John J Mearsheimer: The Great Delusion (Full Transcript)

I want to tell you what the proponents of the policy thought the benefits were, why we pursued liberal hegemony at that particular juncture in time, i.e., the end of the Cold War. I want to tell you about some of the policy issues involved around it, and then explain to you why it failed.

And then I’ll wrap up by talking about the future. So that’s the basic architecture of my talk today. This is all about liberal hegemony. It’s all about American foreign policy during the unipolar moment.

What is Liberal Hegemony?

Now, what exactly is liberal hegemony? As I said a minute ago, liberal hegemony is all about remaking the world in America’s image. That has three dimensions to it. The first of which is to promote liberal democracy across the planet, to go to great lengths to make every country on the planet a liberal democracy, to make it look like the United States of America.

So that’s the first goal. The second goal is to embed every state, and especially those big states like China and Russia, in that international economic order that the United States was principally responsible for creating during the Cold War. In other words, you want to get everybody hooked on capitalism. You want a lot of economic interdependence in the system.

So that’s the second goal. Again, the first goal is to promote liberal democracy. Second is to embed countries in the international economic order that Uncle Sugar created during the Cold War. And then the third goal, which is related to the second, is to get countries embedded in international institutions.

For example, you want to get China embedded in the World Trade Organization. You want to get Russia into the IMF and the World Bank. You want to get more and more countries into NATO and the European Union, which are international institutions. So these are the three principal goals, and it’s easy to understand how a country like the United States would pursue these particular missions.

Benefits of Liberal Hegemony

So that’s really what liberal hegemony was all about. Now the second question you want to ask yourself is, what were the benefits of this? In other words, why was Uncle Sam pushing so hard to remake the world in America’s image? Well, we thought there were three major benefits.

The first has to do with human rights. As you all know, because Canada’s a thoroughly liberal country, much like the United States, liberals care greatly about individual rights. And this is a wonderful thing. It’s one of the reasons that I’m very thankful that I was born and raised in liberal America.

So we care about rights, and we believe those rights are inalienable. And what that means is that every person on the planet has those rights, and that we as Americans and we as Canadians care not only about the rights of our fellow Americans or our fellow Canadians, we care about the rights of everybody on the planet. Rights really matter. They’re a centerpiece of liberal theory.

And the idea here is that if you can create a planet that’s filled with nothing but liberal democracies, we will no longer have to worry about massive violations of human rights, because liberal democracies, by definition, privilege individual rights and hardly ever engage in massive violations of those rights. So again, liberal hegemony is holding out the promise of effectively eliminating the problem of massive rights violations. That’s the first benefit. What’s the second benefit?

The second benefit, which all of the students in the audience will know right away, is democratic peace theory. This is the idea that liberal democracies do not fight against each other. Well, if liberal democracies do not fight against each other, which liberal hegemonists believe to the core, I’m sure many Canadians believe to the core, if you believe that, then if you create a planet that has nothing but liberal democracies on it, you have love, peace, and dope. What else can you have?

There’s going to be no more war. You all know Frank Fukuyama’s very famous piece, The End of History? The End of History says that what’s happening here is that liberal democracy is inexorably spreading all across the planet. And we’re eventually going to reach the point, Frank says, where there’s nothing but liberal democracies on the planet.

And what does he say is then going to be the most formidable problem we face? Boredom. Boredom. Why? Because nobody fights against each other, there are no massive violations of human rights. So you can see where if you have a country like the United States, right, that’s a thoroughly liberal country, that it’s going to think that spreading liberal democracy is a really good thing, because it’s going to bring peace to the world and eliminate human rights violations. The third reason, the third benefit that we think you’re going to get from liberal hegemony is it’s going to make the world safe for democracy, for liberal democracy. It’s very important to understand that liberal democracies are very skittish about their future.

They worry about internal threats, and they worry about external threats. When I was a little boy growing up in the United States of America, we, meaning Americans, the American government, worried about communists. We really worried about communists. We worried about the American Communist Party forming an alliance with Moscow.

Well, if you have a world where there’s nothing but liberal democracies, you don’t have to worry about your communist party forming an alliance with Moscow, because there’s no Moscow that’s communist that’s out there. It’s a liberal democracy too. So for the purposes of maintaining your liberal democracy forever and ever, to use Woodrow Wilson’s term, for purposes of making the world safe for democracy, what you want is a planet that has nothing but liberal democracies on it. So this was our goal, to make the world a place that had nothing but liberal democracies, because it would give us these three major benefits.

Why Liberal Hegemony in the Post-Cold War Era?

Now the next question you want to ask yourself is, why didn’t we do this in 1980 or in 1920? Why did we do it in the post-Cold War period? Why is liberal hegemony, in my story, peculiar to unipolarity? And there are three factors you want to keep in mind here.

First, and this is a general point you should all keep in your frontal lobes over the years moving forward, what’s going on in the world today is that the glacis plates are moving. We’re going from unipolarity to multipolarity. And when many of us in the room, I’m talking here about the old dogs, when we were young, we grew up in a bipolar world, and the glacis plates shifted in the late 80s, early 90s, and we went from bipolarity to unipolarity. So in my lifetime, we’ve gone from bipolarity to unipolarity, and we’re now going to multipolarity.

All of those of you who are trying to make sense of what’s going on in the world today, and you can’t figure out what’s happening, a large part of the story is that the glacis plates are moving, and all sorts of adjustments are being made. There are all sorts of consequences from this. But anyway, we went, when the Cold War ended, from bipolarity to unipolarity. Now why does this matter for liberal hegemony?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: The fact is, if you live in a bipolar world, you have the US and the Soviet Union, those two countries are going to behave towards each other in a realist fashion. Balance of power politics is going to dominate relations between the US and the Soviet Union. But when you move to a unipolar world, you have, by definition, only one great power. So you can no longer have great power politics.

All of this is a way of saying that the unipole, or the solepole, which is the United States of America, does not have to worry about balance of power politics, because there are no other great powers in the system. Just to get way ahead of myself, you understand what’s happening now, is we’re moving at a unipolarity to multipolarity, i.e. balance of power politics is coming back. But that’s getting way ahead of myself.

The point is, in the early 1990s, we were moving squarely into a unipolar world, especially after December 1991, when the Soviet Union went down the toilet bowl. So we were in a unipolar world where we did not have to worry about balance of power politics. All of that’s another way of saying we were free to pursue an ideological foreign policy in ways we were not free to do before 1989. So that’s the first enabling condition.

