John J. Mearsheimer, “The Roots of Liberal Hegemony”

hello and welcome everybody welcome to the Macmillan Center for International and area studies I'm Ian Shapiro that the current director and I'm delighted to have the opportunity today to be the host and introduce John J Mishima who's this year's Henry L Stimson lecturer he is the Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service professor of political science and co-director of the program on international security at the University of Chicago professor Mearsheimer has written extensively about security issues and international politics more generally he's published five major books including perhaps the one he's best known for the tragedy of the grave of great power politics which came out in 2001 and a second edition - in 2014 which won the Joseph let Gold Book Prize and has been translated into eight languages and then with Steve Walt in 2007 the Israel lobby and US foreign policy which became a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into twenty four languages he's also written many articles in academic journals such as international security and in more popular outlets such as Foreign Affairs and the London Review of Books he's won a number of teaching awards and became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003 he's here today to give three lectures from me from his forthcoming book of Stimson lectures that'll be published next year by Yale University Press under the general heading liberal ideals and international realities today is the first of the three its title is the roots of liberal hegemony his next lecture which will be on Wednesday will be entitled the false promise of liberal hegemony and Thursday's lecture will be called the case for restraint I hope you'll be able to join us for the whole series of these lectures the funding for this lecture series comes from an anonymous donor in honor of Henry L Stimson Yale College class of 1889 an attorney and statesman whose government service culminated in his tenth tenure as Secretary of War during the Second World War since 1998 the Macmillan Center and Yale University Press have collaborated to bring distinguished diplomats and foreign policy experts to the center to lecture on their books that are published in this series by Yale University Press some of the previous Stimson lectures have included Samuel Huntington's political order in changing societies shellings political shellings arms and influence the Arab Center the promise of moderation by Marwan Masha what happened to national liberation by Michael Walzer and David may his imprint of Congress I'm very pleased today to be able to introduce professor John Mearsheimer welcome thank you very much Ian can everybody in the rear hear me okay I am wired up it's a great pleasure and honored to be here of course I know who Henry Stimson was what student of international security does it and I've also long known about the Stimson lectures because two of my favourite books both of which Ian mentioned Sam Huntington's book political order and changing in societies and Thomas Schelling is very famous spoke arms and influence were originally Stimpson lectures so it's a great honor to be following in their footsteps and before I start I'd like to thank in very much for inviting me to be here today to give this lecture and then of course to give the lectures on Wednesday and on Thursday let me just give you a brief overview of what I want to try and do I want to start off with some preliminary remarks just tell you some stories about the book its Genesis and so forth and so on then I want to talk about the roots of liberal hegemony and it'll become clear as we go along here this is really not much of an international relations talk the international relations comes in the wednesday lecture and in the Thursday lecture what I'm going to try and do tonight is provide background for those subsequent lectures that'll become clear as I go along so as Ian said I'll be talking about the false promise of liberal hegemony Wednesday night and then Thursday make the case for a more restrained foreign policy talk a little bit about the genesis of the book first of all when I started this thing about ten years ago what I really wanted to do is write a big Theory book on the relationship between liberalism nationalism and realism I had written the book on realism the tragedy of great peril politics so I knew a lot about realism but I didn't say much about liberalism in that book and liberalism and realism are the two great isms in the IR world social constructivism critical theory Marxism all these other isms are mildly interesting when you strip away all the layers of the onion it boils down to realism versus liberalism I've spent half my life battling with liberals right as a good realist so I knew a lot about that but I hadn't thought much about liberalism in any detail and then there's nationalism I'm a big believer that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet that'll become clear as we go along here and in the subsequent lectures I also believe that nationalism and realism we're very closely related almost all realists believe in the power of nationalism but hardly any realists have written about nationalism and nationalism is not incorporated into their theories right so I started thinking about the relationship between realism and nationalism and of course nationalism and liberalism and what I wanted to do is figure out you know theoretical way is sort of how all of these isms fit together the problem I ran into is I couldn't do it I spent two years trying to write a book on it and I couldn't do it and I couldn't figure out how to organize it it there was just no organizing principle to make the book work then the second thing is I could never figure out what liberalism really is because the literature is just very hard to discern and truth be told it took me 2 to 3 years just to figure out what I'm gonna tell you here today it may all seem patently obvious and maybe it is to some of you I only