John Mearsheimer | The liberal international order

one of the world's most distinguished public intellectuals and journalists of the 20th century walter lippmann once warned we're all think alike no one thinks very much we're all think alike no one thinks very much well i think someone who thinks very much is our guest today ladies and gentlemen please welcome professor john mearsheimer [Applause] the subject i want to talk about today is basically the rise and fall of the liberal international order and what i want to try to explain is exactly what the liberal international order is very important to sort of understand in some detail what it is and then to lay out to you what i think went wrong and then briefly talk about where i think we're headed uh this is my core argument my core argument is that the liberal international order was created in 1990 and that's when the cold war ended and as i'll try to emphasize here the liberal international order was not created in 1945 with a different order from 45 to 89. the liberal international order was created in 90 when the world became unipolar the united states which was the soul poll played the key role in creating that order we mattered the most and despite considerable success in the 1990s and early 2000s you know if i had come here in 1999 and told you that the liberal international order contained the seeds of its own destruction you would have laughed at me because things were going pretty well then but then it began to go south right around 2004 2005. and uh it has failed and is doomed and i'll make the argument that's for two reasons one which i just said contains the seeds of its own destruction and also the rise of china and the resurrection of russian power under vladimir putin okay these are the questions i want to address first of all what is the liberal international order make it very clear when do you get liberal international orders you don't get them all the time when do you get them then why did it fail and then where are we headed those are the four big questions i'm going to address in that order okay first question what's the liberal international order what i'm going to do here is i'm going to define for you what an order is what it means to be an international order and then what it means to be a liberal international order okay so an order for me is an organized group of international institutions that help govern the interactions among the member states you hear people all the time talk about the fact that we live in a rules-based system those rules are embedded in international institutions and an order is a cluster of institutions just think about the cold war order that we created we the americans in the west it included nato an institution it included the eu an institution the wto right an institution actually it was gat back then the imf the world bank we had this cluster of institutions that formed the western order during the cold war okay so that's what an order is great powers create and manage orders great powers create and manage institutions they're the guerrillas in the system they're the ones who establish what the rules are and of course that's the united states of america and to a lesser extent countries like china and russia in recent years okay so that's what an order is this cluster of institutions what's an international order an international order must include all of the world's great powers so if you're in the cold war to have an international order it has to include both the united states and the soviet union if you're talking about an international order in the world that we're moving into which is a multi-polar world it has to include the united states china and russia that's an international order and the opposite of an international order is a bounded order a bounded order is one that doesn't include all the great powers and it's usually regional and scope and just to get ahead of myself a bit the order that uncle sam created during the cold war and the order that the soviet union created during the cold war remember the warsaw pact comic-con common turn those orders were not international orders one was an american-dominated order and the other was a soviet-dominated order and those were bounded orders okay so an international order includes all the world's great powers as i say ideally it would control every state now very importantly what's a liberal international order a liberal international order is one where the dominant state is a liberal democracy and that liberal democracy has three goals and if you think about american cold american policy during the post-cold war period those three goals stand out very clearly to you one is you want to turn every country on the planet into a liberal democracy in a sense when you're creating a liberal international order that dominant state is trying to remake the world in its own image that's what the united states was doing so the first thing involves spreading democracy here there and everywhere the second thing that you want to do is you want to create an open international economy and what you want to do is get every state on the planet integrated into that open international economy you want to get every state in the system hooked on capitalism and you want to especially make sure you do that with countries like russia and china and that of course is exactly what we tried to do this of course is an approach that you virtually all of you loved right because people in the west love this whole enterprise right then of course the third goal is to integrate states into more and more institutions you want to go from gat to the wto you want to create more institutions you want to get the chinese and the russians and all these institutions because russians and the chinese will benefit from being in these institutions right and of course institutions are the building blocks of orders so those are the goals and