The second enabling condition is that the United States is a thoroughly liberal country. We are wired that way. It’s in our DNA. So you take a really unusual situation where the United States doesn’t have to worry about balance of power politics, and it’s free to pursue an ideological foreign policy, and it’s a highly ideological state, i.e. it’s a crusader state. You all understand, the United States is a crusader state. Canada, by the way, would be a crusader state if it was powerful enough, because you believe in liberal hegemony just like we do. So we happen to be really powerful.

So the second condition is you have this highly ideological state that is the unipolar. Then the third reason that we did this is we thought it was going to be easy. Some of you in the room are old enough to remember the optimism that existed in the early 1990s. We thought we had, we meaning the Americans, and Canadians and West Europeans, we thought we had the wind at our back.

And this is what Frank Fukuyama told us. Frank told us that the world is eventually going to be filled with liberal democracies. What the United States had done in the first half of the 20th century is it had defeated fascism. In the second half of the 20th century, we defeated communism.

And there was only one viable political order left, liberal democracy. And it was slowly but steadily spread across the planet. And therefore we had the wind at our back. So here you have this highly ideological unipol, also known as a crusader state, that has the wind at its back, and we’re off to the races.

The Failures of Liberal Hegemony

So this is how it all got started. So the question is, what happened? There are three big policies worth talking about here that really illustrate liberal hegemony at play. One is the Bush Doctrine, which has mainly to do with the Middle East. Two is Ukraine and the crisis with Russia over Ukraine. And number three is engagement with China. These are three of the colossal failures from liberal hegemony’s run during the unipolar moment. So let’s start with the Bush Doctrine.

The Bush Doctrine

The Bush Doctrine was all about turning the Middle East, the greater Middle East, into a sea of liberal democracies. The United States believed that it could make Afghanistan a liberal democracy, it could make Iraq a liberal democracy, and we would live happily ever after because we would have peace for the first time in the Middle East, because as you all know, liberal democracies never fight each other, and we’d have no human rights violations in the Middle East. When I make this argument, people say, John, I don’t remember us going into Iraq for purposes of spreading liberal democracy. We went in there to deal with two problems, proliferation and terrorism.

And I said, yes, we did go into the Middle East to deal with those twin problems of proliferation and terrorism, but the way we thought we would deal with those problems was to create a sea of democracies, because once you create a sea of democracies, conflict is taken off the table. You don’t need nuclear weapons. Nuclear proliferation goes away, and liberal democracies don’t engage in terrorism. This is the story that you tell yourself.

So when we went into Afghanistan and we won what appeared to be a stunning military victory between October of 2001 and December 2001, and then we put Hamid Karzai in power in Kabul, we thought we had laid the foundation for liberal democracy, the Taliban had been routed, we got out of town, and we reloaded the shotgun to go into Iraq. You might not believe this, you young people in the audience today, but Iraq was not the last stop on the train line. We thought we were going to go in and do in Iraq what we did in Afghanistan, go in, knock off the government, put Chalabi in place of Saddam Hussein, and then march on to the next target. Very important to understand that.

When the Israelis caught wind in early 2002, remember, we have won, quote-unquote, in Afghanistan by December 2001. When the Israelis catch wind in early 2002 that we’re thinking of doing Iraq next, they send a high-level delegation to the United States and say, are you crazy? You should be doing Iran next, because Iran is the real threat. This makes perfect sense if you read the newspapers every day.

What does the administration, the Bush administration, and their neoconservative allies on the outside tell the Israelis? Relax. Iraq is the low-hanging fruit. We’re going to deal with Iraq first, then we’ll deal with either Syria or Iran next, and we might not even have to deal with Iran, because Iran will throw its hands up and surrender, knowing that we’re on the march, that the crusader state is capable of knocking off regimes here, there, and everywhere, and turning them into liberal democracies.

This is what the Bush doctrine was all about. Of course, it failed, so people don’t talk much about this now, but that’s what they were thinking now. There was a real sense of optimism in the United States. But anyway, we gave up on invading countries after Iraq, but we still have been interfering and causing all sorts of trouble.

Syria? In the United States, they like to say, the United States has had hardly anything to do with what happened in Syria. This is nonsense. The United States is deeply involved in Syria. We were funding and training rebels. We worked with the Qataris, the Saudis, and the Turks to help overthrow Assad. We bear a huge amount of responsibility for that giant mess. Libya?

We all know what we did there. We told Colonel Gaddafi, give up your WMD programs and we’ll leave you alone. He gave up his WMD programs. You know where he is now? Six feet under. And you know who helped put him six feet under? Uncle Sugar did. That’s what happened here.

The amount of murder and mayhem in the Middle East, the greater Middle East that we’re responsible for, is truly remarkable. Just truly remarkable. The Bush doctrine was a colossal failure. Our policies in the greater Middle East were a colossal failure.

If there was any accountability in our system, most of those policy makers would be in the gulag. That’s the Bush doctrine.

Ukraine Crisis

Then there’s Ukraine. In this case, the argument in the United States and in Western Europe, and I’m sure it’s true up here in Canada among most people, is that the Russians are principally responsible for the Ukraine crisis. And by the way, it was lucky that we were expanding NATO eastward, because what happened in the Ukraine crisis shows you that the Russians were highly aggressive, and therefore we anticipated that problem smartly, and we solved it. This argument bears little resemblance to reality, right? The West is principally responsible for this crisis. And basically what happened here is that we didn’t simply move NATO eastward.

We moved the EU eastward as well, and we fomented the color revolutions. You’ve all heard of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Rose Revolution in Georgia, and we were even threatening to foment a color revolution in Moscow itself. Now, what’s going on here? What we’re doing is we’re taking liberal hegemony, and we are moving it eastward in Europe.

What we’re doing is, number one, trying to spread liberal democracy. That’s the first goal of liberal hegemony. We’re trying to spread liberal democracy in Eastern Europe. Think the color revolutions.

Second goal is to get these countries hooked on capitalism, get them integrated into the international economic order that Uncle Sam created. What do you think EU expansion is all about? The third goal is to get these countries integrated into international institutions. Think the EU, think NATO.

