In 2016, as Republican conservative President Trump took office and the liberal international order faced greater uncertainty, the U.S. domestic foreign policy community embarked on a long journey of self-reflection. Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and John Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, are participating in this introspection with a new book in which they sharply criticize the long-standing U.S. foreign policy, arguing that liberal internationalism will ultimately be no match for nationalism and realism. The Blob is the wave of the liberal hegemony strategy that is bound to fail. He also criticized the U.S. diplomatic establishment (The Blob) as self-interested and egoistic incompetents who want to make a name for themselves. In response, Jake Sullivan, writing in Foreign Affairs, argues that Walter’s and Mearsheimer’s bias stems from a deep distrust of the foreign policy establishment and a lack of understanding of the foreign policy community, but that in fact, since 2016 the foreign policy community has been thinking about solutions to problems such as China-U.S. relations have deteriorated, international anti-liberalism has taken hold, terrorism has proliferated, and common threats to humanity have risen sharply, among other thorny issues. Rather than discussing whether or not the first 25 years of Walt and Mearsheimer’s policy should be adopted, it is time to discuss how U.S. foreign policy should adapt to the new international situation over the next 25 years.
On November 23, 2020, President-elect Biden will announce that Sullivan will be appointed National Security Advisor to the Biden Administration, and a systematic compilation of his diplomatic views will be available in France and Italy.
Since November 2016, the U.S. foreign policy community has embarked on a long journey of self-reflection, filling publications such as this one with articles that explore the past, present, and future of the liberal international order and the question of where U.S. macrostrategy is headed. The pervasive sentiment is not simply repetitive; important questions are sparking debate in ways that have not been seen in years. What are the goals of U.S. foreign policy? Has the world changed fundamentally and does foreign policy need to be adjusted accordingly?
Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer enter this serious and thought-provoking conversation with new books, both of which once again make strong statements about their long-held views on the failures of U.S. foreign policy. Walter’s new book is called The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Supremacy; Mearsheimer’s book is entitled The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy. Primacy); and Mearsheimer’s new book is called The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities; these titles clearly imply the cases they present: for constraint and offshore equilibrium. Oppose democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention, nation building, and NATO expansion.
Both books add new content. Walter’s work contains a long-standing attack on the U.S. foreign policy community, and in several chapters he paints a dark picture of a clergyman plagued by multiple diseases who is leading the nation astray. At the same time, Mearsheimer turned to political theory, exploring the relationship between liberalism, nationalism, and realism. He argued that liberalism could not change or abolish nationalism and realism, and that where the three met, the latter two would triumph over the former. (Although he took pains to emphasize that he was talking about liberalism in the classical sense rather than liberalism as understood in American politics, his repeated attacks on “social engineering” suggest that he was referring to liberalism in both senses. For Mearsheimer, the analysis of the three doctrines ultimately provides an alternative path to conclude that the strategy of liberal hegemony is doomed to failure, and that the United States has in fact failed.
Both authors make some valid points. But their book does not distinguish between obvious mistakes (such as the Iraq War) and flawed outcomes due to imperfect choices, which are common in a matter as messy as foreign policy. They focus on irony, exaggerate interventions, and downplay the institution-building that has been a more enduring and pervasive feature of U.S. post-Cold War policy. What is most disappointing, however, is that the authors do not really engage either in the new debates that are currently occupying the attention of the foreign policy community, or in the thorny questions about the future of U.S. strategy.
Mistrust and the “Foreign Policy Establishment”
Walt and Mearsheimer have long been regular contributors to foreign policy debates. Leaving aside their joint polemic on U.S.-Israeli relations, published in book form in 2007, the two offer a certain out-of-the-box approach that is crucial to the public debate, prompting advocates of a forward-looking foreign policy to polish their views, consider their mistakes, and confront the difficult issues they would prefer to gloss over. In this new book, Mearsheimer argues extremely forcefully that there are too many liberal internationalists who cannot compete with the enduring forces of nationalism and identity. Recent history has shown him to be more right, and the U.S. foreign policy community to be even more wrong. On this and many other issues, foreign policy practitioners should listen more fully to the views of these scholars (and the academic community as a whole) and consider their opinions more fully, even if they ultimately do not adopt them. By the same token, these scholars (and the profession as a whole) should also assume that policymakers are credible, honest, and pragmatic, even if they find their decisions to be flawed.
