the argument the argument that people like me make is that that was from the bottom of what happened in 1989 was not a case of the United States causing regime change and helping to create a liberal democracy it was the collapse of the Soviet Union and the evacuation of Soviet forces in a very important way the return of sovereignty to those countries where there were powerful Democratic or liberal democratic forces down below that bubbled up because I remember in the context of the Iraq war opponents of that war like myself argue that things would go Souths as i believe they did and many of the proponents of the war this is the Iraq war in 2003 would argue that the experience of the various countries in Eastern Europe showed that once you got rid of a dictator right once you got rid of an authoritarian leader that democracy would bubble up from the bottom and of course that did happen in Eastern Europe but we didn't do it and and the situation the Middle East was fundamentally different yes ma'am but in cases where you do have group of people that are starting are those places only democracy could I answer your first question first just because I'll forget it I'll answer your second question - was it the first go ahead go ahead you could ask both just on the second part I think what was going on at home was more important than foreign policy I didn't mean to oversell foreign policy I thought I used qualifying language I was not arguing that the principal reason he got elected was that he opposed liberal agenda I just said it contributed I think your description is on the money that it was mainly domestic politics the fact that there's a large amount of resentment in this country involving jobs and income and so forth and so on those kinds of things I think really mattered more but I was just saying this contributed to it and your first question is where do people fit in and I think you said where people's preferences fit and especially preferences for democracy well first of all I think people are a big part of my story when it comes to nationalism right for sure and I understand your point about preferences and I think if if people in a particular country want to become Democratic that's wonderful as I said in the first lecture my views on liberal democracy at home are fundamentally different than my views on liberal democracy abroad I thank my lucky stars I was born in the United States which is a liberal democracy and I think all things considered I prefer to live in a liberal democracy than any other form of political system any other kind of political system but my argument is when you take it abroad it leads to all sorts of problems I tend to favor self-determination and I believe that if people want to become democratic that's up to them right and it's not our business to go in and influence things one way or the other and I think you end up getting into lots of trouble now some people might say you might say the John you can do this in a sophisticated way the problem is that we've behaved in blunder puss fashion in the past let's do it in a sophisticated way let's pay attention to the Preferences of people in other countries and so forth and so on I kind of understand that argument but I think you then run into what I call the slippery slope problem that once you get in the business of trying to promote democracy in other countries and you're as powerful as the United States and you're as confident as people in the United States are about your ability to do social engineering you're off to the races and I don't like that at all so for purposes of promoting democracy my way of doing it would be to be the city on the hill and to tie that in to my last point the argument I was making is that it's hard to be the city on the hill when you're intervening all over the planet in a militarized fashion because you're undermining liberalism at home and I am I'm actually a huge civil libertarian I'm and I think civil liberties matter enormous Lee and I think the idea of having a national security state is frightening you go to Washington these days it is a national security state we're addicted to war and again I'm not against having a military I went to West Point I was in the military for ten years of my life I understand you need a military mind you have to be very very careful not to turn the United States into a militaristic state and I think when you pursue your more sophisticated defense of liberal hegemony or promoting liberal democracy around the world you quickly run into the slippery slope problem that would sort of be my argument sir everybody here is question his view is basically I have a more or less reactionary view and that what I'm talking about in defending the Russians is basically arguing that we should go back to a sphere of influences view of the world and I interpret and I don't think you would have any trouble with this I interpret a sphere of influences type of the world to be basic balance of power politics right they they go together right now I believe that you can't go back to balance of power politics because we never left them behind right this is what this is what we forgot when we moved NATO eastward balance of power politics was alive and well not in the United States but in Russia and it's true in China and it's true in Iran and it's true in South Korea right so the idea that this is old think I mean I think this is the way most Americans think your view is what I would call that today the sort of typical American view of international politics we have transcended spheres of influence right we live in a different world and I don't believe that for one second I believe balance power politics is alive and