Review of John J. Mearsheimer, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). By David C. Hendrickson

John Mearsheimer is an intrepid thinker whose distinguished body of work has the virtues of intellectual honesty and fearless courage. He pulls no punches, is unafraid in questioning various pieties. With his latest book on the great delusion that is liberalism he has written a polemic that scores many effective points against the “liberal interventionism” of the recent past. He skewers a set of policies that have brought great woe to the peoples of the Greater Middle East, with results injurious both to them and to the United States. He likens these policies to the sort of social engineering analyzed by James Scott in Seeing Like a State, a practice the obnoxiousness of which is easily seen by Americans when done by others, less easily detected when done by themselves, but nevertheless undoubtedly pernicious in its wanton use of violence and its totalizing tendencies (185–187). In Mearsheimer’s view, the Bush Doctrine epitomizes the liberal mentality in foreign affairs, the seemingly insatiable desire to bring democracy and human rights to all four corners of the globe. Against these and other “liberal” impulses he counterpoises the need for “realism.” There is no entry for neoconservatism in the index to The Great Delusion, but what Mearsheimer means by liberalism is a pretty good proxy for what came to be identified with neoconservatism in foreign policy—that it is America’s national mission and security imperative to plant human rights and democracy across the globe. So the essential strategy of the book is to discredit neoconservatism by pilloring liberalism. While I concur with the objective, I bemoan the strategy.

In the great foreign-policy argument, Mearsheimer is among the restrainers, as is this author. But I want to make the case that the version of realism he proffers, in the name of restraint, is seriously defective and cannot form the basis of the alternative foreign policy we need. Instead of the hard-nosed realism he recommends, with its insistence on selfish interests, power maximization, and the weakness of norms, we need a conception of the national interest that respects international norms. We need a return, I shall be arguing, to the political truths once embedded in the liberal tradition, but of late forgotten by liberal interventionists and neoconservatives alike. Mearsheimer wants to savage liberalism; I want to salvage it. He thinks we are in trouble because we have fulfilled it; I think we’re in trouble because we’ve abandoned it. He thinks that realism is the opposite of liberalism; I think that liberalism in its origin and development incorporated rather than repudiated basic realist insights about the role of power in human history.

Many Liberalisms

Of all the “isms” of contemporary political speech, liberalism has proven to be the most malleable. On college campuses today, liberalism is often equated with social justice warriors who see an ideology of white supremacy lurking everywhere within the hallowed halls of academe, though the older liberals among the professoriate are generally appalled by the new intolerance. In international financial circles, liberalism means free capital movement and minimal tariffs on traded goods, reflecting the policies that emerged in the 1990s, but which were quite different from previous “liberal” understandings in salient respects. When conservatives denounced liberalism in the 1980s and 1990s, as before, they were condemning the high taxes necessary to fund the welfare state or regulations to repair the environment or the workplace, but in any case throwing shade on the legacies of the New Deal and the Great Society; today, liberalism (certainly neoliberalism) is most often associated with the interests of capital, not labor. Mearsheimer, as we have seen, identifies liberalism with the Bush Doctrine, and also with “humanitarian intervention,” but for the last fifty years it was more often identified with McGovernism or Carterism, symbols to most conservatives of a weak and feckless foreign policy. One great liberal, Lyndon Johnson, was the architect of the Vietnam War, but the liberals hated by Richard Nixon were part of the New York commentariat who came to despise the war. In 1972, liberalism was parodied by conservatives as embodying “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” to say nothing of “free love,” but back in the nineteenth century it was as likely to be associated with sexual repression, as the strange cases of John Stuart Mill and William Gladstone attest. (I forbear to describe the heart-rending details.)

These recent ideological somersaults, in which liberalism seems weirdly to embrace opposites and contain multitudes, should not be especially relevant to Mearsheimer’s overall project, which is to dissect liberalism to its foundations. He identifies with Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America in its argument that the United States has been the quintessential liberal polity. Mearsheimer gives an account of it in which individualism is the be-all and end-all, with no conception of the common good conceivable and with rights that are inalienable, illimitable, and universal. This leads him into some very problematic assertions, as in his claim that “the first problem with liberalism is that it wrongly assumes that humans are fundamentally solitary individuals, when in fact they are social beings at their core.” But liberalism did not assume that. It assumed that solitary man in a state of nature would find life nasty, brutish, and short, with Thomas Hobbes, or in want of a mechanism to peacefully resolve disputes, with John Locke. For both, man in his natural state was inevitably encased in a social situation. In such a situation, radical individualism was an impossible solution: something had to be given up, in order to secure the rest. What is significant about that starting point is that it put survival above virtue in considering the ends of the commonwealth, separating it from the teachings of antiquity and the church. But the initial assumption of a state of nature was made in order to show its limitations, as Hobbes and Locke went on to demonstrate. The political problem became whether freedom was best served by too much or too little power in the state. Too little might expose the commonwealth to external and internal marauders, but too much could become oppressive to the people.

