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Sept. 19, 2024 - Ron Paul Liberty Report
26:57
'The Limits of Military Power in International Anarchy.' John Mearsheimer.

Famed University of Chicago professor John Mearsheimer explains why the US military empire finds it difficult to stop expanding.

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Time Text
The Bush Doctrine Debunked 00:14:36
Our next speaker is an international relations scholar.
He's very well known for his books, especially the Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy and The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.
He's a distinguished professor at the University of Chicago since 1982.
Please welcome John Mearsheimer.
Thank you very much for the kind introduction.
It's a great pleasure and an honor to be here.
I appreciate all the people who've come up to me and talked to me.
And I look forward to talking to you about international anarchy and the limits of military power.
What I want to do here is I want to explain to you why I believe that international anarchy means that the United States will always have a very large and powerful military.
And then I want to talk about what the limits are regarding how you use that military.
So to start, what do I mean by international anarchy?
As I'm sure many of you in the audience know, international anarchy is a catchword for saying that in international politics, there is no higher authority that sits above states that can rescue them if they get into trouble.
The international system is basically comprised of states.
States are the principal actors in international politics.
So anarchy in the lexicon of international relations scholars is the opposite.
It's the opposite of hierarchy.
If you live inside the United States, you have hierarchy.
You have a state that is very powerful that sits above you.
It has a police force associated with it.
It has courts and so forth and so on.
In the international system, there's no higher authority.
Furthermore, it's very hard to know the intentions of other states.
And it is impossible to know the future intentions of other states because you don't even know who's going to be running China or the United States or Russia in five years.
So how can you know what their intentions are going to be?
So you're in an anarchic system.
There's no higher authority to rescue if you get into trouble.
And there are states out there that may have malign intentions.
And furthermore, there may be states out there that are really powerful.
So if a really powerful state decides it's going to come after you and you dial 911, you know who's at the other end.
Nobody.
And in a system like that, you have no choice but to have a powerful military.
Your goal is to be the most powerful state in the system.
And you want to be the most powerful state in the system because you understand that if you're weak and you get into trouble, nobody can help you.
It is what we call a self-help system.
You have any doubts about this?
Go to China and ask them about the century of national humiliation.
The Chinese were very weak from the late 1840s until the late 1940s.
They call it the century of national humiliation.
What happened then?
China was weak and it was preyed upon.
It was preyed upon by the United States.
You know the open-door policy, Japan, and the European great powers.
The Chinese are never going to let that happen again.
They want their own state and they want that state to be powerful.
The same basic logic applies to every other state in the system.
And this includes the United States, of course.
And the United States, you all understand, worked very hard to become powerful.
It started out as 13 measly colonies strung out along the Atlantic seaboard.
We marched across North America all the way to the Pacific Ocean, acquiring and conquering territory all the way.
We invaded Canada in 1812 for the purposes of making it part of the United States.
And all those island countries in the Caribbean today would be part of the United States were it not for the slavery issue, because the northern states did not want more slaveholding states admitted into the Union.
And of course, because of the sugar industry, there were huge numbers of slaves in the Caribbean.
So the Caribbean did not become part of the United States.
But we had a voracious appetite for conquest, and we built a very powerful military once we became the dominant state in the Western Hemisphere.
This is just the way international politics works.
Now, for most of you, that's bad news.
But from my point of view, that's not the really important issue.
The really important issue is how you use that military power.
What I'm telling you is we're always going to be powerful militarily.
The question is, what do you do with it?
And this is where the United States has gone off the rails, at least since the end of the Cold War, and many would argue, before the Cold War.
Now, what's happened since about 1989, when the United States became the unipole?
You all remember the unipolar moment when we were incredibly powerful relative to every other state on the planet.
What the foreign policy establishment in this country decided it was going to do is that we decided we were going to use that awesome military power that we had to run around the world and do social engineering.
What we were going to do is we were going to try and remake the world in our own image.
We were going to spread democracy here, there, and everywhere.
We were going to spread capitalism and economic interdependence all over the planet.
We were going to take these institutions that we had created during the Cold War and we were going to integrate countries all around the world into those institutions and turn them into rule-abiding citizens.
