"The Future of the Liberal International Order" with John Ikenberry and John Mearsheimer

i'm not making the argument that it's wonderful and it's far better than the classroom but i think it's marginally better than the classroom john i always lived in fear in your grad seminars just so you know yeah no well people have always lived in fear me because i call on everybody i always tell them you can run but you can't hide all right well on that note i'll get started with the festivities uh greetings uh to everybody i'm ed barrett the research director at the naval academy stockdale center for ethical leadership and on behalf of the center thank you for attending this discussion about the future of the liberal international order with two renowned scholars dr john eichenberry of princeton university and dr john mearsheimer of the university of chicago the stockdale center annually examines a timely ethic topic relevant to military operations through its research seminar and mccain conference given mounting doubts about the ability of human rights to guide national and international affairs last year's topic was the foundations and future of human rights unfortunately covet forced us to cancel last march's con conference but because concerns about the viability of liberal democracies in the liberal international order have only intensified since last march we thought it wise to revisit these issues through the newfound magic of zoom as mentioned in the invitation we'll focus on three questions this afternoon what is the liberal international order how is it being challenged and how might it be maintained professors eikenberry and merceimer thank you for joining us today to provide the definitive answers to these and many other questions dr eichenberry is the albert g milbank professor of politics and international affairs at princeton university in the department of politics and the princeton school of public and international affairs his most recent book is a world safe for democracy tucked right behind him in his office uh liberal internationalism and the crises of global order dr meersheimer is the r wendell harrison distinguished service professor of political science at the university of chicago his most recent book is the great delusion liberal dreams and international realities dr eichenberry will speak first followed by dr meersheimer each for uh 20 to 25 minutes and then followed by your questions sent to me through the chat function so professor eikenberry thank you for being here and the floor is yours thank you edward and good to see john an old friend uh on the screen and thank you all for coming um uh it's a great topic that you're posing and uh i'll just uh uh start by by maybe uh starting with the current moment uh i think we've just left a year 2020 that is long will long be remembered destined uh as a year of crisis of upheaval breakdown in the the global system the economic crisis the public health crisis on a global scale upheavals we really haven't seen since the 1930s there's a real feel that many people have that were at a global turning point a kind of world historical moment the the world order built after 1945 the sometimes called the liberal international order and we'll talk about that today others call it the western democratic order or the u.s fled order seems to be unraveling maybe ending so scholars are asking the basic questions again what are the sources of order can liberal democracy rebound can there be a cooperative organization of the global system a kind of collective construction of rules and institutions and what is the future of liberal internationalism which is the the topic of of my new book uh but the point is that the the most basic questions about order are back on the table people are going back to their libraries and rereading the classics uh carr morgenthau uh polanye even a little a mirsheimer and and maybe on a a a whimsy a little iconberry so these are the the the debates that are really in front of us so in the next 20 minutes i thought i'd say a little bit about um the new president biden and the the vision of liberal order that may be part of this foreign policy agenda then say something about the deeper challenges of liberal international order and then end with you know what what does the future look like what are the steps that might be made to reconstruct uh a a a liberal democratic order and what is how does it relate to the to the rising uh confrontation between the united states and china i just start by the presidential election because we're we're really still in that that moment uh it was a huge election i i can't imagine that we would be talking about the future of world politics in the same way if the election had gone the other way if a few hundred thousand votes had gone the other way it was that kind of moment where a passage in one direction rather than the other seemed to have occurred and we've just been through uh extraordinary a period of four years where i i think many people would argue i certainly would that the u.s has gone down a very different even sort of revisionist path a dangerous path attacking the the the foundations really the pillars of this 75-year old us-led order think about it on all the different dimensions on trade alliance alliances public health environment arms control human rights and what i'll call democratic solidarity which means a lot in my argument today democratic solidarity i think there are implications for a biden uh uh effort to re-uh orient america's role in the world uh obviously wanting to re-establish a a global uh position a kind of rebuild its status its leadership position i think it clearly wants to signal this with returning to to international agreements the paris agreements uh the the who reassuring uh allies but what i i think what we are seeing is is is not so much a new foreign policy but a return to what i would describe as a 75-year grand strategic playbook of tying american power to projects that bring together various states uh through institutions and partnerships uh building frameworks for cooperation uh certainly for like-minded states but more generally platforms for mutual gain that implicate the united states in progress and advancement across a wider sphere of the international system certainly again among liberal democracies so a return to diplomacy multilateralism security cooperation the kind of traditional leadership style and you see this in in the various figures tony blinken he spent his time in the obama administration trying to build coalitions to fight isis in syria and iraq and it's that kind of methodology of building alignments to pursue a strategic ends i think is the the touchstone of what we will see but and here's the big but uh it is certainly a an effort uh to to to to bring the united states back that will face great headwinds and i'm sure we'll talk about this uh today uh domestic headwinds of course uh uh it was a very close election the u.s is very divided there's there's not a consensus uh uh even in foreign policy and then perhaps more so a problem internationally where a global crisis of various sorts not just the pandemic not just the economic decline but the broader uh you might say revolt against modernity the broader uh upheavals and transformations that are are deeply rooted go way beyond trump that are in the international system so the first set of comments i really want to make are that there are multiple crises unfolding that we have to understand if we're going to uh answer the question what is the future of liberal order or the u.s led order and i would say there are three three crises uh that are are interactive and mutually unfolding one is the the crisis of geopolitics if you will it will but it's really the global power transition a well-known widely debated the u.s or western order which has held sway for decades indeed centuries is is giving way in one in one form or another making room for a rising china the non-western world this is something we've been looking at and thinking about for for years now but it's it's accelerating in various ways certainly with china and it's more assertive personality today but it's also more profound if you will from what uh