Thank you for coming. We've got a great discussion and a great panel on John Mearsheimer's The Great Delusion. Before we start, I did want to highlight that while we don't expect any emergencies, in case we do, we will...
We'll relocate over to the National Geographic Museum, which is next door. They've got a great cafe. I'm not taking any money from them or trying to plug, but we'll reconnoiter. So just listen to my instructions if.
if we have an emergency. I am really excited to welcome John Mearsheimer from the University of Chicago and Charlie Glazer from George Washington University for a discussion on John's book, The Great Delusion. Thank you both for coming. It's great to have you at CSIS. John, before we start, too, I wanted to thank you for your clarity.
You write clearly. and lucidly your arguments are clear. That serves, in general, good purpose, but I think for those who disagree, it also provides an opportunity to understand and to fire back as well.
I wanted to begin, actually, by reading how you dedicate your book, because I thought that was interesting, and I learned something that I didn't know about, which was you say that, I would like to dedicate this book to all the students I have taught over the years, going back to when I taught my first course at Mohawk Valley Community College. Community College, that was news to me in upstate New York in 1974. And I just wanted to ask, as you write a book like this, and we'll get into the discussion on policy issues, you enjoy the process of teaching and educating people and then influencing to some degree. Can you tell us when you write a book like this also, what's your motivation on education along these lines and what's encouraging?
people to take steps and we'll get to some of that a little bit later but what's how important is education here well there are a number of points I would make in response to this Seth first of all I just learned a lot from students being a scholar is really a dialectical process Charlie for example was at the University of Chicago for many years and he and I were close colleagues and still are close friends but we disagree on all sorts of issues and I benefited greatly from going back and forth with Charlie and one thing that happens at the University of Chicago and I'm sure it happens at most other schools around the country is that when you go into a classroom and here we're talking mainly about seminars you engage in combat with the students right and you fight about ideas and in the process of fighting about ideas you learn all sorts of things that you otherwise didn't know and indeed in some cases you go in there with an idea firmly implanted in your brain you engage in combat with the students and they change your mind there are actually a lot of ideas I have about international politics it would be impossible to pinpoint them that I learned from students as hard as that may be to believe I would also say that I have never viewed myself as someone who preaches you know a lot of people probably think Mr. Realism, and I like to go into a class and do everything I can to convert everybody in the class to my way of thinking about the world. I've never felt that way at all. I think it's very important that people figure out for themselves how they think about the world.
And I do think that the great advantage of dealing with me is that I am very clear, as you were pointing out. So you can take your bearings from my arguments and figure out where you agree. and where you disagree and benefit greatly from that. So when I write a book like this, I do hope that a lot of people agree with a lot of what I say.
I am trying to convince some people for sure, but I think even more importantly, it's just imperative that someone get these ideas out there and other people think about the ideas and think about where they agree and disagree. And I think this is an important public service that we provide. we academics, not only in the context of the classroom at a place like the University of Chicago, but in the broader public at large. That's helpful. And I think that'll be more apparent as we get into the policy implications of this.
Let me start with, I'm going to outline what I take to be the basic argument, but let me give you a chance after I do that to define a couple of key terms, particularly liberalism, realism, nationalism, and liberal hegemony. So for people who haven't read it, what I take to be some of the key parts of the book, and we'll let you expound on the arguments a little bit later, is that the U.S., after the end of the Cold War, became so powerful a unipolar international system that it adopted a profoundly liberal foreign policy, commonly referred to as you call liberal hegemony. And that this strategy, in part, attempted to turn... many countries into liberal democracies while also fostering an open international system and building international institutions. But you also note that nationalism and realism generally trump, no pun intended here, trump liberalism and that when you come to the end of the book you you advocate a policy of restraint.
So before getting you to expound on these arguments, really, can you define some of the terms you use first, and then we'll get into the argument and the evidence? Yeah, just let me make one quick preliminary point. I distinguish very clearly between liberalism at home and liberalism abroad. And my argument is that I'm profoundly thankful that I was born in the United States of America, which is a liberal democracy.
And I do believe liberal democracy is the best. political form in the world. My argument is that when you take liberalism and you turn it into a foreign policy, that's when you get into trouble. So this is not an argument against liberalism per se, it's an argument against the liberal foreign policy. Now the question that Seth asked me is how would I define liberalism?
Let me define liberalism and nationalism as best I can at the same time. Liberalism is a theory or an ideology that focuses on the individual. Liberalism assumes that we are naturally individuals first and foremost who form social contracts. Nationalism, on the other hand, is predicated on the assumption that we are first and foremost Social animals who carve out room for our individualism.
This is a terribly important distinction which is really in essence what separates nationalism from liberalism. Liberalism focuses on the individual. You know all the emphasis we place on individual rights in this country. Whereas nationalism focuses on the tribe. Now let me just unpack this a bit more.
Liberalism not only focuses on the individual, but it places great emphasis on inalienable rights, individual rights. Liberals believe, and this includes I think virtually all Americans, that we are all born, all meaning everybody on the planet, with a set of inalienable rights. And once you assume that all individuals have a particular set of rights. You have, in effect, a universalist ideology. In other words, you go from individualism to universalism.
And that, in large part, is what drives liberal hegemony. Now nationalism on the other hand does not focus on the individual, it focuses on groups, it focuses on tribes, it says that we're social animals from the get-go, and you in effect privilege the people inside of your group. Now on the the planet today, the highest group that people identify with is the nation.
And we live in a world that's populated with nations. And those nations all want their own state. See the key word, nation state, nation state. So when John argues that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet, he says just look at the globe today.
The globe is filled with nothing but nation states. The nation states are the. embodiment of liberalism. Shows you what a powerful force liberalism is. So those would be my two definitions.
Can I interrupt you for a second on liberalism? I'm going to quote you from comments earlier on the book, just so people are aware. You note, for example, that Republicans and Democrats are the Tweedledee and Tweedledum on foreign policy. They're both liberals, but I think it would be helpful for you to expound on that.
Yeah, it's very important to understand that I'm not being. using the word liberal here in the sense that it's commonly used in political parties. In the United States where Democrats are liberals and Republicans are conservatives.
I'm using liberal in the Lockean, that's John Locke. Lockean sense of the term, where all Americans are liberals. That's because... all Americans are deeply concerned about rights. And the principle difference between Republicans and Democrats is really over how you think about rights.