in this world the dominant state pays little attention to balance of power politics the dominant state pays little attention to real politique so people like me of this world are basically dinosaurs as you all know i'm a realist we just don't matter right this is a liberal international order where what really matters is ideology economic interdependence and institutions that's the liberal world order when do liberal international orders appear my argument is that there are two key factors that shape an international order one is the number of great powers in the system and two is the political ideology of the dominant state and the reason that you got a liberal international order in 1990 was because we moved into a unipolar world where the dominant state was a liberal democracy you have to understand just how special just how special the structure of the international system was in 1990 we had never seen a unipolar world before it had always been either multi-polar as it was before 1945 or bipolar as it was from 45 to 89 in the cold war period we had for the first time in recorded history a unipolar world and of course the unipole was uncle sam and uncle sam is a liberal democracy so it's hardly surprising that you're going to get a country that tries to create this liberal international order and remember i told you in a liberal international order the soul poll does not pay attention to real politic the balance of power politics and the reason is that there are no other great powers you you realize that during the post-cold war period from 1990 up until about 2017 the united states paid hardly any attention to the balance of power because it was godzilla there was no other great power in the system which means that we were free to pursue this liberal agenda right history of the liberal international order i want to talk about the cold war orders and the post-cold war order very important to understand what's going on here as i said you before in my story the liberal international order is the post-cold war order it's not the cold war order and the reason should be obvious to you now the cold war was a bipolar world and in that bipolar world the united states was engaged in an intense security competition with the soviet union soviet union was engaged in intense competition with the united states and the united states was not free to create a liberal international order instead what you get in the cold war mainly are these two bounded realist orders the soviet-led communist order and the u.s led western order those bounded orders were created to wage the cold war think about nato look at the origins of the european union the origins of the european union are based on real politique most people today think it was really all about you know economic prosperity economic prosperity mattered but the eu was mainly set up at the beginning for purposes of waging the cold war all those institutions were part of a bounded order in the west and the soviets had their own bounded order warsaw pact comic-con common turn right so you had these two bounded orders and you also had a very weak realist international order think proliferation the npt the npt right the iaea nuclear suppliers group all those institutions soviets and americans the two great powers on the planet were involved in those institutions so you had a thin realist international order and two bounded realist orders okay now that's the cold war no liberal international order but what happens in 1989 in 1989 the soviet union loses the cold war and its bounded order collapses and the u.s led western order emerges triumphant so what we decide to do is take that western order that western bounded order and turn it into a liberal international order because we can do it we're the unipole we have no other great power to worry about so there's no great power security competition we're a liberal state and we want to remake the world in our own image and we have this wildly successful bounded order that we think we can expand think about nato and eu expansion and the color revolutions in eastern europe nato and the eu were created during the cold war they were part of a bounded realist order but realism's gone but the institutions are still there so what you do is you take those institutions and you just move them eastward you incorporate more and more countries into this order it's morphing from a bounded order into an international order that's what nato expansion eu expansion the color revolutions is all about what about the bush doctrine the bush doctrine was designed to deal with the terrorism problem and the nuclear proliferation problem in the greater middle east by turning every country in that region into a liberal democracy iraq was just the first stop on the train line we expected to go to war in syria iran and turn the entire region into a sea of democracies this is what promoting the liberal international order is all about engagement with china what were we doing with china the idea was let's get them hooked on capitalism let's get them integrated into these institutions they'll get rich and once they become rich they'll demand democracy china will turn into a liberal democracy and to use robert zelick's term it will become a responsible stakeholder how could it be otherwise if they're a liberal democracy right that's just the way the world works in the minds of most people in the west i'm sure most of you are australians think this way you love the engagement let's engage china so we instead of containing china engage china now as i said to you the golden years were 1990 to 2004. i had been here before 2004. you would have thought i was nuts right but then in 2005 the order started going south iraq turned into a disaster afghanistan which first looked like a great success turned into a disaster the international economy almost went off the cliff in 2008 the euro crisis happened shortly after that