the stories of say paul kennedy's rise and fall of the great powers because it's not simply a story inside the the western family of great powers it's it's really between two different kinds of states us and china with very different values and objectives each wanting to make the world safe for a different set of of institutions and polity principles so it's the deeper struggle that will be with us for for probably the rest of our lives the second crisis is what i call the crisis of modernity uh the intensification of of of economic uh environmental and human interdependence this is liberals talk a lot about this uh perhaps more than than realists uh the arrival of the anthropocene era uh the three great uh headless horsemen of the apocalypse the climate crisis uh health pandemics and uh weapons of mass destruction proliferating on a global scale three of great threats to not just interstate relations but to but humanity as itself a civilization and looking for ways to cope with these rising complexities of interdependence would tax any international system but particularly one that is as degraded as the one that we live in today we're going to have to reinvent ways to cope uh with these problems of modernity and uh we've only scratched the surface of what that may entail and thirdly there's a crisis of liberal democracy the weakening of the old western liberal style of of of liberal democracy unraveling in various ways again deeper than the the last president or the most recent cycle of leadership uh the the the erosion of growth coalitions of of class compromises of a pluralist ethics in the in the body politic rising inequality polarization populism as a kind of manifestation of this and i would say it's it's even deeper than that in the sense that what we often call enlightenment values open societies the role the rule of law freedom of speech the integrity of science the flow of free flow of information a civil society as a phenomenon outside the the reach of predatory states uh all of these features we associate with the last 250 years of of of global advancement are are being discussed in a way that suggests they're they're more fragile than we thought they were certainly at the time of 1989 when the berlin wall fell and we all thought that history had rendered a verdict so together these three crises i think are are are manifesting themselves uh we haven't seen a kind of breakdown of cooperation as great as we have today april 19 uh 2020 might be a kind of hallmark when in the midst of the this great pandemic the g7 ministers got together and they couldn't even agree on an uh on a communique of common cause a sense that we really are uh uh uh in a hole here and it's not clear how we're going to get out and many of us think that the closest moment that looks like today is the kind of 1930s 1940s uh when at that moment liberal democracy was experiencing a kind of extinction moment there were major uh alternative projects for modernity uh in communi in the communist and fascist worlds that were growing uh and so there there is a kind of sense that the stakes have grown and um the the uncertainty of of what what will come next is very strong across the board now obviously there are deep and proximate causes for this crisis i i'll i think i said a few things about the deep crisis and i'll come back to that in a moment but i i also think in the united states in the american foreign policy establishment uh this has been itself part of the problem a kind of discrediting of internationalism and i would mention three more proximate causes of the the problem of of articulating and defending a notion of a us-led order one is the iraq war which i think uh discredited uh internationalists certainly on the republican side and to some extent on the democratic side uh the 2008 financial crisis uh uh uh in some sense discredited neo-liberalism and kind of international elites uh internationalist elites on the democratic side and then thirdly uh the the failure of what we might call the liberal bet uh that china uh uh invited to to be a a responsible stakeholder in this order joined the wto would would move in a direction closer rather than further away from a liberal democratic system and in some sense all three of these failures and disappointments have really led to to a question do you uh do is this the end is this a verdict that uh we need to now think about a different a post uh american post liberal international order or or do we defend uh the accomplishments while acknowledging the failures and it's that latter choice that i would would take up today and i do in my book to to recall and defend uh order features that we want to preserve even as we we have to struggle in this more agonistic world to do so and this is where i'll just make the the argument that after 1945 the u.s and its partners built a far-flung complex system of relations unlike anything that had been seen before that's why we have a hard time finding a label for it it's not empire it's not balance of power it was a global complex with regional systems built around institutions alliances partnerships shared values uh strategic interests built around a set of convictions that often are seen as the the core convictions of the the liberal international imagination uh first that openness uh um uh trade openness if you will exchange uh has possibilities for mutual gain properly managed secondly that institutions facilitate cooperation in various ways thirdly that liberal democracies have some special capacity to work with each other have values that might lead them to want to uh to to to to affiliate with each other to to build a kind of critical mass among themselves uh for creating a space that allows for them to function at a higher level and then finally uh rising interdependence which is associated with modernity with the great forces of science technology industrialism mean that we are in each other's face more than ever before we are connected in ways we can't disconnect really and under conditions of rising uh interdependence we have reasons to to look for ways to coordinate and cooperate rather than than the than the alternative and i'll come back to that but the under the auspices of this system the us built and we we often forget this in the in the wake of our debates about the failures of the last few decades that there was a kind of world system created for states to seek mutual advantage under the auspices of this order and this is a my most important point today really is that there was a kind of a lot of work done in this order democracies were able to reopen the world economy that's number one secondly there was a reintegration of germany and japan a kind of framework for them to come together all the advanced industrial countries found a way to make a passage from a kind of 19th century liberal democracy to what we now call modern welfare states this was done under the auspices of this post-war system germany and france found a new way to bind themselves together think of the coal and steel community launching the european union uh the trilateral countries more generally created mechanisms permanent mechanisms to facilitate governments from from doing things better think of the bretton woods system giving governments tools to make good on their rising promises to their own people uh number six these this framework this u.s led order created a kind of home for countries that were making transitions uh from from other forms of government a place to affiliate to seek security assistance trade and institutional cooperation and in some ways this was an order uh we sometimes call it the pax americana in which china had its best decades in two millennia uh found a way to trade and advantage itself that we'll talk about later but arguably and this is my bottom line if you were to look at the last 75 years from an american perspective and i think from a wider perspective of the liberal democratic world this was the most successful uh international order in world history defined in terms of three metrics wealth creation the absence of physical violence and a glimmering of social justice so what went wrong and these are uh my last remarks uh uh in some ways what