The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (Henry L. Stimson Lectures) Hardcover – September 25, 2018

Professor John Mearsheimer at the University of Chicago wrote 'The Great Delusion' in 2018. Given what is happening in Afghanistan it is worth rereading. He is often controversial but is always worth reading. Mearsheimer is a foreign policy theorist and is often prescient. In 2001, he was skeptical about China’s “peaceful rise” and suggested that the US and China were probably on a collision course. He criticized the Iraq War in 2003 before the invasion took place.Mearsheimer argues that the U.S. pursued “liberal hegemony” after the Cold War, and this has been a terrible mistake. Internationally, this has resulted in never-ending wars. He argues that ‘liberal states have a crusader mentality hardwired into them that is hard to restrain.’ Liberalism prizes the concept of inalienable or natural rights, committed liberals are ‘deeply concerned about the rights of virtually every individual on the planet.’ This universalist logic leads liberal states to fight endless wars, and to ‘collide with nationalism, which inevitably wins.'The main aim of liberal hegemonists has been to remake the world in America’s image. It was assumed that the U.S. had an almost divine right to run the world because it was smarter and better than everybody else. The strategy had three components: 1. Spread liberal democracy across the planet. 2. Integrate more and more countries into the open international economy. 3. Integrate more and more countries into international institutions. This strategy has often failed. Although China joined the WTO it never aspired to become a democracy. America's focus on military might and the pursuit of primacy to spread its values has embroiled us in costly, unwise and unwinnable wars.Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony has failed miserably. It was assumed that the Muslim world could be Americanized. Non-democratic or hostile regimes, like Iran, Syria and North Korea that were opposed to American influence, could be sanctioned and threatened with force. When tougher measures were required, the U.S. could use its powerful military to remove despotic regimes and impose democracy. For decades the U.S. has forcibly overthrown regimes it considers hostile to its interests, usually in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Unfortunately, regime change using military force has not gone well in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Nation-building in the Muslim world has proved expensive in terms of blood and treasure.Americans are very patriotic, but in recent years US policymakers have not always understood that other countries are also patriotic. They don't want to be occupied by foreigners, even if they mean well. American nationalism has also supplied an unhealthy dose of hubris to the equation. He blames people like Madeleine Albright and others who promoted American exceptionalism. Albright believed that the U.S. is "the indispensable nation" and nobody else has the required wisdom and expertise to lead. If America wasn’t running the show the jungle would grow back and bad people, like ISIS and Putin, would take over. They believe the American president is the leader of the free world and operates like a good shepherd protecting the Western flock.Mearsheimer argues that aside from the family, the most important group in today’s world is the nation-state. Apart from the EU countries, sovereignty and self-determination are important to most independent nations. They usually resist foreign interference. After WW1, President Woodrow Wilson made self-determination an important aspect of American foreign policy. China and Russia are also fiercely patriotic and nationalistic as we have seen in the South China Sea and Crimea. Mearsheimer believes that nationalism and realism will always trump liberalism. He also believes that great powers dominate the international system, and they constantly engage in security competition with each other, which sometimes leads to war. China and Russia don't aspire to be like the US, they don't want to be part of an American led world order, but they are too powerful to invade and occupy.Mearsheimer examines liberal hegemony’s track record. Firstly, the Bush Doctrine & the greater Middle East. which was a plan to turn the Middle East into a sea of democracies. The result was a total disaster, it created several failed states instead. Secondly, the Ukraine Crisis and U.S.-Russia Relations. He blames the awful relations between the US and Russia and the Ukraine crisis on NATO expansion. Pushing up to Russia’s borders was a mistake. George Kennan, who advised Harry Truman on containing the Soviet Union, told Clinton he was making a mistake in 1997, and his actions would lead to a new Cold War. Clinton had Albright advising him and she did not seem to understand Russian patriotism or its fear of invasion. Thirdly, he blames the failure of “engagement” with China. Mearsheimer criticizes the way the US has engaged with China, helping it grow quicker while naively thinking that it would eventually become a liberal democracy.The costs of liberal hegemony begin with the endless wars a liberal state ends up fighting to protect human rights and spread liberal democracy around the world. Once unleashed, he argues that a liberal unipolar power soon becomes addicted to war. The US has spent over $2.3 trillion fighting the war in Afghanistan. Mearsheimer argues that “the idea that the US can go around the world trying to establish democracies and doing social engineering is a prescription for trouble.” Countries will resist foreign interference. Also, in many parts of the world, people prefer security over liberal democracy, even if that security is provided by soft authoritarianism. The Libyans and Iraqis were probably happier under Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein. If they stayed out of politics, people could live a relatively normal life. The Christians in Iraq had been protected by the government, after the war they were persecuted. I once met the so-called ‘Vicar of Baghdad’ an Anglican pastor. He received death threats from Islamists and required several bodyguards. Eventually, it became too dangerous for him to stay in Iraq. Russians remember the chaos and anarchy of the Yeltsin years and they don’t want that to return. Putin may be an authoritarian leader but he offers stability.Mearsheimer argues that problems arose because a liberal order calls for states to delegate substantial decision-making authority to international institutions and to allow refugees and immigrants to move easily across borders. Modern nation-states privilege sovereignty and national identity, however, which guarantees trouble when institutions become powerful and borders are porous. Furthermore, the hyper globalization that is integral to the liberal order creates economic problems among the lower and middle classes within the liberal democracies, fueling a backlash against that order. Finally, the liberal order accelerated China's rise, which helped transform the system from unipolar to multipolar. The liberal international order is possible only in a unipolar world.Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony is finished. The US now needs to worry about the growing military power of rivals like China and Russia. The collapse of the Afghan army in the space of just a few weeks will prompt the military and Washington’s policymakers to reflect on their policy failures over the course of the last twenty years. The US seems to have ignored Afghan culture, politics, and history. Whatever they have tried in Afghanistan has not worked. The US probably has too many international obligations, and we meddle too much in other country's affairs. We should forget about being the world’s policeman and focus more on solving our own domestic problems. We should spend more money fixing the homeland.The spread of liberal democracy once seemed inevitable, but China will never become a democracy. Russians seem happy with a strong man like Putin as their leader. As Lieutenant General Dan Bolger pointed out in his book 'Why We Lost' about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American army is not good at fighting insurgencies. By the time the book was published in 2018, democracy was in retreat in many places and under considerable strain in the U.S. itself.

