UnCommon Core | Imperial by Design, John Mearsheimer

welcome it's great to see every here at this great university is I was just saying here for 29 years this August it's the only University the only University that I've ever taught at which is actually quite unusual for people of my generation most of my friends have taught it at least two or three universities so I think I will have started here and finished here which is a wonderful thing uh the subject I want to talk about today is American foreign policy and where we are and I want to start off by just reminding everyone in the audience of where we wore when the Cold War ended in the early 1990s of course it ended in 1989 but it was really in the 1990s that it played itself out and as almost all of you remember that was a period of great euphoria we thought we basically had the world in our hands and we were on the march and nothing but good would happen and indeed many people were talking about a fundamental transformation in international politics that would work to america's advantage I think the two paradigmatic pieces from the time were number one Frank Fukuyama's very famous article in the national interest entitled the end of history which was actually a lecture that he gave here in social science 122 he was invited by Allan bloom who was his teacher in college at Cornell and Frank gave that lecture here and it eventually became an article and a famous book and the other article was Charles Krauthammer 's famous piece and foreign affairs called the unipolar moment let me say a few words about each of those pieces because they were so important at the time and they say so much about what has happened over the next 20 plus years Fukuyama argued in his piece that the United States as a liberal democracy had defeated fascism in the first half the 20th century and then we had defeated communism in the second half and the end result is that liberal democracy had emerged triumphant and his basic argument was that liberal democracy was going to spread over the rest of the globe and the end result would be that we would live in a world that was populated by states that had a lot in common with the United States and since most Americans believe were the good guys and anybody who looks like us by definition must be a good guy Fukuyama hypothesized that the biggest problem that we would face in the future would be boredom and we would would be plagued by boredom I know those sounds like funny words we'd be plagued by boredom because it would be such a peaceful world because a world made up of liberal democracies can't be anything but a peaceful world I think even more importantly what he was arguing quite explicitly was that we had the wind at our back in other words democracy was on the march and slowly but steadily over the course of time the rest of the world would look like the United States and Western Europe there was going to be no more fascism no more communism no more authoritarianism slowly but steadily those political systems would disappear that was one piece the other piece written by another neoconservative both of them were neoconservatives at the time Fujiyama no longer identifies as a neoconservative Krauthammer still does but both of them were very prominent neo-cons at the time but Krauthammer argued in his famous piece the unipolar moment that we had emerged from the Cold War as the most powerful state on the planet by far he argued and many others are quite correctly that we had never really seen a country that was as powerful as the United States and it was not only economically powerful it was militarily powerful and of course to go to the Fukuyama argument which meshes very well with the Krauthammer argument what Frank was saying was that we had this remarkably attractive ideology so not only did we have all this power but we had an attractive ideology as well and not surprisingly and I'll argue about this in more detail as we go along what happens over the course of the next 20 plus years is that the Fukuyama argument and the Krauthammer argument get married together and we use that big stick that Krauthammer describes right to push forward the process that Fukuyama said is inevitable in other words we use that military force at our disposal whenever we could to facilitate the spread of liberal democracy across the globe well in the belief that this would be good for the United States of course it has not worked out very well and we are in a hell of a lot of trouble today and I won't go into this but it's only going to get worse with the passage of time none of these problems that Obama faces are solvable at least the way we would like to solve them just to go over what I think of the five big problems facing us first of all they're the two wars Afghanistan and Iraq we're going to lose both of those wars it's just a matter of time and we've been in both of them for a long long time and the third problem is the Iranian nuclear program and I'll talk about all these in a bit more detail as we go along but on the Iranian nuclear program we're dedicated to shutting down their efforts to develop the nuclear fuel cycle I don't believe that there's any good evidence that they're developing nuclear weapons Seymour Hersh has a piece in The New Yorker that I think has it right despite all the talk about Iranian nuclear weapons no evidence to support it but in a funny way it doesn't matter because if you develop