happened was uh uh these countries were a victim of their own success uh the the order had its highest functioning decades inside of the cold war and this is where john and i might disagree but this is really when this order crystallized if you will and it was in some sense a kind of club a kind of uh subset of a larger international system where uh free world states could and create a kind of mutual aid society and to be in this order was to buy into a kind of suite of responsibilities of rights and obligations there was a kind of logic of conditionality you see this logic of conditionality in the eu but it was also part of the liberal order and it was an important component i make this argument in my book because the old liberal vision of wilson and the 19th century was of a kind of moral rectitude enforced by public world public opinion well that was ridiculous it didn't work and and this next generation of of architects of order uh realized that and in some sense they said to be to to enforce good behavior you have to in some sense create a club that that is is that is exclusive that not everybody can get in that to get in is to to incentivize you to to play by the rules and to to advance your activities to promote this higher set of social purposes outside of a mere kind of anarchic order but what happened was this inside order became the outside order that the the club lost its club characteristics it became more and i argued this in the book more like a shopping mall where states could wander in and wander out i've also used the term public utility uh you could connect your pipes to the system uh this one but not this one the different providers a kind of fragmentation of the of the coherence of the complex uh uh you could pick and choose uh and of course this is again uh takes us back to to china uh so where do we go from here uh and i would just simply say uh uh there are you know there's no i don't think there's any uh safe passage i don't think there's any obvious and inevitable next era i do think states liberal democracies will want to to to try to reimagine and recreate this order uh after all this order was in some sense built because they wanted to make themselves safe to make the world safer democracy democracies all states are but democracies in their own special way very vulnerable types of polities we know this all that go all the way back to aristotle and polybius and then on to machiavelli and and uh montesquiou and alexander hamilton the kind of republican political institutions are vulnerable to geopolitics you need to have a kind of space a zone of protection where your fragile institutions are not subject to garrison state incentives and so you need to in some sense create like you do for eggs a kind of container and the liberal order in many ways is is an egg carton and to engage in liberal order building is to build egg cartons for liberal democracies to make themselves safe so how do you redo this how do you do this for the next era and i'll just mention three things i think uh you need to in some sense re-tie liberal international order to the everyday lives of everyday people uh uh that there is a kind of uh sense that that the liberal order became a neo-liberal project for bankers and corporations to do deals and a loss of how people in on main street uh might be tied to a larger system of cooperation that creates resource resources for their governments to do things that they they expect them to do so in some sense a kind of re-uh reconnecting of of international order to domestic order every moment high moment in the past uh 200 years of internationalism has been tied to domestic social movements the 19th century reform liberalism the progressive era the new deal era and so forth secondly i do think that the liberal vision needs to return to basics uh which is not that the liberal project the liberal international project is to promote globalization a kind of thomas fried friedman the uh the world is flat because it certainly is not flat uh but to re remind uh people that liberal internationalism is fundamentally about managing interdependence not about expanding interdependence necessarily or promoting globalization but finding pragmatic opportunistic world weary solutions to problems of interdependence those problems are not going to go away and if i'm right they're going to get worse and so we will need more not less liberal international uh organization uh and so those are the the main things and then finally just a few words because i got i think two minutes left um uh a china i in some ways if there's good news for liberal order there's probably bad news for u.s china relations there's a kind of inverse relationship uh part of why we might wish a liberal international reconstruction well is that uh there's power in numbers that a a world that has a kind of center of gravity tied to liberal democracies is one that will be less uh less threatened by illiberal states that wish them ill this is what fdr believed more than anything else when he when he and his advisors talked about the grand area and the the fundamental uh motivation of american policy coming out of world war ii was to create a kind of new order among the liberal democracies so they would be the critical mass with the idea that if they were increasingly marginalized in a larger westphalian anarchic order where the ill liberal fascist or totalitarian states hold sway their prospects are reduced so there is power in numbers rebuilding that coalition it was seen as an explicit part of what was done in the 40s it's in a 21st century way this would would need to be done not least because china more so than i certainly appreciated 15 or 20 years ago before china began its its great ascent uh china is clearly uh uh uh oriented towards a different kind of modernity at one that uh will be uh one that the the united states and other western liberal democracies and other non-western liberal democracies will want to to avoid so uh perhaps there's there's a a an incentive that we didn't have 20 years ago to compose our differences and to look for ways for for the liberal democracies to to build a kind of new uh new uh gathering a kind of d10 or d15 that can provide a kind of coalition in the absence of american hegemony which will never be as strong as it used to be a kind of coalition of states who can drive the reform agenda and can protect values that we would like to see survive the 21st century for our grand trip children and great grandchildren and we aren't going to be able to do that alone operating in a fragmented world uh as as benjamin franklin said on the eve of the american constitution to the 13 colonies we will need to hang together because if we don't we will certainly hang separately thank you all right thank you john uh just a reminder to everybody uh listening uh go ahead and put any questions you have at this point in that and i'll get to them right after right after dr meersheimer's talk and john the floor is yours thank you very much ed thank you for inviting me it's a great pleasure to be here with you and john eckenberry both university of chicago phds and i only wish that i was physically present at the naval academy instead of doing this virtually but maybe another day uh i think that in answering your questions i will give a talk that could be uh placed under the rubric of the rise and fall of the liberal international order and it's important to understand and i think for most of the midshipmen watching this exchange this will be hard to comprehend but in the early 1990s when the cold war ended there was a huge amount of optimism in the united states about america's position in the world about american foreign policy and about the liberal international order in fact that optimism i would argue is reflected in john eichenberry's classic book after victory if you look at after victory which i would encourage you to do john basically makes the argument that we have found the magic formula for making uh the liberal international order work for as far as the eye can see and moreover it's going to be a really happy time ahead we're in the era of peace love and dope realism is effectively dead right the liberal international