But both believe in rights. We are all liberal Democrats. We all believe in the Bill of Rights. We all believe what's in the Declaration of Independence. So my argument is, especially with regard to foreign policy, that both Republican administrations and Democratic administrations, this excludes the Trump administration, but up to the Trump administration, Clinton, Bush, Obama, all three of those administrations, whether they were Republican or Democratic, pursued liberal hegemony, which is...
is consistent with the fact that we have liberalism in our DNA, which as I said, is a good thing domestically, but it's a source of big trouble as a foreign policy. So I wanted to give you a chance to also unpack and then to Charlie to comment as well on realism, which is one of the three that you have not defined here. Yeah.
Well, realism, which I've done most of my work on over the course of my lifetime, is an ism that that focuses on states, states of the principal actor in the realist story, and the key assumption, as I'm sure almost all of you know, is that those states operate in an anarchic system, which means there's no higher authority above them. And for that reason, states pay great attention to the balance of power. Realism is an ideological phenomenon. or it's a theory that says that the domestic structure doesn't matter much at all. In other words, a good liberal would say whether or not a state is a liberal democracy matters greatly, and of course, that's why liberal hegemony is all about promoting liberalism across the planet.
A realist would say that states are basically black boxes. What kind of political system they have doesn't matter that much. What really matters the most is the balance of power. Charlie, I was going to give you an opportunity to take a moment. Your views on realism are slightly different from John's, so can you take a moment to highlight that?
Yeah, just briefly. So within structural realism, which is the type of realism that focuses on anarchy, there is a deep divide between people who think that the international system itself, basically, basically drive states into competition, not always, but usually. And then a different group of analysts, and I would put myself in that category of being defensive realists, say under certain conditions, competition between states is not the best way for them to achieve their goals and they can cooperate.
And at the core of this is the security dilemma, which is the question of whether when you compete or when you try to pursue security, whether you make your adversary more insecure or not, and that can vary. The key to difference between offensive and defensive realism, I think, if you had to boil it down to one thing, is that offensive realists say you should only focus on the balance of power, and therefore, in a sense, you need to assume the worst about your adversary. It doesn't matter what your adversary's goals might be. The adversary could eliminate you from the system, so you assume the worst. And defensive realists on the flip side say, no, if you assume the worst, you may actually end up provoking your adversary, making your adversary more insecure, and in turn making yourself more insecure.
And so these are two two different views. They accept the basic assumptions of realism hold. Anarchy, states as rational actors, unitary actors, black boxing.
But the question is when you look out at the international system, do you assume the worst or not? And it can lead you to... very different conclusions, both about competition and cooperation, but also closely related about the importance of the security dilemma. So let's get to the implications of your argument. What happened, if you can take us back, what happened after the Cold War ended?
Part of what you're trying to describe is the shift, the structural shift in the system from a bipolar system during the Cold War. to a unipolar system. When we get into these terms, including liberal hegemony, what happens after the Soviet Union collapses? What happens to US foreign policy in this period?
My argument to build on Seth's question is that if you're in a bipolar system or a multi-polar system you cannot pursue liberal hegemony. You have to pursue a realist foreign policy because by definition great power politics matters because there are more than one great power in the system. So during the Cold War, the United States acted in a largely realist fashion vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Cold War ends, the Soviet Union...
collapses and the United States emerges as the most powerful state on the planet. And balance of power considerations largely go out the window because there's no rival great power. The United States is incredibly powerful.
So the question is, what do we do? And for a country like the United States that has liberalism wired into it, it's hardly surprising given how much power it has. that it's going to try to remake the world in its own image. Now what exactly does that mean?
And this gets to the essence of what liberal hegemony is. My argument is liberal hegemony has three elements, the first of which is the most important. The first is to spread liberal democracy all over the world. It's to topple authoritarian regimes and replace them with liberal democracies.
The second goal is to promote an old open international economic order. Sort of what we had in the West during the Cold War. Just expand that to the entire planet.
And then the third goal of liberal hegemony is to expand the institutions we have. This is think NATO expansion, EU expansion. And to increase the membership in those institutions. So the more countries that you get into the institutions, the more countries that you get hooked on capitalism, and the more countries that you turn into liberal democracy, the more the world looks like the United States, and the more the world looks like the United States, how could we have a better situation? And more specifically, if you spread democracy, liberal democracy across the planet, there are really two key results that liberal hegemonists focus on.
One is you solve the human rights problem, because liberal democracies hardly ever... violate the human rights of their citizenry in major ways. It's usually authoritarian regimes that do that.
So if you can spread liberal democracy across the planet, you basically take the problem of human rights violations off the table. Second, and this is an argument that many of you have heard many times, is that if you spread liberal democracy across the planet, you get peace. Because liberal democracies don't fight each other.
And if you believe that terrorism and proliferation are big problems as well as interstate war, then creating a world that's filled with liberal democracy solves all those problems as well. So liberal democracy was a very ambitious foreign policy that was filled with good intentions but ultimately failed. I'd like to go back and I want to invite Charlie to chime in as well. I want to go back to the Cold War and just talk about empirics for a moment.
What's your What's your view about the early phase? So the Cold War was a bipolar system. The early phase of the Cold War was an attempt, it sounds like, to do exactly what you're talking about, to establish international institutions in ways that sound a lot like liberal hegemony.
So why or why not did we see what was occurring in the early phases of the Cold War? Why is that not liberal hegemony? or is it? And then the second question is, again, it's a bipolar system. How do we explain in that kind of system the decision by successive U.S. administrations to get bogged down in Vietnam or to get bogged down in El Salvador or in Mozambique or in Guatemala?
One would think that a more realist interpretation would cause the U.S. in that case. to focus on the Soviets predominantly and not get bogged down in these relatively insignificant countries? Yeah, I'll take your first question first. We built institutions like NATO and the European Union as well, largely for purposes of waging security competition with the Soviet Union.
I believe that the institutions that were created in the West. mainly by the United States in the context of the Cold War were basically realist institutions. This is not to say they didn't have a liberal flavor to them, but they were basically designed for the purpose of waging war against the Soviet Union waging security competition because thank God we didn't have a war.
And really what happens at the end of the Cold War is that we take those institutions and we incorporate into a different strategy, which is liberal hegemony. And I think the example that highlights this most clearly is the expansion of NATO and the EU eastward towards Russia. From an American point of view, we were expanding NATO, just to focus on NATO for a second, not because we wanted NATO to contain Russia.
We wanted NATO to contain Russia. It's really quite remarkable if you look at the historical record, is that there's really no evidence that NATO expansion was seen as a means of containing Russia. In fact, what we were doing was we were expanding NATO, expanding the EU, and fostering the color revolutions like the Orange Revolution in Ukraine and the Rose Revolution in Georgia for the purposes of creating a security community, creating a peaceful...
liberal region in Eastern Europe, just like we had a peaceful, liberal region in Western Europe. So that NATO expansion was not realist. But during the Cold War, if you look at what NATO was up to, it was very realist. So the argument I'm making is that the foundation of our foreign policy changed in fundamental ways when the Cold War ended, and especially when the Soviet Union collapsed. And this is reflected in how we thought about institutions.