i could go on and on right something went badly wrong this brings us to the question what went wrong now as tom said lots of people think the problem is donald trump right oh my god you know how did that guy ever get elected and you know once we get rid of him in 2020 and we put somebody like joe biden in there we'll be fine and just sort of go back to square one right i want to be clear here i am not a trump supporter i'm very clear on that i'm not a trump supporter but i do not believe that donald trump is responsible for the mess we're in in fact it's very important to understand that donald trump got elected in part by running against the liberal international order which of course is why most of you don't like him right donald trump said i'm getting out of the business of spreading democracy around the world and as you know he's never been an authoritarian leader or a dictator he didn't want to jump into bed with right that's one two with regard to an open international economy the guy's a protectionist and with regard to institutions he's never seen an institution he doesn't love nato's obsolete eu leaders say that he's the greatest threat to the eu they've seen on the planet the guy loads the wto he's never seen an institution he likes nafta pulled out of the tpp which i think was a huge mistake but he didn't like institutions he ran against the liberal international order he said it failed and he got elected he's not the problem he's a manifestation of the problem what really went wrong the order contains the seeds of its own destruction and let me go through the argument as quickly as i can first of all we assume to begin with this is the frank fukiyama thesis for those of you haven't read or long ago read frank's very famous piece go back and read it his basic argument is that there is no alternative to liberal democracy we are inexorably moving towards a planet that's filled with liberal democracies wrong liberal democracy doesn't look so attractive to a lot of people today they're alternative models i love liberal democracy i'm glad i was born and raised in the united states but not everybody on the planet agrees with me there are alternatives go to russia ask the russians about liberal democracy they think about the 1990s when that country was a total disaster they don't want to hear about liberal democracy they'll take soft authoritarian authoritarianism with vladimir putin every time second the crusading soul paul ends up in endless wars do you realize that the united states of america has been at war for two out of every three years since the cold war ended and we have bought seven different wars we are a highly militarized state to put it in slightly different terms we are addicted to war that's what happens when you become a crusader state and when you're trying to create a liberal international order and remake the world in your own image you are a crusader state number three the crusading soul poll ends up poisoning relations with the world's major powers this is nato expansion eu expansion and the color revolutions you think the russians are happy about us driving nato right up to their border i can tell you they're not and they've been telling us that since the mid-1990s in 2000 after 2008 when we told them we were going to make ukraine and georgia a part of nato they told us in known certain terms that ain't happening and it isn't happening right the chinese you think the chinese are happy about us interfering in their politics and talking about turning them into a liberal democracy you notice that they think we're behind the protests in hong kong this is surprising it isn't surprising at all because they understand what the united states was trying to do turn china into a liberal democracy and they don't like it so we've poisoned relations with the russians and the chinese in fact we've so thoroughly poisoned relations with the russians that they've jumped into bed with the chinese the order clashes with nationalism by undermining sovereignty and national identity i could go on and on about this with regard to undermining sovereignty anytime you create really powerful institutions and you give them a lot of authority to make decisions think the eu think how many people in britain think about brussels brussels is a curse word in britain to many brits that's why you got brexit many brits feel decisions about britain's future should be made in london not in brussels and then with regard to national identity just think about open borders right you know the eu has this system that basically involves open borders taking in refugees in the age of nationalism that's prescription for really big trouble hyper globalization right we went to hyper globalization we moved from a globalized system to a hybrid globalized system uh we went from gat to the wto trade became much more uh much more fulsome uh it was much easier to move capital around the world uh and this created all sorts of problems donnie rodrick in his terrific book on the paradoxes of globalization lays this whole story out as a result you know lots of people lost jobs in the western world the liberal international order was undermined inside countries like the united states and britain because of the economic consequences of hyper globalization and those economic problems led to significant political problems and then finally integrating china into the liberal world order and making china richer and richer undermines unipolarity you understand what's happening here we're moving from unit polarity to multi-polarity and one of my principal themes here that you don't want to lose sight of is you can only have a liberal international order in a unipolar world because the unipole then does not have to worry about balance of power politics once you go into a multi-polar world once you're in a multi-polar world or you're in a bipolar world balance of powers politics are back on the