the full nuclear fuel cycle you're so close to having nuclear weapons that it's just a short jump to weaponizing so if the Iranian if the Iranians had been smart from the beginning they would have just done this out in the open and made it clear to everybody what they were doing developed the full nuclear fuel cycle which is perfectly legitimate they've signed an NPT the non-proliferation treaty which allows them to develop the full nuclear fuel cycle but again once you develop the full nuclear fuel cycle you're very close to nuclear weapons but the problem is Obama wants to shut down the nuclear fuel cycle and he's not going to do that and in fact I believe there's a good chance that they'll end up weaponizing I think they'd be fools not to weaponize I often tell audiences that if I was Ockman energy odds national security advisor and he asked me what to do I'd weaponize right I'd just tell the West you're not going to take your gun sites off me I'm going to weaponize forth probably faces the North Korean nuclear program we tried to stop North Korea from acquiring nuclear weapons in the 90s we failed and now they have nuclear weapons and the Obama administration would like to get them to give up their nuclear weapons but we can't do that it just hasn't worked and then the fifth problem is the israeli-palestinian conflict where the Obama administration much like the Bush administration and before that the Clinton administration is deeply dedicated to two-state solution and as you most of you know there was a big fight between President Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu over the borders the whole question of whether Israel is going to go back to the 67 borders that they're going to be minor modifications this was all a smokescreen that's not the nature of the fight between the two of them the nature of the fight is over with is going to be to States or not Benjamin Netanyahu was elected on the platform that there would be no two-state solution his government is filled with people who are opposed to a two-state solution and Obama of course wants two-state solution it but Obama is not going to get a two-state so it's not going to be a two-state solution so we're going to fail there too so basically if you look at where we are today we're in two wars maybe even three if you want to count Libya but I'm not going to talk about Libya we're in two wars Iraq and Afghanistan where we're going to lose number three we can't shut down the Iranian nuclear program number four we can't get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons and number five we can't get a two-state solution to settle the israeli-palestinian conflict so we're sort of 0 for 5 all that great enthusiasm all that talk about how powerful we were all of that talk about how we had the wind at our back it's not turned out very well at all and of course on top of all this we have huge budget deficits and all sorts of other problems in the country so the question you want to ask yourself is what went wrong here I mean it's really I think the question of the day and by the way the same question applies on the economic front if you think about what the economy looked like when Bill Clinton handed it over to George Bush in 2001 and then you look at where we are today something fundamentally wrong happened what was it I mean how did we end up in this mess and of course the same applies on the foreign policy front and what I want to do is give you my best take on why we ended up in the mess that we're in today I believe it's a function of the grand strategy that we chose some people might like the word foreign policy instead of grand strategy but the world I operated and we refer to it as grand strategy and the United States has basically a choice among four grand strategies and what I want to do is I want to lay out each of those grand strategies for you and then explain to you which one we took and then why we got ourselves into a heap of a lot of trouble okay first grand strategy that the United States can choose is isolationism which as many of you know was what the United States chose pretty much up until 1941 when we went into World War two isolationism is not a viable strategy today but the logic that underpins isolationism is very powerful in this room when I teach students I always say you want to pay very serious attention to the logic underpinning isolationism the reason that Franklin D Roosevelt had such enormous difficulty defeating the isolationist in the 30s and very early 40s was because there's a powerful logic that underpins it and isolationism basically says that the United States is physically separated from those areas of the world that have other great powers by giant moats called the Atlantic Ocean and the Pacific Ocean and because it's almost impossible to cross those moats and attack the United States we are remarkably secure and when you marry that simple fact with the fact that we have thousands of nuclear weapons it's hard to see why we should care who dominates Europe or who dominates Asia so what if Imperial Germany or Nazi Germany dominates Europe they can't get at us so what if Imperial Japan or some future Chinese threat dominates China how are they going to get across the Pacific Ocean as you all know the Pacific Ocean is six thousand miles wide you think there's going to be a Normandy like invasion on the California beaches as the Chinese Navy transports troops 