The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy

by Stephen M. Walt

From the New York Times–bestselling author Stephen M. Walt, The Hell of Good Intentions dissects the faults and foibles of recent American foreign policy—explaining why it has been plagued by disasters like the “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan and outlining what can be done to fix it.In 1992, the United States stood at the pinnacle of world power and Americans were confident that a new era of peace and prosperity was at hand. Twenty-five years later, those hopes have been dashed. Relations with Russia and China have soured, the European Union is wobbling, nationalism and populism are on the rise, and the United States is stuck in costly and pointless wars that have squandered trillions of dollars and undermined its influence around the world.The root of this dismal record, Walt argues, is the American foreign policy establishment’s stubborn commitment to a strategy of “liberal hegemony.” Since the end of the Cold War, Republicans and Democrats alike have tried to use U.S. power to spread democracy, open markets, and other liberal values into every nook and cranny of the planet. This strategy was doomed to fail, but its proponents in the foreign policy elite were never held accountable and kept repeating the same mistakes. Donald Trump won the presidency promising to end the misguided policies of the foreign policy “Blob” and to pursue a wiser approach. But his erratic and impulsive style of governing, combined with a deeply flawed understanding of world politics, are making a bad situation worse. The best alternative, Walt argues, is a return to the realist strategy of “offshore balancing,” which eschews regime change, nation-building, and other forms of global social engineering. The American people would surely welcome a more restrained foreign policy, one that allowed greater attention to problems here at home. This long-overdue shift will require abandoning the futile quest for liberal hegemony and building a foreign policy establishment with a more realistic view of American power. Clear-eyed, candid, and elegantly written, Stephen M. Walt’s The Hell of Good Intentions offers both a compelling diagnosis of America’s recent foreign policy follies and a proven formula for renewed success.

Genres: Politics, Nonfiction, History, International Relations, Political Science, American, The United States Of America

400 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 16, 2018

Reviews

[Murtaza · Rating 5 out of 5]

A thoroughly iconoclastic book about America's disastrous post-Cold War foreign policy establishment. Walt is a "realist" when it comes to international relations and is opposed to the strategy of liberal hegemony that the United States has been pursuing over the past several decades. The demand that other states be liberal and emulate American values, for their own good, has created many disasters and fed an intolerantly Manichean view of the world. Walt is what you could call a principled realist, so he does not totally discount the merits of the liberal viewpoint or disdain any sort of morality being involved in policymaking. Instead he makes a very thorough case that liberal hegemony has been a disaster practically and morally, both for Americans and for those who have supposedly been the recipients of their twin gifts of democracy and liberalism.

The book documents a long list of crimes and errors, as many other similar books do. But what really makes it worthwhile is that rather than simply highlighting problems, Walt has some reasonable solutions as well. Instead of trying to impose liberalism on the rest of the world he calls for a return to the strategy of "offshore balancing.” This effectively means that the United States must live and let others live, and should focus its foreign policy mainly on making sure that no other potentially threatening international hegemon consolidates itself abroad. The U.S. should not engage in military-led social engineering projects (see: "regime change") nor should it go out in search of monsters to slay. Instead it should identify a few key regions where its interests need to be protected and ensure that no other major power consolidates there that could threaten it. This can be done by arming local states to resist an aggressive would-be hegemon, using leverage like sanctions and diplomatic pressure, and only when absolutely necessary getting involved militarily. Walt is not totally against intervening to stop mass killings in any circumstance, but would greatly circumscribe the scenarios when that would be done. He is absolutely not interested in the chimerical goal of forcing other states to become liberal or threatening them with destruction if they fail to do so. His proposal is a modest, reasonable and achievable strategy - much more so than the messianic, crusading liberalism that has caused so much harm over the past few decades.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries when the United States became a great power it pursued this same strategy of offshore balancing. This is precisely why it only became involved in the world wars when it seemed like a German power was consolidating itself in Europe and might one day emerge as a threat to America itself. Today, China is a mirror image of the coldly realistic foreign policy that America once had. It is patiently building its domestic strength while cautiously choosing when and where to get involved abroad. Meanwhile the United States is looking very much like the unwieldy, flailing empires of Europe, with its footprint in dozens of countries around the world and an infrastructure that is increasingly incapable of fulfilling its grand global ambitions. The rise of China might actually force America back into a realistic position that entails offshore balancing, if its institutions are not too hidebound and corrupt to respond.

Walt issues a scathing denunciation of the DC foreign policy class, which, aside from a few outsiders, is totally committed to a failed foreign policy vision and seems to have almost zero meritocratic controls. Refreshingly, he names names and calls out specific institutions and interest groups that have obviously been involved in subverting rational policymaking. He is realistic about the prospects of change, however. What is needed is the creation of a counter-elite that can deconstruct the existing stranglehold of liberal hegemonic views in DC and slowly steer the ship of state back towards a sensible, sustainable and rational foreign policy. If its successful, it'll probably also end up being a more moral one than the blood-spattered liberal establishment has shown itself to be.

[Joseph Stieb · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I don't always agree with realist scholars like Walt or Mearsheimer, their arguments are always worth wrestling with. Even though I would consider myself a sort of part liberal institutionalist part offshore balancer (and maybe a soft realist-yes I know this is pretentious), I largely agreed with this book.

Walt argues that the foreign policy establishment, broadly defined, has been committed to a grand strategy of liberal hegemony since the end of the Cold War. Under this paradigm, The United States has sought to spread both its power and influence over key strategic regions and also its values and ideology, esp democracy. Walt believes that this is simply an out-of-control and unnecessary strategy that has gotten us into disasters like Iraq and kept us over-extended and distracted with global crusading while provoking more opposition from countries like Russia, China, and a variety of others. Walt believes that the absence of superpower competition in the aftermath of the CW should have led the US to downsize militarily and reduce its commitments abroad. Instead, those commitments broadened and deepened, from the expansion of NATO to the occupation of several countries.

