Commentators have discussed many possible causes for the war in Ukraine. Some have suggested Russian addiction to territorial expansion or Putin’s personal “complex” over the demise of the Soviet Union or, in other versions, of Czarist Russia. Others blame the US and its determination to expand NATO into Ukraine, drawing the analogy with the Cuban missile crisis, which triggered the first major nuclear alarm in history. Other reasons mentioned have to do with the nature of the mono-polar world order or a global order in which globalisation was not rooted in the principle of serving all countries. Some pinned it on President Biden, arguing that he saw his popularity ratings slump so low that he fabricated this crisis to rally American, NATO countries and the whole Western world behind him.
The list goes on, but whatever the actual causes – historians will one day battle it out – we can not eliminate the possibility that “iberalism” and “democracy” have a hand in the war. These principles have turned from noble ideas inspiring a system of government that took root in Western countries and enabled them to progress and flourish into a weaponised ideology that the US uses to destabilise other countries, delegitimise their governments, and intervene with forms of sociopolitical engineering that often backfires in drastic ways. None of it has to do with the liberalism, democracy and freedom the US claims to promote.
John Mearsheimer is among a minority of political scientists who, since the end of the Cold War, foresaw, not just how Washington’s liberalist enterprise would lead not just in war but also in tremendous failure. A good many of his books, articles and elections fall under the heading of The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, the title of a book he published in 2018.
A political science professor at Chicago University since 1982, Mearsheimer was born on 14 December 1947, in Brooklyn, New York, which is where he grew up. At 17 he enlisted in the US army. He was then admitted into the West Point Military Academy, from which he graduated in 1970. After a five year stint as an air force officer, he enrolled in Cornell University, earning his doctorate in international relations in 1980.
Mearsheimer is an exponent of the realist school in international relations theory founded by Hans Morgenthau, one of the most influential political thinkers after World War II. Morgenthau also taught at Chicago University so it was from there that the realist school spread to other US universities and among the US public in general. Another proponent is Stephen Walt, international relations professor at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, who co-authored with Mearsheimer The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (2007), a study on the power of the pro-Israeli lobby in the US and how it shapes US foreign policies, towards the Middle East in particular, in ways that conflict with real US interests in the region.
Mearsheimer and his colleagues pose a great challenge to liberalism, or the “great delusion” as he called it, with his assertion that the liberal hegemony project that US foreign policy has embraced since the end of the Cold War has been a recipe for unmitigated disaster. He draws attention to two basic liberal assumptions related to human nature: firstly, that the individual takes precedence over the group and, secondly, that individuals are unable to attain a general consensus on first principles; passionate differences over those often lead to violence. Liberalism’s solutions to such potential violence is threefold: inalienable human rights for the individual, an emphasis on tolerance despite disagreement, and a state to maintain order when disputes turn violent and to restrain those who threaten others’ rights. Such traits make liberalism a universalist theory which can turn liberal democracies into crusading states.
This underlies the US belief that it has a duty to spread liberal democracy across the world, to strengthen an open global economy and to build international institutions. It operates on the assumption that by remaking the world in America’s image, it will safeguard human rights, promote peace, and make the world safe for democracy. But this is not what happens. Instead, the US has become highly militaristic, and the military campaigns it wages ultimately undermine the prospects for peace, harm human rights, and jeopardise liberal values at home. What always happens, Mearsheimer concludes, is that the forces of nationalism and realism trump liberalism, which seems unable to resolve the economic, social and ethnic problems that other countries have to deal with in the context of very complex realities.
We in the Middle East probably do not need to hear what the US realist school has to say in order to understand the sins of US policy. The experiences of Iraq and Afghanistan bear vivid testimony to the consequences of years of liberal sociopolitical engineering. In one we see the inability to manage the state and in the other the return of the Taliban to power. For a full decade, Washington backed an Arab Spring that resulted in the rise of Islamism and terrorism. Revolutions with botanical names like lotus and cedar gave rise to a theocratic oriented clique (Egypt) or political and economic paralysis (Tunisia). In the former Soviet republics, the US-backed revolutions were named after colours, such as orange and velvet. They did not yield inclusive democracies capable of assimilating Russian-speaking minorities.
The American project that Joe Biden unveiled last year split the world into democracies versus authoritarian regimes. It signalled not just the intent to meddle in the internal affairs of other nations at whim but to delegitimatise their governments, especially in China and Russia. If this was a challenge to these powers’ attempts to revise the world order as it emerged after the Cold War, it ultimately produced the war in Ukraine. At the same time, it precipitated sharp tensions with Washington’s allies which began to see advantages in drawing closer to the superpowers that sought to revise the world order politically, strategically and economically.
There were no strategic reasons for NATO enlargement after the Soviet Union collapsed and Federal Russia, itself, was ready to join the pact for the purposes of mutual defence. NATO enlargement was motivated by ideological ambitions, above all the zeal to spread liberalism and the American model. Eventually, it drove Russia, whose political system was under constant ideological attack, to act preemptively with a military offensive in Ukraine.
A version of this article appears in print in the 7 April, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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