Professor M is of course right: liberal hegemony is toxic, murdered millions of innocent people all over the world, never achieved its aims, and hurt Americans economically and politically. But his optimism on what the “restrainers” can do to turn the tide is misplaced. For one thing, the general American public will not read this book, but instead every day they are brainwashed by the “liberal” media, and then vote for their “liberal” government.

Author perfectly describes tension between liberalism and nationalism. After the overview elaborates on falures of libaralism in intenrational politics and why it must be replaced by realism. Eventhough, the author presents american perspective and does not revere to problem of the europeization, which was succesful in many ways, his book is great pick for anybody.

If you are a practitioner of public policy and diplomacy, this book is worth reading. Some may find the pages provocative or controversial, but Mearsheimer provides convincing and thought-provoking narrative on why foreign policy based on progressive ideals face significant challenges, particularly when working with or against illiberal states. Whether you agree or disagree with his premise, I recommend taking time to study this book to understand this perspective and help propel foreign policy moving forward.Mearsheimer makes clear that we in the U.S. can be our own worst enemy because of our idealism and desire to improve the human condition through ideals centered on individual rights. This is deeply ingrained in our psyche and has led to our relative success as a nation-state. It seems natural then, that we would want to export our model of governance to others so they may share in our prosperity and, to simplify, make the World a better place for all of us. This belief has driven the U.S. to pursue policies from a liberal hegemonic standpoint that has led, unfortunately, to more involvement of the U.S. in military conflict. While the U.S. is not necessarily alone in this foreign policy perspective, shared to some degree with fellow Western liberal democracies, our history with individual rights differs from some of our European partners who went through a relatively long imperialist phase that colors their traditions and beliefs to some extent. Mearsheimer's early chapters cover this somewhat to set the stage for his views on exporting liberal ideals.With the rise of China as a Great Power competitor, Mearsheimer believes we should reassess and recalibrate our approach to avoid the pitfalls of trying to force liberalist ideals on nationalist and realist schools of thought that are likelier to have larger influence on human behavior in most countries. Perhaps this is a sensible thing to do as the competition for influence increases. Mearsheimer warns, however, that should the U.S. find itself as a lone superpower again in the future, liberal hegemony is bound to failure and cautions a return to this strategy.