So the basic goal here was not to contain Russia. Michael McFaul, who was the American ambassador to Moscow, will tell you that he told Putin that NATO expansion was not aimed at containing Russia. And I believe that was true. It was part of a policy of liberal hegemony, which was to make Eastern Europe up to the Russian border look like Western Europe, to make countries like Ukraine and Georgia a bulwark on Russia’s borders, liberal democratic bulwarks.

And there was even talk that maybe eventually Russia would become part of this liberal international order. Well, do you think the Russians were going to tolerate this? The Russians were adamantly opposed to NATO expansion from the very beginning. They opposed the 1999 expansion, which included countries like Poland, Czech Republic, and Hungary.

They opposed the 2004 expansion. And then the big mistake was made in Bucharest in April 2008 at the NATO summit, where when the summit concluded, a communique was released by NATO, which said that Georgia and Ukraine would become part of NATO. And the Russians said, that is not happening. It’s no accident, ladies and gentlemen, that in August of 2008, there was a war over Georgia.

And it’s no accident that in February 2014, a war broke out over Ukraine. The Russians have absolutely no intention of letting either Georgia or Ukraine become part of NATO. And as you can understand, the Russians don’t like the idea of a color revolution in Moscow. I’ll talk more about this in a minute.

But we, with NATO expansion, EU expansion, and the color revolutions, went a bridge too far. And this all blew up in our face. And now the United States, which needs the Russians to deal with Iran, needs the Russians to deal with China, has pushed the Russians into the arms of the Chinese, and pushed the Russians into the arms of the Ukrainians, excuse me, the Iranians. But the idea that the Russians caused this, that they were poised to take over Ukraine, there’s no evidence to support it.

It was all a reaction to Western policies.

Engagement with China

And then finally, we get to engagement with China. This is the biggest blunder of all, right? The basic goal here is to get China hooked on capitalism, to make China really rich, get it into the WTO, which we finally accomplished in 2001, then let the Chinese violate a lot of the important rules in the WTO, get richer and richer.

That’s the second goal. Third goal is embed them in institutions, which we’re doing, get them in the WTO. And then the belief is that once you do that, they will become a liberal democracy. The richer you make them, the more likely it is they’ll become a liberal democracy.

And once they become a liberal democracy, they’re hooked on capitalism, and they’re rule-abiding citizens because they’re in all these international institutions, which are really all about rules. They will become what Robert Zoellick famously called a responsible stakeholder. That one worked out really well, didn’t it? Xi Jinping, he looks like a paradigmatic liberal Democrat, doesn’t he?

It looks good. It’s real good. It’s a colossal failure. Read Kirk Campbell’s piece in Foreign Affairs. He was one of the principal architects of that remarkably foolish policy, who now admits it was wrong. But what’s the end result of that? We helped grow a country that is a potential peer competitor. We are up to our eyeballs in alligators and thinking about how to deal with this country, which has four times as many people as us, and is growing economically at a rapid pace.

This is a potential peer competitor. From the American point of view, this is the worst possible outcome. And we helped create it. And many Chinese will tell you behind closed doors that they were amazed at the time that we were feeding the beast.

They couldn’t understand what we were doing from our own point of view. It’s very simple, liberal hegemony.

What Went Wrong?

So the question is, what went wrong here? And as some of you know, my argument is that nationalism trumps liberalism, and realism trumps liberalism. And what happened here is that liberalism ran into two different buzzsaws. One was nationalism, and the other is realism. And let me just take a few minutes to lay this out for you. Let’s just talk about the Bush doctrine.

The idea that the United States can invade countries and do social engineering in those countries, especially at the end of a rifle barrel, in the age of nationalism, is foolish in the extreme. Nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet. And it’s very clear that if you invade a country like Iraq, or Afghanistan, you are eventually going to go from being a liberator to being an occupier. And once you become an occupier, nationalism kicks in, and there’s tremendous resistance from the people who live in this country.

I learned this when I was a young boy, slash, man, when I was in the American military. I was in the American military from 1965 to 1975, which was coterminous with the Vietnam War. Marines landed at Da Nang on March 8, 1965. I went into the Army as an enlisted man on June 22, 1965.

I got out of the American military in August of 1975. The Vietnam War ended in the spring of 1975. And one thing I learned during those years is that we were not fighting communism in Vietnam. The reason that the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong fought like wild dogs against us was not because of communism.

It was because of nationalism. They didn’t want a bunch of Europeans when the French were there telling them what colored toilet paper they could use. And they didn’t want us telling them what colored toilet paper they could use. They wanted to run their own politics.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: I remember in 1979, when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, everybody said, oh my God, this is the end of the world. The Soviets are on the march. I said exactly the opposite. The Soviet Union has just created a huge blunder.

They just invaded a country in the developing world where they’re soon going to be seen as an occupier, and they’re going to be up to their eyeballs dealing with resistance. You want to stay out of places like Afghanistan if you’re the Soviet Union, or if you’re the United States of America. My view is if you’re arms racing or you’re in a security competition with another great power, what you want to do is encourage that great power to intervene in places like Afghanistan and Vietnam. When I first started going to China in the early 2000s, I told the Chinese, tug-in-cheek of course, I said what you want to do is tell the Americans that they have to win the war on terror.

You’re counting on them to win the war on terror, and they have to stay in Afghanistan and in Iraq until they win. I said they’ll be there forever, wrecking their military, wrecking their economy. You want to stay out of those places. This is why I oppose the Iraq war, Brian referenced that, Steve Walt and I and all the realists, because the realists appreciate the importance of nationalism, the most powerful political ideology on the planet.

Let’s talk about the Russians and the Chinese. You don’t think that Vladimir Putin got really upset at the idea that we were doing social engineering in Moscow, that Michael McFaul was going to be active with groups that were interested in turning, Michael McFaul was the ambassador to Russia from 2012 to 2014. You don’t think the Russians and Putin in particular were going to be very upset about the fact that we were trying to tinker with the Russian political system? You all follow American politics.

You know how ballistic the United States goes at the mere thought that the Russians are interfering in our politics. You know what that is? That’s American nationalism. Nationalism is all about sovereignty.

We are a sovereign state. We do not like the idea of the Russians meddling in our politics. Well, as my mother taught me when I was a little boy, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, and if we don’t like the Russians interfering in our politics, are you surprised that they didn’t like us interfering in their politics? That’s nationalism.

Go to Beijing, ask the Chinese what they think about us interfering over issues like protests in Hong Kong. They do not think for one second that we have a right to interfere with what’s going on in Hong Kong. You all follow this story for sure about Houston Rockets’ general manager who tweeted in support of those protesters in Hong Kong. He got himself into one whole heck of a lot of trouble.

