 Welcome, everyone. I'm very delighted to welcome Professor John Merchheimer to SAAAS. This talk is sponsored by the SAAAS Center for International Studies and Democracy as a part of the International Relations Speaker Series. My name is Marisin Adi Magadam. I'm a professor of normal thought at the Department of Politics and International Studies. Professor Merchheimer doesn't really need an introduction. For most of you studying international relations and the social sciences in general, he surely you will know him and his writings. I will say a little bit about his institutional position, and then we will move on to the other parts of this lecture. Professor Merchheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. He's the author of several books, including the Israel Lobby of course, which is a book that is taught here at SAAAS in several courses, including my humble course as well. And of course, he's the author of The Great Delusion, Liberal Dreams, and International Realities. And this is the title of this talk today as well. Professor Merchheimer will talk about, for about 40 minutes, should give us enough time for questions and answers and a good dialogue thereafter. And we will also have a drinks reception in the foyer for those of you who want to join us. But allow me to introduce the talk with a tweet. And don't worry, this is not from President Donald Trump and not from his Twitter site. Although there is a lot of exciting stuff happening there. And some people would say some illiberal delusions that are posted on that particular Twitter site. I'm allowed to say that as a scholar here. But this is not from his site. This is actually from one of our distinguished guests today. And I thought it was very pertinent for this particular talk. So allow me to quote this tweet. John Merchheimer is coming to speak at SAAAS. That's going to be an interesting one to say the least as one of the lions of realism enters the den of heterodoxy. I found that very interesting. So without further ado, please give a very distinct SAAAS welcome to Professor John Merchheimer. Thank you very much for the kind introduction. And thank you to SAAAS for inviting me here. This is the second time I've been to SAAAS to speak. The first time was actually with Steve Walt when we came here to talk about the Israel lobby and US foreign policy. The subject I'm talking about tonight is the subject of my new book, The Great Delusion, Liberal Ideals and International Realities. OK. My basic story. When the Cold War ended, the United States adopted a foreign policy of liberal hegemony. And the basic aim of that foreign policy was to remake the world in America's image. My argument is that the policy failed miserably. And I believe that one of the principal reasons, certainly not the only reason, but one of the principal reasons that President Trump is now in the White House is that he ran against liberal hegemony. His arguments resonated with the American public because the policy failed. And he got elected. But again, there were other reasons. Now, regarding why it failed, my argument is that liberalism, as reflected in this policy of liberal hegemony, ran up against two other isms, nationalism and realism. And when liberalism runs up against nationalism, nationalism wins almost every time. And the same thing is true with realism. So what really defeated liberal hegemony in the end was nationalism and realism. So that's the story that I'm going to tell you. Now, here's the outline of the talk. I have to start by defining what I mean by liberalism. Then I have to tell you what I mean by nationalism. Then I have to describe for you what the foreign policy of liberal hegemony was all about. Then I want to tell you why the United States pursued liberal hegemony. Then I want to tell you what its track record looks like. And this is a story of one failure after another. And then I'm going to tell you why I think liberal hegemony failed. And then I'll close by offering some comments on where I think liberal hegemony is headed. OK, let me start with what liberalism is. Key thing to understand about liberalism is that it is based on two fundamental assumptions about human nature. The first one goes like this. Do you believe that human beings are fundamentally social animals who carve out room for their individuality? Or do you believe that we are fundamentally individuals to begin with who come together and form social contracts? Very, very important question. And where you stand on this issue is of enormous consequence. Liberalism is predicated on the assumption that we are individuals from the get-go and that we form social contracts. This is why people like Hobbes and Locke, who is effectively the father of liberalism, and Rousseau are known as social contract theorists. They all start with individuals in the state of nature who form social contracts. So that's the first point you want to keep in mind about liberalism. The focus is on the individual. Second is that liberalism assumes that human beings cannot use their critical faculties to discover universal truths. When it comes to first principles, when it comes to those big questions about what is the good life, what is the proper political system, we cannot reach universal agreement. I like to talk about abortion and affirmative action when I talk about this subject in the United States. Abortion and affirmative action are hot-button issues. It's very hard to imagine that you could get a wholesome of people together, let them turn on their critical faculties, and they could reach agreement on these issues. I know really smart people, really smart people who favor abortion and really smart people who are opposed to abortion. And what's very important to understand when it comes to liberalism and this critically important assumption is that sometimes people believe so fervently with regard to a particular issue that they're willing to kill each other. It matters so much. And you want to remember that you can trace the origins of liberalism back to this country. And you can trace the origins back to a time when Protestants and Catholics were killing each other in huge numbers. There is no way you can use your critical faculties to determine whether Catholicism is a superior religion to Protestantism or vice versa. They're just real limits to what you can do with your critical faculties when it comes to dealing with first principles. And the potential for violence is always there. So the central question for liberalism is how should politics be arranged to deal with this potential for violence? This is what liberalism is all about. Thinking about this central problem, this is the liberal solution, has three parts to it. First part is to argue about individual rights. The argument is that everybody has individual rights, a set of rights that they cannot be denied. And those rights are inalienable. That's why I use the word everybody. This is very important. And I'll talk more about this in another minute. It's very important to understand that liberalism privileges rights. And those are inalienable rights or natural rights. That means they apply to everybody on the planet. And the idea is that individuals have a right. They have the freedom to live life pretty much as they see fit. Because we individuals cannot agree on what is the right life or the good life, we can't agree on first principles. The name of the game is to carve out space in civil society for individuals to have as much freedom as possible to live life the way they see fit. That's what living in a liberal society is all about. It's why I'm very happy that I live in liberal America. Because we have lots of rights to do pretty much what we want. Second part of the story is we emphasize the norm of tolerance. Because we recognize in a liberal society that there are going to be differences and that some people are going to live in ways that are different than you and in ways that you don't approve of. But we tolerate difference. Again, what we're trying to do here is we're trying to prevent people from killing each other. And at the same time, allow them as much freedom as possible to live life the way they see fit. But the problem is that tolerance and an emphasis on rights only takes you so far. Because there's still going to be some people out there who want to kill those they disagree with and who are living according to principles that they don't agree with. That's why