Nor was liberalism incompatible with and hostile to nationalism, as Mearsheimer repeatedly declaims. In its pure form, he writes, liberalism makes no room for national loyalty. Instead of exploring this historically, Mearsheimer constructs a social-science theory called liberalism and from this deduces an unvarying hostility to nationalism. In its historical development, however, liberalism was closely associated with nationalism. Mearsheimer appears to recognize this in citing David Armitage’s account of the independence declarations begun in 1776 and widely imitated thereafter, as nations struggled in agonies of independence, but it plays no role in his theoretical construction called liberalism. In his conception, liberalism is invariably at war with nationalism. But such a view can hardly be squared with what historical liberals believed. Taking the American branch as Franklin Roosevelt thought of it, descending from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, the commitment to liberalism was hardly deemed incompatible with love for the nation. One might love one’s country for many reasons, but a favored one in America was to do so because the republic guaranteed those immortal rights and seemed thus to carry the fortunes of human freedom. That’s why Lincoln loved it, as he memorably wrote in his eulogy of Henry Clay. Yet Mearsheimer can write that “civic nationalism is not a useful concept.” Honest Abe thought it was. Jefferson thought it was. Hamilton, too. That it always stood alongside a sense of communal identity, of Americans as a people, does not deprive it of its existence or its attraction.

What Mearsheimer is really describing as liberalism is not liberalism as it was, but a militarized cosmopolitanism that, in its relationship with nationalism, is profoundly different from previous versions of liberal internationalism and the broader society of states tradition. Cooperation among nations for the purpose of securing their mutual independence was the way that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt saw it. The idea wasn’t to meld the nations into one homogenous mass, but to secure them in their freedom and independence. In Mearsheimer’s conception, liberalism always had these nationality-destroying ambitions within it, but only with unipolarity in the New World Order could they finally find release. That account misleads in vastly underestimating the real change of objectives that took place under the auspices of “neo-liberalism” and “neo-conservatism” (the two great ideas of the 1990s, initially competing, which seemed to undergo a mind-meld over time).

In his analysis of liberalism, Mearsheimer begins with the distinction between “progressive liberalism” and “modus vivendi liberalism,” following John Gray’s Two Faces of Liberalism. This discussion of the best domestic policy for the liberal state, whatever its other merits, is not to the point in assessing the liberal conception of foreign policy and international relations. Mearsheimer’s reconstruction of liberalism focuses on the rights of individuals, ignoring states, and thus entirely effaces the central international distinctions that liberal thinkers drew. It is as if the law of nature and of nations never meant anything to liberalism, when in its historical etymology it was most closely identified with it. We learn nothing from Mearsheimer of Hugo Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, or Emer de Vattel, nothing of the importance of the law of nations to America’s Founders and to many (but not all) U.S. leaders that followed. These silences should not obscure the point that liberalism had a well-developed international theory, which put the rights of states and nations at the center. Michael Doyle expresses a key part of it, in a formulation Mearsheimer cites much later in the book: states have a right to be free from external intervention. That postulate did not put liberalism at war with nationalism, but mostly in alliance with it. Nations were to be self-determining. Liberals generally thought that was grand. Liberal opinion could, of course, also be divided: a central conundrum of international liberalism was whether the right to non-intervention held most for states or nations. Both views registered the fundamental right of independence, but this could set them at odds in particular circumstances. Mearsheimer takes cognizance of the distinction between the state and the nation, but does not explore the arguments among liberal thinkers over its significance in law and diplomacy.

As a social scientist, Mearsheimer finds it necessary to use the language of prediction. Instead of focusing on the record of the United States as the sole world superpower, he writes about what “liberal great powers” have done and will do. “Liberal great powers,” it seems, will promote democracy and human rights, increased trade and investment, and international institutions. In a similar vein, he writes: “It is hardly surprising that a liberal foreign-policy favors market-based economies and calls for furthering international trade and investment.” Over history, however, there has been great variation in U.S. attitudes toward these things. Increased trade and investment, for example, describes the neoliberal policies of the last twenty-five years, but the Bretton Woods system after World War II gave much greater emphasis to the protection of national discretion and labor rights. Looking further back, the United States had a highly protectionist trade regime from the 1820s to the 1930s, and this in a country that, as Mearsheimer puts it, was always “liberal to the core.” If liberalism was omnipresent, how can it explain the variations? Mearsheimer solves this problem by ignoring the variations.

This language of prediction about what “liberal great powers” will do is dubious for another reason. Who, after all, are the liberal great powers? Mearsheimer doesn’t specify any other liberal great powers besides the United States, making his a theory built on one case. Generalizing about “liberal great powers” on this basis, however, slides easily into the proposition that whatever did happen (sometimes in the name of liberalism) had to happen and was historically inevitable. The theoretical language adds nothing to the historical description and in fact detracts from its veracity. The defensible generalizations, if such there be, would concern not “liberal great powers” but great powers, and would hold that powerful countries like to throw their weight around, that their appetite for power often grows with the eating, and that the United States has not proven to be an exception to that rule.