Why nationalism? Go to China today, boy, the nationalism is really powerful. All this is to say in a world where nationalism is really powerful, if you’re a crusader state and you’re sticking your nose in everybody else’s business, and especially if you’re trying to occupy one of those countries, you are going to get yourself in a whole heap of a lot of trouble. And what you want to do again is you want to stay out and encourage your adversaries to go in.

That’s nationalism. Then there’s realism. Let’s just talk about Ukraine. Does anybody seriously think that you can march NATO right up to Russia’s border and turn Ukraine and Georgia into Western bulwarks and the Russians are just going to sit there and take it?

They’re going to understand that we’re a benign hegemon? This is not the way international politics works. Just take the United States of America. We have the Monroe Doctrine.

The Monroe Doctrine says that no country in the Western Hemisphere is allowed to invite a distant great power into this hemisphere and form a military alliance with it and put military forces in the hemisphere. Do you think the United States, let’s hypothesize the situation. It’s 20 years from now. China forms a close relationship with Canada and Mexico.

They form a military alliance and the Chinese decide that they’re going to deploy some military forces in Canada and in Mexico. You think the United States is going to say, Canada is a sovereign country, Mexico is a sovereign country, and they can do whatever they want? If you believe that, you are really asking for trouble. If you show any interest in forming a military alliance or getting too close to the Chinese, the Americans will be on top of you like nobody’s business.

You remember, there’s enough old bogs in this room who remember the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fidel Castro had the audacity to form a military alliance with the Soviet Union, then invite the Soviets to put missiles in Cuba. We still have not recovered from that. You notice that we still have our gun sights on Cuba.

Oh, that just drove us crazy as a violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Again, you know my rhetoric about what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. You’re surprised that the Russians were upset about NATO expansion? And it was not just NATO expansion, it was NATO expansion plus EU expansion plus the color revolutions.

And you know, a lot of people say to me, don’t you understand, John, that Ukraine is a sovereign state and it can choose its own foreign policy? To which my response is, that’s a foolish way of thinking about international politics. If you’re a small state and you live next door to a gorilla, you have to be really very careful what you do, because if you make that gorilla angry, that gorilla is going to do all sorts of horrible things to you. And we basically, probably unintentionally, encouraged Ukraine to pursue policies that got it into a heap of trouble.

And then when they got into a heap of trouble, what did we do? Nothing. We led them down the Primrose Path. And we did the same thing with Georgia.

The Georgians were expecting us to come to the rescue. They’re expecting the Seventh Cavalry to arrive. It didn’t happen. Surprise of surprises. But anyway, all I’d say is, you’ve got to understand basic realpolitik here.

Conclusion: The Future of Liberal Hegemony

All right, talking in conclusion about the future, liberal hegemony is dead. And it’s dead for two reasons. One is Donald Trump.

It’s very important to understand that Donald Trump ran against liberal hegemony. As you all know, he said, we’re getting out of the business of spreading liberal democracy around the world. He said that. As you know, he’s never met a dictator that he wasn’t willing to jump into bed with, and in most cases, with enthusiasm.

And most of our Democratic allies, he’s into slapping around, right? With regard to economic interdependence and an open international economy, he likes to refer to himself as Mr. Tariff, right? This is a guy who’s not interested in maintaining the open international economic order that the United States created after the Cold War ended.

He has a fundamentally different view with regard to institutions. The guy’s never met an institution he doesn’t love, right? He thinks NATO’s obsolete. Some of the EU leaders identify him as public enemy number one when it comes to the EU.

He hates the World Trade Organization. He hates the IMF. He hates the World Bank. One of the first things he did foolishly, in my opinion, was to nix the TPP, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, when he came to office.

As you up here in Canada know, he hated NAFTA. He hates institutions. So he hates institutions. He has no interest in spreading democracy. And he’s Mr. Tariff. He ran against liberal hegemony, and he got elected. And why did he get elected?

He got elected in part because the policy was bankrupt. The story that I’m telling you about failure after failure is not one I’m making up. Trump recognized that, and he ran against his Republican opponents in the primaries on that platform. He said explicitly that George W. Bush was a failed foreign policy president, and then he ran against Hillary Clinton and the Democrats, and he won. That’s the first reason it’s done.

But the more important reason that liberal hegemony is done is we’re no longer in a unipolar world. In fact, we’re now moving into a multipolar world with, one, the rise of China, and two, the resurrection of Russian power under Vladimir Putin in the 2000s, roughly over the past 20 years.

The Russians are back. The Chinese have grown very powerful. The United States, by the way, is still the most powerful country in the world. I don’t want to make light of that.

The United States is very powerful. But nevertheless, we’re now in a multipolar world. And as I told you at the beginning of my talk, when you are in a multipolar world, the United States has to pay primary attention to balance of power politics. You can’t pursue an ideological foreign policy because the balance of power matters so much.

So liberal hegemony is out the window for that reason. Let me conclude with just one quick observation. I have very mixed emotions about this. And the reason I have very mixed emotions about this is that we have turned China into a peer competitor.

And I believe that from an American point of view, we are now moving into very dangerous waters. I think the United States behaved foolishly during the unipolar moment. And there’s no question we did a lot of damage in places like the greater Middle East. But I think the world was far less dangerous in the unipolar moment than it’s going to be moving forward, because I think the US-China competition is going to dominate the landscape in the decades ahead.

And I think the potential for big trouble on that front is not to be underestimated. And the key point you want to keep in mind is that the individuals who ran American foreign policy during the unipolar moment created this situation by feeding the beast. Thank you. I’ll be happy to take questions.

And the only thing I would ask is if people would stand up and they would only ask one question. It allows more people to ask questions. And the other thing is, it’s very hard from my point of view to always remember two questions. So if you just ask one pointed question, that would be much appreciated.

Oh, there are microphones. Oh, okay. Here. There’s they said there’s microphone.

Oh, do you if you want. Again, I can always repeat the question.

AUDIENCE: [QUESTION INAUDIBLE]

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: One will be liberal. The United States will be liberal.

The Russian and Chinese polls will not be. Just with regard to that point, I think the Russians and the Chinese, as I tried to make clear in my talk, I didn’t say this explicitly, but it was implicit, but I want to be explicit here. During the unipolar moment, the Russians and the Chinese acted in a realist fashion. It was the United States that did not, okay?