Now with regard to your second question, the fact is, let's just focus on Vietnam for a second, the fact is virtually every realist opposed the Vietnam War. Two of the biggest thorns in LBJ's side on Vietnam were Hans Morgenthau and Walter Lippmann, both of whom were card-carrying realists. Kenneth Waltz was an early opponent of the Vietnam War, well before it escalated in March 65 when the Marines landed at that time. Da Nang. Realists thought Vietnam was a major mistake.
Nevertheless, the United States committed this major mistake. What this tells you, I'm sad to say, is that realism is sometimes wrong. That realism as a predictive theory, I believe at its best, gets it right 75% of the time, and the other 25% of the time, it's wrong.
It's just the nature of social science theory. So we could point to a number of cases besides the Vietnam. debacle that I think were instances where the United States acted in ways that did not accord with basic realist logic. And my argument, by the way, is when you don't act in ways that accord with realist logic, you get your snout whacked.
And we got our snout whacked good in Vietnam. Charlie, I wanted to give you a chance to weigh in on this too. So I'd say one thing is John reminded us the way he's using liberal would include Democrats and Republicans. I think it's good to keep in mind also the way that we use realist in the academy does not necessarily quite the way realist is used in the press so it's often in the in the public in the press or and maybe even in some elite discourse real to the ones who want to use force and consistently favor the use of force in international policy sometimes realist academic realist scholarly realist do it like think force is the right means but in fact there's a big divergence between the academic understanding and the more the public use, which is realists have consistently been against the use of force when much of the U.S. public and foreign policy establishment was in favor.
So Vietnam is one example. The Iraq War in 2003 is another example. But I would also say NATO expansion.
So here's a case where the vast majority of realists, offensive and defensive, although I think that the defensive realists have the stronger argument here, but were against NATO expansion. And it wasn't because... because people thought that it was bad to try and bring capitalism or democracy to Central Europe, but the concern was that it would threaten Russia. And for a decade or so, this didn't seem to be a failing policy. But now we've seen in the last handful of years, most dramatically starting with Crimea, but even before then, that the Russians really meant what they said, which was they really did see NATO as a possible threat of a Western movement toward their border.
as a possible threat. I don't completely agree with John that that's the only reason for Putin's more assertive Russian behavior, but I think it's a very important one, including also United States ballistic missile defenses and getting out of the ABM Treaty, which also Russia does see as a threat to its security. So the point is, the realist prediction in the mid-'90s that NATO expansion would backfire, mid to late-'90s, is at least partially coming true. Now, whether or not partial NATO expansion...
Because as you know, it's gone through many tranches. Whether we could have expanded NATO really to Central Europe but not kept going, and how that would have affected Russia is a more open and nuanced question. But certainly when we included the Baltic countries, and when we raised the possibility of bringing in Ukraine and Georgia, that was maybe if not not decisive, but at least the sum of it was too much. So there may have been some possibility, but anyway, that's a more detailed question.
But the point is that realists were opposed to all of these uses and expansions of force. Can I just pick up on what Charlie said? It is true that most people think that realists are warmongers, and that's not true at all.
And most realists are defensive realists, as Charlie pointed out, and believe that the structure of the international system pushes states to behave in rather status quo oriented kind of ways. But what I tried to do in the book was to say that it's not just realism that should engender caution and restraint. It's also nationalism. My argument is that nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet.
when a state like the United States tries to interfere in the politics of other countries, put the realist logic that Charlie just laid out aside, there's this whole nationalism logic that kicks in. You all know, as Americans, or at least the Americans in the audience, that we do not like the idea of the Russians interfering in our domestic political system. The idea that they might have interfered in the 2016 election drives Americans crazy because this is a violation of our sovereignty, of our self-determination.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is nationalism. And as my mother taught me when I was a little boy, what's good for the goose is good for the gander. And if we don't like them interfering in our domestic politics, you can rest assured that when we interfere in their domestic politics, they're not going to be very happy about that. And that's one of the key points that I tried to drive home. that when you're interested in promoting liberal democracy, and especially when you're interested in using military force to topple regimes and do social engineering in countries like Iraq, Syria, Libya, or Afghanistan, you are asking for a lot of trouble.
And my basic view is you want to stay out of those places, right? You're jumping into a briar patch when you go into a place like Iraq. And that's the nationalism logic cutting against liberal hegemony, which I would marry to the realist logic.
which Charlie was pointing to. So one question before we get deeper into the restraint argument is I'd be interested in both of your views on your sense of the outcome, the effectiveness, the performance of US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War. We've talked a little bit about Iraq, but I'd be interested in your views.
Obviously the US overthrew the regime in Libya, Qaddafi, it engaged and sent. forces, still has them in Afghanistan. Obviously, it's still fighting in Iraq.
Debated whether to do the same in Syria and does have small numbers of U.S. forces in Syria. So what's your sense about how liberal hegemony has performed since the end of the Cold War? I'll give you my quick take on this and then turn it over to Charlie.
I look at three sort of sets of events first is the Bush doctrine to his NATO expansion which we've talked a bit about and three is engagement with China all three of these I believe were failures the Bush doctrine was basically an attempt to spread democracy across the Middle East Iraq was not supposed to be the first regime that we toppled and turned into a democracy we were then going to do Syria and we might not even had to do Iran because They would have bandwagoned with us when they saw how powerful we were militarily and how good we were at social engineering. But the name of the game with the Bush doctrine was basically to turn. The Middle East into a sea of democracies.
Again, because that takes the human rights problem off the table, it causes peace, and once you have peace, the terrorism and proliferation problems are off the table. So that was the basic goal. That's lost now because this whole enterprise... crashed and burned in Iraq.
Although we then tried Libya and Syria as well, so maybe I shouldn't say that. But anyway, I think that was a colossal failure. And I think the amount of blood that we have on our hands for what happened in the greater Middle East is truly astonishing. And this had all sorts of collateral effects, like refugees flowing into Europe, which has caused significant political problems there. So the Bush Doctrine is the first great failure.
And then, of course, the attempt to create a zone of peace in Eastern Europe through NATO expansion, EU expansion, and the color revolutions ultimately backfired on us. Building on Charlie's point, we might have been able to get away with it. with limited NATO and EU expansion. But Ukraine and Georgia was a bridge too far. It blew up in our face.