table for the great powers and remember what john said it's the great powers that create orders so unipolarity is finished because china and russia are now great powers and we're not in a unipolar world so the question is what kind of orders will prevail in the future we're going to move back to a situation that's somewhat similar to the cold war orders but different in some ways i won't go into this any detail now but i'll just lay it out for you number two and number three are key you're going to get a chinese sled bounded order and you're going to get a us-led bounded order and they're both going to be focused on asia and as you know here in australia most australians are deeply concerned about the fact that they feel like they're being pulled in one direction by the chinese and pulled in another direction by the americans right what the americans are going to want is the americans are going to want you to join their order and the chinese are going to want you to join their order you're going to have alliance structures out here right you're going to have economic relationships that are all tied up with this security competition that is setting in the united states and china will lead to bounded orders that will wage security competition and hopefully not war between them just like happened during the cold war that's why so many people who look at what's happening today say this is reminiscent in important ways of the cold war and of course as was true in the cold war you also have an international order again think proliferation my sense is that both the chinese and the russians and the americans will work together at the international level to create or to maintain a proliferation regime and they will work together on other issues hopefully on things like climate change but there will be a thin realist international order but the two orders that will matter the most as was the co case in the cold war there's two bounded orders that the two biggest guerrillas in the system the united states and china will be in charge of and for australians what this means is that you will have to decide which one of those two orders you're going to be in thank you thank you john that was a lot to digest there and we'll take some questions i'll ask the first one to put you on the spot because your thesis is that we're witnessing not just china's increasingly assertive behavior strategically but also the reassertion of russian power but is there a danger you're overstating their their strengths because both of those states are bound by serious limitations and weaknesses i think of russia they've got some serious demographic problems they're addicted to petro dollars and as for china the saying is that they'll grow old before they grow rich they have serious problems with air and water pollution across a lot of corruption at the higher end of the political leadership and that's not to mention the ethnic tensions in china so is there a danger you're overstating both the power powers of both russia and china uh with regard to russia russia is a declining great power and even now it's not as mighty of power as china is from the american perspective the real threat here is china it's not russia and again russia gets weaker with the passage of time for demographic reasons and also because of its economy it's basically one giant gas station and the russians would like to rectify this situation but they can't do that because they're in an arms race mainly with the united states so the russians are not a problem uh the question is the chinese right i hope that you're right you understand from an american perspective i want to see the chinese economy flat lying if not decline i don't want the chinese to become a potential peer competitor this is why i was opposed to engagement i thought it was lunacy to fuel the economy of china so that it could become a potential rival of the united states and i saw no way of avoiding that okay so i hope that those problems that you describe in china manifest themselves and that china does not become a pure competitor and indeed the united states continues to grow and grow and grow and then by the way we would go back to unit polarity and again the interesting question would be would we pursue liberal hegemony again okay next question just one second richard beatty professor the united nations was one major international institution you didn't mention in your talk i'd be interested in why yeah just very quickly uh remember during the cold war i said there was a realist international order and that will be true in the future that's where the u.n would be because all the great powers are in the u.n and virtually every country is in the u.n so the u.n is the truest international institution on the planet and i didn't mention it because it's basically a meaningless institution [Laughter] it just you know it just it just doesn't matter james phillips thank you and thank you so much for your talk john the um uh part of the thesis that you could easily export liberal democracies particularly to countries in south uh in central asia which came from a very different um political tradition seems to me is always very a historical because the circumstances in which liberal democracies have developed are very very specific and quite rare do you think there's a a bit of a problem in uh in washington strategic thinking about being a historical and being too ideological i i think the answer is of course yes and i i think that was especially true at the end of the cold war the fukiyama thesis was wildly attractive to most people in the west not just americans especially americans and actually especially west europeans because we had come to believe that we won the cold war because we were liberal democracies that was a superior system and that we had defeated fascism in the early part of the 20th century communism in the second part of the 20th century those were