Moving forward, the Russians and the Chinese will continue, as you said, to act in a realist fashion. My argument is the United States will act once again in a realist fashion, as it did during the Cold War. So you will have three great powers competing among themselves. Your question in particular was, what effect will this have on the liberal international order?

I did not talk about the liberal international order. I’ve written a major article on this, which I can send you, that came out in the spring of last year. I sent you the piece? Oh, okay.

It shows you how much I remember, but anyway, okay. But my point is the liberal international order is kaput, right? Many people think that Trump is principally responsible for tearing down the liberal international order. And my argument is that is not true.

It’s in response to your question, it’s the fact that you now have three great powers competing that takes the liberal international order off the table.

Q&A Session

AUDIENCE: [QUESTION INAUDIBLE]

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: When you say global conflict, what do you mean? Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. This is a great question. I think that as a result of nuclear weapons, it is almost impossible to get a World War I or a World War II-like situation between China and the United States. And by that I mean a massive conventional war between the United States and China.

I could tell you a story, I won’t do it here unless somebody asks the question, is why a war between China and the United States is more likely than a war was between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. I think there is a reasonable chance you will have a shooting war between the United States and China. But I do not think that will lead to World War III, which is your question, although you tacked on the nuclear weapons argument. And I do think if there is a war between the United States and China, there is the ever-present threat of nuclear escalation.

It is very important to understand that because we have never had a nuclear war, thank goodness, we do not understand the dynamics that underpin escalation. And the real issue here is that you get into a conventional war, and then it spins out of control and it escalates, and we all get incinerated. Now, is that likely to happen? I think not.

I actually think if the United States and China got into a shooting war, it would be limited and we would go to great lengths to shut it down, simply because we would live in mortal fear, us and them, that it would spin out of control. Because again, we just don’t understand the dynamics here very well. So my bottom line to you is, you don’t have to worry about World War III looking like World War I and World War II, but you do have to worry about the possibility of a limited war, especially because it could escalate.

AUDIENCE: Two seconds just so everybody can hear you. Where realism is kind of the necessary strategy, but back in the United States, you talk as if the United States foreign policy is a monolithic single thing. But yet in the United States and their politics, it’s been bipolar for a very long time. How do you expect that to play out in this new, you know, this new if things go as you think?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Thank you. I think you’re the first two thirds of what you said was an excellent synopsis of my views. I actually disagree with you when you say that you had this sort of bipolar relationship or polarization between, let’s say, the Republicans and the Democrats on foreign policy. Actually, what I believe is that you have remarkable consensus among the Republican and Democratic foreign policy elites in the United States.

They were all liberal hegemonists. The Democrats are constantly accused by the Republicans of being pussycats. And President Obama was said to have been an isolationist. This is nonsense.

President Obama upped the ante in Afghanistan. Yes, he was forced out of Iraq, but we went back in. President Obama is responsible for what happened in Syria, because it all started in the summer of 2011. President Obama is responsible for what happened in Libya.

The guy was infatuated with drones and became the assassin in chief as we went around the greater Middle East, killing people from the sky, right? The idea that President Obama was a wussy and an isolationist, I mean, this is the kind of rhetoric that takes place between the Republicans and the Democrats that bears no resemblance to what’s really going on. They were two, there are two political parties that are filled with liberal hegemonists. Trump was the outlier, right?

Trump ran the table in the Republican primaries, and then he beat Hillary Clinton. Trump was calling for a radical change in American foreign policy. And it’s no accident that a huge chunk of the foreign policy establishment, the Republican foreign policy establishment, was and remains appalled by the Trump presidency, because they view Trump as a threat to this crusader state mentality that they all have. Now, just a final point on what is really the essence of your question, what’s going to happen moving forward?

My argument, as you would expect from a structural realist like me, right, is that as the structure changes, we go from unipolarity to multipolarity, and the United States has to play balance of power politics, both the Republicans and the Democrats will become more realpolitik, right? You go to China today, and you talk to very high level people about the trade war, and US-China competition, and you ask them, do you think things will change if President Trump is defeated? And virtually everybody will tell you it doesn’t matter whether Trump is defeated or not. The Americans have their gun sights on us.

They’re coming after us. We fully understand that. And I think that’s just a way of answering your question by saying that Republicans and Democrats will probably be united again, but they’ll be united in a more realpolitik and less in liberal hegemony kind of way. Should we get somebody down there just…

AUDIENCE: Hi. I just took the initiative to walk up to the mic. Oh, sorry about that, sir. You recently joined the Quincy Institute on Responsible Statescraft as a non-resident fellow, Washington, DC-based think tank, aiming to stop what they call forever wars.

What do you see the role of think tanks in shaping national foreign policy? And what do you hope to do with the Quincy Institute?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. The Quincy Institute is a new institute that was created, this is kind of hard to believe, by George Soros’ money and Charles Koch’s money.

And as you know, Koch is out here and Soros is out here, but they’re both against, as this gentleman said, the forever wars. And the Quincy Institute, its principal mission is to do everything to influence American foreign policy so we stop intervening in the politics of countries all over the planet. Now, with regard to think tanks, I think most think tanks are very interested in promoting policies that cause us to intervene here, there and everywhere. The foreign policy consensus that exists in the United States between Republicans and Democrats, the answer I gave to this woman here, right, the think tanks are behind that 100%.

I’m not saying they’re the only driving force, but they’re one of the main driving forces, right? All the think tanks in Washington, except maybe the Cato Institute, right, which is a libertarian think tank, all the think tanks are heavily invested in liberal hegemony. And what’s going to happen here with the Quincy Institute is you’re going to have a new player on the block that has a fundamentally different view of how we should conduct foreign policy. And the $64,000 question is whether the Quincy Institute will end up mattering very much.

It’s a really interesting question. You all understand that Barack Obama opposed the Iraq War. And Barack Obama, when he became president, said that my goal is to do nation building at home. And what he wanted to do was get out of the business of liberal hegemony.

And what happened is that the establishment rose up, and it beat down President Obama. And if you read President Obama’s exit interview with Jeffrey Goldberg of the Atlantic Monthly, for those of you haven’t read it, you should go read it. Basically, President Obama says the blob, he and his lieutenants used to refer to the foreign policy establishment, Democratic and Republican, as the blob. Obama says that the blob beat me, right?