Realism 101

Mearsheimer is at great pains to describe what he calls “the realist story,” the master narrative that makes sense of human history and that is applicable to wide ranges of human behavior. In this theory, states are seen as power maximizing entities that privilege their own right of survival. It is a world after the Athenian generals at Melos, in which the strong do what they will and the weak do what they must. Mearsheimer’s theory assumes that states are the main actors, with no higher authority above them; that states can never be sure that the capabilities of opposing states reflect malign intentions, and hence must fear the worst if they hope to survive, and that this overriding goal of survival is pursued rationally by maximizing their own power whenever they can. “No society can ever be too powerful relative to its competitors.” For purposes of maximizing security, “social groups have a strong incentive to incorporate or dominate—even eradicate—other groups.” States, in Mearsheimer’s reckoning, “tend to think they alone have the right to survive. They do not apply the right to other states.” In the realist story, there is no room for rights, just as there is no room for “the international community.” Norms are powerless. Appeals to concepts like rights or justice are just window dressing “that powerful states use to sound high-minded when they are pursuing their interests, and that weak states invoke when they have no other recourse.”

There are scattered references in The Great Delusion to writers often deemed “realist,” like Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, but Mearsheimer’s version of realism is far more extreme than anything to be found in those authors. It would be pertinent to note, for example, that the words that Thucydides puts in the mouths of the Athenians at Melos, which Mearsheimer cites, were immediately followed by the deed of the Sicilian expedition, resulting in the disastrous loss of the Athenian army. That unfolding drama suggests “hubris followed by nemesis” rather than amorality and power maximization as the real lesson of The History of the Peloponnesian War. It would be pertinent to note that Hobbes laid down as a law of nature not only the right of self-preservation but also the duty to seek peace, and indeed suggested various “means to peace”—“justice, gratitude, modesty, equity, mercy, and the rest”—that relied upon a mutual respect for right and found the basic standard in the Golden Rule. Mearsheimer’s idea of the Golden Rule would undoubtedly be the old joke that he who’s got the gold gets to make the rules. That was not Hobbes’s conception.

Even Machiavelli, the most “realist” of these writers, does observe that good faith, liberality, and justice are real and valuable things, adding the proviso that they would have to be abandoned when pressed by necessity. Machiavelli’s allowance that evil may be done to bring forth good inverted in vital respects the Ciceronian inheritance, and he was denounced for five hundred years for reasons like those I would like to deploy against Mearsheimer, but Mearsheimer’s depiction of the role of norms in social life makes Machiavelli look like a saint. Machiavelli’s doctrine of reason of state—that when the survival of the state is in question, moral restraints could be put aside—does not dispense with such categories for all time. It is avowedly a doctrine for parlous circumstances, such as Machiavelli believed Italy faced when he was writing. What Machiavelli has to say on that score is comparatively mild and innocuous by comparison with Mearsheimer, because while Machiavelli inverts certain moral categories and shows that good intentions can produce disastrous results, he doesn’t totally subvert that moral world; you’re still in it, if a bit upside down. But Mearsheimer’s science of IR takes us out of it. Machiavelli engaged in a sustained, vexatious, and even mischievous dialogue with justice, whereas Mearsheimer regards all norms as either ineffective or hypocritical, always pretexts, never motives, always window-dressing, never standards.

So long as we’re making Machiavellian calculations, it also should be remembered that Machiavelli was keen on the distinction between appearance and reality. One of his most important pieces of advice is that the prince must disguise his morally dubious intentions, leading subsequent writers and statesmen to the startling realization that the last refinement of Machiavellism was a denunciation of Machiavelli. Mearsheimer, by contrast, seems to advise the open avowal of iniquitous principles (we don’t care a fig for your right to survive). If Mearsheimer had a conception of right, one could say, he would be making an argument from fact to right, or might to right, but he seems to hold all such rights talk as meaningless. Machiavelli distinguished between necessity and mere advantage as relevant in determining when the suspension of the conventional moralities could be justified, whereas Mearsheimer collapses that distinction into the relentless struggle for survival, in principle justifying anything.

The first thing to notice about Mearsheimer’s conception of hard realism (what he called “offensive realism” in his Tragedy of Great Power Politics in 2001) is how terribly unrealistic it is. It is so because it vastly understates the importance of justice and injustice in social life. Human beings can be pretty dim bulbs, we human beings must admit, but one thing people can figure out pretty quickly is when they’ve been wronged or kicked around. Even a three-year-old objects when her brother appropriates her toy. In other circumstances, it would be pretty difficult not to pay heed to the boot on your neck, or that someone has invaded your country and burned your house. The sense of right or honor violated prompts to anger, which is motivating, and conjoins to interest, making it powerful. Mearsheimer, I suppose, would just call this nationalism, but it attests to the vital significance of such sentiments as drivers of engagement in the political arena. It is true, of course, that human beings have a strong tendency to put the emphasis on wrongs received rather than given, a phenomenon yet more applicable to political collectives. The problem with justice is not that it is insignificant but that we can’t quite reach agreement on what it is. From the fact of moral disagreement, however, we cannot derive the injunction to put justice aside. That is a huge mistake. In his philosophical reckonings, Mearsheimer imagines a knock-down drag-out fight between interest and morality, as if acting unjustly were the most prudent thing a state could do. The reverse is true much more often. On this point, one can only repeat the verities, with Burke: “Justice is the great standing policy of civil society; and any eminent departure from it, under any circumstances, lies under the suspicion of being no policy at all.”