This is one of the better versions of a category of most realist critics who attack all of post-911 foreign policy as overly idealistic, expansionist, and poorly executed. Walt shows that the FP establishment, writ large, is committed to liberal hegemony and U.S. leadership, including an on-shore military presence around the world and a massive military in general. He points out the obvious conflict of interest here: the bigger USFP is, the more that the FP establishment can get in terms of relevance and funding. This isn't the entirety of his explanation, but he shows how repeated failures since 1990 have not led to any accountability or lesson-learning in the establishment, other than obvious lessons like no more ground invasions of Middle Eastern countries. Still, I think Walt and other realists lump together Clinton and Obama with Bush and the neocons too much. Clinton's foreign policy record was spotty, had one big success (Bosnia and Kosovo), but lacked a major disaster. Obama's FP, moreover, was largely about cleaning up the problems leftover from Bush. It was a mistake to surge in Afghanistan and to jump on-board with regime change in Libya, but neither of these problems come anywhere close to Bush's disastrous mishandling of Iraq and Afghanistan. So I still think the Bush administration was uniquely destructive in this sense in terms of its running roughshod over treaties and institutions, its unilateralism, its brutality (torture, indefinite detention), and the utterly self-inflicted wound of the Iraq invasion. These administrations have have reasoned from assumptions (although there are major differences between neocons and liberal internationalists that Walt somewhat elides), they didn't carry out those tenets all that similarly.

Walt has a very interesting take on Trump's first 2 years. Trump dissented from the FP establishment and liberal hegemony-he denigrated alliances, trade deals, treaties, etc. Trump was sort of an experiment: could the arrival of an ignorant and iconoclastic president shift the US away from liberal hegemony? The answer: no, in large part because Trump was too dumb, disorganized, and unfocused to carry out this kind of shift. You could sort of treat this as a victory of the FP establishment, but I think that overlooks the very real differences within that establishment over things like, say, the Iran Deal. Walt isn't making some kind of conspiratorial deep state argument but a rather sensible point about how bureaucracies tend to coalesce around certain missions that are hard to get them to budge from.

This is a great book to pair with John Mearsheimer's The Great Delusion, which does the more theoretical work about why liberal hegemony won't succeed. It also features a succinct explanation of offshore balancing as a sensible foreign policy. Walt is more about the practical failures of this policy, and I think he's about 90% right. Occasionally, he commits the academic's sin of not appreciating that policy-makers often have to choose between terrible options, but overall he is fair-minded. Definitely worth reading for foreign policy scholars across the board.

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The message of Stephen Walt's book is that ever since the end of the Cold War the United States has pursued a foreign policy which promotes liberal democracy globally. What we've been doing for 30 years is seeking to use American power to spread the traditional liberal principles of our democracy, meaning our way of government, our pursuit of individual freedoms, and a market-based economy. It's thought that what's good for the U. S. is good for the rest of the world and that the U. S. is the "indispensable nation" best able to spread these ideas and to bring others into these systems and alliances promising peace and prosperity. But, he argues that the strategy has failed, that it's poisoned relations with many nations, embroiled us in wasteful and extended wars, encouraged allies to take advantage of us, and led adversaries to block our initiatives. Our proselytizing democracy to the world didn't make the U. S. safer or stronger. Nor did it make the world we intended; some parts of the world are more chaotic, and indicators show there are fewer democratic institutions and less democratic governance today than in the 1990s.

All this is laid out in 6 chapters explaining why the grand strategy was flawed and why it's failed, the role of think tanks and media and their influence on the foreign service community. There's also an analysis of the Trump administration, which is essentially a repudiation of liberal hegemony, and why it's also failing.

The final chapter is Walt's solution, which is a return to offshore balancing. It calls for a much less active role in the world, particularly in projecting power. Instead of trying to make every other country in America's image, we need to focus on our position in the global balance of power and ways of preventing other nations from threatening our interests. Walt claims that 3 regions matter to the U. S. strategically and have the potential to threaten us in the event a rival state is rising as a potential hegemon: Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf. The rise of a dominant state in any of those regions should draw an obstructive response from the U. S. I found his argument for this shift in thinking (which isn't really a shift) convincing. He spends considerable time covering America's foreign policy history and demonstrating that offshore balancing--that is, letting regions solve their own problems unless the rise of a hegemon seems eminent, as Germany in the 2 world wars of the previous century--was how we built a powerful America and established our own Western Hemisphere hegemony by 1900. He writes that a return to offshore balancing would be a return to diplomacy and a turn away from military power.

I needed the convincing of that final chapter. I'd feared Walt's arguments would descend to the level of polemic, and I think in some areas he does. He can be strident and exhausting with his agenda. The last chapter smoothed some of the edges of his attack on those he blames, the administrations of Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump. (Actually, he believes the American electorate saw the foreign policy problems he describes and that the election of Trump was a direct reaction and indication of a desire for change, but that the inexperience and incompetencies of the current administration have made matters worse.) In this final chapter he diagrams a way out while at the same time writing that our achieving a new foreign policy direction may not be as onerous as previously thought. Though he does admit the ideas of the liberal hegemony philosophy are imbedded in our foreign policy service and will have to be overcome.

[Max Berendsen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review to follow

[Mizuki]

Let's see how this one will go~

More to come.

[Socraticgadfly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply an excellent book about everything wrong with the national security state, the "blob," the "deep state" or whatever term you prefer. And, it's from someone who totally knows his chops on this issue.

Despite different political parties, somewhat different emphases, and at times, somewhat different main issues, Walt noted that the three presidents at the core of the book — Clinton, Shrub Bush and Obama — were overall very much alike in their dealings with and acquiescence to this polity. So, too, despite the overselling of the story of his briefly suspending part of Israel's foreign aid over settlements in occupied Palestine, was Poppy Bush, Walt notes.

The results? The quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan. A worse Iran deal (before Trump abrogated it) than one we could have had earlier. Needlessly antagonizing Russia through NATO expansion, especially with various full or affiliate offers to Georgia and Ukraine. Wrecking the two-state solution as a possibility on Israel and Palestine.

As for Trump? (Walt had started the book during the 2016 election, and did a decent pivot to include enough of Trump's administration to make a good assessment.) Some of his critiques were justified and correct, Walt notes. But, other than the trade war with China (offset by his picking trade wars with the EU and Canada at the same time), he soon abandoned most of them. Plus, as any non-MAGA knows, Walt notes Trump was too disorganized to follow through. And, Walt notes, even someone much more organized than Trump would have struggled to succeed.