wish you had told me before I spent two to three years trying to figure it out for myself so I had a lot of trouble figuring out exactly what liberalism is and then I couldn't write a book that did what I wanted to do now there was another big issue I cared about and that was liberal hegemony wonderla Germany is basically the foreign policy that the United States has pursued since the Cold War ended almost everybody I know agrees on this some people use a different label for it but I think liberal hegemony is a fair label and it's one that many people use it's very important to understand that the foreign policy establishment or would Ben Rhodes you remember Ben Rhodes he worked for Barack Obama he called the foreign policy establishment the blob the blob loves liberal hegemony right it's it's it's the approved solution for how to conduct American foreign policy but at the same time there's there's a small group of foreign policy experts who think it's a deeply flawed strategy and I'm one of those people right I think that liberal hegemony is a prescription for disaster and I'll make that clear as we go along here right but we've never gotten much traction and to the extent that anybody's gotten any traction I'll talk more about this in startled Trump because you understand Donald Trump ran against the blob and he got elected in heart because American foreign policy is a disaster zone regarding the pursuit of liberal hegemony just for background purposes here between 1990 and 2000 you could argue that we did pretty well with liberal hegemony I would argue against that but you can make a pretty good case but that was the heyday of liberal hegemony and since 2000 and certainly since 2001 everything has gone south and the $64,000 question that's on the table today is what went wrong you know why is American foreign policy in so much trouble why was Donald Trump able to run against liberal agenda and he ran against almost every element of the liberal hegemonist agenda and get elected right that's that is the big question and my argument is the liberalism is doomed as a foreign policy because nationalism and realism are more powerful forces and they undermine liberal hegemony at every turn and if you think about it focusing on what happens when a state pursues a liberal foreign policy and liberal hegemony in particular allows me to analyze the relationship between the three isms so this is how I figured out how to write a book that dealt with the relationship between liberalism nationalism and realism by asking the simple question why is liberal hegemony a flawed foreign policy so in a very important way the organizing question in the book is why was liberal hegemony doomed to fail and the answer is in large part because of nationalism and realism and in the process of laying this all out I deal with those three isms so I solved my problem but it took me a couple years my approach my approach and this will become clear as we go along is to drill down deep and to try to understand liberalism at its roots and what I really want to know to begin with or what are its starting assumptions about human nature I've worked very hard here and this will become clear as I go along which is not to say people have to agree with me just sort of figure out what the bedrock is that liberalism is based on and then figure out the principal elements of liberalism and then try to understand liberalism as a political ideology for a particular country independent of how it works in the realm of foreign policy so what I tried to do was not get wrapped around the axle about how liberalism applies to foreign policy I just try to figure out what the heck is this thing called liberalism how do I think about it and of course in the process as I'm thinking about liberalism I'm trying to think about how it relates to nationalism and realism and this is the table of contents of the book chapter one is the introduction so you don't pay much attention to that but chapter two is on human nature chapter 3 is on political liberalism that's liberalism inside the black box that's liberalism is a political system in a country and then chapter 4 is cracks in the liberal edifice those are tensions potential problems with liberalism and then it's not till chapter 5 that I get to foreign policy so what I've done here is I've written a book that has eight chapters and I don't deal with IR or foreign policy until the fifth chapter a number of IR friends who have read the manuscript don't like it really because they say what are you wasting all your time talking about human nature and talking about liberalism as a political ideology who cares right I want to go right to IR and the view that I have which I'm going to try and lay out tonight and in the next two lectures is that you really have to understand liberalism at its core to understand how it applies to foreign policy now oh sorry I want to say a few words about me and liberalism and then a few words about me and nationalism I distinguished between liberalism at home and liberalism abroad and I thank my lucky stars that I was born and raised in a liberal democracy called the United States of America I'm not anti liberal one of the great paradoxes in this business is virtually all of the realists that I know are liberals in every way Morgenthau waltz these guys were in terms of their domestic politics they were liberals par excellence right but they thought liberalism is a foreign policy was a prescription for trouble and that's my basic view my basic view is you have to think about liberalism at home versus liberalism abroad so I'm not arguing that liberalism in general is a bad thing I like liberal democracy very much it's not perfect by any means but I'm glad I live in the liberal democracy my arguments are all about liberalism when it applies abroad I want to say about a few words about me and nationalism nationalism is in my opinion the most powerful political ideology on the planet it's no accident that the world is populated by really nothing but nation-states and nation-states embody