you need a state. There is a very important role for the state in a liberal society. But it's supposed to be a limited state. Because if you have a really powerful state, that state can trample on individual rights. And you don't want that. You want to give individuals the right to live the life as they see fit. So those are the three solutions or the three elements of the liberal solution to the starting problem. Now, here's where the taproot of liberal hegemony comes in. I'll say much more about this as we go along. It took me a long while to figure this out when I was thinking about liberalism. But a theory that's based on individualism and says that every individual on the planet has a certain set of rights quickly becomes a universalistic theory. It's very important to understand that. That's what turns this is, as I go along, I'll tell the story in greater detail. This is what turns the United States into a crusader state. It's that heavy emphasis on rights, individual rights, inalienable rights that leads to a universalistic ideology or foreign policy in this case. OK, but don't want to get into that at the moment. Let's talk a little bit about nationalism. Nationalism's core assumption, very different than liberalism, starts with the assumption that humans are naturally social animals. We are born into and heavily socialized into particular groups. We're born into tribes. Before our critical faculties kick in, we are socialized by our mother and father and by others around us. And individualism takes a backseat to group loyalty. This is not to say that you have no room for individualism in any society. You can carve out lots of space for individualism, but you do it in the context of group loyalty. We are all social animals. That's what nationalism assumes. Aside from the family, the most important group, the most important social group in today's world is the nation. And I'll say more about this in a second. Before I do that, what exactly is nationalism? Nationalism is a set of political beliefs which hold that a nation, a body of individuals with characteristics that purportedly distinguish them from other groups, should have their own state. A nation state, the concept of a nation state captures what nationalism is all about. So nationalism is predicated on the assumption that we're all born into social groups, and the most important social group outside the family in the world we live in is the nation. And each one of those nations wants its own state. To drive this point home, think of Zionism and think of Theodor Herzl. Theodor Herzl was the father of Zionism. His most famous book is called The Jewish State. Just think of those words. The Jewish state. He's effectively saying, there is this group, there is this nation, there is this tribe called Jews, and they want their own state, Jewish state. Think about the Palestinians. What do the Palestinians want? The Palestinians want a state of their own. People talk about the two-state solution. Palestinians and Jews go to Catalonia. What do the Catalonians want? The Catalonians want a state of their own, a nation state. That's what nationalism is. Take this a step further. Very important to understand, especially from my story, that nations place enormous importance on sovereignty or self-determination, which is why they want their own state. Palestinians want their own state because they want to determine their own future. They want to determine what their politics look like. They want to have a control over their own daily life. Sovereignty, self-determination, these are concepts that matter very greatly in a world of nation states. And of course, this brings us to nation states. It's not just nations. Nation states place enormous importance on sovereignty or self-determination, which inclines them in powerful ways to resist foreign interference. Think of the United States today. And think of all this talk in the United States about the Russians interfering in American elections. This is categorically unacceptable to the vast number of Americans. Why is that the case? It's because the Russians are violating our sovereignty. They're interfering in the politics of America. And it's quite clear that most Europeans feel the same way about the Russians interfering in their politics. And that, of course, is because Europe is filled with nation states. And those nation states care about their sovereignty, and they don't want other countries interfering in their politics. It's all about nationalism. Now, my argument is, as you heard me say early on, nationalism beats liberalism at every turn. Why is that the case? It's because we're primarily social animals. We're not individuals from the get-go who form social contracts. We're social animals. We're born into groups. We're born into nations. We're born into tribes from the beginning. We're heavily socialized from the beginning. We have deep loyalties in almost every case. And on the empirical side, just look at the planet today. Have you ever thought about what the planet looks like today compared to what it looked like in, let's say, 1450? If I gave you a map of Europe in 1450, and I told you to memorize it in one week, it's not clear you could do it. It would be such a complicated map. There's principalities. There's douches. There's city states. There's empires. There's just all sorts of different kinds of political entities on that map of Europe in the 15th century. Today, the entire planet is covered with nation-states, remarkable homogeneity. Of course, each one of those nation-states is different because nations are different from each other, different cultures. But the planet is covered with nation-states. Furthermore, just to compare it to liberal democracies, we have never even had 50% of the states on the globe being liberal democracies. And since 2006, the number of liberal democracies on the planet is decreasing. At the same time, every state is a nation-state, nationalism. Finally, very important to remember, all liberal democracies, this includes countries like the United States and Britain, are liberal nation-states. The United States is a very nationalistic country. Britain is a very nationalistic country. Witness Brexit. Okay, nationalism, very powerful force here and in the United States. Even though what we talk about most of the time is these countries as liberal countries. I often say to people, if you went to the main research library at the University of Chicago, you would find that half the library is filled with books on American liberalism, yet you can't even find one full shelf of books on nationalism. Okay, I've given you my definition of liberalism and my definition of nationalism. That's all for setting up my discussion of liberal hegemony and why it failed. Okay, liberal hegemony is basically an attempt to remake the world in America's image. Liberal hegemony, as I said to you before, is the foreign policy we adopt when the Cold War ends. And liberal hegemony has three important dimensions to it. The first and most important dimension is the United States and its European allies, including Britain, are committed to spreading liberal democracy all over the planet. We are going to interfere in the politics of countries here and there and everywhere all for the purpose of making them liberal democracies. We want a planet that's not just filled with nation-states, but filled with liberal democratic nation-states. That's the first dimension. Second is we're bent on integrating more and more countries into an open international economy. The name of the game is to get countries hooked on capitalism. The name of the game is to create more and more economic interdependence. And then the third goal, which is related to the second goal, is to integrate more and more countries and especially big countries like China and Russia into international institutions. And as you know, those international institutions like the IMF, the WTO, the World Bank are inextricably bound up with that open international economy. So the name of the game is to have really robust and numerous international institutions and get countries all across the planet, especially the China's and the Russia's out there, embedded in those institutions, also get them embedded in this open international economy and going back to my first point, spreading liberal democracy across the planet. Those are the basic goals. And let me give you an example of this policy at