That's another touchstone of the book — the sheer size of the bipartisan foreign policy establishment. It's big enough if one counts State, DoD and the 17 intelligence agencies. Add in all the think tanks, many of their senior fellows connected to the government revolving door, and it's bigger yet. Add in foreign lobbyists on top of that. And, US weapons contractor lobbyists. And, pundits from major media, also in some cases familiar with that revolving door.

What drives the blob, Walt says, is "liberal hegemony." It could well be summed up in Madeleine Albright's "the indispensible nation that sees farther than others." The second half of that is certainly not true, per all the mistakes above. The first is rarely true. It's usually compounded with American exceptionalism as the "what" that liberal hegemony peddles.

Sidebar: Directly relevant to current times? Despite lies by a few of his fellow "Harvards," Walt says, yes, we promised Russia, starting with James Baker's words to Gorbachev, that we wouldn't expand NATO eastward. And, starting with Slick Willie, broke that.

The solution? The last chapter is not bad, but somewhat anticlimatic. Walt advocates a modernized version of old balance of power politics, which itself is not bad. He does elide over the need to do one thing more than sell a positive version of that, and this is the battle against not only the portions of the blob in the government, but those outside, above all military contractor lobbyists and foreign lobbyists. I write this just days after Brookings' head was forced to resign over allegedly lobbying for Qatar, following Brookings as an org taking money from Qatar up to 2019. (Walt notes that Brookings isn't the only foreign policy shop to take foreign money.)

[Ted Tyler · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Therapeutic." That's my one-word review. As a young foreign policy analyst, I have already become disillusioned with the mainstream American foreign policy establishment ("The Blob") and the goals it pursues. Endless wars, regime toppling, excessive use of economic statecraft, and overextended security commitments have made the U.S. significantly weaker than we were at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Stephen M. Walt, a political scientist at the Harvard Kennedy School, writes a refreshing academic critique of the liberal hegemony, America's grand strategy since the conclusion of the Cold War. America has used diplomatic, military, and economic tools of power to pursue the propagation of democracy. This strategy tries to create democracies all around the globe with the belief that more democracies will make the world safer for American prosperity. Part of this logic explains the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the interventions in Libya and Syria. A more restrained foreign policy approach might have simply hunted Osama bin Laden, and only chosen to leverage military action against Saddam Hussein if he once again threatened a neighboring country. In short, Walt argues for "off-shore balancing." His strategy calls for retaining military forces that can be deployed in areas of the world such as Northeast Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Currently, he argues that only Northeast Asia poses a potential threat because of China. Europe and the Middle East, while not necessarily free of conflict, do not have an adversary capable of dominating the region. Russia is a declining power and Iran does not have the military capability to even dream of unilaterally taking the Middle East.

In short, Walt's book is brilliant because he traces why the US only thinks of liberal hegemony. Executive branch agencies, most think tanks, and most academic institutions value and train individuals that support liberal internationalism. He convincingly argues that only people who value neoliberalism tend to end up in places of influence. They are not bad people or people who want to undermine America, but the policies they advocate for have largely failed. The same people that brought us intervention in the Middle East and unwise NATO expansion are the same people still dispensing failed policy in 2020. From Clinton to Trump, America's strategy has been flawed. Walt's book ends by offering practical solutions to help create alternative sources of intellectual capital that offers new, innovative solutions. He argues that America should pursue restraint because it allows the country to free-up money for investment in education, climate change policy, infrastructure reforms, healthcare reform, and other pressing needs. It's time for America to stop creating trouble abroad.

[Robin Kim · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The main government agencies responsible for conducting U.S. foreign policy have an obvious interest in an ambitious global agenda because it justifies their claim to a sizable share of the federal budget... The more U.S. foreign policy tries to accomplish, the greater the need for foreign policy expertise and the more opportunities for ambitious foreign policy mandarins to rise to prominence."

Through the Hell of Good Intentions, Walt makes the intimidating topic of foreign policy accessible to readers without any prior knowledge. Though explained in simple terms, his critiques of the foreign policy elite and America's conquest of liberal hegemony are devastatingly incisive and thoroughly substantiated.

I highly recommend this for anyone new to foreign policy like me, as it provides a helpful framework to analyze the U.S. approach to all foreign policy issues from Israel-Palestine to Russia vs. NATO. I found this to be not just informative, but a genuine page turner and my most enjoyable read in a long time. I've gained a strong interest in the subject and a confidence in my ability to understand foreign policy issues, if only because the people in charge in Washington don't really know much either.

[Dimitar Angelov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Смел и силно критичен преглед на интервенционистката външнополитическа линия на САЩ от последните 30+ години. Книгата не пести нищо никому. Не е писана от руснак или "тръмпист". Харвардският професор Стивън Уолт задава прост въпрос - доведе ли до повече мир за света и ползи за САЩ политиката на намеса и глобална ангажирноаст след края на Студената война? "Не и не" е отговорът, даден в книгата, а аргументите в защита на тази позиция ми се сториха повече от убедителни. Кой тогава има полза от продължаването на политика, която не просто не успя да спре конфликтите в арабския свят, а ги насърчи; не можа да възпре Русия да напада съседни държави; и позволи на Китай да разширява влиянието си горе-долу без особени притеснения? Според Уолт за това американският народ трябва да благодари на външнополитическия истаблишмънт (от президентската администрация и службите, ангажирани с външната политика, до стотиците тинк-танкове, факултети, фондации и изследователски центрове), който успява да постигне завидно единомислие по основните въпроси на външната политика - а именно, че САЩ трябва да се меси навсякъде и по всички въпроси, дори да няма най-често експертизата или възможностите за това. Този външнополитически истаблишмънт, макар и базиран на либералните ценности, които желае да проектира върху останалия свят (засега горе-долу успешно само на места в Европа и може би в няколко азиатски държави), същевременно е остро критичен към различното мнение (че може би Вашингтон трябва да се вгледа в собствените си наболели проблеми, а не да гради демокрации, там където такива не никнат). Причината за консерватизма спрямо всеки алтернативен поглед на това либерално ядро се дължи на лични обвързаности и кариерни амбиции на хиляди хора - от кандидат президенти до университетски преподаватели, борещи се за стипендии и академични позиции.