order is here to stay as you all know something went badly wrong along the way not in the 1990s but it began to happen in the early 2000s and 2016 was really the critical year uh two things happened in 2016 that indicated that the liberal international order was in serious trouble uh one was brexit and then number two was the election of donald trump i'm not going to talk much about this now but it's very important to understand that donald trump ran against the liberal international order he hated the liberal international order he was elected in 2016 and absent covid he would have been re-elected in 2020 and indeed even with cobit if he had acted like an adult over the past year he would have gotten re-elected and again he ran against the liberal international order and then there's brexit and my basic argument is the liberal international order is history it's over folks it's and and my argument is i'll make clear as i go along here is it was doomed from the get-go because it contained the seeds of its own destruction now let me start off by defining what exactly the liberal international order is because john and i have some differences here that are reasonably important then let me talk a little bit about the history of the liberal international order and then go to the meat and potatoes of my talk which is why it failed why all that optimism has now turned into abject pessimism and then say just a few words about where we're headed let me define the liberal international order by first defining what an order is it's very important that you understand exactly what an order is an order is basically an organized group of international institutions that helps govern relations among the members and helps those members deal with other countries that are not in the order itself so an order is a compilation of institutions if you think of the cold war order in the west right we had nato we had the imf we had the world bank these were all institutions and these institutions were cobbled together to form an order and you also want to remember that institutions are basically rules there's widespread agreement on that point in the literature so orders are conglomeration of rules and the reason that orders are so important the reason that rules are so important is because in an incredibly complicated and interdependent world like the one we live in you just need rules for states to deal with each other if nato is an institution and nato is all about rules what's going on there is that you need nato so you have clear rules on how the members of nato interact with each other especially if they have to fight a war against the soviet union during the cold war we are consigned to having an order of one sort or another for as far as the eye can see because again we live in a highly interdependent and complicated world where we need rules so institutions are rules and orders are basically an organized group of institutions now what about an international order and here's where john and i have some disagreement for me an international order has to include all the great powers in the system to be international otherwise it's a bounded order so to get ahead of myself when i talk about the cold war order the cold war order in the west was not an international order because it didn't include the soviet union or the soviet allies or china for most of the cold war it was a bounded order and my argument is that after 1990 when we were in the unipolar moment and there was only one great power which was the united states obviously we had an international order so i distinguish between bounded orders which don't include all the great powers and international orders which include all the great powers then very importantly we get to the word liberal what is what is a liberal international order i've told you what an order is right i've told you what an international order is versus a bounded order now let me tell you what i think a liberal international order is the leading state has to be a liberal democracy and indeed you need a number of important players in that order to be liberal democracies right to have a liberal international order furthermore you want to pay a lot of attention to the question of what are the goals of the liberal international order there are basically three goals one is obviously to spread liberal democracy all over the planet if you want to have a liberal international order that includes every state on the planet in an ideal world every state would be a liberal democracy number two you want to promote an open international economy and you want to integrate every state into that open international economy in a very important way what you want to do is you want to get them hooked on capitalism you want to create a lot of economic interdependence and then thirdly you want to rely heavily on institutions and you want to integrate states especially all the great powers in the system into those institutions so that they become responsible stakeholders they obey the rules remember institutions are rules right and this is what we wanted to do with china and with russia after 1990 we wanted to integrate them into those international institutions that existed so they became responsible stakeholders now the final point i want to make which has been implicit in what i've said up to now in my opinion you need unipolarity to have a liberal international order if you have more than one great power in the system i.e if you have bipolarity or multi-polarity those great powers are going to compete with each other for security you're going to get balance of power politics realpolitique and you can't have a liberal international order you need unipolarity okay now let me go to the second part of my talk which is briefly talk about the history and here i think you'll see that john and i just have a slightly different view of the history john believes that the liberal international order was created in 45 and existed up to at least 2017 maybe he believes it it still exists today i believe that the liberal international order was created in roughly 1990 and what you had between 1945 and 1989 was a world that was dominated by two bounded orders that were realist to the core one was an order that was dominated by the soviet union it included institutions like the warsaw pact and comic-con on one side and on the other side you had a western order an order that was led by the united states that included institutions like nato the imf the world bank gat so forth and so on that was mainly concerned with waging security competition with the soviet union so i believe that you did not have a meaningful a thick international order during the cold war what you had were two bounded orders that were not international and were not liberal then what happens is that the cold war ends and the soviet lead order goes down the toilet bowl it just disappears it's gone in fact the soviet union is gone by december 1991 and we won this is why we were so optimistic and what we do then in the early 1990s is we take that western-led bounded order and we expand it into or we attempt to expand it into a liberal international order and my point to you is we can do that the united states can do that because it's the unipole it doesn't have to worry about great power competition by definition there's only one great power in the system so great power competition real politique is taken off the table for the united states and it's free to pursue an ideological agenda also known as a liberal agenda and it's in a position to take that western bounded order and turn it into a liberal international order and if you look at things like nato expansion eu expansion the promotion of the color revolutions in eastern europe this is all part and parcel of our effort to take that western order and make it into an international order and not a realist order but a liberal order because we don't need to worry about realism we're the only great power on the planet and what happens is that this enterprise is actually quite successful in the 1990s john's book comes out his classic book after victory comes out in 2001 and john looks kind of like a genius people are thinking that you know he's really nailed