But the most important thing we were interested in doing was spreading liberal democracy.
And when I say the foreign policy establishment, it's very important to understand I'm talking about Republicans as well as Democrats.
As far as the Republicans and Democrats go on the issue of foreign policy, you're talking about Tweedledee and Tweedledum.
Just think of the Bush Doctrine.
And as you all know, George W. Bush was a Republican.
The Bush Doctrine, right, which was enunciated after the Afghanistan War, that was in 2001, and before the Iraq War, which of course was March 2003.
The Bush Doctrine said that what we're going to do is going to go into the Middle East.
We're going to topple the regime in Iraq, right?
We're going to put in its place a democracy.
We're going to create democracy, get rid of Saddam, create democracy, just as we had done in Afghanistan.
You remember?
We toppled the Taliban and we put Hamid Karzai in power in Afghanistan.
We're going to do that in Iraq, and then maybe we'd have to do it in one more country, Syria maybe, Iran, and pretty soon everybody in the region would get the message.
They'd throw up their hands for fear that the United States would come after them and they'd all turn into liberal democracies.
That's what the Bush Doctrine was about.
This is Republicans.
And of course, the Democrats are no better.
Both the Republicans and the Democrats love their color revolutions.
What are color revolutions?
This is where you run around the world overthrowing regimes and putting in place pro-Western liberal democracies.
That's what you want to do.
It's social engineering.
And of course, it's social engineering in many cases at the end of a rifle barrel.
That's what the Bush doctrine was.
It was social engineering at the end of a rifle barrel.
And you want to think about what's going on here.
You're saying, when you pursue this policy, which me and my friends call liberal hegemony, when you're pursuing liberal hegemony, you're saying you can take this big stick that you have and you can use that big stick.
You can use military force to turn the political tide inside of particular countries in ways that are favorable to you, which is to create a world of liberal democracies.
And by the way, you all know the Francis Fukuyama argument in The End of History, that very famous article.
For those of you who haven't read it in a long time, you want to go back and just reread it because it says a great deal about what's happened to us since 1989.
Frank's basic argument was we defeated fascism in the first half of the 20th century.
We defeated communism in the second half of the 20th century.
The future is liberal democracy.
We got the wind at our back.
And it's just a matter of time before every state on the planet is a liberal democracy.
As you can imagine, when the Cold War ends and the Soviet Union disappears in December 1991 and we're left as the sole great power on the planet and people like Frank Fukuyama and people here in the foreign policy establishment are saying the future is a world of liberal democracies.
You've got the wind at your back.
We're going to pick up that big stick we have and we're going to use it to speed up that process, to facilitate the spread of democracy.
This is the Bush doctrine, right?
This is the emphasis on color revolutions.
This is what was happening, right?
Now, there's a fundamental problem with this approach to dealing with the world.
And the fundamental problem is political.
You know, Clausvitz said war is an extension of politics by other means.
You guys want to think about that?
War is an extension of politics.
What Clausvitz is telling you is it's the politics that really matter.
War is an extension of that.
It's an extension.
You don't want to get too carried away with the military instrument.
It's politics that really matter.
Now here's the real fly in the ointment that the foreign policy establishment faced.
That is that the most powerful political ideology on the planet is nationalism.
Nationalism is a remarkably powerful force.
Very hard for Americans to understand that, and I'll get to that in a few minutes.
But nationalism basically says that the world is divided into nations.
The highest social group that we identify with is the nation.
You know, Sam Huntington talked about the clash of civilizations.
Civilizations are not the highest social unit that people really identify with in a meaningful way.
It's the nation, right?
And what those nations want is they want their own state.
Nations want their own state.
Very important to understand that.
Think about the concept of a nation-state.
We live in a world of nation-states.
Nation-state.
That's nationalism.
The concept of a nation-state embeds, has nationalism embedded in it.
Theodore Herzl, who's the father of Zionism, his most famous book is called The Jewish State.
Nation State.
Jewish nation state.
Jewish state.
The Palestinians want their own state.
Palestinians view themselves as a nation and they want their own state.
Nation state.
You live in a liberal state, a liberal country.