6,000 miles across the Pacific Ocean not going to happen it's that kind of logic that underpins isolationism hard to argue against this is what Roosevelt was up against I'm not an isolationist that's the first choice second choice which is my favorite and which I'll talk about later on is what's called offshore balancing offshore balancers like me believe that there are three areas of the world that really matter Europe Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf Europe and North East Asia matter because that's where the great powers are and their potential threats to the United States and the Middle East or the Persian Gulf matters because that's what oil is an oil is a critical resource like none other okay so we have to care about the Gulf those are the three areas that Americans should be willing to fight and die over then the question becomes how do you fight and die in those areas when do you fight and die in those areas my argument is you build military forces to fight in those areas but you don't go into those areas unless there's one country in the region that threatens to dominate it to take it over to become what I would call a regional hegemon you go to war against Imperial Germany in 1970 seventeen you go to war against Nazi Germany in 1941 you stay in Europe after World War two to deal with the Soviet threat you go to war in the Pacific in December 1941 to deal with Imperial Japan those are potential threats to the United States because it's a serious possibility they'll dominate the entire region which is not numeric as interest otherwise you stay offshore that's offshore balancing again three areas of the world that matter three areas of the world that are worth fighting and dying for and you only fight and die in those regions where there's a potential hegemon that needs to be contained and where your essential to make containment work third strategy first is isolationism second is offshore balancing the third is called selective engagement selective engagement says that there are three areas of the world that matter John is correct those three areas of the world matter but it's our job to keep the peace in those areas it's not only our job to deal with the potential hegemon that's offshore balancing it's our job to be in the region to keep peace let me give you an example when the Cold War ended Soviet Union went away John said as an offshore balancer let's get out of I'd pull everything out of Europe I pull everything out of Europe there's no potential hegemon in the region right I take everything out the idea that we're spending absurd amounts of money to defend rich Europeans who have wonderful infrastructure while our infrastructure is going to hell in a handbasket drives me crazy but the Europeans defend themselves if Adolf Hitler comes back from the dead Germany goes on another rearmament campaign then I'm willing to come back in but absent that I stay out I would have pay for themselves I'm an offshore a balancer most of my realest friends disagree with me they say John we have to stay in Europe to keep the peace the Europeans are dangerous to themselves and ultimately dangerous to us let's stay over there and play the role of uncle sugar daddy okay that's selective engagement it's selective because they think that three areas of the world matter like the offshore balancers think just that they favor maintaining peace over dealing with potential hedge amounts okay so it's isolationism offshore balancing selective engagement then we come to the fourth grand strategy which is the most important from my story global domination this is the idea that the United States should dominate the globe there are no three important areas all areas are important you dominate the globe you're willing to use military force anywhere I think this view is best captured by Madeleine Albright's famous or infamous depending on your viewpoint comments that we are the indispensable nation we stand taller and we see further this is Madeleine Albright basically saying that we not only have a right but we have a responsibility to run the world we have the right to stick our nose in everybody else's business global domination global domination is the grand strategy that we adopted after 1989 and it remains our grand strategy we believe that we have a responsibility to run the world its Imperial by design now very importantly there are two kinds of global dominators one are the neoconservatives who are aligned in large part with the Republican Party and two are the liberal imperialists who are aligned with the Democratic Party and let me tell you what the difference between the two is the difference is that the Neo conservatives hate international institutions and privilege the unilateral use of military force the liberal imperialists on the other hand loves international institutions they're always talking about multilateralism which is a euphemism for institutions they love international institutions and they're not unwilling to use military force but they're quite skittish think about Bill Clinton in the 1990s Bill Clinton an administration that was filled with global dominators as did george w bush his successor but Bill Clinton had liberal imperialists driving the Train you remember Bill Clinton refused to use ground forces against Bosnia in 1995 or in Bosnia in 1995 or against Serbia in the war over Kosovo in 1999 very reluctant to get too involved remember what happened