I played by the Washington playbook, right? And one of the big questions about Donald Trump when he took office was whether or not Trump, who has more agency than any president I’ve ever seen, whether Trump could beat the blob, right? And that blob includes those think tanks. So when you think about the Quincy Institute, you want to think about the problems that Barack Obama had.

And you want to think about the problems that Donald Trump has had. And it’s not clear they’ll succeed. Okay. Yeah.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. So Professor, you talk about, sorry, you talk about how we’re moving into a more multipolar world. And specifically, the three states you mentioned America, China and Russia, do you see Russia and China as taking a more balancing strictly against America? Or do you see them kind of balancing against each other?

And in this case, would it be China and America as the main adversarial positions and then Russia playing the spoiler? Or how do you see that relationship?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Great question. I think the central feature of the multipolar world we’re moving into, as I said before, is the US China competition.

And then the question is, what are the Russians do? My argument has been all along until recently, that the United States and the West created the Ukraine crisis. And that has driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese. I think that’s true still.

Okay. And my argument was that with the passage of time, as China becomes more powerful, the Russians will switch sides. And I believe it’ll be the Russians and the Americans against the Chinese. What I’ve come to think differently about this argument is that I was in Moscow, I think it was two years ago, and I was talking to these two young Russian IR scholars who are both very, very smart.

And I told them the story I just told you folks. And they said to me, John, you’re missing Russia’s third alternative. And I said, what’s that? And they said to sit on the sidelines and not get involved.

And as soon as they said that, I said, that’s a brilliant thought, you know, why didn’t it occur to me, but it had not occurred to me. So I think moving forward, the question you want to ask yourself is which one of those three strategies will the Russians end up pursuing? And there’s a lot to be said for sitting on the sidelines. The problem the Russians face is Belt and Road in Central Asia, right?

The Russians are very nervous about the Chinese, because one, they understand how powerful the Chinese are. Number two, they’re geographically co-located, right? And Central Asia really matters. Right?

And the Russians, not all Russians I’ve talked to, but a lot of Russians will tell you that the natural position for them is to be allied with the United States, if anybody. China is the last country they should be allied with. But this gets back to my point about the Ukraine crisis and the negative effects of it. We have driven the Russians into the arms of the Chinese.

But I think those are the three options. And I think you’ll either get the Russians sitting on the sidelines, or being with us over the long term.

AUDIENCE: Thank you. I am a U.S. civil servant. So on that attachment, what do you think the prospects are of the settlement under the U.S. in the long-term process to solve the problem of neutral Ukraine or whatever, and then have the Russians, like President Macron has said, bring the Russians back into the tent and lift the sanctions?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, everybody heard the question. No, okay. I’ll just repeat it very quickly. The question is, how likely is it that we will be able to solve the Ukraine problem and improve relations between the Russians on the one hand, and the West on the other? And then once that happens, we are more flexible, the Russians are more flexible in dealing with this gentleman’s question.

I’m not sure what the answer is there. I think there is so much hostility towards Russia in the United States. And it’s not geopolitical. It’s mainly a consequence of the fact that President Trump is associated with the idea that we should improve relations with Russia.

And therefore, that has caused huge problems in terms of improving U.S.-Russian relations and working to solve the Ukraine problem. So I think there are real problems from our side, the West side. And I think if you look at the politics inside Ukraine, which I’m not an expert on this, but given what’s going on in the East and how many people in the West feel, it’s very hard to see how you can work out some sort of arrangement inside Ukraine that makes everybody happy. So I don’t, I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t hold out much hope that you’re going to be able to solve this one anytime soon.

I’ll come to you in one second. Let me just go down this way to get a person or two.

AUDIENCE: Professor, given your criticism of the previous administration, what grade would you give to Trump’s foreign policy so far?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: His question was, what grade would I give Trump’s foreign policy?

I’m simply just, I’m tempted to say just one letter, but I’ll just say a few words. I think some of Trump’s instincts are smart. I think ending the forever wars is a good idea. A number of people have pointed out that Trump is the first president in a long time who hasn’t started a war.

And I think that in terms of getting tough with China, I think that was a smart move. And I was recently in Geneva talking to some people who were involved, these are not Americans in WTO issues, who say that a lot of people won’t say it publicly, but they’re happy with what Trump is doing with regard to the Chinese in terms of trade policy. So I think Trump’s instincts on a number of issues are good. They’re bad on a number of other issues.

I think, for example, on the Israel-Palestine business, I think he’s blown that big time. And I think on Iran, pulling out of the JCPOA, boy, I don’t want to get into that because I’ll be here for the next hour talking about that. That was a big mistake. But anyway, I think he has some good instincts.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: But I think the execution is almost always disastrous. Just let’s talk about balancing against China. He wants to balance against China. I think this is the right thing to do.

But we have to balance with allies. We especially need our East Asian allies. We also need our European allies. But this guy, President Trump, goes around the world beating up on our allies, poisoning relations with our allies.

This is no way to form a balancing coalition. And I could go on and on. So if you were to ask me what grade I would give him, I’d give him a grade of D, I think, when you look at what he’s done. We could go down the whole list.

I won’t do that because there are a lot of questions. But yes, ma’am. You could have Yeah, oh, yeah. I would rather sit if that’s okay.

AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. Most of the historic liberals, including John Stuart Mill, who I do work on, built a foreign policy or policy on the basis of a theory of value and morality. If you look at it that way, you get a sort of a different picture about what liberalism is trying to do. So my question to you is, if you don’t believe in universal, inalienable human rights, or that we should be at least working for them, what do you do about situations where nationalism, as in Rwanda, massacres in horrifying degrees, which was actually the circumstance that turned many people towards liberal interventionism and responsibility to protect your analysis overall is wonderful, except if you come at it from a different angle, I always say, you leave people to be massacred, tortured, raped, whatever, if you are not interested in the circumstances under which you should be promoting policies to address that.

So the question really is, what do you do if you’re interested in human rights, and yet you want to be realistic?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. This is a very tough question. And my view on this is that when there is genocide, or mass murder, a massive violation of human rights, where people are being killed, if you can, you should intervene.

I was in favor of intervening in Rwanda, right? This is not for not because I supported liberal hegemony, but for liberal reasons. I didn’t make this clear in my talk, I think, but I consider myself to be a card carrying American liberal, I’m thrilled that I was born and raised in liberal America. And I understand the importance of individual rights.