well and this is why we got ourselves in so much trouble on Russia now I just want to unpack this a bit more talk about the rise of China okay if China continues to rise and Russia continues to come back from the dead we move from unipolarity to multipolarity or if you want to excise the Russians and just talk about the Chinese and the Americans you move back to bipolarity okay now remember what I said in the presentation if you're in a bipolar world or you're in a multipolar world you cannot pursue liberal hegemony right so my argument is that if China continues to rise the United States will engage in an intense security competition with China we're balance of power politics and spheres of influence matter greatly and if you go to China today and you talk to the Chinese about the South China Sea and the East China Sea and you talk about the American military presence in those areas they do not like it because they view those areas as their sphere of influence they understand that we got in there when China was weak but they'd like to get us out and I would argue that what you'll see with the United States is that the United States will think in terms of spheres of influence you know what the Monroe Doctrine is right the Monroe Doctrine basically says that the United States owns the Western Hemisphere and no distant great power be it from Europe or be it from Asia is allowed to move military forces into the Western Hemisphere and form a military alliance with a country in our hemisphere the Monroe Doctrine which has not gone away right the Monroe Doctrine is all about spheres of influence it says the Western Hemisphere is our sphere of influence do you think in 25 years if China decides to form a military alliance with Canada or Mexico and station a couple Chinese divisions in Vancouver and Toronto that we're not gonna go ballistic you're a young guy so you probably don't remember the Cuban Missile Crisis unfortunately I'm not a young guy and I remember the Cuban Missile Crisis the idea that the Soviets were putting missiles in Cuba was completely antithetical to us and then when they talked about building a naval base at Cienfuegos we almost blew another gasket the Soviets are not allowed in the Western Hemisphere why because it's an American sphere of influence why because it's our backyard well if you're Vladimir Putin or any Russian leader the idea that NATO is going to be allowed to drive right up to your border it's not gonna happen it's just not gonna happen you know people will say wow John don't you understand that the Ukrainians are free to choose their own foreign policy you often hear this argument we were talking about this yesterday the Ukrainians are free to choose their own foreign policy their sovereign state this is not a decision the Russians can make for them my view is that's a very dangerous way of thinking about international politics Ukraine is not a sovereign state when it comes to this issue the Russians are not going to tolerate them form an alliance with NATO right and if Ukraine behaves like it is a sovereign state right it's going to get itself into a well of a lot of trouble this is what happened to Castro do you think the United States believed during the Cold War and even after the Cold War the Cuba had the right as a sovereign state to form an alliance with any state that it chose to we didn't think that for one second we did not think that for one second and we went to great lengths to kill Castro and to strangle Cuba because Castro thought that he liked Ukrainians thought had the right to form an alliance with just any state when you're dealing with great powers this is another election great powers are ruthless in that states is one of the most ruthless great powers in modern history that you cannot underestimate how ruthless the United States is this is all covered up in the textbooks in the classes that we take growing up right because we hate this is all part of nationalism nationalism is all about creating myths about how wonderful your country is right it's America right or wrong we never do anything wrong right if you really look carefully at how the United States is operated over time it's really amazing how ruthless we have been and the British the same is true of them as well but we cover it up so I'm just saying if you're if you're Ukraine and you're living next to a powerful state like Russia or you're Cuban and you're living next to a very powerful state like the United States you should be very very careful because this is like sleeping in bed with an elephant if that elephant rolls over on top of you you're dead right so you got to be very careful am I happy about the fact that this is the way the world works no I'm not but it is the way the world works for better or for worse [Applause] [Music]

Channel: YaleUniversity

Views: 2,525,724

Keywords: Yale University, The MacMillan Center, John J. Mearsheimer, Henry L. Stimson Lectures on World Affairs, Liberal Hegemony

Id: ESwIVY2oimI

Length: 83min 43sec (5023 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/5leeveen]

Just finished watching it.

He completely and thoroughly dismantled everything I believed as a grad student 10 years ago.

Loved it.

[u/WolfofBallMeat]

John Gray had a great book from the 90s called Enlightenment's Wake that rips on liberal universalism after the breakup of the USSR. People still believe this shit lol.

[u/FcLeason]

I did a YouTube binge of this guy a couple weeks ago. The algorithm seems to have chosen him recently.

[u/idealatry]

I'd just like to point out that every single post on r/worldnews is about Ukraine/Russia right now. LMFAO. Those motherfuckers finally got what they've been looking for.