work. Think about NATO expansion, EU expansion and the color revolutions, the Rose Revolution in Georgia and the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. What we were trying to do, we meaning the West, United States was in the driver's seat, but the Europeans were with us, hook, line and sinker. Okay, what we were trying to do was we were trying to spread democracy in Eastern Europe, including in countries that were part of the former Soviet Union like Ukraine and Georgia, through devices like the Rose Revolution and the Orange Revolution. That's what we were trying to do. And we were even talking about turning Russia into a liberal democracy. So the name of the game in Eastern Europe, as we move NATO and the EU eastward, is to foster the growth of liberal democracy. Furthermore, we're interested in integrating more and more countries in Eastern Europe into the open international economy. This is why we wanted to bring those countries into the EU. Remember, we brought a whole slug of countries in Eastern Europe into the EU in the early 2000s and we were talking about bringing Ukraine and Georgia and other countries over time into the EU. We're spreading capitalism, getting people hooked on economic interdependence. And finally, we wanted to integrate them into more and more institutions. We're spreading the EU, which is an institution, and spreading NATO, which is an institution eastward. A lot of people tend to think that NATO expansion was designed to contain Russia, that we were fearful that Russia was going to try and conquer Eastern Europe. There is no evidence that that's what underpinned our thinking. In fact, Michael McFaul, who was the American ambassador to Moscow from 2012 to 2014, emphasizes that he told Putin on numerous occasions that he had nothing to fear from NATO expansion. Madeleine Albright, you can find it on the internet, told Vladimir Putin he had nothing to fear from NATO expansion because we did not see NATO expansion as part of a containment strategy vis-a-vis Russia. That's the way we talk about it now in the wake of the Ukraine crisis because we're trying to blame the Russians for the crisis. But that's not the way we thought about it beforehand. What we thought beforehand is we would take this giant security community, right? These three goals were at the center of that security community and expand it eastward. Okay, so what are the benefits of liberal democracy? Why are we doing this? First is we believe it eliminates significant human rights violations. Again, when you talk about liberal states like the United States and its West European allies, you're talking about countries that place a very high premium on human rights or individual rights. And when those countries see individual rights or human rights being violated in other countries, there's a very powerful tendency to intervene. Well, the belief here is that if you make every country on the planet a liberal democracy, then you effectively take this problem off the table because the key operating assumption is that liberal democracies don't violate the rights of their citizens in deeply harmful and massive ways the way non-liberal democracies do. So the name of the game is to create a world of liberal democracies to solve the problem of massive human rights violations. Second, the liberal hegemonists believe in democratic peace theory. They believe that democracies don't fight other democracies. Well, if you believe that democracies don't fight other democracies and every country on the planet is a liberal democracy, it's peace, love, and dope. Just go back to Francis Fukuyama's very famous article, The End of History, which I'm sure all of you have either heard of or read. If you haven't read it, you ought to read it. He says at the end of the piece, and that piece is consistent with the basic story I'm telling here, he says that once the planet is filled with liberal democracies, the biggest problem that we're gonna face is boredom. He says that. You think I'm probably making it up? Go read it. He says that the biggest problem we're gonna face is boredom. That's because when you have a planet that's filled with liberal democracies, human rights violations are off the table, massive human rights violations, that is. And furthermore, it's a more peaceful world. That's why it's boring. And you know the United States is deeply concerned about problems like terrorism and nuclear proliferation, terrorism and nuclear proliferation. Well, the argument is if you have a peaceful world, those problems disappear. So this is a way to solve the terrorism and proliferation problems. Finally, liberal hegemony makes the world safe for liberal democracy. This is Woodrow Wilson's famous phrase. What am I saying here? Inside any liberal democracy, there are gonna be a number of people, sometimes a substantial number of people who don't like liberal democracy. Remember I told you, people cannot reach universal agreement on first principles. So inside any liberal democracy, there are gonna be people who are unhappy with that political system. And they're gonna wanna overthrow it. And the great danger is that they'll be able to go to another country and get support. Let me tell you a story. When I was a little boy growing up in New York in the 1950s, everybody worried about communists. Communism was a real threat, so they said. And what people worried about was that those communists in the United States would form a close alliance with the Soviet Union. And the Soviet Union would provide those communists with the wherewithal to begin to erode liberal democracy and ultimately overthrow the American government. This now sounds crazy, but at the time, people really did think that was a real threat. Well, if the planet has nothing but liberal democracies on it, then communists or any other group inside a liberal democracy who don't like the political order have no foreign country that they can go to for help. And this is how you make the world safe for democracy. So these were the benefits of liberal hegemony that were touted in the early 1990s and played such an important role in motivating us, us meaning the Americans, to push hard with this strategy. I wanna talk a bit more about why the US pursued liberal hegemony. My argument is that unipolarity made it possible to largely ignore balance of power considerations and pursue a liberal foreign policy. The foreign policy that I just described to you is impossible to pursue in a bipolar or a multi-polar world. And the reason is that when you're in a world where there are two or more great powers, the great powers have to compete with each other and they engage in security competition. This is the realest side of John coming out. In other words, when there are more than one great power in the system, those two or three or four great powers compete with each other and they cannot afford to pursue an ideological or an idealistic foreign policy like liberal hegemony. They have to compete with each other for power. And of course what happens when the Cold War ends, and most of you students are too young to remember this, but the Soviet Union collapses and the United States is left as by far the most powerful country in the world. It is Godzilla. Therefore it does not have to worry about balance of power politics with another great power because there is no other great power. It is the sole pole. It is the utipole. So it is in a position to pursue a profoundly liberal foreign policy. And that's my second point. The United States is a profoundly liberal country that places a very high premium on individual rights and believes in things like democratic peace theory. See what I'm saying here? You had a situation where this profoundly liberal country had just won the Cold War and was very optimistic about its prospects for spreading democracy, making this open international economy attractive to everyone and incorporating states of all sorts, including China and Russia, into international institutions. But there's a third dimension to the story, and I wanna really emphasize this dimension in good part because it shows you how nationalistic the United States is. American nationalism supplied an unhealthy dose of hubris to the equation. And I write, think Madeleine Albright. Madeleine Albright, as many of you know, is a card carrying liberal hegemonist, right? She's deeply committed to spreading American democracy across the planet, and she's deeply