Уолт при все това е убеден, че американското общество съзнава реалностите и същината на проблема и с вота си ще накаже тази порочна линия във външната политика на страната. За голямо съжаление, отбелязва той, вълната на недоволството бе узурпирана от Тръмп и навъртащите се около него крайно неподготвени сътрудници. Алтернативният поглед следователно днес се дамгосва (доста удобно за истаблишмънта) като тръмпитски, расистки, селяшки и .т.н. Уолт обаче обяснява, че дори по време на управлението на Тръмп, заканите на милиардера да срути истаблишмънта и да завие в нова посока руля на американската външна политика, се оказаха празни. Тръмп нито напусна НАТО, когато можеше, нито спря войната в Украйна, която си върви от 2013-4 насам, нито направи нещо решително по отношение на Китай.

Промяна във външнополитическия курс на САЩ при все това ще има - това е сигурно. Годините на временната еднополярност отдавна свършиха, вътре в Щатите икономическите проблеми няма да позволят толерирането на главоломни разходи за външнополитически демарши, които не водят до нищо ползотворно. За нас българите, може би донякъде парадоксално, е добре влиянието на интервенционистите да се запази, други обаче (близо до нас) може би ще се почувстват с развързани ръце да "поправят понесените от тях американски неправди" от 90-те.

Очакват ни времена, които ще са много много по-различни от това, с което свикнахме последните 3 десетилетия.

[Rodger Payne · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book makes an argument very similar to the one John Mearsheimer makes in his new book, as both blame the pursuit of "liberal hegemony" or "liberal primacy" for post-Cold War American foreign policy failures. They are especially critical of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and elsewhere), but they also criticize US foreign policymakers for threatening domestic civil liberties, violating human rights around the world, etc. Mearsheimer's book was published by an academic press and is laden with much more "political science" theory (and jargon), while Walt's book includes a good deal more policy discussion and somewhat anecdotal overviews of recent events, personnel, and processes. Walt ends up recommending a grand strategy of "offshore balancing" while Mearsheimer recommends "restraint." These are similar (and perhaps compatible) grand strategies.

I'm sympathetic to many of Walt's arguments. US foreign policy (USFP) elites have clearly and repeatedly inflated threats to justify new weapons systems and favored wars or military interventions. The Iraq war was an unmitigated disaster. The pursuit of US primacy has been disastrous.

However, the idea that the US has practiced liberal hegemony for nearly 30 years is somewhat ridiculous. Though I'm not an international relations liberal, it seems obvious to me that their perspective has not been hegemonic over post-Cold War USFP. Most IR scholars, including liberals, opposed the Iraq war. Liberals have also critiqued a plethora of dubious US practices that Walt mentions (and criticizes), including the events at Abu Ghraib, rendition, water-boarding (and other alleged torture), widespread domestic surveillance, drone strike assassinations, etc. And, perhaps most importantly, IR liberals embrace the virtues (and necessity) of international organizations -- and strongly criticize American unilateralism in the post-Cold War world. One of their main criticisms of the Iraq war was the lack of UN support. IR liberals have lambasted USFP-makers for failing to sign on to the ICC, CEDAW, Law of the Sea, etc. for withdrawing commitments to the climate change treaties (from Kyoto to Paris), and rejecting various arms control accords (CTBT, ABM Treaty, INF Treaty, Iran nuclear deal, bioweapons compliance protocol, etc).

Next, some serious IR work has argued that the Iraq war was a realist, and not a liberal, war. Deudney and Ikenberry, for example, argued in Survival that the Iraq war was about US primacy -- not liberal primacy, but straight up pursuit of relative US POWER. Cramer and Duggan have likewise argued that the war was about US primacy. Walt does not directly address this more nuanced literature or argument, but repeated inserts the modifier “liberal” when discussing US dominance (though mostly using hegemony, rather than primacy).

At the beginning of the post-Cold War era, the prominent mainstream journal International Security ran a series of articles debating the value of primacy. The realist scholar Samuel Huntington memorably defended a grand strategy of primacy based on POWER and INTERESTS, not on principle. Those are traditional realist concerns. While Huntington did mention the fact that America could pursue its values if it was sufficiently powerful, he also rejected the liberal idea (from Fukuyama) that the world was at the end of history and that liberalism had prevailed. He instead embraced the realist idea that competition and struggle for power are tragically ingrained inevitabilities in the international system. American foreign policy makers may well have pursued primacy after the Cold War ended, but this was primarily a realist idea, not a liberal idea.

Even Walt’s scholarship would suggest good reasons to see the Iraq war as a realist war. A neorealist IR theorist, Walt first became well-known in IR for arguing that states balance threats, not power. This explained why the US and its NATO/western allies had significantly more power than did the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Without Walt's friendly amendment, realist theory, which predicted that states should balance power and not bandwagon with the powerful, seemed to fail to explain the alignments that actually existed in international politics.

Given Walt’s understanding of how states respond to threats, it does not make sense to blame the Afghan and Iraq wars on liberal hegemony. The US acted in response to the 9/11 attacks and perceived threat of WMD in Iraq. While the threats were inflated, the logic (and sales pitch to the US population) was clearly based on this threat. And while George W. Bush eventually starting talking about the importance of spreading democracy, this was mostly AFTER the US had failed to find significant WMD programs in Iraq. The real kickoff to this line of thinking was the 2005 second inaugural address. In the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war, the US leveraged the threat of the Bush Doctrine to disarm Libya of its WMD programs. Libya recognized US fear of rogue states that pursued WMD and were ostensibly linked to terrorism.

Mearsheimer has argued that the US, during the Cold War, employed "liberal rhetoric" to sell realist ideas. I don't know why he and Walt do not recognize that idea when quoting seemingly liberal words from USFP-makers during the past 30 years. I suppose if Walt and Mearsheimer are right, then the US actually used what I have interpreted as realist rhetoric about Iraq threats to sell liberal ideas in the case of Iraq. Count me skeptical. Real liberals would not have embraced martial law in Iraq, though that was declared in Iraq in 2004. And again in 2007.