this one but as i said to you before by 2016 the liberal international order is in real trouble now what you want to ask yourself is what went wrong and as john mearsheimer said to you at the start of his talk this whole enterprise contained the seeds of its own destruction now what exactly do i mean let me point out four ways in which this enterprise was doomed from the start first of all it ended up turning china into a great power the idea was john talked about the liberal bet the idea was that we were going to help china grow economically make it prosperous get it hooked on capitalism make it really rich and turn it into a responsible stakeholder we're going to integrate it into institutions like the wto from a realist point of view this was insanity do you you will realize all your midshipmen who are going to spend the rest of your life worrying about the china threat that the foreign policy elites in the united states created this threat or let's put it differently they helped create this threat they created on purpose a really powerful china because they were betting it would be a responsible stakeholder can you believe that and their bet failed and now we're facing godzilla no realist in his right mind would have ever done such a foolish thing but anyway the point is we help china grow and the end result is we no longer live in a unipolar world in fact vladimir putin who comes online in the early 2000s basically resurrects the russians from the dead so now we're in a multi-polar world it's not only the chinese it's the russians as well my point to you early on and you cannot underestimate the importance of this point you cannot have a liberal international order in a multi-polar world you just can't do that you need unipolarity and furthermore do you really think that china is a liberal state that's going to be happy with a liberal international order i would not bet a lot of money on that i'll tell you that they have no interest in a liberal international order right so what we did with china doomed the liberal international order that's point one secondly we were heavily into the business of spreading democracy across the planet and this gun this got us and it got the liberal international order into real trouble first of all we ended up fighting all these unnecessary and losing wars and the amount of murder and mayhem that we're responsible for creating in the greater middle east is truly stunning truly stunning right and we get into wars in places like afghanistan the longest war in american history we're going to lose we got into a war in iraq we lost we made a colossal mess of libya we've helped make a colossal mess of syria we were really great at spreading liberal democracy in the middle east and of course that's what the bush doctrine was all about so we ended up fighting all these unnecessary wars that we lost and that did a lot as john pointed out to discredit the liberal international order furthermore we couldn't fight wars against china and russia but we tried to spread democracies into those two countries as well and you know what they didn't like it at all you all know that the united states does not like the idea of the russians interfering in our elections the idea of the russians interfering in american politics is anathema to us well don't you think that the soviets and the chinese feel that the united states interfering in their domestic politics and trying to spread democracy and promote human rights in russia and china is a violation of their sovereignty that's exactly what they think so this liberal international order not only led to these unnecessary wars in the greater middle east it also helped poison relations with russia and china and gave them all sorts of incentives to undermine the liberal international order third globalization uh globalization did a terrific job at wealth creation there's no doubt about it and it did a lot to help countries all around the world especially china that was my point before and globalization made the american elite rich john and i and ed were all much richer as a result of globalization and what the liberal international order did but there are huge numbers of americans in the lower classes and even in the middle class who did not benefit from globalization who did not benefit from the liberal international order and many of these people are trump voters they are really angry they're angry about the tremendous inequality economic inequality in america and they're angry about the fact they lost their jobs and can't find better jobs or new jobs and so globalization it might have helped china become a pure competitor but uh and it might have helped uh you know people who are well off to begin with like us uh become wealthier but uh for your average american it did not do one whole heck of a lot then finally there's the question of open borders you want to understand that the liberal international order promotes open borders the famous schengen agreement in europe is a manifestation of this the way liberals talk about the border with mexico today right you know the liberal world view uh trends to treat everybody as part of an international community and doesn't privilege the importance of borders and is open to uh all sorts of illegal immigration and so forth and so on this is bound to cause trouble in a world where nationalism is a really powerful force you see this reflected in the brexit vote and again you see this reflected in support for donald trump you cannot have open borders or anything approximating open borders in a world where the most powerful political ideology on the planet is nationalism so all of these different factors came together globalization the spreading of democracy open borders and the rise of china to doom the liberal international order now the question is where are we headed my basic view as to where we are headed is that we're going to end up in a situation that is somewhat analogous to what we had during the cold war you're going to have an american dominated order on one side and you're going to have a chinese dominated order on the other side and those two orders are going to be principally concerned with waging competition with each other this is not to say you won't have a lot of cooperation inside each of those bounded orders and note the word i'm using here folks it's a bounded order a chinese-led bounded order and an american-led bounded order you'll have cooperation inside those orders just as you had cooperation during the cold war inside the american-led western order and the soviet-led eastern order but in terms of how those orders interact with each other that's where the security competition will take place as was the case during the cold war on top of that you will have a thin international order it won't be a liberal international order that thin international order will include china and the united states and russia just as we had a thin international order during the cold war that included the united states and the soviet union but once you're in a world where you have two bounded orders that are engaged in security competition with each other you're basically saying in effect that the liberal international order is no more may it rest in peace thank you all right thank you john i'm just going to add a couple of spotlights a lot of really good questions uh including from the students professor eigenberry did you want to respond to if you want me to i can i certainly i certainly will if you want me to we should we should go to questions i mean i i'd love to hear john but given that we have limited time in the midshipmen or here we ought to let them ask questions and john and i can respond to each other in part in answering the questions that sounds good yeah that was what i was thinking would be best so here's a good question uh um really to uh to john eichenberry um in the interest of furthering the goal of re-tying the liberal international order to everyday people what are some tangible practical steps that american policymakers can take to achieve this outcome yeah well i think uh that's a great question and i i um i think we're kind of into domestic politics at some point about how one can uh can galvanize our