A Book Review… Exploring The Great Delusion

By JUDE P. DOUGHERTY

The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, by John J. Mearsheimer (Yale University Press, 2018, 328 pages, hardcover).

John J. Mearsheimer is a political theorist and international relations scholar who holds the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professorship at the University of Chicago. The book is an indictment of post–Cold War United States foreign policy.
He tells us, “When I began this book ten years ago, I was interested in why United States foreign policy in the post-Cold War period was so prone to failure. I was especially interested in explaining America’s fiascoes in the greater Middle East.”
Mearsheimer finds that in the aftermath of the Cold War, the U.S. adopted a profoundly liberal foreign policy dedicated to turning as many countries as possible into liberal democracies, that is, to remake the world in its own image. It was driven by an idealistic assumption: “The freedom we prize is not for us alone but is the right of all mankind.”
Unfortunately, in implementing that policy under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, Washington has played a key role in sowing death and destruction throughout the Middle East. Far from promoting cooperation and peace, liberal policy has brought instability and conflict.
Exploring the foundations of liberalism, Mearsheimer contrasts liberalism and its assumptions with what he calls nationalism (the recognition that there are nations, each with its own culture). First principles are important. It matters how one understands nature and human nature.
Rhetorically, he asks, “Are men and women social beings above all else, or does it make more sense to emphasize their individuality? Nation states, [he answers], reflect the fact that human beings are primarily social beings who have fundamental views on what constitutes the good life.
“Liberalism plays down that social nature to the point of almost ignoring it by treating individuals as atomistic players.” Furthermore, liberals ignore the geographic element which creates a social milieu that is foreign to others.
Jeremy Bentham might have called natural rights “rhetorical nonsense,” but nationalists, embracing the concept of “natural rights,” are skeptical of positive rights which can be both conferred and taken away by a rudderless state.
Nationalists, perhaps better called realists, maintain that the state should involve itself as little as possible in personal and family life. In common, they resist government attempts at social engineering in contrast to the liberal propensity to engage in it.
Mearsheimer presents himself as personally committed to liberal democracy. “I define democracy as a form of government with a broad foundation in which citizens get to choose their leaders in periodic elections. Those leaders then write and implement the rules that govern the polity. A liberal state thus defined privileges the rights of citizens and protects them through laws.”
Mearsheimer pursues his analysis under titles such as “The Limits and Perils of Social Engineering,” “The Costs of Ignoring Geopolitics,” and “Liberal Blindness.”
Mearsheimer shows that the liberal worldview dominated the thinking of the Bush and Obama administrations. Under their administrations, U.S. foreign policy supported the expansion of the European Union and NATO into Eastern Europe. The United States and its allies, he finds, are mainly responsible for the ongoing crisis in Ukraine. “The taproot of the trouble is NATO’s expansion, and its larger strategy to move all of Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, out of Russia’s orbit and integrate that territory into the West.”
George Kennan — historian and diplomat, who supported “containment policy” during the Cold War — after the collapse of the Soviet Union advised against the expansion of NATO to Russia’s frontiers. In a 1998 interview, as quoted by Mearsheimer, Kennan said, “I think it is a tragic mistake. There is no reason for it whatsoever. No one is threatening anyone else.”
In short, in Mearsheimer’s view, Russia and the West have been operating with totally different handbooks. Putin and his compatriots have been thinking and acting as realists, whereas Washington remains attached to progressive liberal ideas about United States hegemony.
It is clear that the liberal hegemony of the past 25 years does not work. It has left a legacy of futile wars, failed diplomacy, and diminished prestige for the United States. The people who have paid the greatest cost for Washington’s post-Cold War foreign policy are the foreigners who have had the misfortune of living in countries that American policymakers targeted for regime change.
Mearsheimer would prefer to remain on the theoretical or abstract level, addressing social engineering abroad and the failure of U.S. foreign policy in a general way, but he can’t avoid illustrating what he is talking about. The U.S., he charges, has been operating in countries its policymakers know little about. He finds that few government officials speak Arabic or even know the difference between Sunni and Shi’a Islam.
Perhaps the most egregious failure of the Obama administration was its attempt to bring down the legitimate government of Syria. Taking the side of a ragtag group rebelling against the government of Bashar al-Assad, the United States demanded that Assad step down. Duly elected by his people, he refused. The United States then provided military and other support to “moderate” rebel groups. The CIA and the Pentagon spent more than $1.5 billion on weapons and the training of the dissidents.
The strategy failed completely. Assad is still in power. More than 400,000 have died as a result of the U.S. intervention in the so-called civil war. Almost half the population of Syria has been forced to flee their homes.
Another example of ill-conceived U.S. foreign policy is the State Department’s meddling in the internal affairs of the government of Ukraine. The trouble began when President Viktor Yanukovych rejected a major economic deal he had been negotiating with the European Union and decided instead to accept a counteroffer from Russia.
That decision led to protests against the government in Kiev. The United States immediately backed the coup. Sen. John McCain and other U.S. officials participated in the Maidan Square demonstrations. A U.S. government official later publicly admitted that the U.S. spent $5 billion to bring about the removal of Yanukovych and provide support for the civil war that followed.
The Great Delusion does not end on a happy note. “The case for a realistic foreign policy is straightforward,” writes the author, “and it should be compelling to a large majority of Americans. But it is still a tough sell, mainly because many in the foreign policy elite are deeply committed to liberal hegemony and are willing to go to enormous lengths to defend it.”