[Paul Kuntze · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deep insight into and thorough critique of the bi-partisan ideology that has been guiding US foreign policy since the Cold War. The book gives an account of it's past failures, analyses why it seems to be immune to checks and balances (without claiming conspiracies) and offers a good alternative, but acknowledges that it will be hard to attain.
The book doesn't provide much analysis of the "Oil-Argument" that is often invoked to explain the US's crusades in the Middle East However, it doesn't really need to, as it claims that those interventions where based on a misinformed strategy and therefore not at all economically beneficial. With estimates for the total costs of the Iran and Afghan wars to the US taxpayer being around 6 Trillion Dollars, that seems like a very sensible argument. However, I would love to read something supporting the economic arguement, just to get the other perspective.
His analysis if Trump's foreign policy is also fascinating and refreshingly fair, giving credit where credit is due, while emphasising that the majority of his actions are quite disadvantageous (from Walt's point of view)

[Alex Courtney · Rating 2 out of 5]

A solid Realist take on the last three decades of foreign policy in the US. My downgrade is due to a couple of factors. The first is why start with H.W. Bush? Sure the fall of the USSR is a good inflection point but he declined to address all of post WWII intervention including times when we embarked on intervention while the Soviet Union was still a looming threat.

My biggest complaint comes from the brief section where he provides his proposed solution to our misadventures - offshore balancing. In addition to stating without any justification that leaders who pursue a balancing approach will know which crises can be solved quickly and bloodlessly, unlike their Liberal counterparts, he whines about how no one wants to listen to Realists anymore and that he and his buddies aren't invited to State Department posts.

The final straw for me is him trying to have his cake and eat it too regarding the US' ability to intervene in genocide or other humanitarian events. He advises we should only act with force when "1) the danger was imminent, 2) the anticipated costs to the US were modest, 3) the ratio of foreign lives saved to US lives risked was high, and 4) it was clear that intervention would not make things worse or lead to an open-ended commitment." I sure hope the next genocide comes with a clearly-outlined plan of objectives that fits Walt's criteria.

The critiques are good, but this author is disappointingly short on ideas and self-criticism.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is essential reading for anybody interested in US foreign policy and is written well enough to engage both the casual reader and well-informed graduate students. Walt's criticism of the foreign-policy making community in Washington DC as insular and resistant to challenges to conventional wisdom is supported with strong evidence and a compelling narrative. Walt's take on foreign policy is a refreshing divergence from recent books written by Eliot Cohen and Kurt Campbell, to cite two former policy makers mentioned in this book, that make the centrist case for US engagement abroad without fully addressing alternatives.

Walt rightly acknowledges that nearly all of those in the foreign policy community believe they are truly supporting the US national interest and many of them are highly qualified and the right people to do the job. His view is not necessarily that these people should be denied important positions in the future, but that they should be more open to new ideas and more welcoming of those with different points of view.

However, there are several weaknesses to this book that readers should be aware of. In Walt's criticism of those in foreign policy he often does not distinguish between the highly skilled and qualified, such as Robert Gates and James Clapper, and those that should never have been given their high-level positions in the first place, much less the opportunity to repeat tragic mistakes, such as General Tommy Franks, Donald Rumsfeld, John Bolton, and others. He also could have done a better job of highlighting contrarian views. It is fine to mention Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, but their writing and reporting hardly holds the rigor and insight of somebody like Micah Zenko, also highlighted as a foreign policy contrarian thinker. Mentioning Greenwald and Scahill, even if their legitimate contrarian views lack the substance of somebody like Zenko, without providing additional background does the reader a disservice.

Walt's criticism of James Clapper for lying to Congress, which Clapper acknowledged and apologized for on the record and more than adequately explains in his memoir, and of the intelligence community are weak points of an otherwise well-informed criticism of foreign policy. The challenge of saying that the intelligence community failed to predict specific events mischaracterizes the capabilities and role of intelligence. Unfortunately, because of classification issues, there is no way for anybody to actually know what the intelligence community predicted and whether or not sound analysis was ignored by policy makers. Regarding the Arab Spring or the Russian invasion of Crimea, Walt simply cannot know if one or several analysts predicted these events and how their analysis was taken within the intelligence community. A more nuanced criticism of the intelligence community, perhaps by pointing to non-governmental thinkers who accurately predicted events based on information the intelligence community would have been aware of, would have actually bolstered the criticism of the foreign policy elite who either ignored the assessments of intelligence analysts or failed to challenge them to think of more alternative scenarios, even if one cannot tell which was the case.

Walt also makes one mistake made by the conventional foreign-policy thinkers he criticizes of assuming that the US can achieve all its foreign policy goals. Multiple administrations have been criticized for failing to secure peace in Israel or to denuclearize North Korea, but these goals were never realistic in the first place. Walt is absolutely right that the US should consider alternative views, such as adjusting its position on complete denuclearization of North Korea (at least in the short term), but does not go so far as to explore the problem of unrealistic goals and the agency of other important actors in the international system who have the power and a strong interest in preventing the US from achieving its maximal positions.

One last problem is that Walt sometimes overstates his criticism of different parts of the foreign policy community. To take the example of think tanks, there are certainly some that are heavily influenced by corporate and and state donors, and others that maintain a high standard if independent thinking despite taking such donations. Walt could have done a better job highlighting this spectrum so as to challenge the reader to consider this ethical question for themselves when reading think tank, and other, reports.

These flaws are minor compared to the importance of this book at capturing several important criticisms of US foreign policy, but the reader should be aware of them. Walt was certainly aware of several of these shortcomings and does an adequate job of acknowledging that his criticism does not apply to all foreign policy thinkers or all think tanks.

[Jnoub101 · Rating 2 out of 5]

Simply put, Walt has the beginnings of a strong empirical critique of what he calls "Liberal Hegemony." This work seeks, in many ways, to reproduce E.H. Carr's seminal work on the Twenty Year Crisis, in that the book is mainly a critique of the superpower's state craft. And in that way it shares many of the pros and cons of Carr's work. As a pro it is clear Walt has a strong grasp of the inner workings of the American foreign policy establishment. Additionally, he is not afraid to take swings at some of the basic assumptions of American Foreign policy, he takes particular aim at the dominance of analysts and policy makers who see America's role in the world as a promoter, exporter, and defender of Liberal Democratic Capitalism. Instead, Walt calls for the US to pull back from this role as global sentinel and instead to focus on "off shore balancing" where in the US focuses on balancing its many potential rivals around the world while shifting spending from defense towards domestic development projects.