This is why Walter’s new argument is so troubling. It is hard to think of a broader definition of the “foreign policy community,” the target of Walt’s contempt, as “individuals and organizations that are regularly and actively engaged in international affairs. But then Walt lists a litany of think tanks, advocacy organizations, foundations, and specific individuals who collectively make up the foreign policy establishment, a term originally coined by Ben Rhodes, the Obama administration’s former deputy national security adviser, but frequently quoted and referred to by Walt. So while the word “well-intentioned” appears in the title of his book, he doesn’t really think so. With the obligatory clause that most foreign policy experts are true patriots, Walt focuses on the key motivations for their decisions.
The busier the U.S. government is abroad, the more jobs there will be for foreign policy experts, the greater the share of the nation’s wealth used to solve global problems, and the greater their potential influence. A more restrictive foreign policy would leave the entire foreign policy community with nothing to do and diminish its status and importance, and might even lead some philanthropists to reduce funding for their subjects. In this sense, liberal hegemony and constant global activism constitute a full employment strategy for the entire foreign policy community.
Full disclosure: Walter will be reserving a place for me in this group, so I cannot be completely objective in my analysis of his personal allegations. But experience and common sense tell me that this is wrong. Walter has not worked in the Pentagon, the ministries of state, or the observatory with diplomats, public officials – yes, politicians – who sincerely believe that an active foreign policy can achieve the national interest as well as the world’s Peace and progress. If he had done so, I would have been convinced that he would have changed his mind about what was driving these officials.
It is true that people are often biased about government actions, but Walt should understand how much foreign policy practitioners struggle with decisions and how seriously they debate the merits of doing more, doing less, or doing something else entirely. Contrary to his assertions, he would surely be surprised by the seriousness with which the Washington administration would listen to unorthodox viewpoints, including Walter’s own regarding the withdrawal of troops from the Middle East. His proposals did not become policy, not because they were not considered. He will find evidence that the chain of causation runs in the opposite direction to his assumptions: policymakers do not push a more ambitious program because foreign policy is their cause, and they make foreign policy a cause because they believe it will fulfill their ambitions. Pragmatists do themselves no favors by satirizing academic critics, and vice versa.
Walter’s distrust of the foreign policy establishment has led him to ignore the turmoil that has occurred in the foreign policy community since 2016. He legitimately points out how frequently the Washington administration’s discussion of foreign policy has been influenced by groupthink, how universal views have become deeply rooted, why it is difficult to depart from them, and how basic assumptions about geopolitical trends and innate appeals to democracy have long been taken for granted. But he mistakenly assumed that the intentions and motivations of foreign policy experts meant that their views would not change, that they were incapable of learning, adapting, and growing.
Both Walt and Mearsheimer ignore the recent shift in the Washington administration’s foreign policy consensus focus. 2018 debates are not the same as the 2002 debates. For example, they seem to be stuck in 2002, strongly opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq, but today the vast majority of the foreign policy community would actually reject the option of a conflict in the Middle East. Today’s debate focuses on how to develop an effective counterterrorism strategy that reduces reliance on direct military force. So is their emphasis on the need for domestic investment: Since 2016, liberal internationalists have been more explicitly rethinking the relationship between foreign and domestic policy.
Policymakers from Mars’
Policymakers and even those who agree with some of Walt and Mearsheimer’s criticisms often do not know how to respond to their views. They vouch for their own proposals, believing that radical actions such as withdrawing troops from Europe would work well. Like their exaggerated portrayal of liberal internationalists, they are convinced of their own views. And their style of discourse exacerbates the festering problems: they blame U.S. policymakers for all the problems, tragedies, and unforeseen side effects, while taking for granted all the successes and disasters averted.