A second thing to notice about this doctrine of realism is how similar it is to Trump’s worldview. Trump is, in conviction, a hard realist. To revel in that sentiment of pure self-regard and to display it to the American public was the purpose behind his suggestion that, after invading Iraq, the United States ought to have seized Iraq’s oil fields and distributed the loot. Trump’s declaration was not about policy; it was about attitude, a brain fart meant to show that he would definitely put America First and could care less if others objected to the injustice of the thing. The Trump administration, of course, doesn’t go so far, with its officials at least bowing before conventional morality in justifying their actions, or at least having the decency to lie about it, but Trump himself epitomizes the amoral self-aggrandizing politician, the calculating Schmittian decider unconstrained by norms. Or would do so if he was more of a rational actor. (He’s got the right value system for that; his higher mental powers are, however, in question.)

The deficiency of this purely egotistical stance is plain to see. A posture that openly avows that it cares nothing for the rights of others will, as night follows day, induce in others a conviction that they are dealing with a brigand or marauder. Its manifest tendency, if consistently observed, is to produce a condition of enemies to all, friends to none, an outcome hardly consistent with the protection of American security or prosperity (or indeed that of any other state). Mearsheimer has a much keener sense of limitation than Trump, and thus his realism, while theoretically unbounded, is limited in fact. Enterprises that others might condemn as illegal and immoral Mearsheimer would be content with denouncing as simply bone-headed, akin to shooting oneself in the foot. But his realism does take him to some pretty dark places, as in his recommendation that the United States should employ “bait and bleed” strategies toward China. What, one might ask, of the innocents thus to be sacrificed? At one point, Mearsheimer condemns Hitlerian Germany as one of the most evil regimes in history, but does not seem to appreciate that the German theories of Machtpolitik (that bear, in their philosophical claims, the closest resemblance to Mearsheimer’s brand of realism) did assuredly lay the ground for Hitlerlism, as the great German realist Friedrich Meinecke came to see.

Mearsheimer claims that realism is in possession of timeless truths and “takes security competition among the great powers and war to be a normal part of life.” But it is vital to note that the great powers are in possession of means of destruction far more dangerous than anything previously existing in human history. Surely that matters in assessing the rationality of their security competition, giving them incentives to not let their competition get out of hand. Surely that means that war among the great powers, far from being the most normal thing in the world, would emphatically imperil the security and perhaps survival of them all. Ronald Reagan’s declaration that such a war could not be won and must never be fought is a much more persuasive commentary than any such assumption of normality. Mearsheimer recognizes the folly of nuclear war at one point, but it does not enter into his depiction of realism’s timeless truths. I don’t think that this novel condition of the hypertrophy of war, imperiling the species, actually undermines realism, rightly understood, because both Thucydides and Hobbes saw the protean condition of utter lawlessness and moral turpitude as the problem to be solved, not the remedy to be proffered. Liberal thinkers agreed with them in abundance on that point, sharing with Hobbes the assumption that anarchy was intolerable because so obviously hostile to self-preservation, but departing from him on the remedy. The absolute authority vested in the state by Hobbes was seen by liberal thinkers as in contradiction with itself, as who could ensure that the king, being yet a man, should be so tamed? Instead, they focused on devices such as separation of powers, representative government, checks and balances, the rule of law within and among commonwealths. They adopted an international theory stressing the achievement of friendship among nations based on reciprocal respect for right and mutual interest, not superiority and dominance. They saw the merit of an equilibrium of power, which meant avoiding a situation in which any one power could “give the law” to the others. Those were realistic calculations among thinkers attuned to the abuse of power, but yet also the fount of liberalism. Somehow, however, Mearsheimer ignores these foundational concerns, very much tied to security, and can write as if liberalism never bothered with the security problem.