That's what most people say.
You want to remember, you live in a liberal national nation-state.
You live in a liberal nation-state.
Madeleine Albright, who was a card-carrying liberal of the first order, she was famous for her statement that we are an exceptional nation.
We stand tall.
We see further than other nations.
She understood that we were a nation state.
She was not only a liberal, she was a nationalist par excellence.
So you live in a nation-state.
And the problem that you face is that nationalism has deeply embedded in it the concept of self-determination or sovereignty.
Nationalism's Insurgency 00:03:23
And nation states do not like the idea of other nation states coming into their territory and doing social engineering.
You know how exercised Americans get when there's talk about the Russians interfering in our elections.
This just drives us crazy.
The Russians interfering in our elections.
This is an absolute no-no.
It violates self-determination.
We are a sovereign state.
They have no right to interfere in our politics.
This is nationalism at play.
This is American nationalism.
Countries all around the world don't want us interfering in their politics.
They don't want us doing social engineering.
We don't want anybody doing social engineering.
Can you imagine us allowing somebody to do social engineering inside the borders of the United States?
Well, as my mother taught me when I was a little boy, what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
And unsurprisingly, people outside of the United States don't like that at all.
So let's take a couple cases here.
The United States, Vietnam War.
I was in the American military during the Vietnam War from 65 to 1975, which was coterminous with the war, right?
And at first we thought we were fighting communism, and that's why everybody was so gung-ho about the war.
But it eventually became clear to lots of people, yours truly included, we weren't fighting communism.
We were fighting nationalism.
The Vietnamese wanted their own nation state.
They wanted self-determination.
They drove the French out at the NBN Phu in 1954, and they had every intention of driving us out.
They didn't want a bunch of Americans in their country telling them what color toilet paper they could use.
They thought they could figure that out for themselves.
That's nationalism.
You go into Afghanistan.
You go into Iraq.
You are really asking for big trouble.
You think you're going to do social engineering in those countries?
You think you're going to be able to tell them what kind of political system they can have?
It's not gonna work.
Take the Russians, right?
The Russians, during the Cold War, as many of the old dogs in this audience, like me, remember, occupied a huge portion of Europe, most of Eastern Europe.
The Russians occupied it.
They were up to their eyeballs in alligators dealing with protests.
They had huge trouble in East Germany in 1953.
In 1956, they had to invade Hungary.
In 1968, they had to invade Czechoslovakia.
They almost invaded Poland three separate times.
And the Romanians and the Albanians, they were a total nightmare for the Soviets.
They were glad to get out of there.
You think Vladimir Putin wants to go back there?
Vladimir Putin, as I've said on numerous occasions, did not want to invade Ukraine.
He knows what happens when you start invading other countries.
And he'll take a big chunk of territory in eastern Ukraine, but he's not going to take a big chunk of territory in western Ukraine because it's filled with ethnic Ukrainians.
Liberalism Versus Nationalism 00:03:02
And you know what that means?
That if he goes in there, he is going to have an insurgency that is going to be impossible to stamp out because those ethnic Ukrainians are as nationalistic as you can get and they don't want Russia running their politics.
One of the principal reasons that the Ukrainians are fighting so fiercely, it's truly remarkable how they've been able to stand up to the Russians, is because of nationalism.
They are highly nationalistic people.
This is the way the world works.
And just one final example, look at the Israeli case, the Israelis and the Palestinians.
The Israelis have long thought that they could use a big stick, right, what they call the Iron Wall, to beat the Palestinians into submission, to get the Palestinians to accept the fact that it is a Jewish state.
The Israeli Jews run the place, and the Palestinians are third-class citizens.
They have been unable to win with that policy.
And what happened on October 7th is just the latest manifestation of Palestinian resistance, which is another way of saying Palestinian nationalism at play.
So I want you to think now about what's going on.
Here's the United States of America, which is a thoroughly liberal country.
It's a wonderful thing, in my opinion, that we are a liberal country.
And I'm using liberal in the broadest sense of the term to include Republicans and Democrats, okay?
We are a thoroughly liberal country and we don't like nationalism.
And if you look at Frank Fukuyama's famous article, go back and read it.