Knowingly committing a crime is serious, but the crime of negligence is not, or at least not very serious, so there is a difference between an action that leads to unintended consequences and an inaction that leads to unintended consequences. Intervention in Libya exacerbated the refugee crisis in Europe in an unintended way, but failure to intervene in Syria might have had the same effect.
These disconnects lead to a central challenge: When policymakers respond to scholarly criticism, they are forced to rely on counterfactuals for nearly every argument they make. If the Washington administration had not expanded NATO, would what is happening today in Ukraine have happened in the Baltics or Poland? If the U.S. withdrew from Japan in the 1990s, what kind of cards would it be playing with China today? “The alternative is worse” is never an interesting point to resort to in a debate, but there are times when it is the right answer. In the middle of his book, Mearsheimer lightly cites the examples of post-war Germany and Japan. Imagine if, in the second half of the twentieth century, the United States had followed Walter and Mearsheimer’s prescriptions for these countries in 1945, withdrawing U.S. troops and leaving Europe and Asia to solve their own problems; these regions would be much different today, and probably much worse off.
Walter and Mearsheimer’s basic strategic premise seems to be that a U.S. withdrawal might make the world more dangerous, but given its location and power, the United States could both avoid the resulting risks and use them to its advantage. Setting aside the harshness of this logic, it is not at all clear that it is correct. Walter cites the experience of the first half of the twentieth century as proof of the validity of offshore balancing, and his preferred hands-off approach to regional security provides a “reassuring history. But is there anything reassuring about the two catastrophic world wars in which the United States was inevitably involved? It is difficult to accept the 1930s as a success.
There are other reasons for the Mars-Venus-like nature of the conversation between the policymakers and the two scholars. Walter and Mearsheimer could ignore the costs of recalling American troops from around the world and then sending them out when problems arose, and policymakers had to take those costs into account. Walt and Mearsheimer can downplay the instability of a country like Iran acquiring nuclear weapons, while policymakers need to prepare for the worst, including a regional arms race and the possibility of bombs falling into the hands of terrorists. They can argue that liberalism should be divorced from U.S. foreign policy, but policymakers will have to face the fact that liberal ideas are not only strategic elements, but are also embedded in the U.S. system. In other words, authoritarian governments are under pressure not only from the U.S. government, but also from American society, and this will not stop. The release of the Panama Papers, for example, provoked the wrath of Russian President Vladimir Putin just as much as NATO expansion did. Finally, when Walter writes that the foreign policies of Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump are essentially indistinguishable, this kind of paper has no real meaning.
Tough Choices.
But in a way, all of this is a distraction. The battle lines between realists and liberal internationalists have been drawn, the debate has been rehearsed, and it’s hard to change anything. Rather than fighting over what the Washington government would look like today if it had adopted Walter and Mearsheimer’s program 25 years ago, it might make more sense to discuss what should be done in the next 25 years. Despite their insistence that policymakers can easily get things done by following a few simple rules, the two authors say little about the central debate in U.S. foreign policy today, and the thorny issues that the foreign policy establishment has been grappling with since 2016.
The first question is how to shape the deteriorating U.S.-China relationship so that it can advance U.S. interests without degenerating into direct confrontation. The “responsible stakeholder” consensus in U.S. strategic circles, premised on integrating China into the U.S.-led order, has collapsed. The latest argument is that the Washington administration has misjudged China, and the speed with which the current mantra of “strategic competition” (although it is unclear what the ultimate goal of competition is, especially if one assumes that China is not doomed to failure as the Soviet Union was) has shifted from good intentions to bad intentions is bewildering. It is also surprising that the two books do not offer new responses to this new situation.
