Truth, Lies, Nationalism, War, and Election Meddling | Interview with Dr. John Mearsheimer

[Music] that liberalism ran up against nationalism nationalism is an incredibly powerful force and a liberal foreign policy that doesn't take into account the power of nationalism is almost certain to get into trouble hi this is dr jed mccosko at academicinfluence.com and wake forest university today we have another wonderful guest professor john mearsheimer from the university of chicago so professor mearsheimer could you tell us a little bit about how you got your start in political science well i was a junior at west point in the late 1960s and i was actually a terrible student who had never been really seriously interested in academics much less international relations and i took an international relations course it was a mandatory course and i loved it and it was the first course i had taken in my entire life that really excited me so i decided that in my senior year at west point i would take all the international relations and political science courses that i could and i would try to do very well which i did and i decided in the middle of my senior year that after i graduated i would at some point get a phd in political science and focus on international relations i had no idea that i could ever become an academic i just wanted a phd because i love the subject matter so after graduating from west point i went in the air force and my first assignment fortuitously was in los angeles so i went part-time to the university of southern california and then full time for about six months and got a master's degree and when i got out of the air force after my five-year commitment in 1975 i applied for phd programs now i didn't have much of an academic record but it was reasonably easy to get into phd programs in 1975 for a variety of reasons so i barely got into a phd program at cornell to get a phd again in international politics and after i got into the program i discovered that i was really good at it that i not only loved it but i i was good at uh you know doing research and writing and coming up with new ideas and so forth and so on and my professors at cornell were wonderful to me they thought that i had talent and they nurtured me and the rest is history that's great well was there anything that now looking back that you could see uh in your younger self that gave you the idea that maybe this is something you'd be good at were you were you interested in the news when you were a kid were you interested in history or wars or uh tell us a little bit about something that may have triggered that if somebody had been watching you they'd say oh this is something he'd be good at i think that the key here is sports i was deeply committed to playing basketball football and baseball and my dream was to become a professional athlete hopefully in basketball and i was also very interested in reading about sports so i spent endless hours reading magazines and reading the newspaper my father used to work in new york city or he worked in new york city at the time and he would take the new york was then the new york central railroad uh train home and he got off at the last stop and what he would do is he would collect all the newspapers the sports sections from all the new york newspapers and in those days there were like five six seven new york newspapers he'd collect all the sports sections and he'd bring them home to me oh after after dinner i would lock myself in the bathroom and i would read all the sports sections and i was very analytical about it so i knew a great deal and i constantly thought about strategy because as you know sports is really all about strategy it's a very interactive environment what you do depends very much on what your opponent does anyway i think i developed in those years studying sports and playing sports all sorts of analytical skills that were very important for studying international relations because international relations is all about interactions among two or between two or among three or more uh actors and you really have to be good at strategy i think uh to be good at international politics so i think in a funny sort of way all of that time i spent studying sports which my parents used to say was a waste of time actually was very beneficial down the road oh that is such a great story oh my goodness well i do remember seeing a pbs special on major league baseball and one of the most successful general managers was a person who was so paranoid about what the other team was going to do to him that he tried to do it to them first and it made him absolutely brilliant in strategy and i i don't remember which general manager was but it's exactly what you're talking about in politics so some of the the most successful leaders are the ones that are worried what the other countries are going to do to them and they try to anticipate that and and sort of cut that off at the past and maybe sometimes well when when that country doesn't do that to them they're like well then we better do it to them before they do it to us and um your one of your books um why leaders lie gets into that a little bit so do you want to talk a little bit about how strategy um and political you know sort of things that are going on in in the political world internationally played into that book well i think that uh in international politics it is absolutely imperative to understand that the other side has a second move if you are the first mover and i've been surprised over the course of my lifetime how many people don't think that when they move the other side will respond they just think in terms of what's my first move you know i don't like that person i'm going to punch him in the head well you want to remember that if you punch him in the head he's likely to punch you back unless you knock him out so you want to ask yourself you know what are the consequences of not knocking the other person out and the same sort of logic applies in international politics and just to go to the subject of lying if you lie to the other side you may get away with it the first time you do it right because the other side is unsuspecting you have a rich track record of telling the truth but all of a sudden you lie and of course if you're seen as a truth teller that's when you're most likely to get away with lying right but the problem that you then face is that everything you say after you tell that first lie will be viewed with great suspicion and it will make it much more difficult for you to reach agreements to you for you to reach deals with the other side because the other side won't trust