Now we have terrible relations with the Russians. And in my opinion, that is not in the American national interest because we have all sorts of reasons to want to have close relations with the Russians. And then the third case would be engagement with China. In the early 1990s, when it became clear that China was rising at a rapid clip, there were a number of people people who were very worried about that fact because of what it would mean for a shift in the balance of power.
And of course, the liberal response to this is that what we have to do is engage with China. And the basic operating assumption was that if we could get China hooked on capitalism, in other words, integrate it into the open international economy, get it into all these institutions and give it influence in these institutions, turn it into a responsible stakeholder, as people said, it would then democratize it. democratize, and of course, once it democratized, it's nothing but peace, love, and dope from there on out, because we're a democracy, Japan's a democracy, India's a democracy, and China's a democracy.
Well, it failed. There's no evidence that China's about to become a democracy. On the contrary, and worse than that, in the process, we helped create a Goliath. I used to say this in the early 2000s when I'd go to places like Taiwan, and I'd run into all these Taiwanese businessmen who were doing business with the Chinese and saying how wonderful. wonderful it was that everybody was getting rich.
I'd say, do you people understand that what you're doing is you're making a country that said it's going to devour you more and more powerful? You're helping put them in a position where they will devour you. They, of course, said, oh, you don't understand.
What's going to happen is China is going to become a democracy. They're going to be, you know, defanged, and we're all going to live happily ever after. Well, it didn't work, and now they got Goliath on their doorstep. Okay, Charlie, you're...
I'm not gonna I'm not gonna fall on that one not gonna touch the China part I would say on Iraq that it's important to keep in mind and I know John touches you know deals with us somewhat in the book that it may well have been that spreading democracy was only the third most important rationale for going into Iraq and the concern about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and concern about misplaced on both cases about terrorism we're actually the more prominent and I think the more powerful public arguments, but we'd have to get, you know, it'd be a serious slicing and dicing to figure that out, but it wasn't only to go in and bring democracy to Iraq and to the Middle East, and I think that without those other factors, it wouldn't have happened, and my own sense is that without the desire to spread democracy, it probably would have happened, but that's a trickier argument, because there were certainly people in the Bush administration who were very interested in the liberal argument, but I just think for the, on the historical merits, the. I want to touch on that. I want to touch on a theoretical issue related to his book and just sort of see what he responds. And it's related to this, which is that John's described here and large part in the book about, in a sense, a competition between the various isms, the nationalism, the liberalism, and realism. But I think it's important that they are, in certain circumstances, they're definitely in conflict with each other.
Like if a liberal, spreading liberalism may very much run, particularly if you use force, may run into of deep opposition among other reasons for nationalist reasons. But from the state, from the perspective of the country that is trying to spread liberalism, it may well be that realism and nationalism can all work together at the same time. And to some extent for better and to some extent worse.
So one way to think about it is that realism is conditional and in some situations you have real deep security concerns or... and others that you don't. You don't have those deep security concerns, it's not against doing other things.
It becomes permissive. So it's not inconsistent at that time when you're in a unipolar world to go out and pursue other missions, other objectives that you might not be able to pursue when you're. when you are insecure. So it's not really so much that at various times that liberalism and realism compete, but that in some sense you need a permissive environment which realism explains to allow the liberal impulse to take full control. course.
And also that it's not necessarily inconsistent with a liberal approach to also be nationalist at home. I think that when you go abroad, you're going to run into nationalist opposition. But nationalism, the idea in some ways, as John explains in the book, once again, correct, is that nationalism can also have a sense of superiority, if not a cultural superiority, at least that your style broadly defined as superior, which could actually reinforce the desire to spread liberalized.
ideas because it's part of your culture, broadly speaking. That you live in an American democracy, and America is better than other places, partly, but not only because it's democratic. So these two impulses, the nationalist impulse and the liberal impulse, can combine to make a state doubly overconfident that what it's doing is a good idea and appropriate.
In that case, you have all three theories working simultaneously. You have the permissive realist environment. combined with the potential, with the value of spreading liberalism, which the value is not disputed, at least for the other country domestically.
It may not be good internationally. And the nationalism. So in a certain sense, they're clashing, but I think that the clash is much greater when you take these liberal ideas and go use them internationally than it is domestically, where they can actually join together, either effectively or dangerously.
And I'm not sure that's always captured in the... in the spirit of your presentation? Yeah.
Let me make two sets of points. First, I just want to say a very quick word about the invasion of Iraq. And Charlie made the argument that the principal reasons that we went into Iraq were because of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, and the fact that many people believed that those two were conjoined in the context of Iraq. I actually believe that's true.
I want to be very clear on that. But what we What we did when we went into Iraq is we went in with a formula that said that the way to deal with those two problems was to pursue liberal hegemony. In other words, if we could democratize the Middle East, we would take those problems off the table. So, I don't see it as an either or.
It's sort of part of a seamless web. Second point, Charlie and I talked about this earlier, and I wish I had talked to him about this before I. wrote the book for the final time because I would make it clearer than I did in the book and certainly clearer than I have in this presentation or other presentations it's very important to understand that what I'm arguing is that liberalism and nationalism can exist together inside a particular state and you can have a person who's basically a liberal believes fervently in individual rights a nationalist an american nationalist and a realist at the same time and i think charlie fits that description and i fit that description we're all nationalists we're all liberals and we're all realists right that's inside the black box the other example i like to give that really highlights this has to do with madeleine albright madeleine albright is a canonical liberal when it comes to foreign policy if there's any single person I would identify with liberal hegemony it's Madeleine Albright but at the same time she is also a fervent nationalist Madeleine Albright's most famous words are these when asked on NBC why the United States is intervening here there and everywhere she said it's because we are the indispensable nation we stand taller and we see further Just think about those words. First of all, we. We as opposed to the other.
We as opposed to the other. We stand taller. We see further.
We're the indispensable nation. This is what happens when you talk with your hands. This is the chauvinism which you alluded to. That's why I keep my distance. That's why he keeps his distance.
Me too. Me too. But this is the. chauvinism, right? And furthermore just Think about the words that Madeleine Albright uses.
We are the indispensable nation. Nation. There it is.
So Madeleine Albright is a nationalist. At the same time, she is a liberal hegemonist. And many Americans fit that category.
But as Charlie pointed out, and I point out in the book, and I tried to point out here, it's when you take liberalism abroad that liberalism and nationalism tend to clash and liberalism and realism tend to clash. to clash. At home, liberalism and nationalism can get along quite well, and that's why you can have a liberal democracy like the United States that is also nationalistic at its core. So I wanted to give everybody a chance to ask questions in a moment, but I wanted to end this section by asking about where we're going now. So what is your sense, A, of the structure of the international system and where it's going, and And what does that then imply about US foreign policy?