Mearsheimer caps his realist analysis with a critique of a world state. He regards this as impossible, and does not reckon with the thesis (widely held by neoconservatives) that it came into existence de facto in the form of America’s worldwide hegemony, in which America stands forth (or used to) as the chief law enforcer of the “liberal world order.” Instead, he contrasts a centralized world state with a condition of total anarchy. Take your pick, he advises: it’s either a hierarchic state ruling the planet or total anarchy among egotistical power-maximizers. Is there really nothing in between these equally odious outcomes, between an unrealizable tyranny and a depraved dystopia? Mearsheimer quotes Alexander Wendt to the effect that one predator will best one hundred pacifists (ignoring how often those devoted to pacifism, like Erasmus, recognized withal the right of self-defense). There are far more powers of resistance to aggression and external occupation than this depiction of the anarchy of the system conveys (a point that Mearsheimer later recognizes but which does not enter into his analysis of anarchy and the world state). Effectively, as Jonathan Schell observed, the world has become unconquerable. The absence of an international police force does not mean that there are no powers of enforcement in the system. It means they are decentralized. They reside especially in the military capacity of the various nations, but also, as Schell emphasized, in various forms of popular resistance. Because defense is the stronger form of warfare, they actually provide reasonable assurances of security for most states, as a stout defense can hugely complicate the ambitions of a would-be conqueror or, that failing, ensure a costly and brutalizing occupation. Given a past century that saw the successive fall of empires, and a new century that saw once again the capacity of third-rate powers to frustrate the ambitions of the first-rate powers, it is very dubious to describe conquest as “in some circumstances” a winning strategy. In today’s world, states tend to be more worried about migrants overwhelming their borders than incorporating such masses via conquest. On disputed borders, to be sure, the use of military power may force an adjustment to a state’s advantage, but any plan of great conquest (such as might promise a shift in the global balance of power) would waste rather than augment the resources of the aggressive state, rendering it weaker and probably imperiling the stability of its regime.

Mearsheimer credits the “balance of power” as the proper objective for U.S. policy, by which he means the prevention of hegemony by any other power over Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, but with the United States insisting on its hegemony in the western hemisphere. In his hands, such a criterion might produce a restrained foreign policy, but it is sufficiently vague and elastic to be employed with facility in an unrestrained one, as any aggressive action by an enemy can be seen (as it has often been seen) as threatening the balance. More seriously, this analysis does not take account of highly significant changes in the underpinnings of national power, such that the objective of “shifting the world balance of military power” by conquest would have an entirely different meaning from the past. As Robert W. Tucker observed a half century ago (in Force, Order, and Justice, at 278), the nuclear revolution upended the economic and technological calculations that underlay the geopolitical theories of the twentieth century’s first half, theories that stipulated the immense significance of the major world industrialized regions (of which George Kennan in the late 1940s famously counted five). Nuclear weapons made states deeply vulnerable in one sense but, as Tucker noted, “these same weapons render a great nuclear power physically secure to a degree that great powers seldom, if ever, enjoyed in the past. For the first time in history the prospect arises of a physical security that need no longer prove dependent on time-honored calculations of a balance of power. The calculations that characterize balance of power policies must appear increasingly irrelevant where no prospective increase by an adversary of the traditional ingredients of power can substantially improve his chances of surviving—let alone winning in any politically meaningful sense—a nuclear conflict.” Mearsheimer stresses repeatedly the imperatives of survival, but does not register Tucker’s corollary theme that America, in its worldwide nuclear commitments, risks its survival on behalf of interests that, if lost, would not imperil that survival.

A Disguised Liberalism

The saving grace of The Great Delusion is not Mearsheimer’s dark realism but his disguised liberalism. It is not only that Mearsheimer affirms his belief that liberal democracy is the best (or least bad) form of government, but also that he waxes eloquently over the severe costs to liberal democracy that America’s worldwide role has entailed. These include a culture of lying in Washington, illiberal intolerance towards different peoples, madcap policies of universal surveillance, indifference toward the killing of the enemy in vast numbers, and the corruption of domestic political institutions by a security state engorged with tremendous resources. Sometimes Mearsheimer adduces these consequences to show hypocrisy, and his condemnation appears silently, but at other times he is emphatic in his conviction that such lapses have threatened core values. In detailing those domestic costs, however, he inadvertently shows that liberalism—what Daniel Deudney has called “republican security theory” and Michael Lind “republican liberalism”—is a better framework for understanding what has happened than his bare-knuckled version of realism. When Mearsheimer is describing “the dictates of realism,” he takes no account of the republican security thesis, which always warned that powerful military institutions in a centralized state would risk highly adverse consequences for domestic liberty. He acknowledges the fact, as it were, but it makes no appearance in his presentation of realist theory. If the overriding goal of each state is to maximize its military power, however, this inevitably puts the requirements of domestic liberty in the shade. In contrast with Mearsheimer’s brand of realism, republican security theory places the control of power at home and abroad as the central problem reflection must solve, and sees these two questions as closely intertwined.

One very peculiar feature of Mearsheimer’s argument is his attribution of supreme power to a liberal creed that would impose human rights and democracy everywhere by force, for the betterment of the human race. He see this urge as immanent in liberalism from the beginning, then actuated in the new world order after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the state system became unipolar. Looking back at some thirty years of U.S. war-making, he sees this domineering ideology of liberalism, committed to social engineering, as absolutely in command of the scene. I should think, by contrast, that skepticism about these exalted motives is more appropriate in understanding the factors behind U.S. war-making. Where cynicism is most called for, as it were, Mearsheimer bails and favors a sugar-coated account of U.S. motives. It is odd for a realist to ascribe such power to idealism, especially considering his previous argument that civic nationalism is not a useful concept. In his account, what was not a useful concept at home, incapable of gaining the people’s allegiance, suddenly morphs into a universal creed of bewitching power, capable of globe-straddling intervention everywhere. How can that be? Trump’s ascension presents a further conundrum for Mearsheimer’s theory, for Trump has stripped his administration almost entirely of idealistic attachment to human rights and democracy, yet in Trump’s first year the United States still required an $80 billion boost to already extravagant military expenditures. Why the increase, if the human rights and democracy crusade explains so much of the preceding effort?