And it is here we see Walt's primary problem. Like all realists Walt's analysis begins and ends with the state, and his view of the state is that it acts as an, often problematic, neutral arbitrator of the society it governs. The state is a collection of elected and qualified individuals who use the "market place of ideas" (a term he regularly deploys in this book) as a battle field to debate the efficacy of different strategies. In the end, according to Walt, they are all on the same team and all want what is best for the US (even if they disagree on what that is). This is, in my opinion, beyond naive. Taking from Justin Rosenberg's critique of Realism, its flaw is its lack of historical and social understanding of the state. The US did not choose to enact Liberal Internationalism due to purely ideological reasons, or due to some neutral cost-benefit analysis on the world balance of power, it did so because it was the best policy for promoting the interests of American Capital. Walt sees Imperialism as a choice, a policy flaw, rather than a driving structural motor of the world system- and the US in particular.

Overall a pretty good book, I certainly did not hate it. But it has many flaws.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably now the definitive text for both making the case against liberal hegemony in foreign policy as well as making the case for a more defensive realist offshore balancing.

My full review can be found here:

https://geotrickster.com/2018/11/17/t...

[Danny Cooper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Walt throughly outlines the disastrous record of US foreign policy since the fall of the Soviet Union and makes a compelling argument for a shift in US grand strategy going forward.

[Fathy Sroor · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a serious work of realistic politics. Trying to reveal the intricate structure of the machine producing the USA’s worst export: foreign policy,bad for both the USA & the world.Despite the title, not all of its wickedness originates from “good intentions “ trying to make the world a better place.

A combination of geography, geopolitical supremacy, excess of power and complex political system created the ground for this reckless political behavior. But fixing this system, unlikely as it seems, depends at understanding how it works.

Note:

In general, realistic politics is always a useful tool to understand the basic dynamics of politics.
I would recommend john mearsheimer’s “ The tragedy of great power politics “ as an introduction to this realm.

[Robert Clarke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really good insight into the circular-firing-squad culture in the US foreign policy community, and worth a read for anyone disturbed by current events unfolding around the globe.

[Paul Froehlich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Among those experts who shape American foreign policy, there has been a broad, bipartisan consensus for decades about what that policy should be. That consensus led to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the chaos and civil war in Libya, the humanitarian crisis in Yemen, Moscow’s reaction to NATO expansion, the spread of nuclear weapons, and the stalemate between Israel and the Palestinians.

That consensus receives a blistering and cogent critique from Harvard Professor Stephen Walt, who critically examines U.S. foreign policy across three administrations – from Clinton through Obama – and into the first two years of Trump. Walt’s target is the “blob,” the foreign policy establishment that shapes and executes foreign policy in both Democratic and Republican administrations. This elite community encompasses various think tanks, some of which receive funding from defense industries. It also includes leading newspapers and special interest groups seeking to influence foreign policy.

Walt’s thesis is that the USA “spent the past quarter century pursuing an ambitious, unrealistic, and mostly unsuccessful foreign policy.” The main strategy, which Walt calls “liberal hegemony,” has been a costly failure. Yet three presidents clung to it, and the fourth changed rhetoric more than substance. This book explains why and how the blob has been so successful in retaining its dominance despite spectacular failures. Walt also calls for a more restrained policy to avoid repeating the errors.

Liberal hegemony is the belief that the United States plays an indispensable role in world leadership, should preserve U.S. dominance, and should intervene around the world to promote democratic values (except when our allies violate them). That intervention often includes economic sanctions and use of the military. Its premise is that the U.S. has the right to use force where and when it wants. By definition, nation-building is part and parcel of reshaping the world. This grand strategy is misguided, Walt argues, and the elite refuses to learn from its mistakes.

Despite setbacks and failures, there has been no serious reconsideration of liberal hegemony. One reason is the lack of accountability for mistakes. Whether the mistakes are prolonging quagmires such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, overthrowing regimes, nation building, or civilian massacres, those responsible are rarely held accountable. The architects of wrongheaded policies are almost never discredited and forced into retirement.

For example, the neocons who masterminded the invasion of Iraq and the bungled post-invasion occupation are still prominent members of the establishment. No one was blamed for intelligence failures before 9/11, for claiming that Iraq had WMDs before the invasion, or for being taken by surprise by the Russian takeover of Crimea.

No one has been held to account for decades of ineffective stewardship of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. No high-ranking policymaker was held accountable for Abu Ghraib. No one who committed perjury before Congress to cover up the Iran-Contra affair was punished. No one was prosecuted for using torture on suspected terrorists, not even when the suspect died while being afflicted.

Though President Obama has the reputation of a reformer, his foreign policy was basically a continuation of policies he inherited, with the exception of the Iran nuclear deal. Though he declined to intervene more fully in Syria, he increased troop levels in Afghanistan, supported the overthrow of Gaddafi in Libya, and increased drone assassinations.

Before his election, candidate Trump made a frontal challenge to the premises of the foreign policy establishment. He criticized Bush 43 for the Iraq War, and raised doubts about the value of NATO and continuing the war in Afghanistan. Trump promised a sharp departure from the internationalist agenda of his predecessors.

The Trumpian rhetoric translated into few changes in policy. One exception was withdrawing from the nuclear agreement Obama had negotiated with Iran. But that meant a return to the previous policy of threats and confrontation. Trump more openly embraced Israel and acceded to Netanyahu’s wishes, but that was simply a more honest approach than pretending to be an honest broker in peace negotiations.

“As president, Trump embraced the worst features of liberal hegemony – overreliance on military force, disinterest in diplomacy, and a tendency toward unilateralism – while turning his back on its positive aspirations, such as support for human rights and the preservation of an open, rules-based world economy.”

Why did the strategy of liberal hegemony mostly fail? Its advocates underestimated the resistance their policies would provoke, and overestimated what American military power could accomplish. Though veteran diplomats had warned of a severe Russian reaction against the expansion of NATO to its border, expanding NATO was a policy of Clinton and Bush. Though candidate George W. Bush had pledged to end nation building, he nonetheless pursued it with a vengeance in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Because they overestimated what power could accomplish, there was less emphasis upon diplomacy. When opponents are demonized, it makes compromise less attainable. By emphasizing sanctions and force over negotiations, the U.S. missed opportunities to resolve conflicts without force. For example, rather than seeking a way through diplomacy to peacefully satisfy Moscow’s concerns regarding Ukraine, the U.S. invited Ukraine into NATO and simply demanded that Moscow abandon all its interests in its next-door neighbor.