nationalism and I think at the same time it's very important to understand that at universities especially places like Yale and the University of Chicago nationalism is a bad word I'm always amazed at how my colleagues at the University of Chicago really lo of nationalism it just it really rubs them the wrong way and I understand that nationalism has a dark side to it it has an upside as well as a dark side but nationalism and liberalism and this will become clear as we go along are two different animals liberalism is I'll try to make clear tonight it's all about internationalism and universities are very international and to illustrate this I have quote from Jonathan Holloway who is the Dean of Yale College that was recently in The Washington Post this is a story in The Washington Post called the surge in foreign students may be crowding Americans out of elite colleges that was the title of the article and this was mr. Holloway's comment we want to bring together an incredibly diverse student body diverse in every way if we want to train the next generation here are the key words of global leaders we better have the globe here just think about what this is saying right this is an internationalist version of the world and this is of course what university is all about and I'm perfectly content to operate in this world I would not want universities to become more nationalists right I think the fact that universities are internationalist is wonderful and I really don't consider myself much of a nationalist although I'm going to make the argument that virtually every American is a nationalist right I don't consider myself a nationalist in a deep-seated way right but I think in large part that's due to the fact that I've operated in the Academy for so long and the Academy is very internationalist in nature and is very uncomfortable with the concept of nationalism but the point I'm going to make here is that the United States a very nationalist country it's one of the reasons that Donald Trump got elected president he fully understands that he fully understands that and if Donald Trump ever saw this and gave a 15 minute tirade on what the Dean said and what the title of that article said he'd make a lot have it he really would right so just want to be clear that with regard to liberalism I'm talking about liberalism abroad not liberalism at home and with regard to nationalism I'm not making the argument that nationalism is this wonderful force all the time okay roots of liberal hegemony this is the talk tonight as I said you got to start with human nature remember that was my chapter - and when you talk about human nature really what you're asking is what are those common traits that all individuals have in common and by the way this is something that the founding fathers of liberalism paid enormous attention to and I believe that if you're going to think about liberalism and nationalism you have to wrestle with these questions and there are two big questions the first question is are men and women social beings above all else or does it make more sense to emphasize their individuality in other words are humans fundamentally social animals who strive hard to carve out room for their individuality or are they individuals who form social contracts that's question number one question number two second have our critical faculties develop to the point where we can reach Universal consensus on what defines the good life can we agree on first principles can we use reason are we able to reason our way through collectively and come to meaningful agreement on the big questions about life those are sort of the two big issues on the table when you think about human nature now my views on this subject are that human beings are primarily social animals we're born into societies were born into groups and we are heavily socialized inside those groups both by the family and the society around us in a really big way before our individual individuality really gets to assert itself I think human beings are very tribal to put it in simplistic terms from the get-go it's not to say that you can't have a lot of individualism but we're primarily social animals and secondly I think it's impossible to come close to reaching a universal consensus on questions about the good life I mean all you have to do is think about religion do we have anything approximating a consensus on religion can you use your critical faculties to prove to me the Catholicism is superior to Protestantism or Protestantism is superior to Catholicism and then we can throw in all the other religions or what if you're an atheist I don't think so and you could point to all sorts of other examples why does it matter so much who's appreciate who's appointed to the Supreme Court why do we really care about that because we know it's the judges opinions the judges personal opinions that determines what the rulings are when you're dealing with hard cases that reach the Supreme Court that's why the Republicans care so much and the Democrats care so much there's no truth there's no universal agreement I mean they're people like Ronald Dworkin who push in that direction but they're outliers among legal theorists and even at universities do we teach moral principles do we have a body of worrell principles that we teach to students I don't think so what we do is expose students to all sorts of different perspectives we have no agreement on first principles there are a few things that we agree on but even if we do agree once you get outside the university once you get outside the United States the idea that you're gonna generate meaningful agreement agreement on what's the best political system liberal democracy go to Russia today and ask people what they think of liberal democracy 1990s that's what liberal democracy is for them they'll take stability every time over a liberal democracy so there's no real consensus here this is my view and what about liberals the liberal take on human nature is that humans are basically atomistic individuals the basic story they operate as