Nationalism is not discussed.
It's all about liberalism.
Liberalism has won.
For Frank, it's liberalism versus fascism.
Then it's liberalism versus communism.
And liberalism has won.
People like me are saying at the time, does he not understand that the most powerful political ideology in the world is nationalism?
And the idea that you're going to interfere in the countries that are not liberal and turn them into liberal democracies is a prescription for disaster.
And of course, this is exactly what's happened.
And what's really amazing is that the foreign policy elite does not seem to have gotten the message.
There's just no healthy appreciation of the power of nationalism inside the American foreign policy establishment, be they Democrats or be they Republicans.
And the end result is we are likely in the years ahead to have more trouble because of our inability to conceptualize just what a powerful force nationalism is.
Permanent State of Emergency 00:05:32
Now, there's another factor that matters greatly when it comes to doing social engineering with the military.
Militaries are good at breaking things.
That's what they're designed to do.
These are giant killing machines.
For anybody who spent any time in a military organization, it's very important to understand that's what they're good at.
You want lots of people, right, who are good at killing people on the other side.
When you go to war, you have these two huge organizations clashing into each other, armed to the teeth with all sorts of sophisticated weapons.
And the A's are trying to kill the Bs and the B's are trying to kill the A's.
They're trained to do that.
Well, do you think that that military, just think about the people who are going to be on the front lines in that military, do you think that military is going to be good at doing social engineering in a foreign country where nobody knows the culture, nobody speaks the language?
Really?
A bunch of American GIs running around in South Vietnam?
What do you think that's going to end up doing?
You're more likely to get a My Lai massacre with Lieutenant Calli than you are to have successful social engineering.
Furthermore, even if you brought in a whole bunch of trained people and you replaced those GIs with trained experts at social engineering and you set them the task of doing social engineering in South Vietnam or Afghanistan, do you think they succeed?
I don't think so.
Think about the United States.
Think about doing social engineering in our own country.
Our system is broken.
We can't even fix it.
The idea that we're going to go into Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam.
The Russians or the Soviets figured this out in Eastern Europe.
The Poles didn't want them there.
Highly nationalistic people.
The Czechs didn't want them there.
This is the way the world works.
We live in a world of nation states.
Nationalism is a relatively recent phenomenon.
You do not want to lose sight of that.
It's a relatively recent phenomenon, but it is the most powerful political ideology on the planet.
We live in a world that is populated by nation-states, and those nations like the Palestinians that don't have their own state want a state really badly.
Same thing is true of the Kurds.
Same thing was true of the Jews before 1948 when Israel was created.
This is the way the world works.
And if you're in one nation and you're going to try and impose your way of life on another nation, you are asking for big trouble.
Let me conclude with one final point.
People who don't understand, who don't understand the limits of what you can do with a military and decide that they're going to run around the world and use that military force to do social engineering,
and who think that we have a right and a responsibility and the capability to reorder the world in our image, are going to end up creating a highly militarized society.
Remember, I said that in international anarchy, the United States is always going to have a large military.
But that's different than saying we're always going to have a large military that's fighting wars.
That's the key distinction you want to keep in mind.
And what's happened to the United States over time is that we not only have a large military, but we're fighting wars all the time.
And the end result is we're in a permanent state of emergency.
That's what we're in.
We're in a permanent state of emergency.
It happens to be worse now than it was two years ago or four years ago because of where events in places like Ukraine are going.
But we're in a permanent state of emergency.
And what's very important to understand is that when you're in a permanent state of emergency, liberalism begins to erode in serious ways.
It's very important to understand what's going on in the United States, and it's going on in other places in the world as well.
But liberalism is, in my opinion, under threat in the United States.
And what's quite remarkable here is that the foreign policy elite, Republicans and Democrats, that have taken us into these wars have had a worldview that is thoroughly infused with liberal values and liberal thinking, and as I said to you, missed the importance of nationalism.
Policies Undermining Liberalism 00:00:22
So these people are not anti-liberals at heart, but the policies that they are pushing this country to pursue and have successfully pushed this country to pursue, those policies are undermining liberalism in the end, which, in my opinion, is a great tragedy.
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