in Somalia when those soldiers were killed we quickly cut and ran and then the next year that was 1993 the next year 1994 we sat out the genocide and Rwanda because we were so spooked the liberal Imperials were so spooked by what happened in Somalia right and every time we used military force we tried to do it multilaterally we wanted allies to get involved right we wanted to work through institutions like the UN and NATO and so forth and so on but the goal was global domination after September 11th the neoconservative strand of global domination moved to the fore and you all remember the Bush Doctrine you remember the rhetoric after Afghanistan fell before we went into Iraq where we believed that we could act unilaterally with our military force to reshape the world in our own image this is Fukuyama and Krauthammer coming home to roost right it's the idea that the United States has this incredibly powerful military right and the wind at its back and doesn't need allies because we're not going to do it diplomatically we're going to do it with the big stick and we have a stick that's so big that we don't need a lot of help most of you probably don't remember this but right before the Iraq war which started on March 19 2003 George Bush dialed up Tony Blair and he told Tony if you don't want to go with us you don't have to go because he knew that Tony Blair was the only guy in Britain who wanted to go virtually everybody else in Britain thought this was a Looney Tunes operation including everybody in his government but Tony wanted to go Bush didn't want to get him in trouble Bush called him up says you don't have to go if you don't want and the reason he called them up and said that was because we didn't need them the American military could do it pretty much by itself if we took Saddam down very easily all right so it's the whole idea that you could do things unilaterally if you have doubts about military force and you have to use diplomacy where you think that the military operation is going to get messy then you need allies and of course think about what happened once Iraq or once Afghanistan go south then we start begging everybody to come and help us police the place because it's a mess and you need help but if you believe the big stick is going to you know produce quick and decisive victories to put it Muhammad Ali's terms you believe it's going to allow to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee you do not need lots of allies that's the neoconservative world view unilateralism not multilateralism and the big stick and that's what you see with republicans democrats both in the 1990s under Bill Clinton and now under Barack Obama they're interested in global dominance just like the neo cons but the difference is the Liberal Democrats are more skittish about military force okay the key event that really flips us is September 11th and after September 11th which happened shortly after Bush gets elected the the neoconservatives really are able to convince key players in the Bush administration that they have the magic formula which is again a combination of the Fukuyama Krauthammer worldview of course this ends up not working and we're in the mess that we see before us today and that I described at the beginning of this talk now the question is what went wrong how did we end up in such a mess the argument I want to make is that we made three fundamental errors number one we misunderstood the terrorist threat number two we did not have a healthy appreciation of the limits of military force and number three and most remarkably we did not understand how difficult it was to spread democracy at the end of a rifle barrel the three different flaws in this grand strategy and before I go on I want to make a quick point as I said to you there is this divide among the global dominators between the neoconservatives and the liberal imperialists but you want to remember that after September 11th and after the war in Afghanistan when Bush was pushing us to go to war against Iraq that he had much support from Democrats he had much support from the liberal imperialists I'm going to explain why this is the case in due course but the idea that Bush went to war and the liberal imperialists opposed him is simply wrong you all understand that George Bush I mean it should be Barack Obama does not have a single foreign policy advisor who opposed the Iraq war every single one of Barack Obama's advisors favored the Iraq war the only person in that administration was opposed to the war was Barack Obama himself this just shows you the extent to which the liberal imperialists and neoconservatives came together and it happened after Afghanistan I'll talk about that in due course okay first let's just talk about the terrorist threat and how we blew that three ways we blew it first of all Bush says that the threat is global in other words we have to go after every terrorist organization on the planet and furthermore he says that states like Iraq Iran Syria this is the famous or infamous axis of evil those states would have some times called rogue states are inextricably linked or tied to terrorist groups like al-qaeda so Bush says not only do we have to take out every terrorist group on the planet we've got to take out rogue states too because they're joined at the hip with these terrorist organizations this is crazy first of all there are terrorist groups all over the planet beating them is