individuals in the state of nature you know the basic story that Hobbes who's not a liberal but laid out many of the founding principles of liberalism makes and that John Locke makes that individuals are atomistic in the state of nature and they come together and they form a social contract so that the individual comes before the social and then of course liberals believe that's impossible to come close to reaching a universal consensus on questions about the good life right so I agree with the liberal position with regard to the second question but I disagree on the first question whereas liberals think individuals come before society I think the opposite now if you put the two liberal assumptions together about human nature what you end up is a world where individuals will sometimes have vehement disagreements about first principles right once you agree that individuals cannot reach a consensus on first principles and first principles involve hot-button issues you then are in a situation where those disagreements might be so profound that you'll have violent conflict so what this tells me is that the potential for mortal conflict since at the root of liberalism and this of course in the Haab story and even in the Locke story is why you leave the state of nature and the reason that you want to create a state you know the rest of the story right but the point that I'm making to you here is when you look at the to bedrock assumptions about individuality and about the ability of people to use their critical faculties to answer the big questions of life and you look at the liberal perspective and you put those two assumptions together you get significant potential for conflict and then the question becomes how do you prevent conflict how do you set up a liberal society so as to avoid conflict I just put that up there because it's important to emphasize that when liberalism got its start it was in large part concerned with the consequences of the Reformation which was that Catholics and Protestant fought bloody wars in countries all over Europe and again the limits of Reason show you that you can't answer which religion is superior but at the same time there's no question that people are profoundly attached to Catholicism and hate Protestantism and vice-versa so how do you deal with that problem this again is the problem that liberalism faces my argument is a liberal solution it has three parts first as an alien rights second is tolerance and second is the Nightwatchman case this is the hard core of liberalism I'm going to make some additional points about differences among liberals in a few minutes but when you talk about the liberal solution to the problem of conflict they're sort of three elements that come together to in effect dampen conflict the first is the concept of inalienable rights what this says that is that every individual on the planet has a set of rights to be life liberty and property so forth and so on but every individual on the planet has a set of Rights that are inalienable that nobody can take away from that person and inalienable rights are of enormous importance for solving this problem because for example if somebody has the right to life that means you can't kill that person somebody has Liberty life liberty pursuit of property all these rights everybody has those rights and you're not supposed to interfere with them and the second is the norm of tolerance that should be a two and a three the norm of tolerance and tolerance in large part grows out of this emphasis on rights because otherwise and rights to think their own way right you and effect should be tolerant so liberal societies place a very high premium on tolerance right in addition to rights and again the tolerance is inextricably linked with the rights once you have been a label rights it'll be a big emphasis on tolerance but the problem is because of the vehemence of the disputes and the fact that there is a tendency for people when they really disagree to want to kill each other tolerance is not going to be enough and therefore you need a state to act as a night watchman right liberals believe that you need a state it's very clear that liberals have a mixed set of feelings about the state in large part because a powerful state can threaten the individuals rights but at the same time virtually all liberals understand that you need a state and you need a state to act as a night watchman because again just to go back to square one you have individuals out there who have profound differences about terribly important issues and the question is how do you prevent people from killing each other and again you emphasize rights you emphasize tolerance but those two things together are not enough you need a state as well now this begins to morph into the IR issue and I want to just take a few minutes to lay this out without getting into the international relations dimension of things the focus on the individual and his or her in a Lea Beloit's turns liberalism into a universalistic or Universalist ideology there's in other words is this dimension in liberalism that grows out of its emphasis on the individual that makes it universal what liberalism is saying is that every person on the planet has the same rights those rights are universal they apply to everybody if you focus on social groups if you believe that human beings are social animals first and foremost you end up with a particular astrology like nationalism so nationalism doesn't focus on individuals it focuses on the group and there is your group and then there is the other it's a particular estai d ology that's not what liberalism is all about liberalism focuses on the individual and once you focus on the individual you quickly and don't the Universalist ideology when you throw in inalienable rights and of course when you start thinking about liberal hegemony just to get ahead of myself when the rights of people outside the borders of the United States are violated there's a very powerful temptation to go abroad now take this step further there are two kinds of