Mearsheimer does a great analysis of the mindsets and motivating factors in the incredibly frustrating dynamics in today's political world. Most apt is a dissecting of a liberal's self-defeating and unseen (to ourselves anyway) mistaken assumptions. Not sure if I'm comforted or more fearful?

John Mearsheimer presents an alternative world view to that of Francis Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ thesis that has dominated Western politics since 1989. Fukuyama’s vision was based on a unipolar world when the US emerged as the only world power following the collapse of the Soviet Union. The wisdom of the last 30 years has been to export Liberal Hegemony to the rest of the world, promote liberal democracy and Human Rights and ignore the rise in Nationalism and Realism (balance of power politics).Mearsheimer argues that with the rise of China and Russia, the world is now not unipolar but the liberal elites have been slow to catch up to that fact. Liberal Hegemony he says cannot succeed in a bipolar or multipolar world. He also says that liberal policies abroad lead to illiberal policies at home.I found this book riveting since it explains the delusional mindset of liberal elites and their quest for a world government based on Liberal values. Given the rise of Russia as a nuclear power and the inability of the West to contain it, it undermines Fukuyama’s assertion that there will no longer be wars and that mankind’s greatest problem might be boredom. Mearsheimer takes us back to the role of Realism or Realpolitik or peace through strength. In having downplayed the role of Nationalism or Populism, the Liberal mindset has been caught up in a delusion of ‘Love, Peace and Dope’.

The book is an interesting attack on US Foreign policies that emphasise Human Rights and the attempted transformation of autocratic regimes into Democracies, viewing the attempts as anti-realistic. That seems generally pretty obvious now. The only successful examples of regime change to Progressive Liberal Democracy that I can offhand identify were in Western Europe and Japan after WW2. The author does not explore how and when regime change is possible and under what conditions. The Soviet Union after WW2 successfully imposed regime change on Eastern Europe that lasted almost 50 years and even in Afghanistan managed to establish a government that lasted significantly longer after Russian withdrawal than the Government the US established lasted after US withdrawal. Regime changes of other kinds by imperialist powers in Africa and Asia (to add to their empires) were successful for relatively long periods of time in 19th and 20thC. Post Colonial regimes in Africa and the Middle East were often set up initially as Democracies by the exiting powers but few continued that way. India and perhaps Pakistan are exceptions although neither are Liberal Democracies with respect for human rights or equal opportunities for minority religions. The United States attempts at regime change from Democracy to Dictatorship (eg Pinochet in South America) have proved more successful than the other way round. I would suggest that autocracies based on elements of local elites backed by military and security forces are way easier for invaders to establish than Liberal Democracies, especially when concern for human rights does not inhibit the forces seeking regime change.

John Mearsheimer is one of the foremost proponents of Neo-realism. The great Liberal hope that following the end of the Cold War, the ideals of liberal democracy would become the global standard, turns out to have been nothing more than a hopeful dream. The hard realism of nation states pursuing their own perceived self-interests can be seen in the policies being pursued by China under Chairman Xi and most vividly by Russia under Czar Putin. Time to wake up and smell the coffee before it's too late!

Es un libro importante, pero no siempre fácil de leer. Es el desarrollo de por qué la política exterior de EEUU los últimos 30 años ha sido muy perjudicial para el mundo, para Europa y para EEUU. Pero algunos de los primeros capítulos son densos. Yo recomiendo concentrarse y leerlos. Pero si el lector se cansa, puede ir directamente al capítulo 6, que es el meollo del asunto y está magníficamente explicado. El libro se escribió hace 5 años, cuando Trump recién había sido elegido. Pero su explicación del creciente conflicto en Ucrania ya era clarividente y ya lo veía como inevitable, por el mal hacer de los norteamericanos. Libro básico para entender porqué hoy el mundo es más inseguro que lo que era, con la política exterior de EEUU siendo la principal responsable.

In der Ukraine ist Krieg. Er ist uns sehr nah. Viele fühlen sich aufgefordert, etwas dazu zu sagen. Abgesehen von dem objektiven Leiden werden immer wieder psychologische und emotionale Argumente vorgebracht: Die Russen haben Angst vor der NATO, die baltischen Völker haben Angst vor den Russen... Das Moralisieren hat Hochkonjunktur. Wenn sich die Stimme eines geostrategischen Realisten erhebt, dann gerät er leicht in einen Shitstorm. Wir sollten aber auch ihm zuhören.