On March 18, famed political scientist John Mearsheimer visited Swarthmore and spoke on liberal hegemony. Hosted by the Swarthmore Conservative SocietyStudies, the event was part of the Agora speaker series, a forum for Swarthmore students to engage with guest speakers on timely topics ranging from philosophy and history to politics and economics. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and a well-known representative of “offensive realism,” a theoretical approach to international relations that views states as constant-power-maximizing agents in an anarchical competitive geopolitical landscape lacking a central authority.
According to Mearsheimer, liberal hegemony was the foreign policy adopted by the U.S. from 1991 until roughly 2017. Following the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world transitioned from a bipolar to a unipolar system, with the U.S. standing as the single global superpower. This period, marked by American dominance in global affairs, ended with the rise of China and the resurgence of Russia, which shifted the global order from unipolarity to multipolarity.
“My argument is that during the unipolar moment, we pursued this policy of liberal hegemony, and we pursued it towards China, Europe, and the Middle East, where the Persian Gulf is located. Those three areas of the world matter [to the U.S. for strategic reasons], and we really screwed things up,” Mearsheimer said. “Liberal hegemony was a policy that failed miserably, and it helped create the mess that we’re in today.”
According to Mearsheimer, liberal hegemony is based on three liberal theories that are largely aimed at shaping the world in America’s image. The democratic peace theory posits that if the world were entirely made up of liberal democracies, peace and stability would prevail. This vision aligns with Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” argument, suggesting democracy would eventually spread globally after the defeat of fascism and communism in the 20th century. Second, the economic interdependence theory argues that integrating nations into global markets would avoid war, as those nations wouldn’t risk damaging the system they benefit from. Accordingly, the goal was to bring countries like China and Russia into the world economy. Finally, the theory of liberal institutionalism aims to make nations responsible stakeholders by integrating them into international institutions.
“The idea was that you would remake the world, which would not be too difficult to do because of what Francis Fukuyama said, but it didn’t work out that way,” Mearsheimer said.
Based on the doctrines of liberal hegemony, the U.S. integrated China into the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, a move that supercharged Chinese economic growth and made modern China a major competitor of the U.S. Mearsheimer criticized the foreign policy elites at the time for ignoring the danger and unknowingly cultivating a security competitor. He also remarked that the U.S. is not in a strong position in East Asia due to the significant resources it has spent on Ukraine and the Middle East, particularly supporting Israel.
As for foreign policy in Europe, Mearsheimer critiqued frequent eastward expansion of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), as well as the U.S.’s exporting of color revolutions into Eastern Europe. The U.S. carried out three tranches of expansion in 1999, 2004, and 2008, which overturned its relationship with Russia. Russia voiced its opposition each time; in 2008, Vladimir Putin stated that Ukraine’s joining NATO posed an existential threat to Russia and that he would destroy Ukraine. Despite these warnings, the U.S. kept on pushing for Ukraine and Georgia’s NATO membership bids.
“NATO expansion was not about containing Russia. This was liberal hegemony at play,” Mearsheimer said. “In that unipolar world, we weren’t worried about the Russians. The Clinton administration was interested in NATO expansion because it wanted to spread this zone of peace that we had created in the West — the zone of peace based on liberal democracy, economic interdependence in the capitalist world order, and the spreading of democracy — to Eastern Europe.”
While the U.S. waged the war against Saddam Hussein in 1991, Mearsheimer observes, the policy of liberal hegemony in the Middle East only started to surge after 9/11. The attack drove G.W. Bush, who had run as a realist, to the opposite direction. The U.S. soon invaded Afghanistan, overthrowing the Taliban and putting in place the Karzai government with the help of Europe.
“We thought that we found the magic formula for knocking off regimes, [then] putting in power, very quickly and easily, quasi-democracies, and then moving on to the next part,” Mearsheimer said.
In the summer of 2002, the Bush Doctrine was introduced. According to Mearsheimer, it was never designed solely for the toppling of Saddam Hussein, but outlined a broader deployment that, after Iraq, would target Syria or Iran, aiming at a massive regime change across the Middle East. However, both operations in Iraq and Afghanistan failed disastrously. “And, in 2011, you have the Arab Spring. Think about the amount of death and destruction we have created,” Mearsheimer continued.
By the end of the Q & A session, Mearsheimer had spoken on the U.S.-Israel relationship, one that is “unparalleled” in its unconditional support for Zionism despite U.S. popular opinion against a continuing genocide in Gaza: “A small country gets unconditional support from the U.S. — there’s just no [such] case in recorded history.” He argued that unwavering support from the U.S. aligns with neither American national interest nor public opinion but has been due to “the Israel lobby,” an agenda now struggling to contain growing public dissent in the U.S.
“Defending [Israel] that’s executing a genocide in the U.S. is a Herculean task, and this means that you begin to infringe on free speech — to make this [lobbying] work right, you have to interfere in free speech,” he said.
For Mearsheimer, liberalism at home and liberalism abroad are two distinct subjects. What he opposes is not liberalism and liberal values in general, but liberal foreign policy that is ambitious and brings about unnecessary wars. He believes that the pursuit of this policy not only resulted in massive death and destruction in the greater Middle East, but also caused huge amounts of trouble on the U.S. homefront: “I actually believe that one of the reasons that Donald Trump is the president of the United States is because of these bone-headed policies that the liberal elite pursued during the Unipolar Moment.”