Candidate Trump wasn’t far off when he said that U.S. foreign policy was “a complete and total disaster.” As Walt points out, however, President Trump “failed to develop a coherent alternative.” Walt describes a coherent alternative called off-shore balancing, a traditional American strategy.

It entails deploying power abroad only to combat direct threats to U.S. interests, and relying more upon diplomacy to resolve disputes. Vital interests include the Western Hemisphere, Europe, Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf. The goal should be to prevent domination of any of those regions by a single power, especially a peer competitor. The strategy is to keep U.S. forces “offshore” as long as possible, seeking to engage allies in the region to confront a threat. This restrained policy rejects nation building and regime change. Had offshore balancing been in effect, there would’ve been no wars in Vietnam or Iraq.

Walt recognizes, however, that significant change is unlikely in the foreign policy consensus. Debates occur “within the same familiar echo chamber and stay between the forty-eight yard lines.” Nonetheless, this book makes a strong case for a more balanced debate over foreign policy, one not dominated by the tightly knit community of like-minded experts who seek to remake the world in the American image. -30-

[Ron Peters · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the preface to this book Walt says he was invited to give a presentation to the State Department on Why U.S. Foreign Policy Keeps Failing, and “it occurred to me afterward that my remarks might form the basis for a short book.” In fact, it probably should have stayed as a power point presentation with a few accompanying notes. As a book, it is over-written, and it may be four times longer than it needs to be. The basic material is good, though, and some chapters – one on how no one in the foreign policy community is ever held accountable for failure, and another on the foreign policy escapades of The Donald – are readable, enlightening and entertaining. I really picked it up for the last chapter, “A Better Way,” which describes the grand strategy of Offshore Balancing – how it was originally used by Britain, how it was used by the U.S. over most of the last century, and why it would be better to turn back to this approach and to drop the current grand strategy of liberal hegemony. If you want the short version, read just the Introduction and the last chapter; that would do in a pinch. If you want a bit more, also read the concluding paragraphs of each of the other chapters. Better still, maybe Walt will email you his power point presentation! 😊

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

[3.5] I chose this book for an assigned book review in my American foreign policy class. It was an enjoyable read though I think, often with monographs like this, that the content and main message could have been an article instead of a full-fledged book. In general, I enjoyed how Walt presented the foreign policy decision making complex in the United States and identified key areas in which the U.S. would have to get active to retain its primacy. He further gave some policy recommendations and rounded up his argument nicely.

Good to know though is the fact that Walt comes from a realist perspective of IR and foreign policy (he is among those deemed “defensive realists”).

[Jimmy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Want to read a book on the concerns for American foreign policies the last few decades that gives an analysis of the institutions and dynamics of the foreign policy establishment? This book might be for you! The author is Stephen Martin Walt who is a Professor of International relations at the Kennedy School at Harvard. In our age of partisan politics this book isn’t just a slam against “Neocons” that one would expect from a professor who teach at Harvard; it is also a critique of Democrats and Republicans. As the book reveals often the Democrats and Republicans who are involved in foreign policies have a lot more in common in assumptions and views than the general public think. And yet it is those assumptions and views where at times even if it is good intentions can become a detriment to US long term interests and also cause international upheaval. Given how dangerous our foreign policy in America can be I think this book is worth reading by not only those interested in politics and international relations but also the general readers to understand what is going on.
The book has seven chapters. The first chapter in on America’s dismissal record with the United States pursuit of foreign policies. The next chapter questions the liberal hegemony view that is popular among those who are in the foreign policy establishment. I thought this chapter itself was gold enough to buy this book. Chapter three is on the people involved with foreign policies and how people enter this realm while chapter four is on the lobby and think tanks relations to those in government making policies. Chapter five is on the problem of accountability in our government with foreign relations; this is not just limited to the State Department but also the intelligence and National Security community. Chapter six looks at Trump which the author argued was rather ad hoc and inconsistent with trying to solve the problems with how America approach foreign policy. Chapter seven finally presents the author’s suggestions towards a solution with his view that is called “off shore balancing.”
I learned a lot from this book. Interestingly I read this book while I was traveling and go about internationally. The author’s overall thesis is the concern for our policy makers’ inflated expectations and hubris during the Post-Cold War years that drive policies that hurt everybody in the long run. In the world of foreign policy failure, good intentions is not enough to justify a policy; this is a realm where there’s blowback and unintended consequences with governmental policies that not only effect the US but a region and nowadays even transregional consequences. It is interesting that the author and many others have noticed how the American public in general don’t favor oversea intervention with other countries’ affair and yet the foreign policy establishment in general are pro-interventionists than the average Americans. The book’s exploration of why that is so and also of the problem of how there’s no official “guild” and pipeline for people entering into foreign policy can result in a group conformity where those in entrance level are expected to agree with older hands in foreign policies in order to enter this world. But I don’t know if the author is right to suggest a more official process to enter into the world of foreign policy decisions would remove the groupthink and echo chambers within the foreign policy community; it will just reinforce and exclude outside thinkers through formal and structural manner rather than informally. The author noted there’s greater conformity of opinions the higher one climb the foreign policy food chain and it seems to me a rather larger systemic problem of the Federal government overall and not just with foreign policies, look at the way the FBI and Department of Justice community can have group think in concerning ways the last few years. I think statism is the root problem. I also found the book’s discussion about the role of think tanks to be very fascinating, where some operate as a way for people to enter a foreign policy career and others operate more as lobbyists rather than actual objective researchers.
This is not a book that is joyful to read. There’s discussions about the increase of immunity of those in the highest echelon of the military, intelligence agencies and States Department when there is a crisis or wrong doing with their respective agencies, from torturing prisoners to wrongful spying and killing of civilians, it is something that everyone who cares about ethics should be concern about. What’s even more tragic some of these leaders can be rewarded in their career with promotions and moving on to adjacent lucrative careers. There’s something larger here than a military industrial complex: There’s a foreign policy administrative “deep state” if you will, that has a revolving door with retirement to boards of big companies and lucrative teaching and think tank positions.
This is a very informative book, even when I’m not sure the author is right on certain things nevertheless he really knows this area of political science and I am deeply enriched with understanding this realm more. In an age where partisan voices are the loudest the book struck me as balance, moderate and yet penetrating and critical in its analysis. That’s a big plus for me and why I recommend it.