committed to using American military force for that purpose. But Madeleine Albright is also an American nationalist par excellence. Her most famous comment that she has made over the course of her lifetime was made in the late 1990s when someone on TV, in an interview, asked her, why is the United States intervening here, there, and everywhere? And she said, it's because we are the indispensable nation. We stand taller and we see further. Now just think about the word we. The word we? When you hear the word we, you always wanna think the other. We, the other. This is nationalism. We are the indispensable, there's the word nation. We are the indispensable nation. And of course, we stand taller, we see further. All of this is a way of saying that she is reflecting the chauvinism that is almost always part and parcel of nationalism. This is why most people don't like nationalism, especially in the academy, because it has a real chauvinistic side to it. I'm not saying this is a good thing, I'm just telling you this is a fact of life. And it's reflected in Madeleine Albright's comments. We are the indispensable nation. We have a right, we have the responsibility, and now we have the military power since we're Godzilla to turn the world into a different place to remake it in America's image. Think about the concept of American exceptionalism. No American politician can move one micrometer away from American exceptionalism. You know that Barack Obama, who got criticized on this issue, was forced to say that America is the indispensable nation. He used those words. It's American exceptionalism. We're different, we're better. But that nationalism juiced the liberalism. The nationalism coupled with the liberalism coupled with the fact that we were so powerful, coupled with the fact that we had this template in our head about how we were gonna make the world a much better place. And we were off to the races. What's the track record? Let's talk about the Bush doctrine in the greater Middle East, the Ukraine crisis, US-Russia relations. I've talked a bit about that. And then the failure of engagement with China. These are the three most glaring examples of failure. The Bush doctrine. The Bush doctrine was designed to turn the Middle East into a sea of democracies in keeping with liberal hegemony. It's very important to understand that the war in Iraq, 2003, was not going to be in the minds of the liberal hegemonists the last war in the Middle East. It was the first stop on the train line, the second stop on the train line, if you wanna include Afghanistan. We didn't go much further in terms of invading other countries because Iraq turned into a fiasco. But the idea was that we could use military force or the threat of military force, the threat of military force to overthrow governments in the region and install liberal democracies in their place and therefore produce peace in the Middle East that solved the proliferation and terrorism problems. I know this sounds crazy now, but this is the way we were thinking. You remember Afghanistan is finally under American control by December 2001 and then in early 2002 the Americans are talking about maybe invading Iraq. The Israelis catch wind of the fact that we're gonna do Iraq. And the Israelis send a high level delegation to Washington to say, why are you doing Iraq? You should be doing Iran. It's the greater threat. The Americans say, don't worry. Iraq is the low hanging fruit. We're gonna go in and do Iraq. And then when we're done with Iraq we'll either do Syria or Iran next. But we won't have to do one or two more of these military invasions before everybody in the region understands how powerful we are and throws up their hand and jumps on the American bandwagon. The Israelis foolishly believed the Americans thinking that we have found the magic formula for winning wars and they then begin to champion an invasion of Iraq, right? What's the result? Total disaster. It's truly amazing the amount of murder and mayhem that the United States is responsible for in the Middle East. Truly amazing. Virtually no successes and nothing but failures. And failures where huge numbers of people die. Countries are physically wrecked. Afghanistan, now the longest war in American history. I know not a single national security analyst who thinks there's any possibility we can win that war. And all we're doing is kicking the can down the road now so that Obama doesn't get blamed for losing Afghanistan. And now Trump doesn't get blamed for losing Afghanistan. Iraq, we wrecked that country. Syria where the United States has played a very important role in trying to topple Assad that's hardly ever reported in the media. That's a total disaster. The amount of murder and mayhem we've created in Syria. And oh, Libya, we did a great job there, right? With the help of the Europeans. My God, right? The Bush doctrine in the greater Middle East and abject failure. Then there's the Ukraine crisis in US-Russia relations. I've talked a little bit about this. You know in the West, here in Europe and certainly in the United States, we blame the Russians for the crisis. Well, I don't buy this argument for one second. From the time we started talking about NATO expansion, the Russians made it very clear that it was unacceptable to them. They were too weak to stop it in 1999. That's when the first tranche took place. They were too weak to stop it in 2004, which is when the second tranche of expansion took place. But after 2008, when we were talking about doing Georgia and talking about doing Ukraine, they said this is not gonna happen. It was in April 2008 at the Bucharest Summit, the Bucharest NATO Summit, April 2008, where when the meeting was over with, the declaration was issued by NATO that said Georgia and Ukraine would become part of NATO. The Russians went ballistic. It's no accident, ladies and gentlemen. Then a couple months later, in August 2008, you had a war over Georgia, Georgia-Russia war, August 2008, Bucharest Summit, April 2008. And then on February 22nd, 2014, you had a major crisis break out over Ukraine. The Russians had no intention of letting either Georgia or Ukraine become a Western bulwark on their doorstep. And the end result is that neither one of those countries has become a Western bulwark, and the Russians are going to Great Lankz to wreck those countries. And the Russians are now going to Great Lankz to split NATO apart and split the EU apart so that they can expand further eastward. And furthermore, we have terrible relations between Russia and Western Europe, between Russia and the United States. And from an American point of view, we have foolishly driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese, which is not in our interest. And the people who are suffering the most from this are the Ukrainians, because the Russians are interested in wrecking that country and we're not gonna do anything to defend the Russians. We meaning the United States and the Europeans. It's failure number two. Failure number three is engagement with China. It's clear in the 1990s that China is on the rise. So the question is, what do you do? The basic view of the liberal hegemonists is that you engage with China, right? And what does engagement mean? You get China deeply integrated into the open international economy. You get China deeply embedded in the international institutions. And as it becomes richer and richer, it will become a liberal democracy. I mean, this is the story we tell ourselves in the West. It will become a liberal democracy. And of course, once it becomes a liberal democracy, to put it in Robert Zelleck's terms, it will become a responsible stakeholder in the international system. So actually, the United States doesn't think like a realist would and say, geez, I'm not sure that I wanna turn China into Godzilla or that maybe I wanna contain China. No, no, no, no. We decide we're gonna help China grow more and more powerful, right? Because it will eventually then become a democracy. It'll look like us and since we're the good guys and they will then be the good guys and the planet is populated by nothing but good guys, we all live happily ever after. That's the story. Didn't work out that way. Just as she's even paying. Didn't work out that way. And actually, all the architects of this strategy, right? All the architects of this strategy now would bet that it was a failure, right? I just wanna say, what other thing about