I think. And then I'll go to Charlie when I'm sure. Sure, sure. I think it's quite clear that what the United States is doing is moving from a unipolar world to a multipolar world.
I think that's reflected in the Trump administration's national security strategy. from December of 2017 and the national defense strategy that came out of the Pentagon earlier this year. They see us operating in a multipolar world, one having to do with the rise of China and two having having to do with the resurrection of Russian power. This is not to deny for one second that the United States remains the most powerful state on the planet, the most powerful of those three great powers.
But we're in a multipolar world. And as you know, my argument is that once you leave unipolarity and go to either bipolarity or multipolarity, a country can no longer pursue liberal hegemony. So my argument is that given that the structure of the world is changing, we'll liberal hegemony is basically history.
Now, there's an alternative way of looking at this, and that's to focus on Donald Trump. There's no question, if you look at Donald Trump's campaign platform, that he ran against liberal hegemony. I would make the argument, by the way, that Barack Obama ran against liberal hegemony, and both of them were elected. And the reason they were elected was because liberal hegemony was an abject failure.
Donald Trump ran against the foreign policy establishment in Washington, and it's not the only reason he won, but it is one of the reasons he won. The policy is bankrupt. So the question you have to then ask yourself is whether you think that Trump has the capability to defeat the foreign policy establishment here in Washington, which is so deeply committed to liberal hegemony.
And it's hitting in front of you right now. Yes. Right. It's a very interesting question.
And by the way, as most of you know, Obama clashed with the foreign policy establishment and he clearly lost. He thought that the blob won in a famous interview with Jeffrey Goldberg a few months before he left the White House. He basically conceded defeat.
And again, this highlights the fact that Obama was elected on the platform that we had to do nationals. nation building at home and be much less intervention on the foreign policy front. The question is, do you think that Trump could do that?
My argument is it's a moot question because the structure of the system is changing. But I do think, however, if the structure of the system were not changing, let's assume that China and Russia were not causing us to enter a multipolar world, I think a good case could be made that Trump would still defeat the blob. So, Charlie, building on this, on this point, what's your sense also of the structure of the system and where we're going?
And what's your sense right now of what's possible in Washington in the sense of building a policy, whether we can move from a liberal hegemonic policy to one that is much more of a realist one? Okay, so I mean I should just say I haven't taken a position on how much liberalism there should be in U.S. policy, but I actually tend to agree with John, even though we have different realisms. But my sense is that, particularly with respect to China, whether you call it polarity or not, and there's issues with calling it polarity, that the...
there's a major threat to established U.S. interests in East Asia, and the United States is going to respond to that. And I think it's important to realize, even though right now we're seeing the shift to more competitive policies against China as being the result of the Trump administration, there's actually a quite broad movement in the U.S. politics in the last half year. in that direction. Some of which really did start in the Obama administration.
So I would say that even without, I mean even if Trump stopped being president soon or in four years, I think we will not see a major reversal in the way our China policy is trending. I think we'll see hopefully a very large change in how it's being handled publicly and so forth. But the basic shift is happening. I think within reasonable boundaries that will actually lead to some of the restraints that John has referred to, which is that we will not be able to fight costly interventionist wars of choice because we're going to be spending more and more resources against a very, very capable adversary.
So I would say two points, though, related to our discussion. One thing with respect to China, where John and I do disagree, at least at the margins, is I've, for a decade, and I'm sort of being proven wrong, at least by the policy over the last decade, thought there was more possibility of non-competitive... non-competitive or even cooperative relations with China. And his version of realism would say that's not the case.
I actually still think that there are possibilities, although I think they're closing, and they've been largely closed by the Chinese, not by us, for that kind of cooperation. But I do think that the trajectory there is, even though it's becoming more competitive, is not yet closed to be competition. I would also say, relevant to the question of realism versus liberalism, a tremendous amount of opposition...
opposition, foreign policy opposition to China is articulated in terms of its regime. And many China experts actually understand the threat in terms of a capable authoritarian regime. And whether you think that's really the threat, whether it's authoritarian China or whether it's extremely powerful China, does actually have important implications for the type of policies we should pursue.
So I don't think I want to get into that now, but I would just say that, I mean, John's view is very much the non-liberal. real straight up realist view, which is it's really China's power and interest in the region and not its regime. That's not the way the current discussion feels. It may be underlying the current public discourse may be an understanding of the threat that Chinese power presents.
But it's very important analytically and for policy to separate out those two dimensions. In terms of where US policy is going, though I put this on the table and it's also maybe a way to think a little more thoroughly about John's argument is there are many ways to pursue spreading liberalism that don't have to do with using force, or at least not in a large way. So the United States does support NGOs, it does support democratic elites in other countries. Many of those are not very expensive.
And some of those we pursued during the Cold War also. So all of this, I mean, to some extent, it is an issue of by degree how much, how liberal the dimension of U.S. foreign policy is. I think independent of the polarity or China's rise, there's plenty of room to try and support the spread of democracy around the globe without the use of force.
Whether or not that's a good idea, however, is quite a complicated issue. And I think one thing that was highlighted for me in reading John's book is just the extent that U.S. support of democracy in Ukraine, for example, really was threatening to Russia. Because of what Russia believed the implications of that would be.
So it's interesting to... to think through sort of how, when and where do we wanna use the non-force based efforts to support the spread of democracy and liberalism? And is that something we wanna do across the globe?
Not at all. Or in some regions but not others. And I think that will be something, and if you had to divide it between a realist and a liberal policy, I think we can sort of do it that way. And I think there's gonna be a shift toward the realist perspective and much less large scale use of. of force for state building and democracy spreading.
But there may still be an important liberal dimension, which is not even inconsistent with the thrust of John's argument. Great. Well, we've got microphones with Clayton here and then with Nick. We've got a number of people in the audience.
If you could just do me a favor, otherwise I will interrupt you, and just make sure you're asking a question. This is not a time to give monologue here, but if you can ask a concise question. That'd be great.
And introduce yourselves. And introduce yourselves, yeah. Right here, go ahead.
Hi, James Siebens from the Stimson Center. I wonder if you could comment on the use of force without declared war. That's been a trend to move away from UN sanctioned interventions and that sort of military force to sort of undeclared wars and A constant low-level gray zone sort of conflict.
It doesn't matter to me. Yeah, I mean, there's no question that has been the trend, and I find it somewhat disturbing. I mean, I would link it to this basic line of argument. One of the themes that's in the book that...
