Roundtable on The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities

Bottom Line: While John Mearsheimer’s latest book on liberalism and American foreign policy has received much praise, a variety of scholars take issue with the book’s methodology, diagnosis, and prescription.

John Mearsheimer’s latest book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities is “a stinging indictment of post-Cold War policy as being founded on a form of liberalism that ignores the realities of nationalism and the limits of the power of even the strongest states.”

In Mearsheimer’s view, forces like realism and nationalism always triumph over liberalism in matters of foreign policy, no matter what theorists or practitioners claim.

Christopher Layne praises Mearsheimer’s “important” new book, and describes its central argument as follows: despite claiming that liberal values are “inalienable” and “universal,” the United States tries to “hurry along the progressive forces of...history by protecting the rights of others when they are suppressed or menaced by ‘bad’ regimes.”

Mearsheimer contends that America’s commitment to liberal values around the world often leads the United States to intervene in foreign affairs, in order to preserve an international arena that respects these values.

According to Layne, American-style liberalism “leads to the belief that the world is populated by two kinds of states: good states (liberal democracies) and troublemakers (non-democracies). Liberal states—or at least since the early twentieth century, the United States—are hard-wired to embark on wars of regime change to get rid of the latter.”

Like most of Mearsheimer’s works, this book has provoked strong reactions, both positive and negative, from scholars across the ideological spectrum. For instance, while Layne largely agrees with Mearsheimer’s thesis, he holds that the books explanation of “liberal hegemony” is “not on solid ground historically,” that Mearsheimer “understates” how liberalism has shaped U.S. foreign policy, and overlooks the role of economic processes in matters of war and peace.

Other critics have more to say about Mearsheimer’s book. Jennifer Pitts applauds Mearsheimer’s diagnosis the United States’ liberal, post-Cold War foreign policy has inflicted around the world, but believes “the book’s potentially robust prescriptions...are hampered by its diagnostic shortcomings,” calling the book “a realist account of recent American foreign policy that is often unrealistic.”

To take just one example, Pitts notes that “American economic and corporate interests are nearly absent from Mearsheimer’s analysis,” which is problematic because interests of capital are central to liberalism, and thus to a foreign policy guided by liberalism. Pitts argues that capital interests are crucial to explaining the U.S. intervention in the Middle East, a connection Mearsheimer doesn’t explicitly draw, instead taking at face value the Bush administration’s narrative of democracy promotion.

Similarly, Jack Snyder agrees “with much of what Mearsheimer says about the dangers of heedless liberal overreach which were given freer rein after the Cold War,” but objects to Mearsheimer’s reliance on “ ideal types of liberalism, nationalism, and realism in a way that underestimates the degree to which these ideas overlap and interpenetrate in real life.” Snyder argues, for instance, that historically speaking liberalism and nationalism evolved in tandem, and that they inform each other, and cannot be read as inherently contradictory forces in a zero-sum foreign policy landscape.

William C. Wohlforth has more structural objections to Mearsheimer’s offering, claiming that the book does not "and cannot by design...make good on its central claim.” According to Wohlforth, it is impossible to “establish a causal connection” between liberalism and bad foreign policy simply by examining those two forces. In this view, Mearsheimer focuses so much on liberalism that it’s impossible to tell which other ideologies have negatively influenced U.S. foreign policy, and to what degree.

Despite these reservations, each of the aforementioned scholars would join Robert Jervis in praising Mearsheimer’s book for “the clarity of the argument, the verve of the writing, and [Mearsheimer’s] willingness to stake out a strong claim on an important subject.

Read the full roundtable here.