And it sickens me when I see situations like Rwanda, right? So I’m in favor of going into Rwanda, and fixing that problem, which would have been very easy to do. But the question is, what do you do beyond that? And the real temptation here, and I think it was reflected in your comments, the real temptation is to go into a place like Rwanda and fix the politics so that it never happens again.

And if you listen to my description of what liberal hegemony is all about, that’s what we thought we could do. That was benefit number one, right? The point that I tried to make in my talk is, I think you do more damage than you do good. When you go get into the business of social engineering, I don’t think you solve those problems.

AUDIENCE: There’s a mic here. No, no, go. Lots of questions. Don’t intervene and allow people to be massacred. You do as much wrong as you do intervene and mess it up.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Well, no, I again, I want to I just want to be clear. I’m not I’m not against intervening to stop the massacre. My question, my point to you was, that then leads to the question, should you intervene in countries to organize their politics so that a massacre never happens?

And that’s what I’m opposed to. Okay.

AUDIENCE: Hi, I just have a question regarding the China situation. Now, a lot of new theorists have come out, Fareed Zakaria, Peter Zeihan. And they say that China is much less of a threat than we give a credit for, that the China situation right now is being overblown. Their demographics are failing their 300% debt to GDP ratio at the moment, the Belt and Road Initiative, you can’t promise Iran $400 billion in infrastructure, that’s unrealistic. And so I just wanted to ask to those people who don’t believe in the China threat, and who don’t believe that China is going to become a great power for whatever reasons, geographical, demographic, etc. How would you respond to these individuals?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Yeah. There are two big issues when it comes to China. Two big questions when it comes to China. One is, will China continue to rise?

And number two, if it continues to rise, can it rise peacefully? If I were giving my China talk tonight, I would start off by saying, I am simply assuming that China is going to continue to rise. And I’m answering the second question, can it rise peacefully? Okay.

Now, this gentleman says, there are a lot of people who think it’s not going to rise. I was in China for 17 days, in October, talked to all sorts of people, it is quite striking how many smart Chinese basically agree with the thrust of what he said, which is that I overestimate the threat from China, because China is not likely to continue growing at an impressive rate in the years ahead. My response to that is, first of all, that’s great news. Right?

I want to see the Chinese economy flatline. Right. But the second point I would make is, I don’t know how to think about what’s going to happen to the Chinese economy over time. And if you talk to economists and people who specialize on this issue that this gentleman raised, there are people who are all over the map.

You know, I don’t know whether China is going to be able to continue to rise or not. And just to embellish this just a bit more, there are two sets of factors that can slow China down. One is, and this is the direction you’re going, there are structural problems inside of China, that guarantee it will slow down. He mentioned the demographic problem, debt problems, banking problems.

These are the problems that a lot of Chinese point to. This train is slowing down for structural reasons inherent to China. Then the second reason is Trump’s policies. How do you think about Trump’s policies?

You know, is he going to hurt Huawei? Is the trade war hurting China more than it’s hurting the United States? If you try and get an answer to that as a non-expert, it’s almost impossible to figure out how to think about it. So I don’t know whether it’s going to slow down.

But again, going back to my first point to you, I hope it slows down because if it doesn’t, oh my God, you know, they have many, many more people than us. And if this place turns into a giant South Korea or a giant Hong Kong, they’re going to have one heck of a lot more wealth than we have. And we’re taking them on 6,000 miles from the Chinese, I mean, from the California coast. So let’s hope Fareed Zakaria and those people are all right.

AUDIENCE: Haider, thanks so much for the lecture. I guess for my question, I want to return to the point that you were making that in general, in this period where it seems to be shifting towards multipolarity, the United States is being forced to act in a more sort of self-interested way, especially as it looks to sort of international relations. And my question is sort of more towards the institutions that we have, which have largely grown up, you know, both in a bipolar and a unipolar world, but often, you know, done a lot to work with American interests. How do you see them going forward in a multipolar world?

And do you think that they would be able to, you know, take on more of the responsibilities when it comes to, you know, promoting peace, for example, that the United States might be relinquishing in the multipolar world?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, this is a great question. You know, as I said to you before, President Trump is somebody who hates institutions. And one of the first things he did when he became president was to nix the TPP.

He hates NAFTA, hates the WTO, and so forth and so on. One thing I’ve learned over the years, it’s one of these subjects I’ve changed my thinking about over time, has to do with international institutions. I believe that when I was younger, I did not fully appreciate the importance of international institutions. In a highly complicated world, like the one that we live in, you need rules.

And institutions are basically rules. If you’re going to fight the Cold War all over again, you do it with NATO every time. The Soviets would do it with the Warsaw Pact every time. These are institutions.

Institutions are very important. And President Trump’s idea that you can just sort of get rid of institutions, ignore them, because he likes to ignore rules, is foolish in the extreme, right? And I say that as a good realist, a good realist should like institutions. Your question is a great one.

And it gets back to the international order question that Peter raised before. And the point is, the glacis plates are moving. We’re going from unipolarity to multipolarity. And the question is, what is the configuration of institutions going to look like?

The TPP, which was aimed at China, was an example of a new institution being created to deal with the transition from unipolarity to multipolarity. So my view is that some of the institutions that exist now will continue in place. I think the IMF, the World Bank, there are a number of institutions that will be modified for one reason or another. I think the World Trade Organization is one.

New institutions will be created. If Trump or his successor get their act together, we’ll hopefully have some sort of meaningful alliance structure in East Asia or in Asia more generally, that involves countries like India, Singapore, and so forth and so on. So I think that what’s going to happen here is that the institutional structure, right, in the West, and on the Chinese side is going to change. And by the way, that prompts me to just say one very quick point.

You notice the Chinese are creating their own institutions now, the AIIB, Belt and Road, so there’ll be more Chinese institutions. Right. But again, the one thing I learned, institutions do matter because you do need rules. So we only have time for just one more question, and then we can wrap up.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: I’ll stay till 10 o’clock if you want. I don’t think so. Brian’s looking at me like, is that guy crazy? But he knows I’m crazy.

AUDIENCE: With the rise of Russia… You should hold that up to you. With the rise of Russia and China, and I guess the relative weakening of the United States, do you predict that the United States will retrench on some of its military bases and military presence around the world and sort of retreat back into its own sphere of influence? Or do you think it’ll maintain its current network of bases and military facilities?