I don't talk about here is that a liberal foreign policy abroad, liberal hegemony, leads to illiberalism at home because what you end up doing is fighting wars all the time and you create a national security state. on the home front the united states has fought seven wars just think about this seven wars since the cold war ended we have been at war for two out of every three years since the cold war ended and as the founding fathers said and i agree with them when you have a highly militarized or militaristic state like the united states has become it has consequences for civil liberties and you should therefore not be surprised that the elites are going to look for all sorts of ways to circumvent the rules. And they're not going to be interested in asking Congress for permission to do X, Y, or Z.
A national security state takes over. When I first started in this business, you know, over 40 years ago, I was very naive. And I didn't think that the state mattered that much, what we now call the deep state.
But, you know, anybody who studies international politics in a serious way over any extended period of time comes to realize that the state. does all sorts of things with good intentions, that in important ways undermines civil liberties. And if you believe in civil liberties, if you're a real liberal, which I consider myself to be, then that's worrisome.
A liberal at home. A liberal at home, yes. Thank you for correcting me on that.
Yeah, right here. We'll go over here. Hi, Peter or Pyotr. It's a privilege to actually finally meet you after reading your work for so long. I'm a student of Professor Jones's at SAIS.
I'm just curious really because I personally have a, I want to take the discussion a little bit away from policy, more ideological. Because for me my father's Russian and he talks about this constantly. I'm having trouble understanding Can you speak a little slower and maybe hold the mic?
Okay, my I'm half Russian So my father and I we debate I'm English and Russian. So we debate this constant thing and your article from 2014 is of particular because it was so refreshing to finally see someone able to understand that it's not only Russia that causes much of the grievances. The West has quite a large amount of things that it needs to reflect on. And I just wanted to know from your personal point of view, what will it take to get the narrative to change between Russia and the West or the US for specificity here? to actually help make progress, because I think that's an underlying issue which needs to be addressed first.
Yeah. Just to embellish his point so it's clear to everybody, he notes that I wrote this article in 2014 in Foreign Affairs that largely argues that the United States and its European allies are responsible for the crisis over Ukraine, and it's not the Russians. And I won't go into the details of that argument. And his...
The question is, is there anything we could do to change the narrative, or what can be done to change the narrative so it's less anti-Russian and is so unrelentingly hostile to anything that the Russians do? My view on this is pretty simple. There's only one thing that will change the narrative on Russia and change U.S.-Russia relations, and that's the rise of China. And if China continues to rise, the United States and the Russians, I believe, will come together in a balancing coalition to try to contain China.
I think from an American point of view, it's idiocy from a strategic point of view to drive the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. If you're dealing with the China threat, which is a much greater threat than the Russia threat, what you need is you need all the help you can containing the Chinese, and that includes the Russians. Russians and the Chinese and Tibet together makes no sense at all. As I like to say, you know, if the people who are running American foreign policy today had been around in the late 30s or 1940s, early 1940s, they would have declared war against Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union at the same time. This is lunacy, right?
Nazi Germany was the much greater threat. It made perfect sense to form an alliance with Joseph Stalin, as horrendous as he was as a human being. But we're not facing, we're not faced with Joseph Stalin, we're faced with Vladimir Putin, and we should have good relations with the Russians. But for a whole variety of reasons, nothing's gonna change that unless China forces us together, in my opinion.
If I can add a question to both of you, and Charlie, it looked like you had a two-finger on that as well. The national defense strategy, and actually the national security strategy as well, point to not just the Chinese, and the Russians, but also to competition with Iran and North Korea, in addition to continuing to fight against terrorism. So is this still an expansive set of threats then? I'll just say one word, then let Charlie go, because I've been talking.
I was thinking about saying this when I was answering this gentleman here. We're doing the same thing with the Iranians. We're driving the Iranians and the Chinese together. We have a deep-seated interest in minimizing...
Chinese influence in the Gulf. It's very clear. Go to Beijing. They are thinking long-term about projecting power into the Gulf.
We want to make sure people like the Iranians are on our side. Instead we're going to drive them right into the arms of the Chinese. So I was going to pick up directly on the question a little bit, and it touches on the end of your book, which is that the other way to change the U.S. narrative in the U.S., not the dialogue between the United States and Russia, I mean, is to have a change...
in the view of the ruling, the people in the foreign policy elite that deal with these issues. And so John argues in the book, and I mean, there are people who understood from the beginning that expanding NATO was a bad idea and that it were against many of these, if not all of the interventions. that he's pointed to as being liberal or otherwise driven.
And even though in some ways in a situation where realism is permissive, there's still an open debate about what the right policy is. Liberalism has its appeal, but it's not clearly analytically dominant. It's not the case that when the threat is low that the liberal arguments have to be the ones that are adopted by the United States. And that may or may not change. I mean, much of what we do in the academic debate and to some extent in reaching out is to say, look, we've got theories and understandings that suggest these were not the right policies, and maybe we should have known before, but now we have a variety of facts on the ground based upon flawed policies, and we should learn.
So going forward, we don't have to be as competitive with Russia. I think it will take a while to unwind that for a variety of reasons, because independent of who provoked whether Russia's... is provoked or acted on its own, we're going to have to deal with that for a while. But that can be unwound in a bit.
But the larger point is that if these arguments are right, which I largely agree with, on the liberalism argument, the sort of taking liberalism abroad argument, then that has to be a change in who's winning the debate in the U.S. and not among academics, among practitioners. I'm Steve Winters, independent consultant. Thank you so much. Since we're on the topic of isms, could I ask you, in your view of an ideal situation for the U.S. policy, what would be the role of feminism?
feminism good domestically, but we don't push it. Because for example, in the case of Afghanistan, I think it can be proven that one of the reasons that we're still in Afghanistan is because of the belief of some very powerful, influential feminists that we have to be there for the girls. Well, what we're talking about here, again, and it's very important to emphasize this, is rights.
We're talking about women's rights. And I am fully in favor of women's rights inside the... context of the United States and the question you have to ask yourself is how do you think about exporting that ideology I am for starters very reluctant to interfere in the domestic politics of other states, because I do believe in self-determination, and I do believe that if in a particular country they want to have one set of rights for men and another set of rights for women, that's their business. On the other hand, I am enough of a liberal that I would like to see that change.
The question is, where do I come out in terms of a bottom line? Thank you. And the argument I would make is I would be very soft in making it clear. You know, to other people what I as an American or what the United States thinks on these issues and what we think other people should do, but I would not push very hard.
