Among post-Cold War treatises, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics remains unsurpassed in its command of the historical record. Mearsheimer’s most recent book, The Great Delusion, poses more urgent questions about the present. What drove America’s utopian policies in the post-Cold War years, and where was the effective resistance to them? The problem, as he sees it, is that the ‘laissez-faire liberalism’ of 19th-century American foreign policy was replaced by ‘progressive liberalism’ – a crisis of knowledge rather than a failure of policy. Whereas laissez-faire liberalism doesn’t presume to know what is best for other people, progressive liberalism does, and works to increase welfare, protect human rights, and pursue other worthy goals. Mearsheimer regards ‘progressive liberalism’ as the best domestic political system, but as a foreign policy ‘liberalism is a fool’s guide for powerful states operating on the world stage.’
The crusading impulse of delivering rights and political systems to distant peoples, he argues, also fatally underestimates the power of nationalism. Since the 19th century, nationalism has been the most enduring force in world politics. Mearsheimer imagines an alternative Cold War in which Washington had made a blanket policy of backing powerful national forces at every juncture, regardless of whether they tilted towards communism or capitalism. The result, he contends, would in each case have been a much shorter and more decisive conflict. If Truman had greeted Ho Chi Minh’s request for support with open arms, the Soviet Union would have faced a far more cunning adversary, a perfectly rational, realist player, who would have left the trouble of managing the Third World to the Kremlin, miring it in a series of Afghanistans.
The Great Delusion ends with a disappointing meditation on the necessity of the US countering the rise of China. Since the US has attained the status of the leading world power, Mearsheimer believes, it has no choice but to stop any other significant regional power from rising up. The fear is that a regional power such as China will quickly move to do what it can to displace the US, inevitably producing problems for America in its own hemisphere. But this argument makes little sense on Mearsheimer’s own terms. He argues for ‘restraint’ by the US, but in the same breath says ‘realism dictates that the United States should seek to remain the most powerful state on the planet’ and ‘must prevent China from becoming a regional hegemon in Asia’. He provides no grounds for these propositions, which are undermined in any case by his insistence in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics on the ‘stopping power of water’: there is no need, with the whole Pacific Ocean between them, for the US to fear the regional hegemony of China in Asia.