realists? Realists like me, I was a prominent public opponent of the Iraq War and all these crazy wars we fought as I often joke to people, I've become a peacenik in the United States. It's hard to believe Mr. Realism 101 is a peacenik. The Ukraine crisis, you just heard my argument. I was opposed to NATO expansion from the get-go as one of those people who said this is gonna lead to big trouble. George Kennan, of course, famously made that argument and lo and behold, that's what happened. And with regard to engaging China and turning it into Godzilla, I would have never done that since we had no way of knowing what China's intentions would be. But anyway, this is liberal hegemony at work. Okay, why did it fail? I've told you what the argument here. First of all, power of nationalism, power of realism and overselling individual rights, power of nationalism. Look, the idea that the United States can go around the world, violating the sovereignty of other countries, invading those countries and doing social engineering at the end of a rifle barrel is a prescription for giant trouble. If you're smart, you stay out of countries like Iraq. You stay out of countries like Afghanistan. When I was young, right, I was in the American military. I was in the American military from 1965 to 1975, which was coterminous with the Vietnam War. And over the course of those 10 years, I watched the United States get battered in Vietnam and lose. We lost the Vietnam War. It was a deeply humbling experience for the American people. And the thing I learned was, you do not wanna go into a place like Vietnam. It's a prescription for real trouble. The French were there before us. Remember the French were defeated at the NBN Fu in 1954. De Gaulle told us in 1964 and 1965, don't go in there, we've been there, done that. It did not turn out well. It's not gonna turn out well for you. It did not turn out well for us. And then I remember in 1979, the Chinese foolishly invaded North Vietnam, or it was then Vietnam, but the northern part of Vietnam, and they got their snouts whacked. In 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Most of my colleagues, not all my colleagues in the national security community were aghast. Soviets are on the march. This is the end of the world. We have to double the defense budget. We have to do this, we have to do that. I said, you're dead wrong. They just jumped into a giant quagmire. If your arm is racing with the Soviet Union, what you want them to do is try and invade a country like Afghanistan. You saw what happened to us? We're still there 14 years later. 14 years later, 18 years later, right? The longest war in American history. Stay out of these places. People in countries like Iraq, countries like Afghanistan, and other countries around the world do you not want the United States invading them and telling them how to do their politics? And what happens is we become an occupier, and that leads to an insurgency, and it is one giant mess. So you wanna stay out. The point is you get resistance. And by the way, the power of nationalism also applies to the Russians and the Chinese. You know that the United States is interested in foisting liberal democracy on Moscow and on Beijing. There's no question about that. You go to Moscow and you go to Beijing and you talk to the foreign policy elites about how they think about it. They think about it the same way we think about the Russians interfering in our domestic politics. Surprise, surprise. Is my mother taught me when I was a little boy what's good for the goose is good for the gander? No? So if we don't like the Russians interfering in our politics, don't be surprised that they don't like us interfering in their politics. And the same thing goes with the Chinese. That's the power of nationalism. You wanna remember this as time goes by. Going in other countries and doing social engineering, you're asking for big trouble. Power of realism. Let me go to my NATO example. It's my favorite example here. The idea that you could take NATO, which was a mortal enemy of the Soviet Union, which was the predecessor of Russia, right? Russia's the largest remnant state out of the Soviet Union. It sort of inherited the mantle of the Soviet Union. The idea that you could take NATO and march it right up to Russia's doorstep and Russia's gonna do nothing is lunacy. It's just lunacy. Just to take the American case. The Americans have what's called the Monroe Doctrine. The Americans basically say, I know many of you are not gonna like hearing this, but it's true. This is what the Americans basically say. We own the Western Hemisphere. That's our backyard. No distant great power from Europe or from Asia is either allowed to form a military alliance with a country in the Western Hemisphere or bring military forces into the Western Hemisphere. When I was young, we had this thing called the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviets put missiles in Cuba. This is categorically unacceptable to the United States. And we told the Soviets that and we forced them to take the nuclear missiles out. Then they talked about building a naval base at Cienfuegos in Cuba. The United States again told them, this is categorically unacceptable. This is the Monroe Doctrine. You do not bring Soviet military forces into the Western Hemisphere. Let me give you a hypothetical situation. 50 years from now, China's really powerful. It forms a military alliance with Canada and with Mexico. It starts to move troops into Toronto and Mexico City. You think the Americans are just gonna sit there? The Chinese ambassador to the United States and the Mexican ambassador to the United States go to the president and they say, you don't have anything to worry about. We're a benign hegemon. Right? This is not aimed at you. What do you think? You think the president's gonna believe that? You think we're gonna tolerate Chinese military forces in Canada or in Mexico? I can't assure you we are not. The United States, you wanna always remember this, is a ruthless great power. There are a few great powers in modern history that are as ruthless as the United States. We cover that up with little rhetoric. Right? But we are ruthless. That's not gonna happen. Any country that invites one of those countries with a lot of power in Europe or East Asia into the Western Hemisphere is really asking for trouble. Well, the Russians are the same as the Americans in this regard. They do not want Ukraine and Georgia turned into Western fireworks. Very simple. By the way, Syria, you understand what happened in Syria. In 2011, when Assad's in trouble, the Americans, the Turks, the Saudis, the Qataris begin to move in and they begin to fund the insurgents and they begin to fuel the insurgency and they begin to try to topple Assad. By 2015, it looks like Assad is going under. What happens? The Russians come in. The Russians have a longstanding alliance with Syria. The Russians have a naval base in Syria. Surprise of surprises. The Russians decide they're gonna prop up Assad. That's realpolitik 101. And who succeeded? The Russians succeeded. And the Americans lost. Assad is going to remain in power. Overselling of individual rights. Final point here. Look, I think if you go around the world, there is a great deal of interest in individual rights almost everywhere. People care about rights and I don't wanna make light of that. But they don't care that much about rights in a lot of places. And they don't care that much about liberal democracy. Liberal democracy is not an easy sell in a lot of places. Go to Russia and say to, you know, your average well-educated Russian somebody even in the Russian foreign policy league what you need is liberal democracy. They'll look at you like you're nuts and they'll say we tried liberal democracy in the 1990s. It was the Wild West. We do not wanna return to the 1990s. We don't need liberal democracy. Thank you. And we'll take Putin and his soft authoritarianism despite its problems every time over liberal democracy. So what this tells you is you're not selling an ideology or a political governing system that is that wildly attractive in all places. It's oftentimes a hard sell. And when you go into a country and you topple the regime and there's chaos all around you, people are mainly interested in security, not individual rights. Okay, liberal hegemony's future and I'll conclude here. My argument is that liberal hegemony is finished. And