And it's not because I don't believe in women's rights, but I believe in self-determination. And furthermore, I believe you get yourself in a whole heck of a lot of trouble once you begin to intervene in big ways to social engineer in foreign countries. John, if I could ask a follow-up question, which is, what's your response to how the U.S. should act in cases where major powers, the Chinese, for example...
or the Russians are themselves getting involved in other countries. So there's been a lot of talk here about Chinese influence in East Asia, including domestically. Australia is probably a good example of that where they're in the process of changing laws to limit Chinese influence in Australian politics.
So how do you respond in cases where competitors, great power competitors themselves, themselves may be getting involved in domestic politics? How do you respond in situations like that? Well, I basically welcome it. Because I think in most cases what they're doing is jumping into a briar patch. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, I remember it very well, virtually everybody here in Washington was aghast.
They thought the Soviets were on the march, that this was the end of the world. What are we gonna do? I said, you folks have this one all wrong.
This is the best thing that could ever happen to the United States. They just jumped into a giant quagmire. When you arms race with a country like the Soviet Union, what you want them to do is intervene in Afghanistan.
If you're the Soviet Union, what you want the United States to do is intervene in Vietnam. Be my guest. When I used to go to Beijing in the early 2000s, I used to tell the Chinese that what you really ought to do is tell the Americans that you're counting on them to win the war.
war on terrorism and tell them that they got to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan until they win it they'll be there forever grinding their military into the ground wasting huge amounts of resources creating ill will all over the planet so in a very important way what you want to do is you want to stay out of the affairs of other countries as much as possible because once you get in and especially if you use military force not in every case but in almost every case right you're asking for trouble The Russians, you don't like the Russians today? What you want to do is encourage them to try to conquer Ukraine or go back into Eastern Europe. They've been there, tried that.
How well did it work out? Not very well at all. That's why they got out of town.
And that's why Putin is smart enough not to go back in. This sounds like a bait and bleed strategy. Exactly. Exactly. One is, Seth, I want to...
Yeah. I would say a different, just on the China point, which is somewhat related, but partly off the liberal strand. but also on the power strand is that a lot of complaints about China have to do with how it's using its economic power to gain influence in other countries.
And we're acting as though that's illegitimate. But it's important to keep in mind the United States has done this forever because we've been economically powerful and we've created alliances and deals and all sorts of, we've used our economic influence all around the globe. And it's basically even within the liberal system. If you're using your economic influence within reasonable bounds, it's acceptable. So I would say two things.
need to keep clear what kind of use of force is very different than use of economic influence is very different than spreading sort of false facts in the internet but to some extent not everything that a country that we're sort of competing with does is not fair. Much of what China is doing even by our own standards is fair and is a reasonable use of their power and the solution is for the United States to maintain its power. I mean it's economic power and invest to be able to do that so that we can compete in that playing field, which is one that we've sort of a is sort of our own territory.
Alek Merkulov, Business Baltic Media Group from Riga, Latvia. Here you write that nationalism played a key role in unraveling the Soviet Union, which is true. A Russian-speaking minority in Latvia very familiar with nationalism.
The discrimination has been going on right from the breakup of the Soviet Union. Citizenship laws, language laws. The latest law they adopted is education law, which closed down all the Russian language schools, is a 100% of the Latvian. Anyway, but I never heard from the State Department or any U.S. official any condemnation or criticism of the situation in Latvia.
What is the controversy between spreading the liberal democratic values and nationalism? I can tell you that Russian-speaking minorities... Can you get to your question, please? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why do you think that the United States, I mean, the State Department, for instance, never criticized its situation in Latvia, which is clearly nationalism and human rights are not observed there?
Thank you. The truth is that when the United States... States pursues liberal hegemony starting in the early 90s, it doesn't pursue it equally everywhere. It picks a number of places where it puts the main emphasis and it concentrates on them. I mean, just to use another example, Saudi Arabia.
The United States did hardly anything to promote liberal democracy in Saudi Arabia during the 90s and in this new century. And with regard to Latvia, it's hardly surprising, given how the United States thinks about Eastern Europe and thinks about the governments in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, that they're not, at this point in time anyway, going to criticize what the Latvian government is doing vis-a-vis the Russians. This all takes time.
It's a lumpy process. That's the basic mindset behind it. liberal hegemony so i don't find this surprising at all but your point is somewhat hypocritical and i think it is somewhat hypocritical but that's just the way international politics works right here Hi, my name is Skylar Moore. I'm with Georgetown SSP.
I am curious whether you distinguish between liberal policy and realist policy that's justified with liberal rhetoric. So if it's possible that some of the policies you've described as liberal are actually... realist in intention but we've just found it easier to justify using words like freedom and democracy so if i'm clear your basic argument is that a lot of the policies we pursue are really realist policies that we dress up with liberal rhetoric I think that during the Cold War that was true. We acted in a realist fashion, but given that the United States is such a thoroughly liberal country, we disguised that realist behavior with liberal rhetoric.
I actually believed that in the post-Cold War world from roughly, let's say 1990, up until about 2016. that the United States really did genuinely pursue a policy of liberal hegemony. That we had good liberal intentions, and it was not realist behavior gussied up with liberal rhetoric. This is not to say, as I just said to this gentleman, that there aren't cases where we supported authoritarian or even brutal regimes, which contradicts the basic approach.
But I think we genuinely believed in liberal hegemony, and we could do that because the balance of power was so favorable so that the rhetoric meshed rather neatly with the behavior. So that would imply in some cases that we'll use the liberal rhetoric regardless of the structure of the system, even if we're acting differently in different systems. Oh, yeah, there's no question. And we did that all the time during the Cold War. We're here.
Hi, I'm Akash. I'm a student at GW. My question is regarding what you talked about earlier, regarding Madeleine Albright and her. Could you hold the microphone and speak loudly?
I'm sorry. I'm a student at GW. My question is regarding what you talked about earlier.
you said earlier about Madeleine Albright and her relationship between nationalism and liberal hegemony and putting it in the context of the current administration how do you reconcile the fact that you're saying that Trump is not a big promoter of liberal hegemony But at the same time, I think it'd be hard to argue, and I think you've said this before, that Trump is still a nationalist. So how do you reconcile his nationalism with the identity of the U.S., also him not promoting liberal hegemony in the same manner as we have previously? Well, just on Trump, he's clearly a nationalist, right? I mean, if you think about his campaign platform of America first, America first is pure, unadulterated nationalism.
You understand American exceptionalism. You know how addicted every American foreign policy president, every American foreign policy president is. American president is to American exceptionalism. American exceptionalism is pure unadulterated nationalism. Trump is a nationalist.
There's no disputing that. He's not pursuing a liberal foreign policy where he doesn't believe in it. in liberal hegemony because he said very clearly we're getting out of the business of promoting liberal democracy across the planet and as you know he's perfectly comfortable jumping into bed with dictators and authoritarian leaders.