The truth about U.S. hegemony is more prosaic, and a lot more crass. Inflated conceptions of security—unless we destroy Saddam, our very existence will be imperiled—meant a lot more than uplifting paeans to human liberty and democracy. The former was a stronger motivation for the Iraq War than the latter, though many of its supporters persuaded themselves, absurdly, that America could create a country dedicated to multiethnic democracy by blowing away its state. It is true that Clintonian liberalism bought into this in Iraq, Libya and Syria, and is deservedly censured for that, but the driving force for the Iraq War came from Republican leaders who had never styled themselves as liberals. Oddly missing from The Great Delusion is The Israel Lobby, one among many domestic factors pushing the United States to war in 2003. Iraq apart, appeals to human rights and democracy, when America went to war, were more in the nature of pretexts and seldom illuminated the true motives. Mearsheimer, one imagines, skirts such excursions into the historical record because it would interfere with the commanding thesis that liberalism had its way in the world over the last two decades and is to blame for all these follies. One should think, however, that you’re getting to a pretty debased coinage if George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have to stand in as epitomes of the liberal. It is a fair and damning criticism that Clintonian liberals have spent so many decades running from McGovernism and Carterism that they’ve ended up in a place not far from Boltonism, but it is a stretch to attribute all this to liberalism. Hillary put her finger in the air to test the political winds, kept an eye on the campaign coffers, and felt she had to be tougher than the boys. Those were more probable causes of her conversion to neoconservatism than a devotion to liberalism.

Though Mearsheimer writes of liberalism as an incredibly powerful force at some times, he also takes back nearly all of the assertion in his observation that it is only possible to do this sort of thing in a unipolar order; if it’s bipolar or multipolar, he argues, states revert to “realist dictates.” Earlier, he had written that liberal democracies “have little difficulty in conducting diplomacy when they’re acting according to realist dictates, which is most of the time.” But if it really is “most of the time,” why all the preceding attention to its liberal identity, which puts the liberal great power on autopilot to impose its system everywhere? To seek an explanation in the structure of the international system can only take you so far, because what that structure is lies too much in the eye of the beholder and is too dependent on how far the leading power presses its advantage. Even in the 1990s, when America enjoyed the widest prestige, and its power seemed to vastly eclipse every other state, Russia retained a formidable nuclear arsenal, as did China and others. It is not clear how Mearsheimer would describe the existing international system, but a vast military establishment at home clearly wants to maintain and extend U.S. military supremacy, wants to keep the system unipolar. Mearsheimer’s prediction seems of no predictive value: the thing to be explained (reversion to realist dictates) is itself unclear, as is the thing that is to explain it: whether the system is unipolar or not.

This points to a broader lesson. The fluidity of power ensures that terms like unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity disguise as much as they reveal; they are shorthand descriptions that do not take sufficient account of what states make of their condition, and that gloss over other dimensions of power besides the military. Theoretical supremacy is often implicitly equated with military effectiveness, an equation experience belies. It is as clear as can be that America’s new status after the Cold War as the “undisputed heavyweight champion of the world” instilled a hubris that led to imperial folly, but the resulting wars were also diminishing of its power and did provoke resistance. A perceived unipolarity was the enabler; a not-quite-recognized multipolarity was the result.

Mearsheimer devotes his seventh chapter to disproving the theories of the liberal peace that blossomed in the academy in the 1990s and beyond, which held that democratic institutions, economic interdependence, and faith in international institutions all strongly inclined toward peace, and even (in some versions) infallibly produced it. Mearsheimer is properly skeptical about a lot of these claims, and his quotations from the liberal academics exude an exceptionalism and optimism that has increasingly been belied by events. At the same time, he can hardly be said to have refuted them. He erects an implausible standard, for one thing, in holding that these theories have got to work 100 percent of the time, because if there is a possibility of bad behavior anywhere, then everyone else must go big time to power maximization. The conclusion hardly follows.

Mearsheimer emphasizes the absence of a perfect historical record in criticizing the democratic peace theory, which is fair enough, but the real faults lie elsewhere. First, the theory has been used and abused in order to promote war, as in 2003. Of equal seriousness, the proper injunction to observe norms of civility within the democratic community has translated in practice into the improper demand to abandon norms of civility and mutual interest in treating those outside the “democratic community.” Today’s liberals, in their intense dislike of Russia, exemplify this failing, but it is pretty common across the political spectrum in the United States. We (and our allies) are great; our enemies (and their friends) are scum—such is the higher morality of the America-led world order, dubiously called liberal.