resources to to uh to re build a a a a middle class and connect uh uh people's lives to the to the to the larger system i think i would start with trade policy uh uh trying to to get a a new uh understanding among uh other industrial societies uh about trade uh that would be tempered with with a kind of rebuilding of the the social safety net and the the kind of programs that we associate with the the modern social democratic state uh the term we often use is embedded liberalism that when the system when the liberal order which i do think and i'm glad to defend this that we've liberal order leave aside international the western liberal order uh actually even predates world war ii we it it was in its kind of um a high high era during the cold war it was it was a it was a bounded order so maybe i should go ahead and get this out of the way but as you notice my argument is that liberal order in some sense for it to function needs to be bounded it can't be a glo a global liberal order would only make sense if all the major states of the system were liberal democracies and short of that uh it will always be a partial bounded order where there are you know gatekeepers and exclusions and there there are sort of entry barriers um that i've that i talked about earlier and part of what that system that more club-oriented character to look to western liberal order did was it allowed these governments after world war ii to create mechanisms through the bretton woods system and the trade system to to reconcile if you will openness with uh economic stability this is the the keynesian the keynesian revolution developing and putting in the hands of governments capacities to promote full employment and to to have openness to the extent promoted efficiencies and comparative advantage and and growth which is still out there as a logic that we want to keep in the in the system but but tempering it with with uh if not protectionism with managed openness that allows governments to overturn commitments to simple openness as you saw in the 19th century for for in the in the in the name of of protecting jobs or providing uh assistance as certain jobs give way and others emerge so this kind of activist role of of connecting uh trade and economic development to to a full-service modern government dedicated to making sure that technology and monetary policy and industrial policy all serve the entrance of of of the middle class because i agree with john the the the the western society starting with the united states really have taken a a hit and and and that will never we will never be able to recreate a functioning international order that i would call liberal oriented a western liberal order until we connect that internationalism to to uh to these sorts of domestic uh programs okay john did you want to respond to that no i think it's better that the students get to ask so here's a good question from one of my students zach vandell which is how would a future politician restart the anti-liberal international order position for the united states without being immediately delegitimized by our country's elites much like donald trump was from 2016 to now you want me to say a few words about that huh i think that donald trump was a very special case uh donald trump uh was somebody who was for better for worse a polarizing figure and uh i think that uh uh he's now behind us and i think with what you're gonna see with the biden administration is what really matters and with regard to the biden administration i believe the bible administration will talk like the liberal international order is still alive and well but what they will actually do is move forward much the way donald trump moved forward to help create a bounded american-led order to deal with the chinese bounded order that is now emerging what i'm saying to you and i'm saying in response to zack's question is i think that although there will be a great emphasis on difference between donald trump and joe biden at the rhetorical level in fact trump has set the train in motion right to move away from the liberal international order and to create a bounded order that may have many liberal features and therefore make john happy but nevertheless it will be a bounded order so i don't think there will be that much difference in practice between what president biden does and what president trump formally did although i think rhetorically there will be a huge difference right right okay here's another question and basically it involves um your assessment of the ramifications of each of your arguments for the future of the military so if your arguments are true what should the military look like in the next 20 years military budget force structure force posture well john has probably a lot to say about that let me just uh say a few words um again i i i think we to kind of have a conversation here we need to kind of keep our terms sort of uh sort of defined and for me the term liberal international order actually i i will have to say this the first use of that term was in an article i wrote with dan dudeny in 1999 before that the term was never used uh and it's not found in the literature and it wasn't until about five years later the new york times used it for the first time so i i do think i kind of know what the term means and there are two two aspects of it one is an international order not necessarily global but an international international interstate order that has liberal characteristics multilateralism rule of law transparency reciprocity uh uh trade these are kind of in an international order that has liberal characteristics but but liberal international order as as i refer to it and i think as most people do also means an international order organized around liberal democracies with features in that order that are not necessarily liberal or don't have liberal properties like the alliance system so for me the alliance system was very important for creating architecture for cooperation among the liberal democracies so that they could collectively create a space an egg carton for those liberal democracies to to operate again it wasn't a global project it was a lot a project among liberal democracies to make themselves safe and so the part of making themselves safe was making themselves safe that is to say secure and that entailed really valorizing security cooperation embedded in nato and the alliances in east asia these are are are hallmarks really of the american-led order uh that have in in as a liberal i i see their realist virtues that john can talk about but also their their virtues as mechanisms that help bind together the liberal democracies germany and france keeping germany down the americans then and the russians out that nato logic was very much an architectural set of principles that allowed for these countries to operate uh collectively over many many decades so my bottom line here to answer the question is that in some sense while i don't have a view about budget levels and technologies for me a world in 2040 will be a more friendly world to again the values and institutions that i hold dear and i think both of you do as well is to have a is to have have the united states tied to in various forms of cooperation including security cooperation with its its allies in europe and asia and it becomes all the more important as china rises and until it it emerges into a new shape and perhaps moves in our direction it is going to be a security rival and the alliances are going to matter in that competition i think with regard to the future of the u.s military we are going to have our hands full trying to contain china this is a country that now has four times as many people as the united states if it had a per capita gnp that looked like south korea it would be twice as wealthy as the united states just think about that at the height of the cold war right the soviet union had roughly the same size population as the united states and at most it had one-third the wealth of the united states and here we're talking about a country right that in the year 2050 is supposed to have 3.7 times as many people as us 3.7 times as many people and we'll probably be about two times maybe even more wealthy than the united