the two viable alternatives but they proved not to be viable alternatives and there really was no other alternative and as fukuyama argued it would be easy right to promote democracy around the world because it was the only meaningful option in other words we had the wind at our back and not only do we have the wind at our back we were extremely powerful charles krauthammer wrote this very famous article called the unipolar moment in which he said and this article was written around the time fukuyama published his article who uh um krauthammer said the united states has just emerged from the cold war as this remarkably powerful country we can do all sorts of things with all the power we have so all you have to do is marry the krauthammer argument with the fukuyama argument which says we have the wind at our back and you're off to the races and this is what you get right and it didn't work out very well now you say americans are not very historical most people are not very historically oriented they don't pay attention to history and it's probably more true of americans than others and as a result we got our snouts whacked it's really quite amazing what a pathetic record we have you know between the period 1990 and when donald trump moves into the white house and trump said this in the debates he made it very clear if you look at the track record of democrats and republicans alike remember he went after george w bush who actually looked like woodrow wilson on steroids right when you re read george w bush's you know second inaugural address it's like holy smokes condoleezza rice she also drank the kool-aid she used to be a realist in the 1990s if you read our famous foreign affairs piece from january february 2000 which when was written uh as sort of a brief for what the republican platform would look like on foreign policy it's a very real polytech non-wilsonian document but after she came to power she and bush wow they really bought into this and and there were very few people who argued against it next question hang on leon former intern at cis practice to be back leon has flown all the way from new zealand thank you for coming to australia professor mia sharma uh this is probably going to be related to my essay question for my uni so i'll ask you this anyway so uh donald trump so i personally think he's more of a random foreign policy guy because in a way he supports liberal hegemony in a sense because he bloated the budget he's very hostile to iran very hostile to china but also you said that he's quite isolationist so is he a realist or is he not i just want to hear your thoughts well i i i don't think that trump is an isolationist right and i also don't think trump is in favor of liberal hegemony he's not in the idea he's not in the business of promoting liberal democracy he likes tariffs and is not a big fan of an open international economy and he doesn't like international institutions these are all the hallmarks of the liberal international order so he he doesn't fit in that category some people ask me is he a realist uh because there are a number of things that i say that sound like trump would agree or that there's some in our views i think it's hard to say trump is anything in particular because he kind of flies by the seat of his pants and it's hard to figure out exactly what his views are at a macro level uh to put it in slightly different terms if you want to distinguish between tactics and strategy he's not a strategist he's a tactician right he just believes he can you know take a problem and he can deal with it right but how it all fits into a big picture is very hard to say uh but uh i i he's not an isolationist that's one key point and the other thing is he's not a fan of the liberal international order thank you john this is uh andy canard andy thanks professor for a very uh exciting discussion um china seems to be looking at the big picture big more than the us if you're talking about just the the bipolar situations in and i take the the belt and road initiative they seem to be gathering if not friends uh alliances by the belton road and putting countries into debt they can't pay and and buying the alliances is that is that right and is it also an issue for the for the u.s alliance well the big difference between the united states and china is that the united states is a global superpower and it has interests all over the world and one of the problems that the united states has had in dealing with china is that when china was rising especially after 2000 and becoming more threatening to the united states the united states was busy fighting the forever wars in the middle east and we didn't pay that much attention to what was going on in east asia you want to remember that when george bush ran for president in 2000 i just made the point that he was not a wilsonian then he was a realist his principal foreign policy argument was that what the united states has to do is pay more attention to china if you go back and read the night the january february 2000 article by condoleezza rice you'll see it very clearly so when bush came to power it looked like we were going to put our focus on dealing with china of course he comes to power in january 2001 and then you have september 11th and that's the beginning of the forever wars and the united states has remained mired in the middle east since then and is only now beginning to pay big attention to east asia right hillary clinton started it with the pivot to asia which of course was in 2011. but even then we were still involved in the forever wars because 2011 is the start of the arab spring and that leads us into you know syria libya god knows where else right and so we have not been focusing enough on east asia and i think pompeo's visit is you know an indicator that's beginning to change in an important way with regard to china china has been an asian power this is focused mainly on east asia