very difficult as we've discovered with al-qaeda it can be done but it's very difficult the idea is you're going to take on all of these terrorist groups at once is really asking for trouble furthermore the idea that states like Iraq Iran and Syria are friendly with al-qaeda is simply wrong Iran helped us defeat the Taliban in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 Syria assumed rehearses documented The New Yorker played a key role in cooperating with us to defeat some terrorists attacks after September 11th and there was no evidence despite prodigious efforts by the Bush administration to show otherwise that Saddam and Osama bin Laden were linked at the hip in fact they didn't like each other at all so the idea that we had to take out rogue States because they were joined at the hip with terrorist groups like al-qaeda was simply wrong in fact they would have been important allies in that fight and again the last thing you wanted to do was take on terrorist groups that didn't have their gunsights on you that's one mistake we made another mistake we made is we just greatly overestimated how dangerous the threat was I mean there's no question that we got whacked good on September 11th nobody would deny that it was a devastating attack but it was never duplicated they've never come close what's the terrorist threat that we have faced since September 11th the shoe bomber the underwear bomber tell me we're spending more money than the rest of the world put together on defense to deal with the shoe bomber the underwear bomber is there a terrorist threat that we face of course there is is it a serious threat yes how serious not that serious I'm sorry right does not justify all the hype that we've heard since September 11 and we've had constant references to imitate tacs we know it attacks nothing close to an imminent attack so number one they enlarge the target to the point where became almost impossible to win number two they greatly overestimated how dangerous these terrorist groups are number three and most importantly they misunderstood why they hate us this is a ghee issue question is why'd they attack us in September 11th why they hate us there are two possible answers they hate us because of who we are or they hate us because of our policies those are the only two possible answers okay we of course we're not going to say they hated us because of our policies in the wake of September 11th because if they hated us because of our policies then we in part would have been to blame would have been to blame for what happened on September 11th so we had to tell the story that they hated us because of who we are they hate our democratic values they hate the fact that we treat women as equals and so forth and so on you know the litany of charges the truth is there is a huge amount of survey data on this there is a huge amount of anecdotal evidence on this and they don't hate us because of who we are they hate us because of our policies okay but we said they hate us because of who we are right think about this remember the Bush Doctrine what was the Bush Doctrine all about the Bush Doctrine was all about going into the Middle East and turning countries like Iraq into democracies it was all about speeding up the Fujiyama process right in other words what we were saying is if they hate us because of who we are we can't change who we are so we're going to change who they are we're going to make them look like us I was adamantly opposed to the Iraq war as many of you know and I have many conservative friends and I used to say to them in the run-up to the war how can conservatives like you support this war and they would say why aren't you supporting this war right you're conservative and I'd say anybody who's got a conservative bone in their body should be opposed to this whole operation because it's social engineering a grand scale this is one of the most radical foreign policy endeavors I've ever seen in my life the idea that a bunch of white people are going to come across the Atlantic Ocean and do massive social engineering in the Arab and Islamic world at the end of a rifle barrel that's a conservative policy not on the planet I come from Thanks this is you know nutty right but but again if you have come to the conclusion that it's not our policies and you do not want to change our policies and instead you believe it's due to the fact that they hate democracy and who we are they you change who they are and that's what the Bush Doctrine was all about this is a fundamental mistake what they really hated right was number one the fact that we had troops in Saudi Arabia people in the Arab and Islamic world do not like us occupying their territory so of course we now have troops in Afghanistan and Iraq there was no al-qaeda problem in Iraq until we went in there now there's our al-qaeda in Mesopotamia right they hate us because of sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s that killed probably about 500,000 innocent Iraqis they hate us because of our support for Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territories right they hate us because we have supported all these thuggish governments in the Middle East for decades Barack Obama pretends like we're embracing democracy like we're this great friend of democracy in the Middle East who is he kidding we've been supporting these thugs we helped put many of them in power we kept them there for years we'd