states and we're taking them on 6 000 miles from the california coast we're going to have our hands full and this is going to be the principal military mission of the united states moving forward and again you want to remember that the liberal international order and liberal hegemony which is the american foreign policy that we've pursued since the cold war ended right and it was pursued by both democrats and republicans alike helped create this behemoth that we now have to deal with and you're going to have to deal with now let me say a little bit about force structure look during the cold war the soviet threat was centered on europe it was the central front and the forces that mattered the most for dealing with the soviet threat were ground forces i.e the army and air forces the navy did not matter much it mattered but it did not matter much during the cold war we're in a fundamentally different world now as you surely know if you look at the geography of asia it's quite clear that the army doesn't matter very much and that the air force and the navy matter one whole heck of a lot so i think all of you are going to have a lot to think about vis-a-vis the china threat it's going to be the main concern you're going to face when thinking about grant strategy operational strategy and tactics moving forward and i am sad to say but i think one whole heck of a lot of money is going to be spent on the navy and the air force and i think that there is a real possibility that we will get into a shooting war at some point with china i hope that doesn't happen but i think it is possible and it makes me very nervous and again i just can't believe that we helped create this behemoth can i just ask john it's a kind of counterfactual in the 1990s um first of all china was already in the international order it wasn't simply on the outside wanting to get in it was a permanent member of the u.n security council in most major international institutions we we did make bets that turned out as i said to be wrong but the counterfactual always puzzles me the idea of a grand american grand strategy in the 21st century tied to a multi-generational effort to keep 1.2 billion people poor and unhappy how do you do that in what sense could we have had a different policy that would have been sustainable in an american democracy with values and institutions and traditions than a history of what we know about the world we live in uh how would we have contained or put the thumb on on a such a large proud country uh in a way that would have made our lives today better off i i would see a very angry uh china with nuclear weapons and all the instruments of power but poor uh uh unhappy outside of some kind of system that the us was enforcing uh uh enforcing on china what kind of world would that have been i i i don't know anybody who credibly argued that including uh realists at the time uh uh who by the way were more worried about about uh germany and japan as rivals to the united states uh at the at the very end of the cold war so what what what is the the law the the 40-year grand strategy that could keep china poor unhappy and outside of our world let me make a couple points first of all there's no way we could have done it simply because public opinion in the united states was firmly opposed to doing it because firmly a public opinion was firmly on your side an elite opinion was on your side when you said before that we made a bet that china could rise peacefully that bet was supported by almost everybody in the national security or foreign policy establishment you included so i don't think it was feasible giving given where the american foreign policy elite was at the time i want to be very clear if you read my tragedy of great power politics which came out in 2001 i said that the united states should go to great lengths to try to slow down if not reverse chinese growth so there was at least one person on the planet who was making that argument but i was a lone voice in the wilderness because you and your buddies dominated the discourse the problem is that you bet wrong and we now are facing godzilla now your question is could we have done anything to slow down china yes we could have done a lot of things to slow down china one is not let them in the wto this was a huge mistake uh and all sorts of liberal elites you included supported bringing china into the wto because you thought it was going to become a responsible stakeholder well you were wrong and bringing him into the wto made him much more powerful and in my opinion much more dangerous now would it ultimately have worked even if we could have slowed them down in the short term by denying the membership in the wto and doing other things would it have worked in the long term i don't know it might not have worked that's the thrust of your argument you might be right i can't tell but i find it amazing that we didn't at least think about trying to slow down china's growth and then trying to do what we could to stop it if you look at britain before world war one the british saw germany rising and they thought long and hard about how to stop germany's rise they ultimately decided they couldn't stop it but they at least thought about it we didn't even think about it except for a handful of people like me everybody else i i would say that this is an important debate and i hope that our midshipmen know that this we're going to be thinking about this for a long time i would just just want to keep one thing in mind and that is that there we we didn't have a in looking at the post-cold war approach to china there never was a singular grand strategic statement there was a there was a consensus that kind of emerged both republicans and democrats about about about china and how to think about china and it really had two two components one is what we've been talking about at the time it was called engagement that uh we would be interacting with them and and and trying to elicit uh behaviors uh they were still this deng xiaoping there was a real sense of openness there was not a sense that they would become a liberal democracy but the the term that was used most often i think in the clinton administration would that there would be kind of economic freedom that would be planted or encouraged inside of china and that would that would be better than the alternative and it might lead to to more more pluralism and contestation and move in our direction but the other that was one feature engagement of china the other feature of american implicit multi uh administration grand strategy towards china was uh securing the balance of power that we would not just maintain but we would strengthen our alliances when the cold war was over uh and there was a real question should we even keep these alliances there is a real effort to define them and lead and and re-legitimate them as as stabilizing forces to discourage a rising china to use its power for military purposes so there's always been a kind of as there was during the cold war a kind of a double thought double strategy part of it is is traced to kind of realist insights part of it might be traced to to liberal insights engagement but balance and balance and at shoring up and make meaning make make sure that it's not just america versus china but it's the allies japan most importantly but also south korea and um all the other uh bilateral alliance ties that that that uh connect the united states to east asia and increasingly to india so i've always thought it wasn't simply a kind of naive bet that will will let them trade with us and and capitalism will will will uh cut the lapping tides of capitalism will erode authoritarian structures that was clearly something that some of us hoped for but there was always this much more much more realist insight about maintaining a balance and i think that's always been there as a kind of double strategy along with engagement ed can i have one minute on this john this was a naive bet right you say that we were interested that we had a vested interest in maintaining the balance of power in asia and of course that's true because we were by far the dominant power in asia and we wanted to keep it that way but if you pursue a policy that helps