you so again this just highlights the interactive nature of international politics and the realm where this matters the most of course is wartime and wartime is you know it's a lot like a football game or a basketball game right you're constantly thinking about what the other side strategy is and what your strategy is and what you want is a strategy that allows you to exploit the weaknesses in the other side strategy so again a very uh sports a and and and foreign policy are are very similar in that way now you wrote the book why leaders lie prior to the 2016 election and the fallout of did uh russia tamper with our election um do you feel like there's a lot of lying going on in the international realms uh with putin lying about whether he was involved or this or that what do you think because you said in the book that the leaders don't often lie that they lie a lot less frequently than one would think but is this an instance where they they are lying well there's two points to be made here my first point is that i argue that leaders do not lie much to each other that you don't have much wine in international relations and the reason is that by and large most leaders don't trust other leaders and therefore you're not going to get away with telling a lie where you see lots of lying is in domestic politics leaders lie to their own people all the time and the reason they do that is because it's much more likely that their own people will trust them because they are their leaders and if people are trustworthy that provides a perfect opportunity for a leader to tell a lie so i i didn't expect that this would be the finding when i first started studying this subject of line but what i discovered is that you get more lying by leaders to their own people than to foreign governments so that's point one point 0.2 is with regard to the russians i'm not sure in the final analysis whether putin's lying or not it's not clear to me from the available evidence how much the russians have interfered in the 2016 election or have interfered since then there's no question that lots of american leaders and i think the foreign policy establishment general screams all the time that the russians are doing this and they're doing that but there's never a lot of hard evidence presented so i have my doubts as to whether putin's lying or not this is not to argue for one second that putin is above lying because i don't believe any leader is above line franklin d roosevelt lied dwight d eisenhower lied jf kennedy lied sometimes i argue in the book it makes good sense to lie jfk for example lied about the deal that he struck with nikita khrushchev during the cuban missile crisis kennedy had told khrushchev that he would take our jupiter missiles out of turkey but kennedy told khrushchev that i am going to deny publicly that we made this agreement even though we've made the agreement and you can trust that i'll take the jupiter missiles out but for domestic political reasons i cannot admit to the american people that i've agreed to take the jupiter missiles our jupiter missiles out of turkey in exchange for you taking your nuclear armed missiles out of cuba so kennedy lied and i believe that was a noble lie uh i don't like lying i don't think any of us like lying but the truth is that sometimes it makes strategic sense hmm interesting so in the particular case of kennedy and the cuban missile crisis do you think that he could have avoided even having to make that deal and then lie about it if he had um done a better job in foreign relations prior to the whole escalation uh was it his fault that things got as bad as it did no okay he was he he was what we used to call a pickle he he was just between a rock and a hard place he he he just really had no choice okay and to make that he he had to get the missiles out and he did not want a war and khrushchev at the last moment insisted that there be a quid pro quo and the quid pro quo was that kennedy take the jupiters out what's really ironic about that case is that when kennedy came to office into office in 61 he told the pentagon to get the jupiter missiles out of turkey and it didn't happen so kennedy had no interest in keeping the jupiters in turkey he had originally before the cuban missile crisis said get rid of those missiles but the context was completely different once you're in to the cuban missile crisis and the american people are expecting kennedy to be top kennedy to be tough with the soviets yeah and kennedy understands that he doesn't want to be too tough because kennedy just wants to get out of the crisis without starting world war three with nuclear weapons yeah i mean i actually think now looking back at the cuban missile crisis i didn't think this when i was younger but i've now come to the conclusion that kennedy handled it brilliantly good for him yeah he was surrounded by hawkish advisors i think there's a good chance we would have had a war had kennedy listen to his advisors but kennedy was bent on making sure we didn't have a war and that of course was why he was willing to trade the jupiters uh for the soviet missiles in cuba interesting well that really helps uh mia better understand your book about why leaders lie that they don't lie to each other which i gathered from the brief read i did of your book uh but they do lie to their own people which is what we see happening uh all the time around us especially uh in the last four years so um what have you been working on since writing that book have you extended some of its arguments to to count to account for the latest administration or have you worked on other things tell us a little bit more about your more recent projects now my most recent book and the subject i've been very interested in over the last few years is the subject of how nationalism and liberalism interact with each other and my argument is that the failure of american foreign policy from the end of the cold war up until when donald trump was elected was due in large part to our failure to understand the relationship between nationalism and liberalism and i argue in this book that i wrote in 2018 it's called uh the great delusion which deals with uh liberal dreams and international realities that's the subtitle the great delusion liberal dreams and international realities my argument is that the united states in the wake of the cold war was so powerful that it was free to pursue a liberal foreign policy it's what most of my friends and i call liberal hegemony the united states once the cold war ended decided it was going to use that tremendous power that it had to remake the world in america's image