Finally, the democratic peace theory underestimates the degree to which democracy can put wings on intense nationalism, as it is doing in a dozen democratic countries today. Mearsheimer, oddly, does not make this objection, but rather in his treatment of China assumes that it would become non-threatening if it were to become democratic. The problem, as he sees it, is that one couldn’t guarantee it would stay democratic. But surely that is not the most cogent objection, as China, whether it becomes democratic or not, would have security interests in its near abroad that are independent of the domestic regime at home. A more democratic China, especially if it listened to the voices of its often bellicose “netizens,” could be more rather than less difficult to contend with. It is difficult to conceive of the Chinese regime that would not object to America’s Air-Sea Battle plan, for instance, or that would not care about its appetite for water or a dozen other interests that China, as a nation, must inevitably take cognizance of and seek to safeguard.

Mearsheimer is also skeptical of the argument that economic interdependence leads to peace. The evidence on this is admittedly mixed, but “compared to what?” is a legitimate question to raise. Autarchy would not give states much of an incentive for cooperative behavior, whereas interdependence does. But the hoary old question also seems badly posed, because economic interdependence does exist and is not going away, even if there is a full blown tariff war; the real question, not taken up in The Great Delusion, is how to make it bearable, as it truly is inexorable.

The most striking feature of economic interdependence today is the use the U.S. government has made of it to impose draconian sanctions on allies in order to pressure U.S. enemies, on pain of losing access to U.S. markets. Mearsheimer doesn’t take up that phenomenon, though it confirms his suspicion that economic interdependence is no sure road to peace. Mearsheimer’s overall treatment of this liberal theory, as with the democratic peace, requires that economic interdependence must guarantee peace everywhere and must postulate that prosperity is more important than survival, whereas it needs neither the guarantee nor the (absurd) postulate in order to be valuable—if, that is, it does have a decided inclination towards peaceful settlement. Mearsheimer refutes the weakest version of the economic interdependence argument—that globalization will transport us to perpetual peace—rather than the strongest, which is that it has an inclination thereto, as giving states a strong stake in avoiding war. There are things not to like about globalization; its incentivizing of peace is not one of them.

In his treatment of international institutions, Mearsheimer makes the excellent observation that calls for international cooperation are often elicited in order to further enmity elsewhere. From today’s liberal internationalists we learn all about the beauty of international cooperation, only then to discover that the real point is to marshal forces against the enemy. This pattern of the U.S.-led world order—its organization into friends and enemies—has been its most important feature. It has also become its most problematic dysfunction, because it conduces in practice toward deeper international conflict. But the perversion of the cooperative ideal on behalf of militaristic policies does not show that international cooperation is in principle a bad thing. It is not a bad thing; it is absolutely necessary, across a wide range of domains. Its true meaning today, concerning matters of war and peace, requires the United States to devise “rules of the road” with adversaries instead of organizing our efforts against them and reading them out of the human race. That requires earnest attention to the reciprocal respect for right and vital interest as the basis for a new détente. Call it liberalism, if you please, or realism, if you must, but reciprocity is the relevant principle in effecting a reduction of tensions among the nuclear powers.

The biggest problem with liberal institutionalism, as usually rendered, is that it throws a slew of “international institutions” into the mix, and we learn of the UN, NATO, WTO, IMF, and World Bank as an undifferentiated blob, as if they work for the same purposes (they do not) or have been uniformly supported by the United States (they have not been). Mearsheimer does not remedy this error but falls into it himself, speaking of international institutions in the abstract when it is their concrete variation that matters.

Illiberal America

As Mearsheimer describes it, liberalism is a truly hopeless doctrine, shot full of contradictions and absurdities. It sets forth claims of illimitable individual rights, ignoring community. It is prepared to ride roughshod over the right of other states to independence. It has “social engineering” in its bones, grinding humanity into an atomized mass. It is hostile to diplomacy, because intolerant and tending toward maximalism. It talks a big game about the peaceful resolution of disputes, but in fact is addicted to war. Its most important attribute is its hypocrisy, blithely violating core principles its second nature.

If this be liberalism, then we are indeed entitled to reject it and cast it to the four winds. As an ideology of international thought, however, the overall thrust of the U.S. effort, when not simply a brackish version of realism, is much more akin to the “revolutionary” tradition associated with Jacobinism or Bolshevism on the left, and the Counter-Reformation and the Counter-Revolution on the right, than to the traditional doctrines in the liberal approach to international relations. Liberalism, especially in its American manifestation, did put the rights of states to independence at the center of things. It did privilege the peaceful settlement of disputes. To this Mearsheimer implicitly replies that the United States is a liberal state “to the core,” always has been, and therefore its historical record is the template by which we assess the virtues and vices of liberalism. Insofar as it can be shown that the United States engaged in conquest, used deception, favored war over peaceful settlement, or tortured to its heart’s content, we thereby show that liberalism is irretrievably tainted with these maladies. That is unsatisfactory. It deprives liberalism of any substantive content whatsoever and make its fortunes identical with whatever the American state decides to do at any particular point in time.