china grow its economy and turns it into an economic superpower you are going to upset the balance of power by definition how could it be otherwise did you seriously think that when you turn this country into an economic superpower that it wouldn't translate that economic might into military might the united states as you surely have noticed is a liberal democracy and it's very rich and it builds incredibly powerful military forces why wouldn't china as it became a liberal democracy and a rich liberal democracy at that build powerful military forces which of course it's done and the end result is it's upset the balance of power and we're now at a point where it may be the case that over time china is by far the most powerful country in asia not the united states this is not in our interest and we inadvertently caused this situation and it was because people like you and not only you by any means i'm saying you're just reflective of the foreign policy establishment in general had this idea that by growing china economically integrated into institutions and so forth and so on it would turn into a responsible stakeholder it was in your terminology a bet and we lost and i'd say the consequences are really disturbing but the theory is that even though they would become more powerful um as the middle class grew they would liberalize politically that hasn't happened that was i think seen as kind of an iron law of social science until now um so is it the case that that that law was wrong or that they're going to liberalize it's just going to take a little bit longer well my point is even if they had liberalized they still want to build military forces the united states is a liberal democracy this idea that once they liberalize and become a responsible stakeholder that they don't build military forces is at odds with what the united states did over the course of its history as a liberal democracy i think i think i i i i don't disagree with john and i i i mean the outcome is is one that i see and i'm i'm i think it is a we are in for a very uh a tough future of competition and that's why i i wish the the liberal international order or the we'll call it the western liberal order so i don't violate john's definition of international but i we should wish the the alliance of democracies well because uh that that will be an important bulwark against a a more powerful and illiberal china which by the way again i i i just don't see how john's grand strategy i think john fancies himself as a realist and he he he likes to point out people who have illusions in their arguments but i it almost seems like it's the grandest of illusions to think that you can keep china poor hungry unhappy weak for the 21st century a billion 1.2 billion people in a civilizational state that 500 years ago was larger in its size partly because of its population than than the western countries so it seems like it's the grandest of of of delusions really to think that that a a grand strategy of containment and it's not just containment it's undercutting and and uh and uh diminishing china to the point where they would not be a 21st century rival that just seems like it's a fantasy and so how do you in the real world uh marshall engagement and balancing tools to to make the best of it so um so i guess that's where i come out on this very interesting debate well one more quick question before the midshipmen have to run of their classes and it's from uh midshipman kathleen rock and she has watched the case for restraint um john's lecture series online and her question is just briefly can and this is the question for both of you can you expand expound upon which situations would be considered geopolitically significant and what actions would warrant counter balancing by the united states yeah i i have a simple answer to that i believe that there are three areas of the world that are worth fighting and dying for one is europe two is east asia and three is uh the persian gulf and i believe that you only fight and die in those areas when there is a potential hegemon there's no potential hegemon in europe i would have left europe put an end to nato at the end of the cold war and there's no potential hegemon in the persian gulf either therefore i'd move to an over the horizon capability similar to what you had during the cold war or the latter part of the cold war with the rapid deployment force the area where there's a potential hegemon is in east asia and that of course is china and there's no doubt that china's neighbors cannot balance by themselves against a rising china so that the united states has to be there and we're going to have to be there in a serious way as i said before i think both president trump and president biden understand that basic fact of life and we will be there when i think of restraint i think it large largely in terms of ending the forever wars the democrats and republicans started mainly after 2001 i think about ending the war in afghanistan ending the war in iraq basically getting out of the middle east getting out of these small wars and exercising restraint in the greater middle east but with regard to china uh unlike a number of my friends who profess the importance of restraint i don't think we should show restraint vis-a-vis china i think we should go full bore to try to contain china i'm not calling for a highly militaristic and aggressive foreign policy where we provoke a war with them but i do think we want to have a robust containment policy because asia east asia in particular matters strategically to the united states and there's a serious threat there obviously there's a potential peer competitor in china so we should focus there so there won't be a lot of restraint in my story vis-a-vis china but i'd like to see us return to restraint when it comes to the forever rewards dr eikenberry last comment on that i i definitely am against forever wars and i think that's not a realist perspective i think liberals are are equally on board on that i i i have to on the iraq war issue uh the the architects of the war were not liberals they were they were of a certain kind of hegemonic realist it was cheney and rumsfeld and the the liberal patina of justification came later after no weapons of mass destruction were found the war was precisely what john just hinted at when he said uh we the americans should fight and die uh if uh america's hegemonic position in a is threatened by a regional hegemon uh that was the argument that cheney made for a a a iraq that would with its uh its leader sodom hussein would would challenge the united states if he had uh weapons of mass destruction so it was a it was a counter regional hegemonic threat that that was the kernel of the iraq war uh impetus and the democracy promotion uh bringing jefferson uh to baghdad that was that was not done by liberal internationalists it was done by uh others who wanted to to wrap their efforts in the flag of of of liberal promote a liberal democracy promotion and so i i think there's a there's a story there that has to be straightened out i i do think i would agree with with john that uh that that that the the future of world politics and of american um grand strategy in the world is is is towards east asia and uh i think i think we need all the liberal democracies running on all their cylinders at full speed if we are going to to make a go of it well our midshipmen are going to be busy when they graduate that's for sure well unfortunately it's uh class starts at 1 30 so the midshipmen have to run so we can close at that and i want to thank dr zike and barry mearsheimer for really just clearly laying out pretty much all the descriptive arguments that pertain to the original three questions uh which is the the mission of universities to lay out both sides so thank you for doing that so clearly and uh i hope we can host you properly when normal life returns at some point in the next year or two so thank you both and to everyone else have a great rest of the day and uh i will send out an email we have another lecture next week francis fukuyama and bill galston on the future of liberal democracies so thank you all

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Published: Tue Feb 02 2021