this is liberal hegemony and as you know it failed this is one of the principal reasons that donald trump is in the white house donald trump ran against liberal hegemony donald trump ran against the american foreign policy establishment and he won so the question is what went wrong how did we end up in afghanistan in the longest war in american history how did we end up blowing it in iraq how did nato expansion lead to the crisis with ukraine why is it that u.s china relations deteriorated so seriously in recent years and my argument is because liberal hegemony was a failure and my argument at its core is that liberalism ran up against nationalism nationalism is an incredibly powerful force and a liberal foreign policy that doesn't take into account the power of nationalism is almost certain to get into trouble and this is exactly what happened to us the united states for example thought that it could interfere in countries like iraq russia and china and turn those countries into liberal democracies that was our goal you know you talked about the russians interfering in american politics there's no country on the planet that has a richer history of interfering in the domestic politics of other countries than the united states of america and our goal is invariably to turn those countries into liberal democracies well what happens in almost all those cases is that the people who live in those countries don't want the americans interfering in their politics and telling them what kind of political system they should have just like americans do not like russians interfering in american politics we believe in american sovereignty american self-determination that's nationalism right the russians the chinese the iraqis the afghanis all feel the same way i learned this lesson when i was a young boy during the vietnam war i was in the american military from 1965 to 1975 that was co-terminus with the vietnam war i was in from 65 to 75 and i learned one thing that was of great importance over the course of those 10 years and that was that we were not fighting communism in vietnam we were fighting nationalism the vietnamese were interested in having a sovereign state of their own they did not like the idea of the americans interfering in their politics and telling them what kind of political system they should have so they were willing to die in huge numbers to drive us out and before that they were willing to die in huge numbers to drive the fridge out so i learned back in those days between 1965 and 1975 you do not want to invade countries like iraq or afghanistan because you're going to run into that buzz saw called nationalism and by the way i'm sure you remember jed when the soviets invaded afghanistan in 1979 10 years later they left defeated why because the afghanis like the vietnamese like the americans like the russians like the chinese like the iraqis do not like the idea of foreigners coming in and trying to reorganize their politics so the great delusion this book that i wrote that was published in 2018 sends a very simple message which is that the united states got itself into a whale of a lot of trouble between 1990 and 2016 because it thought that it could remake the world in its own image and this was a huge mistake hmm now had hillary gotten elected we would have expanded that range for a few more years right it wouldn't have stopped in 2016 it would have started in 1990 and kept going um so is it good that we stopped i mean it sounds like your book is arguing that we should stop and had hillary gotten elected we wouldn't have stopped so what are your thoughts about that two points one is there's no question that hillary's inclination when she ran for president in 2016 was to continue liberal hegemony she was deeply committed to pursuing liberal hegemony trump ran against her and again this is one of the reasons that trump beat her the second point is even if she had won liberal hegemony still would have come to an end rather quickly and the reason is the rise of china once china becomes a great power and a serious challenger to the united states the united states can no longer pursue liberal hegemony as a foreign policy it has to now re-engage uh in basic realpolitique like it did during the cold war you see what's very important to understand about the unipolar moment the period from let's say 1990 to 2016. is that the united states was by definition the only great power on the planet it's the unipolar moment and in a unipolar world where there's only one great power there's by definition no security competition between great powers during the cold war for example you had a bipolar world and in that bipolar world you had a serious security competition between the united states and the soviet union so real politique like liberalism defined the foreign policy of the united states realpolitik because the soviet union was there soviet union goes away unipolarity you don't need realpolytic because there's no other great power so you can pursue liberal hegemony however with the rise of china and the resurrection of russian power under vladimir putin you're now in a multi-polar world and when you're in a multi-polar world liberal hegemony gets put on the trash heap of history and you go back to realpolitik so even though hillary clinton talked about pursuing liberal hegemony once she was in the white house i believe she would have had no choice but to act in very similar ways to how donald trump has acted vis-a-vis china and even vis-a-vis russia and i i might add to that that this is related to the question of what will happen if joe biden is elected president in november there are a lot of people who believe that biden will deal with china in a fundamentally different way than trump has dealt with china i don't believe that for one second and by the way the chinese don't believe that either and the reason is that we are in a multi-polar world and one of those polls one of those great powers is a potential pure competitor china is an incredibly formidable power and it's growing by leaps and bounds every year so the united states is deeply concerned with checking the growth of china chinese power we're deeply interested in containing china and that will be true whether donald trump is in the white house or whether joe biden is in the white house now i think you can make a good argument that biden would do a more effective job than trump has done although there are obviously some people who argue the opposite but nevertheless both of them will make sure that america's gun sites are around china and that we do everything possible to make sure that china does