Great powers are rarely in a position to pursue a full-scale liberal foreign policy. As long as two or more of them exist on the planet, they have little choice but to pay close attention to their position in the global balance of power and act according to the dictates of realism. Great powers of all persuasions care deeply about their survival, and there is always the danger in a bipolar or multipolar system that they will be attacked by another great power. In these circumstances, liberal great powers regularly dress up their hard-nosed behavior with liberal rhetoric. They talk like liberals and act like realists. Should they adopt liberal policies that are at odds with realist logic, they invariably come to regret it. But occasionally a liberal democracy encounters such a favorable balance of power that it is able to embrace liberal hegemony. That situation is most likely to arise in a unipolar world, where the single great power does not have to worry about being attacked by another great power since there is none. Then the liberal sole pole will almost always abandon realism and adopt a liberal foreign policy. Liberal states have a crusader mentality hard-wired into them that is hard to restrain.…
The key to understanding liberalism’s limits is to recognize its relationship with nationalism and realism. This book is ultimately all about these three isms and how they interact to affect international politics....John Mearsheimer is an influential voice in international relations and a foreign policy realist. He is worth paying attention to.
In this excerpt from his book, he fails to recognize that what the West calls "terrorism" is viewed by the so-called terrorists and those that support then in terms of national liberation from Western dominance and endless war to impose Western standards on traditional cultures.
Mearsheimer also fails to mention that Western liberalism is neoliberalism joined with neo-imperialism and neocolonialism, so that so-called liberal internationalism and liberal interventionism are in service of imperial interests.
Of course, if he did mention that, no one would pay any attention to him, other than to demonize him. As it is, foreign policy realism has been marginalized in the US, and Professor Mearsheimer is out of the loop.
The National Interest
The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities
John J. Mearsheimer | R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago
See also
President Trump’s second nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, was confirmed by the Senate 50 to 48. Kavanaugh is the fourth ‘minority justice,’ meaning that the senators who voted to confirm him got fewer votes in their last election than did the senators who opposed him. The other three such justices were Neil Gorsuch, Trump’s other choice, Samuel Alito, selected by George W. Bush, and Clarence Thomas, selected by George H. W. Bush. Of course, George W. Bush and Trump are minority presidents having received fewer votes than their Democratic opponents, but assuming the presidency thanks to the Electoral College.
In the cases of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh the senators who opposed him got almost 20 million more votes than his supporters. Such an anti-democratic outcome is the result of two factors. First, each American state gets two senators whether their population is California’s 39 million or Wyoming’s 580,000. The smaller states are mainly rural and vote Republican while the most populous states are mainly urban and, except for Texas, vote Democratic. Second, those four minority justices were highly contentious choices and aroused massive opposition that ensured they would be confirmed with narrow majorities composed of almost only Republicans....Valdai Club (Russia)
What Does Brett Kavanaugh’s Confirmation to the Supreme Court Mean?Richard Lachmann | Professor of Sociology Department, University at Albany, New York
Also
LobeLog
Trump’s Unprincipled “Principled Realism” Benefits Trump, Not the World
Daniel Brumberg | Non-resident Senior Fellow at Arab Center Washington DC
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