Walt essentially gives up, writing that “American leadership in Asia may indeed be ‘indispensable'” (for those who must hate the “indispensable” and (For someone who uses the word “leadership,” that’s a very good way of putting it). If Walt must carve out an exception for the security issues of the largest nation of our time, it suggests that his overall approach may need to be rethought. Mearsheimer was a China hawk long before China hawkishness became popular, and he has argued in the past that realism and strategic restraint must be different when it comes to China. But in this new book, he is so committed to destroying the “hegemony of liberty” that he almost supports the continued rise of China, arguing that an increasingly powerful China is less of a threat to international stability than the continued unipolarity of the United States. This may or may not make sense from the perspective of the international system, but it is not particularly useful to U.S. policymakers who are concerned about the national interest. Nor do the authors help prepare policymakers for competition in an emerging field that involves not only traditional security considerations, but also economics, technology, and ideas. This is a serious flaw in their analysis, as geopolitics unfolds in increasingly broad areas such as cyberspace, space, economics, and energy.
This flaw raises a second dilemma that is inextricably linked to the first: to what extent do America’s major competitors systematically export their anti-liberalism, and what are the implications of this for U.S. strategy? The Center for American Progress’s Kelly Magsamen and her co-authors increasingly emphasize that Russia has an overriding goal of maintaining their authoritarian model, which creates an impetus for them to increase their intervention in liberalism abroad as a way to reduce pressure on regimes at home. As Thomas White of the Brookings Institution puts it, “Russia’s goal, to combat free and open societies, is to make the world a safer place to inhabit for authoritarianism,” so U.S. foreign policy needs to prioritize safeguarding democracy in the context of great power competition.
Walter and Mearsheimer assume that America’s major competitors are acting largely according to realist standards, and that domestic politics is not a major factor. Thus, their retrospective critique of the U.S. “impulse to spread democracy,” as Mearsheimer put it, does not really address the challenge of defending democracy under increasingly ambitious, organized, and efficient dictatorships. The new diagnosis made by the foreign policy community may be wrong, or it may be overstated, but if it is, neither author explains why. Walt and Mearsheimer do not offer a response to the range of measures that U.S. competitors have taken to pressure the U.S. economic and political system, from direct electoral interference to the strategic use of corruption and state capitalism as tools for building leverage and influence. If the new diagnosis is correct, is their favored strategy of dismantling NATO, withdrawing from Europe, and allowing like-minded allies to curry favor with the United States really the logical next step?
Mearsheimer does argue that pursuing “liberalism abroad can frustrate liberalism at home. But the examples he cites (e.g., wiretapping, government secrecy, “deep government”) are relevant to the war on terror, which has little to do with libertarianism. This leads to a third question: how should policymakers deal with the gap between the objective threat posed by terrorism and the subjective threat perceived by the American public? Walton and Mearsheimer have carefully crafted a bloodthirsty foreign policy community that is dragging a more peaceful public into foreign military adventures. But when it comes to fighting terrorism abroad, the public, emboldened by politicians who are themselves skeptical of liberal internationalism, perceives terrorism as an imperative, even a matter of life and death, requiring military force to address it. Increasingly, the foreign policy community is responding to this need rather than promoting it.
Consider Obama’s experience with Iraq, where he took a cue from Walt/Mearsheimer and withdrew all U.S. troops in 2011. Then, in the summer of 2014, the Islamic State (ISIS) swept into Mosul, which amounted to a shot across the bow of the American public consciousness. Our president’s national security team debated vigorously whether and how to use U.S. military force, but the debate was quickly drowned out by public outrage: after the beheading of two American journalists, the public demanded swift and decisive action, not to contain ISIS, but to defeat it, and in that instance, the public was more right than the experts, and more quickly. But a larger uncertainty remains: the political dimension of the terrorism issue, and its susceptibility to demagoguery, means that policymakers must distinguish it from other national security challenges, and objective measures of the threat have their limits. How this dynamic is handled will be critical in debates about strategy and resources in the coming years, and this is where Walt and Mearsheimer’s blind spot lies.