not become an actual peer competitor and that we remain the dominant country on the planet well now one of your friends uh stephen walt said that it wasn't until trump got into office that people um well that that he took seriously some of the imbalances that were in our trade agreements with china china was promising things and not delivering on them and what he said is that uh that trump's inclinations of there being a problem with those arrangements and that you know china wasn't doing their part uh were correct but the problem was he was inefficient at achieving them so it's almost as if what i hear you saying is that um had hillary gotten into office she might have not had the instincts that trump had about china but now that joe biden could come into the office he would have the same instincts because he has no other choice and most importantly he'll be more effective is that a fair summary of what you would say with what one difference i i think that hillary clinton had she become president would have quickly uh okay uh changed her uh her foreign policy perspective she would have abandoned liberal hegemony you you want to remember that hillary clinton was secretary of state in 2011 and in 2011 she announced the pivot to asia and the pivot to asia was the first step that we took to contain china so it came under hillary now it was not something that she placed a high priority on right she wasn't saying we have to fundamentally alter our foreign policy to deal with china but clinton hillary clinton was aware in 2011 as was barack obama who was the president at the time that china was growing increasingly powerful and the united states had to start thinking about containment now trump took this two or three steps further in 2016 when he ran uh for president and then certainly after 2017 when he moved into the white house and he has been a real hard-liner uh on china now you could argue that if hillary had been elected yes she would have changed her focus and put her gun sites or the administration's gun sights on china but she would have done it um in a more circumspect way than trump has done it i think there's a bit of truth in that but nevertheless i think uh she would have come to play hardball with china quite quickly well that's interesting and another interesting thing that stephen walt said was that uh it was because of her husband's foreign policy specifically the the the building up of nato and the dual containment of of iran iraq that we ended up in a lot of the problems um that we we see that you know you mentioned ukraine uh is because of nato's uh build-up and um 911 due to having a huge military presence in saudi arabia which is what started bin laden off on his rampage against the united states so would you say that those two mistakes that bill clinton made were in part um uh some of the things that led to the collapse of this uh liberal hegemony that you're talking about yes i would not put all the blame on bill clinton though i think that bill clinton george w bush and barack obama all pursued liberal hegemony and i think one could argue that actually george h.w bush who engineered the end of the cold war that he in a very important way got the ball rolling and what bill clinton did was stand on george h.w bush's shoulders but clinton was the first president to really put liberal hegemony up in bright lights okay and there's no question that his policies went a long way towards getting us into trouble but you don't want to underestimate what george w bush did or what barack obama did clinton's biggest mistake in my opinion was to start nato expansion and nato expansion coupled with eu european union expansion coupled with the color revolutions the color revolutions were designed to facilitate the spread of democracy in eastern europe the orange revolution in ukraine the rose revolution in georgia this is a case i will note of the united states interfering in the domestic politics of other countries but anyway nato expansion coupled with these other moves uh eventually poisoned relations with russia huge mistake with regard to the middle east right there's no question uh that the clinton administration made a big mistake uh pursuing a policy of dual containment uh in the wake of the first gulf war what we did was we kept the american military forces in the region in ways we had not done before that and there's no question that got us into big trouble uh with osama bin laden and was one of the contributing reasons uh for the 911 attacks by bin laden and company but then you have george w bush who foolishly invaded iraq and not only does he invade iraq and get us into trouble there but that guarantees that things will eventually go south in afghanistan because we in effect take our eye off the ball we're in afghanistan if we're going to make afghanistan work and we're going to be able to get out of there we have to concentrate on that problem because it's a huge problem but instead of concentrating on that problem bush starts another war in iraq an unnecessary war then afghanistan goes south and then of course along comes barack obama he plays a key role in trying to topple the regime in syria another disaster then he plays the key role in trying to topple the regime in libya we're successful but what does it lead to utter chaos if you look at american policy in the middle east under clinton bush and obama it's one giant disaster and again this is one of the reasons that donald trump got elected in 2016. trump said in no uncertain terms these presidents have failed both republicans and democrats many people forget this but trump he ran the table during the republican the republican primaries he ran against jeb bush marco rubio and so forth and so on and he said veiled foreign policy we need to change america first and he got elected and this is not to argue that he's done a really good job since he's been president but he did get elected well thank you so much this has been fascinating and a real nice uh addition to the material we already got with stephen walt your friend and colleague we really appreciate the time we got to have with you today thank you so much for coming on the show my pleasure thank you for having me on

Channel: Academic Influence

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Keywords: Higher Education, Education, Learning, Influence, Leadership, Interview, Political Science, PoliSci, AcademicInfluence.com, Politics, Liberal Hegemony, Russia, Election, Nationalism, Foreign Policy, Middle East, Presidents

Id: hjy8vJKKLaY

Length: 33min 6sec (1986 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 28 2020