there are two reasons. The first, which is the least important reason is Donald Trump. Donald Trump ran against liberal hegemony. Just think about it. He said that I am no longer interested in having the United States try to spread democracy around the world. And as you know, Donald Trump has never seen an autocrat or dictator that he didn't wanna jump into bed with. He has no special place in his heart for liberal democracies, right? And he's not interested in spreading liberal democracy all over the planet. Second, with regard to the open international order, he's a protectionist. He thinks that America has been screwed by the open international economy. He wants to slap tariffs not only on countries like China, but on our allies as well. And with regard to institutions, the guy's never seen an institution that he didn't love. He hates NATO, he hates the EU, he hates NAFTA, he hates the IMF God, he hates the WTO, he hates the World Bank. One of the first things he did when he took office was to kill the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was actually a boneheaded move. But nevertheless, it reflects the fact that he hates institutions. You wanna know why the foreign policy establishment in the United States lows Donald Trump? It's because he ran against everything they stand for. But he got elected. And you know why he got elected? Because he pointed out that the policy has been a failure. So we have this disconnect between the elites who wanna perpetrate forever and ever this foreign policy and the body politic. And by the way, Trump's done an exception here. Barack Obama was elected in 2008 on the platform that we were gonna get out of the business of nation-building, and Obama, to use his own words, said we should do nation-building at home. And then right before he left office, he gave a very famous interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly, where he basically said that the foreign policy establishment, what we sometimes call the blob in the United States, the blob beat him back. And he was forced to play in his words by the Washington Playbook. But Obama was not that different than Trump in certain respects with regard to foreign policy. But Trump is not being beaten back. But more importantly, liberal hegemony is over because of the rise of China and the resurrection of Russian power. As I said to you earlier, and it's very important you understand this point, you can only have liberal hegemony. You can only pursue this really radical foreign policy. In a unipolar world, where the sole pole, which is of course Uncle Sam, does not have to worry about competing with other great powers. Now that China and Russia are considered great powers, and we're talking about the return of great power politics, and we're talking about multi-polarity, security competition is back in force, and it squeezes out liberal hegemony. So for better or for worse, liberal hegemony is history. Thank you. Questions for my own understanding. And then I will open up to the audience for their question. And there are questions with reference to the two fundamental parts of your lecture. The first really about this interrelationship between nationalism and liberalism in the United States, and how that works in terms of individual freedom and liberty, because where there are formal rights, some would say there are also many formal regulations. And to my mind, the United States and advanced democracies are highly regulated places where the state is almost everywhere, from taxing to mortgaging. There is a whole kind of informal structure of regulations that constrains, some would say, the kind of individual freedoms that the forefathers of liberalism thought about. So maybe a little bit about that, and how it changed now with your very great example about Trump and his idea about what the United States is. For instance, the wall issue with Mexico doesn't seem to me to be a particularly liberal idea that goes well with the kind of idea of American liberalism. So maybe a little bit about the trajectory of Brexit, of course, is the same thing for Britain. This is a very illiberal form of nation building, some would say. So this is just with reference to that part. And then the issue of liberal hegemony, and the analysis was based on the idea that there is a genuine effort in U.S. foreign policy to export democracy. And some would say that this was more like a Trojan horse to expand U.S. dominance or hegemony, however you want to call it, and that examples such as Pinochet in Latin America or the Shah in Iran, or U.S. alliances with autocracies all over the world do not really provide a lot of evidence for a real, genuine effort to spread democracy in the way it was done in Europe with a martial plan that was really a genuine effort to democratize, I absolutely agree with you, the European continent. But with the Iraq invasion in particular, there was no martial plan. There was no really systemic, structured, competent effort to create a democracy. The only ministry that was guarded after the invasion was the oil ministry and none of the others. So this is just a point for my own understanding about the trajectory of what happened to the liberal United States that we used to know. Good, these are two great issues, and let me do my best to answer them. I'll take them in reverse order. First of all, with regard to what happened with the Shah, what happened with Pinochet, Guatemala in 1954, and your comments on the martial plan. Remember, my argument is that liberal hegemony only takes effect with the end of the Cold War, really, about 1990. So I would argue, and this just dovetails with what you said, the United States has a rich history of overthrowing democratically elected leaders, right? And furthermore, preventing the emergence of Democrats in other cases, and furthermore, aligning itself with murderous thugs and dictators. And my argument would be that in a world of realpolitik where security competition is at play, you're gonna see a lot of that kind of behavior. So I'm not challenging that part of the story in any way. What I'm saying is that after 1990, up until recently, up until Trump, the United States, I believe, was genuinely committed to spreading democracy around the world. Now, a number of people, including some of my really good friends, make the argument that you make, which is that even after 1990, this is a Trojan horse. Their argument is, John, this is the atavistic, realist United States taking advantage of the unipolar moment to dominate the globe and then disguising its aggressive behavior with liberal rhetoric, okay? Now, I think that's wrong, okay? And I think whether you and my friends are right or I'm right is largely an empirical question. It may be the case in 30 years when they open the public records, there is an abundance of evidence that supports your perspective, which is that we behaved in a very realist fashion, we tried to become a global hegemon and we successfully covered it up and we bamboozled people like John, okay? That may happen. I cannot deny that, okay? But my argument to you and to my friends is that I believe that's wrong and I believe that the people who are, who have been conducting American farm policy are not that clever. They're fools, they're fools. And they are remarkably idealistic. And I think there is an abundance of evidence to support my position, right? I can't adduce it all here. We can't have a big debate about it, but I do think that's true. And the reason I go to the case of NATO and I say that NATO was not about containment is I'm anticipating your question necessarily from you, maybe from somebody in the audience, right? And I'm trying to show you that NATO expansion was not real, polytheistic at work. It was liberal hegemony. But again, I think I'm right in terms of the story that I'm telling you, but again, this is an empirical question. And as you well know, we wanna be humble in this business because we're sometimes proved wrong. Your question about nationalism and liberalism, I'm gonna make two responses to that. First of all, I do think one can make an argument that liberal democracy is in trouble in the United States with Donald Trump as the president. I think most people believe that there is some chance, some reasonable chance he will get reelected. I think eight years with him could do a great deal of damage to liberal democracy, but I would take it a step further and say