but the chinese want to be a global superpower i hope you understand that right they are building a blue water navy they want to project power all over the planet you understand that the chinese get 25 of their oil from the persian gulf and if you talk to the chinese behind closed doors they will tell you they're going to build a navy that can protect their sea lines of communication between their east coast and between the persian gulf this is why the indians think the indian ocean are so worried about the chinese right so the chinese are beginning to expand belton road is a part of that and their blue order navy is a part of that and the question is what will they be able to do here in east asia and i believe almost everywhere else the united states is going to try to contain them we will go to great lengths to make sure they don't become a global superpower and if they do become a global superpower we'll meet them on every you know square inch of the planet the same way we did with the soviet union although the focus will be mainly here now's a good time as any is to say that on thursday night cis is hosting a debate at canberra's hyde hotel in front of 550 people believe it or not debate between john misheimer and hugh white whom some say is australia's leading strategic thinker hugh white will argue on thursday night john and his view reflects the views of a lot of business people in this country that australia has become obviously a far more prosperous place over the last 20 years thanks to china you know they they we weathered the asian finance we weathered the global financial crisis more than ten years ago largely because of china this is the argument it's our largest trade partner by two uh twice more powerful as a trade partner than japan um china is bound to get more powerful so why should australia support america in a containment strategy against china well what you want to think about is you could have this intense security competition between these two gorillas and it's going to be centered here on east asia and you're caught in the middle you're not the only country that's caught in the middle but you're caught in the middle and you have to choose which side you want to be on and you understand if you go with the chinese then you're our enemy and we put our gun sights on you you understand that right you're either wit this is this is a zero-sum game you're either with us or you're against us so what are you saying because of all this economic prosperity and i i don't deny anything that tom said i fully understand that china has been very good to you and that you would love to perpetuate this situation that infinite you'd be crazy not to i understand that but what i'm saying to you is those days are over you have to choose and if you choose to ally yourself with china against the united states and there's a bitter security competition you're our enemy that's one point second point is this is really a choice between security and prosperity and the question you have to ask yourself is if china dominates east asia what's life going to be like for you and i would say for any of you who think it won't be too bad you should just go to latin america and talk to all those countries in central america and south america and ask them what it's like living in the western hemisphere with the united states as the regional hegemon and most of those people don't like the united states at all and they would be very happy if the united states went away as a regional hegemon and i think that would be the case if china dominated asia i think you don't want that you'd much prefer to have the united states protect you and prevent china from dominating asia even though it will have economic costs okay next question a few years ago it was popular to speak of a strange east asian country called china and india because if china and india was some sort of united mess which was missing against the united states now these days india seems to be totally unfashionable where does india where does india play any part in any forthcoming order it's very simple india is with the americans right in india has two big problems with china the first problem is uh the border problem in the himalayas you remember two years ago they almost came to blows over that border dispute and they fought a war in the early 1960s on this issue and secondly as i alluded to a few minutes ago there's the indian ocean the indians live in fear of the chinese building blue water navy and projecting power into the indian ocean one of the principal reasons that relations between india and the united states are so good today is not because they're both democracies it's because the indians fear the chinese and the indians are interested in having some sort of alliance with the united states for purposes of containing china and i think here in australia and in japan you see even closer relations with the indians for the same reason so the indians will be with us there's no question about that i think the australians will be with us there's no question about that the interesting question in my the interesting cases in my opinion are myanmar and pakistan right you can pretty much predict where everybody will be and of course russia as well but the united states will go to great lengths to have myanmar on its side and the chinese are already working that one from the other side pakistan pakistan looks like it will be allied with china the united states will go to great lengths to peel the pakistanis away from the chinese and then there's the russians where the americans have foolishly driven the russians into the arms of the chinese i mean we need to improve our relations with russia and get the russians on our side and the other case i won't go into this in any detail is iran it's crazy to be picking a fight with iran because we're just driving the iranians into the arms of the chinese i was in iran in