John Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities is an important and fascinating addition to the ongoing debate about the future of US grand strategy. Mearsheimer offers a lucid critique of the US post–Cold War grand strategy of “liberal hegemony,” focusing especially on its central, as well as most futile and destructive, tenet of trying to make “as many countries into liberal democracies as possible” (p. 1). Mearsheimer attributes liberal hegemony’s failure to the incompatibility between the universality of modern liberal ideology—a function of liberalism’s commitments to individualism, inalienable rights for all humans, and state-led social engineering—and the more powerful and abiding forces of nationalism at the center of international relations. People are social beings first, individuals second. Therefore, nationalism is their highest form of identity, globally pervasive in a way that individualism is not. When the two collide, “nationalism wins almost every time” (p. 82). More specifically, nationalism leads targets of liberal hegemony to resist forced liberalization (e.g., recent US failures in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya) and other great powers to balance against the United States (e.g., Russia’s aggression in Ukraine). Nationalism also unmasks the democratic peace, therefore weakening a central theoretical underpinning—that spreading democracy abroad leads to a more peaceful, cooperative world—of liberal hegemony.
In light of liberal hegemony’s failure, Mearsheimer calls for a new grand strategy of restraint, marked chiefly by an end to democracy promotion. Restraint can come, he argues, either by choice through building a new US counter-elite committed to restraint, or it will be forced on the United States someday with the rise of a peer competitor, like China.
In general, Mearsheimer is right about many points: nationalism is powerful; spreading democracy by force rarely works; and more restraint makes sense for the United States moving forward. That said, Mearsheimer’s analysis still raises several questions.
First, although I agree about the limitations of the democratic peace and the misguided policy lessons drawn from it, does liberal democracy have no cooperative effects on states? If not, what explains European bandwagoning and participation in liberal hegemony with the United States since 1990, something Mearsheimer references at several points? Where is the nationalism and fear about survival that should lead Europe, like Russia, to balance against the United States?
Without taking away from Mearsheimer’s larger point, cases such as US–European relations today seem to support the more modest scholarship that claims that the democratic peace exists, at most, between robust, long-standing liberal democratic states that perceive one another as liberal (John Owen, Liberal Peace, Liberal War, 2000). In fact (and somewhat ironically), Mearsheimer’s take on nationalism seems to lend support to this argument. If nationalism leads states to constantly compare themselves to one another (sometimes with hostility, other times not) and liberal nationalism in democratic states serves as a “kind of glue” or common bond holding liberal societies together, it makes sense that when robust, long-standing liberal nation-states look abroad and perceive others to be liberal, the so-called glue of cooperation extends across borders (pp. 19–20, 90,118). Mearsheimer may retort with the realist argument that the anarchic nature of the international system prevents this cooperation. But this still leaves cases like post–Cold War US–European cooperation puzzling in ways that remind us of the limits that permissive/structural causes face in explaining foreign policy (Kenneth Walt, Man, the State and War, 2001).
Second, is Mearsheimer arguing that US restraint will make Russia and China more docile actors in the international system? I assume not. Yet, from Mearsheimer’s account it sounds as if these states have little agency, that their aggression is solely a function of US behavior. By extension, if the United States changes its posture, they will too.
Historically, this kind of messaging (whether intended or not) always presents dangers for restrainers, because docile-expectant actors generally turn out far less docile than expected. A late 1970s surge of Soviet aggression in the third world crushed the United States’ détente-based expectations of Moscow behaving as a status quo stakeholder in the existing order. Under intense public pressure, President Jimmy Carter was forced, as a result, to jettison restraint and return to standard Cold War politics. Similarly, the unanticipated 2014 rise of the Islamic State (IS) stood in sharp contrast to Obama administration promises of a docile, stable Iraq that accompanied his restraint-based 2011 decision to remove troops from that country. He too scrambled to reverse course. In short, history tells us that if restrainers today are not careful, they run the risk of creating unrealistic expectations that could leave them outside the policy process looking in.
Third, although useful and insightful, Mearsheimer’s framework and understanding of liberalism are limited in ways that could hinder—or at least result in missed opportunities—for restrainers moving forward. For starters, Mearsheimer’s definition of liberal hegemony—notably, any US policy from a diplomatic statement to full combat invasion in support of democratization—is so broad and applied (by restrainers generally) in such a rigid, ironclad way that it largely ignores important recent trends toward restraint in US foreign policy. By Mearsheimer’s definition, US policies toward Egypt, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq in the last two decades are indistinguishable manifestations of liberal hegemony (p. 164). The exclusive definitional focus here on policy in kind entirely misses important differences in substance. Based on the latter, restraint is undeniably on the rise today.
Take forceful regime change as an example. The United States last initiated a combat invasion for regime change seventeen years ago (Iraq, 2003). That stretch is nearly four times the average length between US invasions of this type from World War II to 2003 and is comparable in length to interwar isolationism (Walldorf, To Shape Our World for Good). Recent high-profile cases of US nonmilitary action in Venezuela and Iran exemplify this trend. Restraint is showing up in other areas too. In the last decade, global US troop levels have decreased more than 50%, returning to levels of the late 1990s. Again, that trend lines up with restrainer goals.
How do we explain these substantive trends toward restraint? The answer has little to do with a new foreign policy elite or global competitor like China. Instead, these trends have come about, in large measure, through the contested nature of liberal democratic politics in the United States. My research finds, for instance, that a broad public narrative of restraint, resulting from the collective trauma of the Iraq War especially, has created a certain kind of politics of restraint that has helped curb the impulse of US presidents to use costly force, in particular, for regime change ends. Mearsheimer’s conceptualization of liberalism is too narrow to capture these kinds of important restraint dynamics. His elite-centric explanation downplays the contested nature of democratic politics, especially the role that public pressure plays in affecting policy decisions. Since public opinion is easily manipulated by elites, Mearsheimer indicates it is not worthy of much attention (pp. 129–30, 228). He misses, therefore, an important source of restraint.
This reflects, in fact, a broader shortcoming in Mearsheimer’s understanding of liberalism. Although Mearsheimer rightly notes that liberalism causes liberal states to constantly analyze and criticize other (especially nondemocratic) states in the international system, he misses the fact that liberal states also frequently turn that criticism on themselves (pp. 50–56). Liberal states are constantly asking and debating how they measure up to their own liberal standards. This kind of self-reflection in democratic states creates powerful movements at times (such as the civil rights movement) that bring about change and adjustments. In foreign policy, one manifestation of that kind of self-critical learning comes in the form of restraint narratives, such as the Vietnam and Iraq syndromes, that I discuss in my work.
All of this is important. An overly stringent definition of liberal hegemony and an incomplete understanding of liberalism/liberal democracy mean that restrainers like Mearsheimer fail to, first, recognize opportunities and important means to expand current trends toward restraint. Second, restrainers run the risk of not properly managing obstacles ahead, especially China’s rise. Drawing again on realist logic about power politics, Mearsheimer argues liberalism will matter only “in small ways” with China’s ascension as a counterhegemonic power to the United States (p. 228). If the Cold War history of US competition with the last counter-hegemon it faced is any guide, the opposite will be the case, however. By Mearsheimer’s definition, the worldwide program of security assistance, arms sales, and covert and overt uses of force to stop communism (i.e., the liberal-ideological bedfellow to promoting democracy) represented a far more expansive effort at liberal hegemony than US behavior in the post–Cold War period. A fuller understanding of the liberal democratic politics that allowed this to happen is critical for curbing the same in the future. The Great Delusion starts us down that path, but we still need more. One additional and potentially important place to look is at trauma, discourse, and identity—the politics of master narratives.