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Yeah, this is a great question, boy. Let me make a couple points. One is, if you go to the Pentagon today, there are huge numbers of people who want to end the forever wars, which is mainly these crazy wars in the Middle East, because they want to focus on China. Okay.

Now, his question is what I would call a grand strategy question. And what you want to think about is American grand strategy. And when you think about American grand strategy, the first point is, the Western Hemisphere, because it’s our backyard, is the most important area of the world for us. Canada and Mexico matter more to the United States than any other country on the planet, because you’re our neighbors, it’s the Western Hemisphere.

So the Western Hemisphere is really important. The much more interesting issue is what other areas of the world matter to Uncle Sugar, right? And there are three of them. One is Europe.

Two is Asia. Historically, it was Northeast Asia. I’ll say more about that in a second. And third, it was the Persian Gulf.

So during the Cold War, when I used to lecture on American grand strategy, I’d say outside the Western Hemisphere, there are three areas of the world that matter to us. Europe is number one. Northeast Asia is number two. And number three is the Persian Gulf.

Those are three areas. Europe and Northeast Asia matter because that’s where other great powers are. And the Gulf matters because that’s where the oil is. Notice I didn’t say the Middle East, okay.

For all of our history, I’m talking about the United States here. Europe has been the most important area of the world. Before we went into World War Two, we had a Europe First policy. And even though the Japanese attacked us at Pearl Harbor, we had a Europe First policy during the war.

Why? Because Europe is the most important area of the world. During the Cold War, when we used to run war games, Central Europe was like a giant magnet. It used to just suck forces, American forces from all over the planet to Europe.

JOHN J MEARSHEIMER: Why? Because that’s where the Soviet threat was, right? Our Asian allies used to go ballistic because we had the swing strategy. We’d swing forces out of Asia to Central Europe.

Why? Because that’s where the fight was, right? Europe was number one. The United States is now undergoing a fundamental transformation in its grand strategy.

East Asia, not Northeast Asia, and I’ll explain that in a second. East Asia is the number one area of the world for us. The number two area of the world for us is the Persian Gulf. And the number three area, way back, is Europe.

Now, why is this the case? The rise of China, East Asia, right? Remember, when we used to worry about Northeast Asia, the reason we didn’t worry about Southeast Asia was that China was not a great power. It was the Soviet Union, Japan, that’s why Korea mattered.

Soviet Union, Japan, China, all of there. But down there was just China. Southeast Asia didn’t matter, okay? But now China matters, so we care just, we care about Northeast Asia, we care about Southeast Asia.

Oh, by the way, we care about Central Asia, right? We care about Southwest Asia, not surprising, okay? So Asia, mainly East Asia, is the number one area of the world for us. Why does the Gulf matter?

The Gulf matters because China now gets 25% of its oil from the Gulf, and that number just goes up over time. Talk to the Chinese, they’re building a blue water navy. Chinese are building a blue water navy so they can protect their sea lines of communication into the Gulf. So you can rest assured that the Chinese are going to become more and more influential in the Gulf, right?

And this is why the Indians, by the way, India as in India, Pakistan, the Indians are scared stiff of the Chinese, because they understand the Chinese are coming out of East Asia, through the South China Sea, through the Straits of Malacca, into the Indian Ocean. Oh my god, there’s the Chinese right? And into the Gulf, because they get all that oil from the Gulf. So the Gulf and East Asia are inextricably linked.

So you see, we’re doing a fundamental, fundamentally shifting our thinking away from Europe, and Europe doesn’t matter anymore. You know, Europe is basically a giant museum. That’s why you won’t go, that’s why you won’t go to Europe, right? It’s a museum.

They don’t make, no seriously, seriously, they don’t make babies anymore, so all these countries are shrinking, right? There’s no potential hegemon. There’s no potential hegemon. This is why the Europeans are so scared today, because they understand there’s no real reason for us to be there.

Many people say, what about the Russians? Oh come on, the Russians are a declining great power. They’re depopulating, they’re not modernizing their economy. They’re in trouble over the long term, right?

And furthermore, the Russians have never, they tried to conquer Eastern Europe once. They’ve been there, done that, didn’t work very well. The last thing you want to do is do that again. If you really want to wreck Russian, courage them to try and swallow Ukraine.

That’s like swallowing a porcupine, right? The Russians are not a big problem. And furthermore, if you do believe the Russians are a problem, you believe I’m wrong, that they’re not a declining great power, the Europeans can take care of themselves. Let the Germans, the French, the British, and the Poles form a balancing coalition.

Why do we have to do it? For us, what really matters is Asia. So what you’re going to see happen here, you remember Hillary Clinton, 2011, what did she refer to her? The pivot to Asia?

Think about the pivot to Asia. When you talk about pivoting to someplace, that means you’re pivoting away from someplace. So if we’re pivoting to Asia, where are we pivoting away from? Well, in the Pentagon, they want to pivot away from the forever wars.

But the other thing you’re going to pivot away from is Europe. And I say to the Europeans when I go there, because the Europeans live in mortal fear that Uncle Sugar will leave, because you know, we’re the pacifier in Europe. Do you believe they gave the EU the Nobel Peace Prize? This is a joke.

This is scandalous. They should have given NATO the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s the American pacifier that keeps the peace. That’s why there has never been a single European leader who’s called for the United States to leave Europe, because they understand how powerful we are for keeping the peace there.

But the problem that they face is they understand that as China continues to rise, the pressure on us to shift our forces out of Europe and NATO and move to East Asia go up precipitously. So when I go to Europe, I tell them very simply, you folks have a deep seeded interest getting back to this gentleman’s question in hoping that China does not continue to grow at a rapid economic pace, because if it doesn’t grow at a rapid economic pace, it will no longer be a potential peer competitor, and we can stay in Europe and keep the peace. But if it grows, and you do things to make us angry, right, which is very easy to do when it comes to the United States, as all the Canadians in the room understand, right, we may leave. And again, that means taking away the American pacifier.

I greatly regret that Brian won’t let me talk for another two hours, because I love the questions and love the conversation. But he’s the boss. And we’re lucky our speaker is 28 years old, because he he arrived in Ottawa last night at 230 am. And so we’re very, very grateful that you came.

And that was a great last question. That’s a 10 minutes. And that’s because I knew he wasn’t going to let me take another question. I did that on purpose.

INTRODUCER: So on behalf of the Faculty of Public Affairs, Department of Political Science, thank you so much for coming. And thank you, John, so much. And have a good evening.

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