december 2017 you see virtually no american influence and of course we're mortal enemies with the iranians but you see chinese influence all over the place and the chinese are going to want a foothold in the persian gulf remember 25 of their oil comes out of the gulf right so you want to think about countries like iran countries like russia pakistan and myanmar i think those are the key questions not so much india okay i've got a couple more maybe three questions barbara thank you professor meantime i grew up a sydney person spent many years in canberra but my gulag at the moment is a very stressed part of queensland called central queensland and we have had our back broken on the rack of climate change policy and i'm listening carefully to what you're saying but i've made a study of un policy um i've looked at agenda 21 agenda 30 and the paris climate change agreement and my question is when the un is largely now on the left trying to in the name of climate change restructure western economies and destroy capitalism and shift our wealth to uh the un uh treasury which will is very much inspired by the socialist communist example why the un is not someone to fear if you asked me to choose whether i feared china or the un my immediate answer would be i fear the u.n more than china well i think i'll make it easier for you to sleep at night by telling you you don't have to fear the u.n with regard to climate change without telling you what my view is on it you saw what donald trump did with regard to the paris agreement and you see what his views are on climate change and it's not it's not trump it's not trump the people who've told us what climate change is about is uh cristiano figueres uh who is driving the paris agreement morris strong who put his name to the introduction of agenda 2030 and also dr ottmar edenhofer the father of climate change economics they have told the world openly it is not about climate is it is a redistribution of the world's wealth that's what it's about nothing to do with the environment from their mouths from the horse's mouth okay but all i'm saying to your question was about the united nations and you said that you feared the united nations more than you did china because of the issue of climate control and my only point to you is that the united nations is not going to get anywhere on climate control if it can't get countries like the united states and china on board remember i said these international institutions are created by great powers the great powers created the u.n by the way international orders are created by great powers and for those orders to work the great powers have to be in sync and on climate control the united states is not in sync with those people that you described okay i think we've got to thank you so much uh john connor uh yes professor um excuse me if i'm not totally polite but in a spirit of chicago openness yes i love it i'll put it more directly yes do you think that your view of the world in terms of realism is in fact anachronistic you view the world as very much a pattern of one two or three maybe major powers dictating the peers of the world do you think it's at least possible that what we are now entering is a period of many stars not just two or three and the other my other question would be why does australia have to choose between china and america what's wrong with being nuclear and neutral just with regard to the first question the first question is am i a dinosaur and there's no question that in the united states and in western europe i feel like a dinosaur often right uh and i think especially during the unipolar moment when liberal hegemony was in the ascendancy that people like me were treated as dinosaurs and it was really hard to get a hearing i would just say to you that when i went to china when i went to russia and to other countries around the world i find that i'm at home you know when i go to china i start most of my talks by saying it's good to be back among my people i don't speak a word of chinese and when i go to china it's one of the few times i'm conscious of the fact that i'm an american because the culture is so foreign to me and i don't mean that in a negative way it's just i it's so different right but the chinese are realist to the core the russians are realist to the core these people speak my language this is why you take vladimir putin and put him up against barack obama this is bambi versus godzilla right because because barack obama is playing by the liberal playbook and vladimir putin is a black belt eighth degree which is another way of saying he's a realist so people in the west can continue to believe all these crazy liberal ideas regarding foreign policy with respect that's not what i said what i asked you was the possibility of a multi-cultural polar world not liberal democracy not liberal order but multi-polar as opposed to one or two followers no you asked me if i was a dinosaur that was your that was your first question and and i i and i loved the question right no i he said he was going to ask me chicago style then his other question which is a fascinating question these are both great questions i hope you understand i love the questions his second question is maybe the smartest strategy for australia is to not pick sides get a nuclear deterrent and as you all know if you have a nuclear deterrent nobody will really fool around with you for fear that you might use those things if your survival is threatened you can make that argument right you can make that argument the question you have to ask yourself is what are the economic consequences right it's quite clear that neither china nor the united states would attack you with military force if you had nuclear weapons at least in my opinion but the economic consequences are another matter and so it's tricky in that regard but i've not thought this one through in any detail but it is it is an interesting