Another blind spot relates to a fourth question that policymakers are currently grappling with: How can policymakers develop effective mechanisms to address the common threats facing humanity in the context of growing national geopolitical competition and the diffusion of state power? This means that we need to work together to address issues such as climate change, pandemics, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and the risk of a global economic crisis. At least in the context of mobilizing such collective action, Mearsheimer ignores the fact that the motivational theories espoused by many in the foreign policy community may actually be closer to classical republicanism than to classical liberalism, with its emphasis on institutions, interdependence, and the rule of law. Neither Walter nor Mearsheimer offers a convincing explanation of how such cooperation should be achieved without U.S. leadership, without sound rules rooted in sound institutions, or without taking into account the role of nongovernmental as well as cross-governmental actors.
They all pay homage to effective foreign policy, but neither offers a credible explanation of how U.S. strategic retrenchment would enhance, rather than diminish, U.S. capabilities. Walt, for example, seems to like the Iran nuclear deal, but he is unconvinced of the role that tough sanctions, as well as substantial military threats, played in bringing about the agreement. Demonstrated assurance and resolve in foreign affairs is a key strength of the U.S. military’s global deployments, which raises the question of what Walt feels is better-is it harder to make the mistakes of Libya, or easier to engage in successful diplomacy like Iran?
The last area is the future of humanitarian intervention, and Walt and Mearsheimer also surprisingly offer little guidance. For the past 25 years, the Washington administration has grappled with the question: what are the appropriate conditions for U.S. military intervention on humanitarian grounds? Criticism of past military interventions is a central pillar of both scholars’ case against liberal internationalism. However, neither has come out and said that such interventions should never happen again. Mearsheimer’s criticism of the Libya operation is not that the United States should not have intervened to stop the Holocaust. Rather, he simply showed that the threat of a massacre was a “false pretext” — in other words, that it was all fiction. This provides a convenient way for him to avoid the real issue.
As for Walter, he surprisingly supports the use of force by the United States to “prevent war, stop genocide, or persuade other countries to improve their human rights performance. In fact, he “supports the use of force to stop mass murder when (1) the danger is imminent, (2) the expected cost to the United States is low, (3) the ratio of foreign lives saved to American lives potentially at risk is high, and (4) intervention clearly does not make matters worse or lead to indefinite commitment…”. The United States is the only country in the world that has been able to do so.” These are the same standards that policymakers have applied to every humanitarian intervention by the United States over the past quarter century. (Iraq falls into a separate category because it was not a war waged on humanitarian grounds.) The various post-Cold War interventions primarily meet the first three criteria. Walter does not provide more guidance on the fourth, which is the key, and most difficult, trade-off in the debate over action (Libya) or inaction (Syria). A further problem is that neither scholar has considered that humanitarian intervention can also be strategically motivated. Putting Syria in the crossfire does not just risk the loss of a great many lives; it also risks the destabilization of not one but two regions (Europe and the Persian Gulf), both of which Walter and Mearsheim tacitly acknowledge are important.
The New Intersection
This list of difficult issues is not exhaustive. Trump’s rise to power, coupled with broader changes in the international environment, has brought many assumptions back into the debate. Walt, in particular, sees this moment as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for progressives, libertarians, and academic realists to work together to defeat the liberal internationalists. But the real trend is moving in a different direction. Many recent views, including foreign policy commentaries by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, point to a way in which the left and the center are converging. This convergence will be difficult to accomplish, but some common priorities are coming into focus: a heightened focus on the distributional effects of international economic policy, a focus on fighting corruption, rule by thieves, and neo-fascism, an emphasis on diplomacy rather than the use of force, and an enduring commitment to democratic allies. Perhaps most importantly, there is a growing recognition and acceptance on both the left and the center of the fact that many of the successes of the liberal project have had far-reaching effects, such as progress in fighting global poverty and disease, and a lasting peace between France and Germany, two countries that make up the European Union rather than are destined to compete.
None of the above is meant to belittle the role that Walter and Mearsheimer can and should play in future debates. Their focus on first principles is especially important in a time of endless competition. Their admonitions to think differently are also very effective in an era of rapid change. Policymakers should read these books and consider their ideas with care. For their part, Walter and Mearsheimer should welcome, in good faith and with good intentions, the opportunity to engage with policymakers on how to deal with the challenges of the coming decades.
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