been no friend of democracy in the Middle East what are the principal reasons there's no democracy in the Middle East is the United States of America everybody knows that the people in that region don't like our policies you can disagree with them but they don't like the policies and actually many of them like the United States and like American values anyway so we misread the threat second is we did not understand the limits of military force and this is enormous importance to after the war in Afghanistan appeared I underline that word appeared to have ended in December 2001 remember we went to war in Afghanistan against the Taliban on October 7th 2001 ok less than a month after September 11th by early December the Taliban had completely collapsed and that's when we were trying to get Osama bin Laden you all remember that it looked like we had won a stunning victory it looked like we had the magic formula and what allowed us to think that we could go into Iraq and win quickly and easily and what brought the liberal imperialists on board to the enterprise was the belief that Afghanistan had demonstrated that small numbers of American ground forces combined with sophisticated aircraft with smart bombs working with local forces could bring down the Taliban bring down Saddam and we could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee I used to say to people if you could convince me we could bring down Saddam in two weeks you know hardly any casualties and install a democracy I'm in favor of doing it right you tell me you've got a magic formula for taking out the Iranian nuclear program forever I'm for it right the problem is we don't have that right but it went back to Afghanistan what we had in December 2001 was not a victory it was a mirage it was a mirage I did not understand this at the time I'm embarrassed to say but we did not win a quick and decisive victory here's the problem we faced in Afghanistan the problem is we could not decisively defeat the Taliban when I was young in the American military during the Vietnam War years this was the problem that we faced we could never decisively defeat the Vietcong right you could whack them good but they'd melt away and come back to fight another day so what happens in Afghanistan in December 2001 is that we whack the Taliban really them and they disappear into the countryside and they disappear into Pakistan but they're going to come back another day to fight second reason we can't win in Afghanistan is that the man that we put in charge in Kabul is Hamid Karzai who's number one a crook and number two massively incompetent that means that when the Taliban come back from the dead the Karzai government is not going to be able to deal with the Taliban so who do you think is going to have to deal with the Taliban uncle sugar yes so if you chart American forces in Afghanistan you know it's just gone like this over time up and up and up as you know Obama has greatly increased the number of American troops in Afghanistan years after the war was supposed to have been won why because the Taliban came back from the dead the Karzai government can't deal with it now to take this a step further again from Vietnam we know that when you are fighting on behalf of a government in Saigon or Kabul that has no legitimacy you have no legitimacy you are seen as an occupier and furthermore everybody cut in those at some point you're going to leave and the Taliban is going to stay so they're going to be very reluctant to work with you and this is the problem we face so what happened is that we ended up thinking we had won a great victory in Afghanistan and we were going to duplicate that in Iraq and Fay Act what happened in Afghanistan is we want a temporary victory which would eventually go south again and then we went traipsing off to Iraq where we thought we were going to win another quick victory because we had just proved that we had the magic formula when in fact we didn't have the magic formula so there we are in Afghanistan and they are almost everybody I know believes it's just a matter of time before we lose and in Iraq the only thing we can hope for is that they throw us out at the end of this year we're doing our best to stay there right because we understand that once we leave we'll all hell will break loose so we want to stay but they don't want us to stay it appears but we may end up staying but either way total mess two wars total messes one footnote to this there are some people who argue that the problem is that we didn't have the right counterinsurgency doctrine and once we got the right counterinsurgency doctrine in December of 2006 with the new Field Manual 3 - 24 and then we had the surge a month later in January 2007 we finally figured out what to do and now we're in really good shape in Iraq let's assume that that's true and the John's story that we're in trouble in Iraq is wrong ok let's just assume that the problem nevertheless is that to win a counterinsurgency whether you're the British in Malaysia the Americans in Vietnam or the Americans in Afghanistan and Iraq the problem is that it takes well over 10 years to win a counterinsurgency assuming you can do it but if it takes you 10 years you cannot float like a butterfly and sting like a bay and floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee was the key to the Bush Doctrine because we're going to do Afghanistan then we were going to do a rack pull back out