night it might come up on thursday night look i just want to get your thoughts before we close up george claude juncker prominent european union bureaucrat he said just the other day quote borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians and he said on the eve of the european parliamentary elections that voters who support populists are quote stupid nationalists your response yeah what is should have been somewhat clear from my presentation although i didn't emphasize it as i usually do because of time constraints i believe that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet right when i was listening to the australian foreign minister talk the other day uh during the mike pompeo visit she made it very clear that australia will do what is in australia's best interest right this is nationalism right uh you know she's defending it's an australia first policy right as it should be right this is what nationalism is all about and nation states tom also care greatly about their borders and this is why immigration is such a big issue in countries like australia and countries like the united states i mean trump has i think benefited greatly from the fact that we can't control our southern border and we have all this illegal immigration it's not that americans are against immigration they just want it to be legal immigration they want that sense that they can control their borders sovereign states have hard shells around them right again this gets back to brexit the brits don't like the idea that this city called brussels can control their fate they also don't like the fact that all these poles and romanians can come into britain because of the schengen agreement right if you look at the literature on why brexit won right it was immigration that was right up there and it was not you know people from the developing world it was poles and romanians people from eastern europe they wanted to control their borders this is what got angela merkel into big trouble so you have in europe this is part of the liberal agenda you have these open borders this is what yonker represents juncker represents the liberal international order open borders nationalism doesn't matter boom and the end result is that nationalism will win every time you see it in poland you see it in hungary yes at the height of the tampa asylum seekers standoff in 2001 in this country then prime minister john howard famously said we will determine who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come his critics denounced him as a nativist and a populist but he actually resonated with a lot of ordinary australians who just wanted to control immigration and for the next five years of his leadership he more than doubled legal immigration yeah but the what howard was saying represents what howard was saying and his critics were saying represents the clash between liberalism and nationalism right they're fundamentally opposed on this issue and you can tolerate open borders up to a point right this is what they're finding out in europe it worked for a while right but now that nationalism is coming to the surface and of course someone like juncker hates this right and therefore he's going to describe anybody who opposes open borders as an ugly nationalist you can do that but i think in the end you lose anyway which is what's happening now i'd like to call on the chairman of the center for independent studies and my colleague nicholas moore to do the voter thanks nicholas as you say we sit at the intersection of chinese economic growth and uh american power and so everything you say i think actually feeds straight into how we think about the uh the day and obviously what what are they to be doing it on we've just seen the market down three percent i think overnight in mall street as a result of the clash i think that you're talking about and of course with mike pompeo's visit here very clearly it was about the nuts and bolts of security relationship between australia and australia in the united states and how we respond with china so i think on behalf of everybody here we are absolutely delighted that you came tom promised an independent view of the world and certainly it's been very independent and of course your history as tom went through of independent thought that has actually been proven right in terms of this realistic approach now at the center of independent studies obviously we believe in independent thought so we welcome you we also believe in liberal values as tom will tell you we believe in in freedom we do actually uh we we hope probably a little bit more than hope that the liberal order actually has paid off enormously for this country and for the the globe more generally and we hope somehow it will struggle through this this realistic uh point that we're at the moment one of the issues i think in in prior presentations you've always put to one side i think quite rightly is assuming that china's chinese growth will continue and i think the the big issue for the world today of course is not just how the uh the nations are potentially clash hopefully not but in terms of what will happen to the chinese economic order and how liberal order will will continue to play economically in china and of course that feature will play into the international sphere and particularly for australia you

Channel: Centre for Independent Studies

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Keywords: Centre for Independent Studies, CIS, The CIS, The Centre for Independent Studies, John Mearsheimer, Tom Switzer, International Relations, Realism, China, India, Liberal order, International order, Trump, Trade relations, Nuclear deterrent, War, Trade War, United States, Australia, Liberalisn, Foreign Politics, Foreign Relations, USvsChina, Auspol, Liberal hegemony, Russia, mearsheimer

Id: 7kRtt4Jrd_Y

Length: 54min 15sec (3255 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 07 2019