political liberalism one is classical or modus vivendi liberalism and the other is modern or progressive liberalism I got this distinction mainly from the writings of John Gray for anybody who's interested he's written a book called two phases of liberalism which is an excellent book that lays this out and Alan Ryan has also written an important essay that lays this out so what you have is you have motifs what I call modus vivendi liberalism and progressive liberalism and and these are the two different forms of liberalism that we want to think about and the story I'm going to tell as we go along here is the progressive liberalism has trumped moderate modus vivendi liberalism we wit we live in a world where progressive liberalism dominates and I'll lay that story out before I go on to unpacking what modus vivendi liberalism and progressive liberalism are I just want to say that I distinguish liberalism from utilitarianism and from liberal idealism utilitarianism is identified with people like Jeremy Bentham and Jeremy Bentham hated the emphasis on inalienable rights he said it was nonsense and utilitarians and liberals tend to be at each other's throats in all sorts of ways if you look at the debates between Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner both famous legal theorists Dworkin is very much a progressive liberal and Posner is very much utilitarian and they bark at each other use the the language of utilitarian and liberal if you look at John Rawls John Rawls frequently is barking against or barking about utilitarians so I'm not talking about utilitarians when I talk about liberals for those of you who do I are in the audience and have read eh car eh cars attack on liberalism which was written in the 1930s is an attack on utilitarianism and on liberal idealism it's not an attack on the liberalism I'm talking about car and I are going after very different targets liberal idealism by the way is identified with people like th green and John Dewey I won't go into any details on what exactly it is but it's a very different animal than the liberalism I'm talking about and I'm not saying these two are irrelevant or not worth studying but not what I'm looking at I'm looking to progressive liberalism and modus vivendi liberalism both of which focus in large part on rights ok now I want to do is I want to distinguish between these two kinds of liberalism right and you want to remember that this is the hard core so there's no question that both progressives and modus vivendi liberals emphasize those three elements now in distinguishing between the two kinds of liberalism first point I would make is it's not the difference that's based on reason they're actually some progressive liberals who make the argument that we can use our critical faculties to figure out questions about the good life and actually the piece that comes the closest to making this argument is Francis Fukuyama's very famous piece on the end of history if you go back and read Francis Fukuyama's piece after listen to my talk tonight what Francis Fukuyama is basically saying in that piece is that with the end of the Cold War we've reached the end of history we're not going to have any more conflict we're not going to have any more war because we're not going to have any more disagreements on big questions he's basically saying liberal democracy 1 and from here on out the planet is going to be covered by more and more liberal democracies until we have nothing but liberal democracies and liberal democracies never have anything to fight over it's all been settled that's his argument but he's really the only person that makes that argument and if you look at his book he backtracks in the book ok so my initial inclination when I started studying liberalism was to think that there was a difference between progressive liberals and modus vivendi liberals that involved reason but I don't believe that anymore I think there are two big differences the first big difference is between negative and positive rights and the desirability and efficacy of social engineering now you're saying yourself what exactly is he talking about when we talk about negative rights we're talking about you know Liberty we're talking about freedom from state interference we're talking about free speech freedom of assembly the right to property right this is where you have a state that just protects your freedoms right positive rights or where the state actually interferes to guarantee that you enjoy rights that are inalienable and I think the best example of this and I'll talk more about it as we go along is the right to equal opportunity if you look at John Rawls and you look at Ronald Dworkin they talked a great deal about justice and justice for them is all about equal opportunity and equal opportunity is where the state comes in and it levels the playing field it's not equal outcomes it's equal-opportunity right and needless to say if you believe in positive rights you're going to believe in the desirability of social engineering because there's no way you can put positive rights into effect without doing a lot of social engineering just to get ahead of myself a bit if you're doing negative rights only right all you want is a state as a night watchman here we go modus vivendi liberals modus vivendi liberals this is Friedrich Hayek for anybody who really wants to sort of read a canonical version of modus vivendi liberalism read Friedrich Hayek I think Locke fits in the same rough category negative rights over positive rights modus vivendi are classical liberals really dislike positive rights I think it's fair to say Hayek hates positive rights he thinks the state should not be doing social engineering they low cent social engineering they make the argument almost all of them that not only is it not desirable but we're not good at it and that's why we shouldn't do it you know all the arguments Republicans make these arguments all the time that we should let the market decide how to solve problem X or solve problem Y because markets are much more efficient