reload the shotgun do Iran do Syria pretty soon everybody would be so scared they'd just throw their hands up and jump on the American band way you know the Israelis when they heard in early 2002 remember Afghanistan we're talking December 2001 early 2002 the Israelis catch get wind that we're thinking of doing Iraq and they send the team over here to say are you guys crazy Iran is the real threat not Iraq why aren't you doing Iran what we convince the Israelis is that we're going to do a rack first because it's the low-hanging fruit and then we're going to do Iran and then we're going to do Syria right so the Israelis actually get on board for doing Iraq but they keep reminding us don't forget when you're done with Iraq you've got to do her in right and see we say don't worry not only going to do Iran we're going to do Syria because again the name of the game here is to transform the entire region it gets back to that question of why do they hate us if you think about it they hate us because of who we are therefore we have to transform who transform them and change who they are and we think we can do it with military force but again what happened in Afghanistan was a barrage and that's why all these Democrats were fools to abandon their skepticism about military force my final point spreading democracy this is quite amazing there is a huge literature in the social sciences that comes to one clear conclusion that that doesn't often happen in the social sciences right I can tell you it's very easy whenever you teach on any subject put out pieces by people on one side and people on the other side right but with regard to the question of how easy it is to spread democracy the literature is clear it is remarkably difficult to do people will say well what about Germany and Japan well Germany and Japan are exceptions they're modern industrialized countries and in the case of Germany they had a history with democracy remember of Aimar Germany so once we went in there and destroyed the place and we literally destroyed both of those countries in world war 2 Japan and Germany given the infrastructure they had given their histories it was rather easy to create a democracy it's actually rather easy but if you're talking about creating democracy and Afghanistan creating democracy in Iraq right and you look at the centrifugal forces that are at play in countries like Iraq this is going to be a very tricky situation I mean what's amazing about the Bush administration is they thought that this would happen lickety-split this is why they thought they could float like a butterfly and sting like a bee their basic view was that we were going to do in the Middle East what happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 you all remember when the Soviet Union pulls out of East or they don't actually pull out at the moment when the cold war ends and Soviets start pulling out of Eastern Europe most of the Eastern European countries emerges democracy's imperfect democracies but nevertheless democracies so the basic Bush / neoconservative worldview is that if you topple tyrants like Saddam Hussein that democracy will just break out this sort of gets to the Frank Fukuyama Linna thesis but Frank Fukuyama much to his credit opposed the Iraq war he thought the Iraq war was a bad idea he thought that democracy would eventually spread across the globe but it would take time and in places like in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Middle East were generally right it would be a function of what was happening inside those countries not American military force but anyway because we misread the terrorist threat number one number two because we misread what happened in Afghanistan and we did not have a healthy appreciation of the limits of military force we got ourselves into trouble in both Afghanistan and and then finally because we did not appreciate how difficult it is to spread democracy we found out that it was impossible to create democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan quickly so that we again could get out and move on to the next target so I think those are the factors that explain why we are in so much trouble today and the more general point that I tried to make was that the reason we are in trouble is because we adopted this grand strategy of global dominance after 1989 and global dominance is in my opinion a remarkably foolish strategy because it's impossible for any country the United States included to run the entire globe and it's especially difficult if not impossible to do that if you try and do it at the end of a rifle barrel [Applause]

Channel: The University of Chicago

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Keywords: uncommon core lectures, uncommon core, john mearsheimer north korea, john mearsheimer, mearsheimer, john j. mearsheimer, john mearsheimer israel, decline of us hegemony, uchicago, uchicago political science, john mearsheimer iran, foreign policy, chicago university, john j. mearsheimer china, university of chicago, mearsheimer israel, us foreign policy in the middle east, uchicago economics, university of chicago economics, university of chicago department of economics lecture

Id: sKFHe0Y6c_0

Length: 45min 39sec (2739 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 01 2011

Reddit Comments

[u/workingclassfinesser]

Are you a big fam of Mearsheimer, OP?

[u/MoustacheAmbassadeur]

john mearsheimer is a doomer