that Trump is a manifestation of underlying forces that are at play here that don't bode well for liberal democracy. So I'm not at all making light of what a dangerous situation we're in. And of course, it not only applies to the United States. As I told you folks in my talk, if you go look at Freedom House's data, since 2006, the number of liberal democracies in the world has been going down. Now, another fascinating issue you raise is the whole question of the sort of omnipresent state in the United States, right? That doesn't look like a liberal state. It looks like it's interfering in the management of almost everyone's daily life. I don't wanna go into this in any great detail, but basically, when I talked about rights, I was talking about negative rights, I was talking about freedoms. And the problem is that in the modern world, this is all to me a good thing, we're not just interested in negative rights, we're interested in positive rights. And the best example of that is, just think about this, the right to an equal opportunity. It's not just the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, when you're talking about freedoms, those rights. We're talking about rights like the right to healthcare, the right to equal opportunity. Those are called positive rights. And they're very important in every society today, including the United States. And the point is, once you start talking about positive rights as well as negative rights, the state begins to get involved in a really serious way. And you remember folks, when I told you about the three solutions that liberals have to dealing with potential for violence, I said, inalienable rights, tolerance, and the state. And remember that I said that it's very important to have a limited state. And the point that you're making is that we're moving away from that limited state. And I think in modern societies, it's very hard not to do that. I'm agreeing with you because of the emphasis on positive rights. And then when you start thinking about things like artificial intelligence, the national security state, the ability of the state to intervene in our daily lives, you see that liberal democracy is a fragile device that really has to be protected. So I'm agreeing with you in very important ways, in terms of what you were saying. There was essentially the point that we are all in the same boat in many ways, trying to struggle to keep the rights alive and trying to struggle to keep democracy alive here. But questions from the audience. And if I may, I take two at a time, John, is that okay? That's perfectly fine. I should have said at the beginning, by the way, switch off your mobile phones. I'm sure I reminded myself, but there you go. So two questions. The lady with the colored jumper, yes. Come here, I'm just getting a piece of paper. I forgot to bring over a big piece of paper. Hello, thank you very much for your talk. In your talk, you mentioned international institutions, particularly the WTO and the IMF, as kind of instruments of liberal hegemony. I'm wondering what do you see the future of those international institutions now that there's a failure of liberal hegemony? Thank you. Okay, one more question. The gentleman in the back. Just right at the back, yes, with the highest handoff. Yes, that's what the blue sweatshirt. Hi, thanks. You said that obviously liberal hegemony is faltering. Is there any more or less faltering than autocracies such as China, Russia? Thank you, John. First question had to do with the future of international institutions. I believe that in a highly interdependent world, and we live in a highly interdependent world, a globalized world, a hyper-globalized world, call it whatever you want, international institutions are absolutely essential. And that doesn't mean that certain international institutions won't die, but if they do, they'll be replaced by new international institutions. There's just no way you can do business without international institutions. International institutions, as I learned a long time ago when I wrote an article on this subject, are basically rules. And you need rules for all sorts of reasons when you're doing business. And that business can be economic, it can be military. I mean, if you have a military alliance, NATO is an institution, the Warsaw Pact is an institution. If you're gonna fight the Cold War all over again, you're gonna do it with a military alliance, which is an institution. You need the WTO, although I think you need a different variant of it. You need the IMF, the World Bank, the Chinese have created the AIIB. Institutions are here to stay. Donald Trump can get rid of NAFTA, but he in effect just produced another institution that looks like NAFTA. So institutions aren't going away, no question in my mind on that. The gentleman up here asked me about whether, the Chinese political system and the Russian political system were also failing, and maybe failing more so than liberal democracy. I don't know what the answer is to that at this point in time. I think that both the Chinese and the Russians are doing reasonably well at this point in time. What the long-term future of those political systems is hard to say. So I'm just not too sure. I think in both the Chinese and the Russian case, a lot depends on the economy. And I think a lot depends on how much progress they make on the economic front over the future. But I think at this point in time, to some extent, everybody's in trouble. Okay, two more questions. The lady in the back, all the way in the back. My question is about based on the relationship between China and United States, do you think we are entering or we are already living in a new Cold War era? And secondly, do you think that both countries, US and China, will end up in so-cited traps? We'll end up what? So-cited trap. So-cited trap. Okay, second question. Yes, the gentleman right here. Hi, John. Why don't you wait for the microphone? It's right, it's in the front here. Oh, sorry. Thank you. It's okay. Sorry to make you run through the room. Hi, John. Thank you for your talk. Much of the US political discourse lately around Trump seems to be focused apart from the collusion with Russia, seems to be on the lack of coherence for foreign policy. And I think looking at some of Trump's rhetoric in recent years, it seems to align a lot with the core tenets of your book, Tragedy of Great Power Politics. And in particular, we see Trump adopting an offensive realist position towards China. We see him somewhat buck-passing Syria to Russia, and we see a kind of offshore balancing with regards to NATO and Europe. So my question is, to what extent do you think that Trump is a mere shymarist, so to speak? Jeez. Okay, John. Okay, I'll take the first question on China and the United States. And the young woman in the back asked me if I thought there was a new Cold War in store between those two countries. I think the answer is yes. My basic view of international politics is that the great powers in an ideal world want to dominate their region of the world. And they wanna do like the United States in the Western Hemisphere. They wanna be the only great power, and they don't want any other distant great powers coming into their backyard. And if you look at China today, China is growing economically and militarily. And I think that the Chinese are very interested as they should be in dominating Asia. And that means not only being the most powerful country in the region, but also making sure the Americans are pushed out. The Americans, well, the Chinese talk constantly these days about the century of national humiliation, which ran from the late 1840s until the late 1940s. The Chinese were weak over that 100-year period, and they were exploited by the Japanese, the Americans, and the European great powers. They have never forgotten that. And their goal is to make sure they are really powerful in the future. If you were to go up to a Chinese policymaker, or remember the Chinese foreign policy elite, and say to that person, you have two choices. You can be 20 times more powerful than Japan, or Japan can be 20 more times powerful than you. Do you think it makes any difference? They would laugh in your face. They would tell you, we know what happened the last time Japan was 20 more times powerful than us. We intend to be 20 times more powerful than Japan in the future. And then when you ask the Chinese behind closed doors, what they think