than the state when the state gets involved doing anything it bollocks is it up that's the classical liberal the modus vivendi liberal view progressive liberals on the other hand they believe in negative rights because everybody believes Udeid the Nightwatchman to protect those liberties but progressive liberals also believe that it's very important for the state to get involved to do social engineering to create a level playing field right there are all these positive rights it's like just just think about medical care or healthcare do we believe in health care in the United States I think the answer is yes I think if you look at the Republicans they can't just kill Obamacare they have to replace Obamacare because I think we've reached the point and I could go into this greater detail and the Q & A of people well we've reached the point where basically everybody believes that people have a right to the universal health care or right to health care right but once you start talking about a right to health care you're talking about positive rights right the states involved in social engineering and of course this is why Republicans dislike Obamacare because the Republicans talk like classical liberals although I'll make the argument in the short time that they act like progressive liberals you see that's the difference between modus vivendi liberals and progressives liberals it's not that one believes that you can use your critical faculties to reach conclusions about first principles and the other doesn't I thought that initially but no I think that modus vivendi liberals and progressive liberals have a difference about rights right they have a difference about rights a difference on social engineering now my argument is that with the passage of time progressive liberalism has Trump's modus vivendi liberalism or classical liberalism not at the rhetorical level but in practice and let me just say a little bit about this we have in the United States a remarkably powerful state that intervenes in almost all aspects of our life it's involved in heavy-duty social engineering and there's no way you can get around that and the Republicans just to talk about this in some detail the Republicans constantly talk about how terrible this is and how they want to change things and how when they get elected we're going to let the market do this we're gonna stop the government from doing that we're gonna get out of the business of doing social engineering but if you look at how Republicans behave in contrast the Democrats there's hardly any difference at all there's no evidence the Democrats spend more money on social engineering the Republicans do there's no evidence that Democrats create more institutions then Republicans do the Republicans created the Department of Homeland Security the Republicans created the Environmental Protection Agency Ronald Reagan spent one heck of a lot more money on social issues than Barack Obama did and even in cases where Democrats outspent Republicans you look at different presidents it's by tiny margins so there's just not much difference at all there is one political party in the United States that actually truly believes in modus vivendi liberalism it's represented by the libertarian party libertarians are classical liberals or modus vivendi liberals no single no single libertarian has ever been elected to Congress and in the 2016 presidential election the libertarian received a little over three percent of the vote so the idea that we have a political party that really represents modus vivendi liberalism and stands a chance of winning is erroneous it's impossible the Republican Party and the Democratic Party despite all the rhetoric committed to progressive liberalism that's to say they're deeply committed to social engineering and they're deeply committed to positive rights you can make the argument that the Democratic Party is more committed than the Republican Party to positive rights maybe so but the Republican Party is also committed to positive rights now why is this the case it really all began at least in the United States in the late 1800s and it's a function of three things one is the Industrial Revolution to his nationalism and three is these huge Wars that we fight just on the Industrial Revolution what happened when the United when the United States really was hit hard with the Industrial Revolution in the late 19th early 20th century as you had these huge industrial enterprises that came online that did certain things that had huge consequences for people all over the United States and indeed for people all over the planet and it became very obvious to politicians at the time and here we're talking about Republicans because you understand that the original progressives in the United States were not Democrats they were mainly Republicans Herbert Hoover was a social engineer par excellence Teddy Roosevelt was a social engineer par excellence right and the reason was that you had to manage this economy you had to manage these huge industries and figure out rules and regulations you had all sorts of labor unions labor problems child labor problems and so forth and so on that had to be managed by the state there's no way you could avoid that and then of course when you start fighting wars whether it's the American Civil War World War One World War two the state gets involved not only in running those wars but when the wars are over with you have to do all sorts of social engineering to reward the people who fought the wars you remember the GI Bill the GI Bill is a perfect example of a positive right it's social engineering I could go on and on about this right and then there's nationalism of course which I'll talk much more about next time right we start thinking about nationalism what happens is that the state has all sorts of reasons to want to organize people down below for administrative reasons for economic reasons for military reasons the state gets in the business of doing social engineering in a big way right when you think about nationalism the state is