With regard to an open international economy, he's made it clear that he's not terribly enamored with the open international economy and is willing to slap tariffs not only on adversaries, but allies as well. And he's seen in many circles as being protectionist at the core. And with regard to international institutions, the third leg of the triad, I don't know if he's seen any international institution that he likes. Said NATO is obsolete. He loathes.
the eu he loathes the wto he got rid of the tpp doesn't like nafta says bad things about the imf the world bank and so forth and so on so trump certainly in his rhetoric and i believe in a lot of his policies right is anything but a liberal hegemonist so if i can follow up actually to both of you what would and this is looking forward this is sort of a hypothesis This is asking you to put together a testable one. If a Trump administration were to be realist in action, what would it do and what would it not do? How would we know if it was, looking back 10 years from now, whether a Trump foreign policy really was realist as the system moves to a bipolar or a multipolar system, and how would we know if he didn't act in that sense?
You wanna go first? You wanna start? Sure. So, I mean, the first, the easy answer is that you wouldn't see interventions to convert countries to democracies. So you just wouldn't see a variety of the types of interventions we've seen.
After that, it gets more complicated. So, for example. whether or not the United States would continue to trade with China, a liberal would say we need to continue to do this because open markets are good, maybe China will become a democracy down the road.
It could be the realist would say let's continue to trade because it's not going to hurt the It's not going to help China any more than it's going to help us. But if we looked at international trade and realized that there was a way that actually slowing down or changing trade would actually help us relatively compared to China, then a realist would say we need to try and regain some power advantages and would interrupt trade for that reason. I think anybody, realist or not, is going to say as we get into a more competitive security relationship with China, that we're going to restrict certain types of trade.
trade. Trade in high technology, certain types of weapons, certain types of computing capability, and that's sort of going to be independent of, all realists would do that. So I would think, you know, certainly there's the easy answer on intervention.
The other questions really have to do with at this point, the nature of the international economy. If you looked at, in the 1990s, if we could have built a coalition to keep China out of the international economic system, a realist might have done that at the time. Now it's much more complicated because we're intertwined in such a way and China has grown so much.
that it's not clear who will be hurt more or who will gain less by the interruption of trade. And the realist is not against having China be well-off. It's just against China being relatively well-off compared to us. Yeah, I agree in large part with Charlie. Just a couple quick points.
One of them is a point that he made earlier. Realists don't agree on everything, and they oftentimes have different foreign policy prescriptions. I like this. say there are three big grand strategies that the United States can choose among besides liberal hegemony one is isolationism two is offshore balancing and three is selective engagement okay those are three different strategies isolationism is a realist strategy the case for isolationism you make on realist grounds the case for offshore balancing which Steve Walt and I have laid out in an article in foreign affairs is obvious a realist argument.
I would say Charlie and certainly Bob Art, who teaches at Brandeis, believe in selective engagement. They believe that the same areas of the world that John and Steve think are important are important. But they believe we should behave differently towards those regions than John and Steve do.
Whereas John and Steve think we should be offshore balancers, Bob and Charlie think we should be onshore, serving as a pacifier, right? Selective engagement. Those There are three different grand strategies and they're all realist at their core. So it's, you know, very hard to say.
One other point I would make is as a good structural realist, I don't place much emphasis on who is the president of the United States, whether it's Donald Trump or not. And this I think in many ways dovetails with what Charlie was saying. Who's ever president of the United States or whatever the ideology they have is in their head. The structure of the situation, i.e. the rise of China and its interest in projecting power in East Asia, will just push the United States to act in very realist ways to counter China. Last question and then we'll conclude.
Right here? Back there? You have to go around. Thank you.
I'm Linda. I'm a visiting scholar at Georgetown University, and I have a question with regards to your social engineering, because just this morning I was at a lecture with Steve Wald, who has many similar visions about this as you. You stole them off from me.
And that both of you seem very critical of the United States'ability to, for example, have regime change in the Middle East. But then if you think a bit back, for example, I'm European, if you look at the the proposed World War II situation in Europe and Germany, and for example, the American occupation of Japan and actually turning Japan into a democracy, would you say that that would be then a successful incident of social engineering? And if that's the case, why was it successful there and not successful in the case of many more recent examples? Thank you. Yeah, just to make sure everybody heard the question, she was questioning.
my basic line of argument that social engineering on the part of the United States doesn't work, and she was pointing to two prominent examples that appeared to contradict me, which is Japan and Germany in the wake of World War II, running right up to the present. These are clearly cases of successes. I wouldn't dispute that for one second, but I would just say to you, these are cases with very special circles.
circumstances that are hardly duplicated anywhere else. First of all, we destroyed both of those countries in World War II. So they were basically smoking ruins in 1945. Number two, we were in there after we conquered them, not as occupiers, but as protectors.
There was this thing called the Soviet threat out there that scared the living bejesus out of them. certainly the Germans, and they welcomed our presence as a way of protecting them from the bear. This is true of the Japanese as well.
And the third point is that these are countries that had a history of liberal democracy. As hard as that may be to believe, think Germany. Before Hitler took power on January 30th 1933, you had Weimar Germany, which was a liberal democracy. So the roots were there.
Growing democracy was not that difficult in those two cases. When you go into countries like Vietnam, you go into countries like Afghanistan, you go into countries like Iraq, it's a fundamentally different ballgame, right? And it's no accident.
I mean, this is why people like Charlie and I were adamant opponents of the Iraq War. You're quickly going to go from a conqueror to an occupier. And then you're going to have to do social engineering in a country that has no history of democracy, right? That doesn't face an external threat that you're protecting it from that has all sorts of centrifugal forces at play inside the society and in that circumstance You're going to get yourself into a whole heck of a lot of trouble and that's why you want to stay out Now there may be a case down the road where we have another major war and we end up occupying a country that we then have to protect against another country.
And that country may have some history of liberal democracy. And in that case, it'll probably work again. So I wouldn't want to make the argument it never works.
I'm just making the argument that it hardly ever works. And it's one of those things you want to make sure you don't do unless it's absolutely necessary, number one. And number two, you think there's some chance of success. Well, we have gone over a little bit. I wanted to note before we finish that John has got to sign some books, so Danica is going to bring them out.
So I think we'll have a lineup and he'll sign books outside of here. But I want to urge everyone to buy a copy, read it. Again, highlight the first comment I made. One of the things I have always appreciated about your work is the clarity of the prose and of the argument. argument, the logic and the evidence.
And I think you'll find that here. So if you could all join me in thanking both John and Charlie.