about the Americans running ships and aircraft up their coast, and having ground forces off their coast in places like Korea and Japan, they will tell you in no uncertain terms if they get powerful enough, they will try to push us out beyond us, meaning the Americans, beyond the first island chain, and then beyond the second island chain. And if you look at how they think about the waters around them, they've made it very clear that they think the South China Sea belongs to them, and we've made it clear to them we don't agree with that. They've made it clear they think the East China Sea belongs to them. And there's a real possibility they'll get into a fight with the Japanese over those small islands in the East China Sea. Then there's Taiwan, which is a potential flash point of great significance. China is not a status quo power. So the Chinese, as they get more and more powerful, are gonna try and become more and more influential in East Asia, and they're gonna try and push the Americans out. And you know what the Americans are gonna do? The Americans are gonna pivot to Asia, and they're gonna try and contain the Chinese, and they're gonna push back. So I would argue that there is likely to be trouble ahead and to put it in your terms, you are likely to get a new Cold War in Asia. Second question had to do with Trump, and he accused me of being in bed with Donald Trump, intellectually. This is a frightening thought. I would suggest you what that Trump actually reads books. Yes, right, that's right. Then we know there's no connection. Look, to be serious, I think that Donald Trump has no coherent foreign policy. I think he flies by the seat of his pants, and he has certain intuitions. And I do think, I propose your question, that some of those intuitions are consistent with a realist perspective. In other words, when Trump says that he is not interested in using military force to spread democracy around the planet, that's an argument that resonates with realists. There's just no question about it. Now, another example that you used was containment of China, right? That, of course, resonates with realist logic. But also, you wanna remember that the person who articulated the pivot to Asia was Hillary Clinton, and the Obama administration, the Clinton administration, was also interested in the pivot to Asia. So this is not something new to Trump, but it is consistent, both with the Democrats and with Trump, with basic realist logic. My problem with Trump is that he's done a half-baked job of pivoting and dealing with our Asian allies. Trump's big problem, and this is where he parts from realism, is realists believe that alliances matter, allies matter, and if you're gonna deal with an adversary, like China, right, you need help from countries in East Asia, and you don't wanna be slapping them around, which is what he does. I also think the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was an economic institution that was designed to contain China, right? It was designed for economic purposes, but also for security purposes. He vetoed that, or he killed that when he came to office. That was a big mistake. So I think a lot of what he has done is inconsistent with a realist approach, but there is no question that he does have realist tendencies. Although, again, it's not part of any sort of grand theory of how the world works. Okay, last round of questions. The gentleman, the white sweatshirt. Thank you so much for your talk. It was very enlightening. I just have a question with regards to the Iraq invasion. So you said, and I quote, there are virtually no successes in Iraq, and I personally think that there were some successes for the United States. Let's put aside all of the inexplicable damage that has been brought onto the Iraqi population. I think that there were benefits for its economic interests in the long term. We can see today that although what was done in Iraq was a failure in many ways, many oil contracts, if not all, were given to American companies, like ExxonMobil. War was created which increases the demand for weapons, which in turn can increase manufacturing and selling of weapons by American companies. Although all these contribute to the economic superiority of the United States and its prominent companies. So we need a question. I will come to the question. Because we're running out of time. All right, I apologize for that. So we can't imagine the United States today without its superior economy, right? So I ask, can the Iraqi invasion be seen as a commercial success for the United States? Thank you very much. Second question. We need a lady to be equitable, yes. Hi, thank you very much for your talk. My question is regarding the European Union as America focuses on itself more and liberalism takes a back seat. Do you think there's a future for the European Union and what do you think the future holds for Western Europe? Thank you. Thank you. John. I should go. Okay, thank you. With regard to your question about Iraq, I thought you were going to argue that it had some benefits for Iraq, but obviously you're arguing that it had benefits for the United States, economic benefits for the United States. I don't believe that. I think it's estimated that the two wars, one in Afghanistan and two in Iraq, and the Iraqi war is the more expensive of the two, is going to cost us somewhere between four to six trillion dollars over time. Again, when you think of all that money and the consequences for the Iraqi people, it's just stunning, right? But four to six trillion dollars, I don't think the oil companies ended up making much of a profit as a result of the invasion. And I think in terms of arms sales, yes, we sold some more arms, but not enough to really matter, not enough to really affect the economy. So I don't think that you're right, that the United States benefited economically from this war. But again, even if it did, it wouldn't justify what happened in Iraq. And by the way, remember that one of the principal consequences of the invasion of Iraq was the creation of ISIS. Just don't want to lose sight of that. Second question, very interesting question on the EU and the future of the European Union. And you prefaced it by saying America's losing interest in Europe to some extent. And as American interest in Europe wanes, what does that mean for the EU? I'd make two points. First of all, I believe that one of the reasons, probably the main reason, that European integration has been so successful and there has been peace in Europe is because of the presence of the American military in Europe. It's NATO, it's the American pacifier. As I often say to audiences, I've spent a lot of time going around Europe since 1990 when the Cold War ended, I have never met a single policymaker, a single pundit, a single academic, a single representative of the foreign policy establishment in any country in Europe who wants to see the Americans leave Europe. This is quite remarkable. And now, I was recently Romania, I was recently in Denmark, the Romanians and the Danes do not want us to leave Europe. And it's because they understand that, I'm talking about the American military presence, that NATO underpins the EU and peace and security in Europe, okay? That's my view. So in terms of the future of the EU, what really matters in terms of the United States is that we stay in NATO, keep NATO intact and keep American forces here. The second point I would make to you, the problems in the EU today, despite old Donald Trump's rhetoric, have nothing to do with the United States. They're mainly Eurocentric problems, problems associated with the Euro, problems associated with Brexit, if you look at what's going on in Italy. And a lot of these problems, by the way, have to do with nationalism, right? I'm not gonna get into that in any detail here. But there are real problems in the EU today, but those problems are not the result of the United States, right? So the Europeans have to figure out how to fix those problems. But more importantly for the Europeans, they gotta keep the Americans here. In my opinion, I think the European elites understand correctly that an American military presence is a pacifying factor here in Europe. The main pacifying factor. Thank you very much, John. Unfortunately, we have to leave it at that. There'll be a drinks reception outside in the foyer, but join me once again in thanking Professor Merche. I'm afraid it's excellent. Thank you.