interested in creating a coherent nation and it wants that nation to be loyal to the state that involves doing all sorts of things of an administrative nature again of an economic nature and a military nature and of course with nationalism people in the nation have a certain loyalty to the state this is the nation state the nation has loyalty to the state and the end result of that is that the state is expected to do things for the nation for the people and of course your if you're in a liberal democracy like the United States politicians who promise to do all sorts of things for people tend to get elected over those who promise not to do big things for people so in a liberal nation state like the United States that undergoes the Industrial Revolution then fights big Wars fool those reasons you move into a world where progressive liberalism dominates and again progressive liberalism is all about positive rights and it's about social engineering so here's the modern liberal template core assumptions individualism no universal agreement on first principles okay those are the two starting assumptions I had about human nature second progressive liberalism has triumphed and with progressive liberalism you get negative and positive and alienable rights those are inalienable rights those positive rights as well as those negative rights give tolerance and you get a state that engages in social engineering that's the basic liberal story now how does this apply to IR just to get ahead of myself there are two very important dimension to this story one I've already emphasized and that's the individualism right it's the individualism and the inalienable rights that creates the Universalist dimension cannot underestimate the importance of this liberals and is certainly true in countries like the United States and Britain tend to see people who live in other countries as having the same rights as them and because they play such a high premium on rights liberalism is all about rights really matter when the rights of those people are being violated in a serious way needless to say it's gonna create a very powerful incentive to see if you can fix that problem and if you're the United States of America and you are super powerful it's not surprising that you're going to be at least tempted to fix the problem right so again that focus on individualism is so important right married to Italia belies the second thing that really matters for the international relations dimension of my story is the social engineering once you accept the fact the progressive liberalism has triumphed and that we live in a world where liberals are committed to social engineering and by the way even if you were deliberately you'd have to be committed to social engineering just given the complexities of moderns of the modern world whether it's a liberal state or not it's going to be an interventionist state at home but this liberal state called the United States is heavily into social engineering but if you're into social engineering at home it doesn't take long before you think you can do social engineering abroad I remember the Iraq war which I adamantly and publicly opposed before it happened and I would say to people do you seriously believe that you're going to go into Iraq and through social engineering in a country that you really don't understand we can't even do social engineering at home much less in foreign country but I'll tell you those boys and girls who took us in they were very confident that they could do social engineering there are Americans these were skilled thinkers these were people who knew how to do business right so we went traipsing into Iraq and of course you know what happened which is what I'll talk about it next time right but the point is when you unpack the liberal story right what you see is this next lecture next lecture what I want to do is I want to explain logic behind liberal hegemony I've obviously told you part of the story but I want to unpack it in even greater detail in other words the story tonight is basically about liberalism and its roots and liberalism as a political ideology inside a state right I want to explain liberal hegemony then I want to provide evidence that it does not work as advertised indeed it leads to untold trouble I want to talk about NATO expansion NATO expansion was liberal hegemony at work nothing to do with realism I want to talk about the Bush Doctrine in the Middle East and I want to just show you how much trouble we've had and then I want to explain why liberal hegemony fails I want to explain what went wrong with NATO expansion I want to explain what went wrong in the greater Middle East right and of course you're not going to be surprised to hear that my story is all about how nationalism and realism wort liberalism that's my basic story and of course all of this is to say that I in a very interesting way ended up in the end dealing with nationalism realism and liberalism and comparing those three isms although when I started the book I couldn't figure out a way to do that here at the end I did it now whether I succeeded or not you'll tell me tonight and on and on Thursday thank you [Music]

Channel: Yale University

Views: 508,723

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

Id: bSj__Vo1pOU

Length: 53min 34sec (3214 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 22 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

a bit of confused cobbligook on the suposed goodness of realism/nationalism and the evils of liberalism. Very poorly defined and very few explainations to how realism is better.

It is very hard to trust fellows of the think tank brooking institute if they are writting for there own interest or that of donors.

[u/pacg]

A bit dry but useful and beneficial in revisiting and clarifying first principles.

[u/[deleted]]

Once in a while I remember why I like this subreddit. Thanks for sharing this.

This speaker goes to the roots of the liberal idea instead of treating the symptoms.

Also, it's a series of 3 lectures, this is the first one.