That the United States has proven exceptionally bellicose does not invalidate the liberal injunction to privilege the peaceful settlement of disputes. That the “liberal state” has locked up peaceful dissenters during war doesn’t show that freedom of speech isn’t an important value. That the United States has read whole peoples out of the human race, in the name of combating terrorism, doesn’t mean that the equality of nations is a sham. Mearsheimer sees liberalism as the source of the nation’s ills; it is better seen as an oft-neglected corrective to its sinful ways. The problem, as earlier observed, is that in foreign-policy liberalism has been abandoned, not that it has gotten fulfilled. In matters of war and peace, the once-liberal state became illiberal, and did so long before Trump. That is a tragedy, for America and for liberalism, really for the world. It is to be repaired, if it can be repaired, not by deepening the illiberalism but by clawing our way out of that corrupt and morally untenable condition, one that in no wise advances America’s true interests.

That repair or renovation entails recovering the sense of limits that once was central to the liberal outlook. It is not especially complicated; the basic proposition is simplicity itself. The “doctrine that all men are equal,” as William Graham Sumner well said, “was set up as a bar to just this notion that we are so much better than others that it is liberty for them to be governed by us.” We could chisel that in granite, release half the security establishment, and still yet be more secure, prosperous, and free.

A key attribute of the older liberalism was its rejection of universal empire: it saw as perilous the assumption by any state of commanding military dominance over others, such that it could “give the law” to international society. This was not an isolated deduction on an arcane point of law, but a first principle for those who accepted the law of nature and of nations, as America’s Founders did. America’s contemporary world posture, especially its desire to have military superiority and escalation dominance on a multitude of frontiers, is in violation of this rule, yet today hardly an eye is batted at home over the extravagance of the pretension. It is accepted as natural and indispensable, the never-questioned postulate of the entire system, as if from on high came the decree: The U.S. armed forces shall be militarily supreme, everywhere on Planet Earth. The older liberalism saw such aspirations as dangerous and overbearing; we neglect its warning at our peril.

Mearsheimer is likely to object that the recognition of universal human rights impels one to intervention, but when the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted fifty years ago it was understood that it did not erect a right of external intervention to remedy state violations. As proposing rights without remedies, these and other declarations were ineffectual but still not useless; they did erect standards that should not be crossed, did express commanding ideals (e.g., the right to be free from torture) that have not lost their charm. Mearsheimer is right to insist on the particularity of the nations and to emphasize their moral disagreement with one another, but he might more profitably have insisted on their right to be free from external dictation, even in the name of human rights, as the traditional liberal view saw that for human rights to take root the nations had to claim such rights for themselves. In his apparent recognition of the norm of nonintervention, at least in some of his moments, Mearsheimer has an unrecognized ally in the rule of the UN Charter, which laid down the fundamental principle that states were to refrain in their international conduct from the use or threat of force. This was once a liberal principle, and a really good one. Too bad the United States has taken to the wholesale violation thereof.

Given the crimes and follies committed in its name, it is understandable that liberalism should be under siege. In Mearsheimer’s accounting, as in that of many others, the United States is understood as the quintessential liberal state. If the American vision of world order has flaws, it has then followed that these flaws must be ascribed to liberalism. In fact, however, liberalism’s abundant resources are better deployed in a critique of the U.S. record. The most cogent refutation of the U.S. role arises from within the liberal tradition, not outside of it. Hard to recall today, barely discernible in the historical mists, the liberal tradition nevertheless provides essential elements of wisdom that, if observed, might restrain the now greatly empowered American state and show a path to the reform of its international posture. The substitution of mutual interest and reciprocity for the ways of force, liberalism’s great enemy; the equality of peoples and their possession in common of a right to carve out their own destiny; the privileging of the peaceful settlement of disputes; the toleration of difference in religion and creed; a zealous watchfulness against the abuse of power, acknowledging the need for checks and balances upon the exercise of governmental authority; the idea of an order based on the possession of right and the fulfillment of duty, for individuals and nations—all these themes are recognizably liberal, or used to be, and would be good maxims for any government committed to the cause of domestic reform and international peace. These ideas fit a policy of restraint as the hand fits the glove.

One point, however, must be conceded. However much one might seek to recover the lineaments of an older liberalism, seeking a more perfect union at home and a peaceful international order abroad, one does increasingly get the sense that the project is somehow doomed. All the things Americans once said about themselves—a tolerant political culture, an acceptance of civil disagreement, respect for the rights of other nations—no longer hold true. A gigantic gap between liberal profession and practice, between the glittering generalities and the dark underbelly, inevitably induces widespread cynicism. When people are asked to accept a fairy tale and can see with their own eyes the unreality of it, disillusion follows. Fairly or not, it is discrediting of liberalism when that happens, and especially when that happens in the world’s leading “liberal power.” I hold it against the political leadership of this country that the thing most in their care, of which they were to be the sacred vessels, should have been held, in the event, in so little regard by them.

David C. Hendrickson is Professor of Political Science at Colorado College and the author of Republic in Peril: American Empire and the Liberal Tradition (2018).

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