[Jacob Williams]

1. Liberal hegemony

This book argues that the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and to a large extent Trump administrations all followed the same fundamental approach to foreign policy, an approach called “liberal hegemony” which “rests on two core beliefs”:

(1) the United States must remain much more powerful than any other country, and (2) it should use its position of primacy to defend, spread, and deepen liberal values around the world.[1]

Walt thinks this approach has disastrously failed to achieve its own goals and has caused enormous harm and waste—and is doomed to continue failing. He argues that this approach is unpopular among voters, but that the “foreign policy community”—defined to include a broad range of government institutions, think tanks, academics, and others—does not allow dissent from it, and that the members of that community are insulated from facing any consequences for the approach’s failures. (The book names a whole lot of names, of both individuals and organizations.)

I don’t feel anywhere near knowledgeable enough to form much of an opinion on this. I do appreciate the reminder that point #2 above should at least be made explicit and questioned; it’s very easy for it to be implicitly assumed in political discussions.

2. Credibility

Walt notes that “[a] time-honored method for selling an ambitious foreign policy is to exaggerate foreign dangers”[2], and one way of doing this is to raise fears that our nation will lose its credibility. I hadn’t really thought about the dubious nature of this fear before:

…threat inflators believe that U.S. credibility is extremely important and inherently fragile. … Any time the United States chooses not to respond to some external event, threat inflators warn that this decision will destroy U.S. credibility, undermine allies’ resolve, and embolden America’s opponents. … When the United States does respond, however, the effects are fleeting, and Washington has to demonstrate its will and prowess again the next time a potential challenge arises.

Repeated scholarly studies on reputation and credibility show that the world does not work this way: states judge how others will respond primarily based on the interests at stake and not on how the country acted in a radically different context. To take an obvious illustration, how the United States responds to a crisis in a minor power far away says little or nothing about how it would respond to a direct attack on the U.S. homeland or against an important U.S. ally. Yet threat inflators argue the opposite, implying that the United States must respond in places that don’t matter in order to convince adversaries it will act in places that do.[3]

3. Offshore balancing

The book is more about describing a problem than providing a solution, but the final chapter does explain Walt’s preferred alternative to liberal hegemony, called “offshore balancing”:

Instead of trying to remake the world in America’s image, offshore balancing is principally concerned with America’s position in the global balance of power and focuses on preventing other states from projecting power in ways that might threaten the United States….

In particular, offshore balancers believe that only a few areas of the globe are of vital importance to U.S. security or prosperity and thus worth sending Americans to fight and die for….[4]

Those areas are “the Western Hemisphere”, “Europe, Northeast Asia, and the Persian Gulf”, which sounds like a rather broad net to me, but offshore balancing also entails a much lower level of meddling in the regions of interest: the US would not try to play savior or push its vision of democracy onto others. Its goal would only be to prevent concentrations of power, and it would pursue this goal by means other than direct military intervention as much as possible.

Part of me is uncomfortable with this proposal because it seems to have an amoral flavor to it: we’d be giving up on even trying to do what’s good/right in general, and explicitly adopting the goal of protecting our own power. Some ways of pursuing this goal would be morally unacceptable—you can’t justify harming someone else just because you want them to stay weaker than you. On the other hand, if we see some nation rising in power faster than the others in a region, some ways of helping those others keep up may be not only acceptable but commendable, insofar as we’d be enabling them to protect themselves from domination and abuse by the rising power. As long as it’s not interpreted as a license to ignore ethical constraints, it seems plausible to me that the “offshore balancing” approach would both benefit the US and reduce the harm we cause others through misguided paternalism.

[1] Stephen M. Walt, The hell of good intentions: America’s foreign policy elite and the decline of U.S. primacy, First edition (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018), 54.

[2] Ibid., 147.

[3] Ibid., 149.

[4] Ibid., 261.

(crosspost)

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read writings of this author for many years. This book is great. He is clear, he has foundations for each assertion, argument and conclusion. This is a masterful work on US foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, including numerous errors of policy.

[Peter Hansen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Audiobook. I consider myself a realist or at least very sympathetic to the realist arguments and worldview so Walt’s failure to win me over or convince me of his vision was a bit shocking—especially since I am a big fan of Mearsheimer’s The Great Delusion, the other major realist tract taking on the Liberal Hegemony clique.

A few positive things about the book first: Walt provides a good catalogue of the blob and really gives the reader/listener a sense of the foreign policy establishment landscape and the various nodes and ideological networks within it. Walt also makes some good points about the perverse incentives in the FP establishment where bad/wrong calls get rewarded while correct calls made by those bucking the establishment’s ideological orthodoxy get marginalized and/or their careers ruined. The final chapter on offshore balancing was more interesting, especially how to build a parallel network of FP realists.

The bad: This book sounds more like it was written by Noam Chomsky than a prominent realist academic. There’s a really annoying holier than thou, sententious moral panic vibe to the entire book that I found deeply off putting and a bit pathetic, to be honest. The second major criticism is that this entire work lacks rigor, it’s a bunch of complaints and wild speculative claims for which Walt provides no evidence. Of course countercfactuals in IR are not possible, but why not use history to provide counter examples to support realists arguments? Instead it’s a bunch of, “that was dumb, that was stupid, these people are idiots, those guys are awful, bad ideas” — without ever even considering what the alternatives might have been or providing a historical counter example or case study of when his better idea might have worked out in the past.

The third major problem is conceptual—Walt is so vague about what Liberal Hegemony is and blames so many things on it that it basically just becomes the catchall for things Stephen Walt dislikes. No more McRib at McDonalds ? Liberal hegemony is to blame. Overcook the chicken? Liberal hegemony. Undercooked the chicken? Believe it or not, also liberal hegemony. It got to the point where I was just rolling my eyes. Contrast that to Mearsheimer’s Great Delusion where he clearly lays out the concept then meticulously shows how the concept motivated policy decisions that turned out to be blunders.

Then there are lots of other littler problems that just pissed me off. Steve claims liberal hegemony is a DC jobs program, everyone gets IR jobs! Well, as any economist will tell you, the goal of most professionals in a field is to limit the number of practitioners so salaries go up. Why do all these trade groups push for licensing requirements from every profession from doctors to real estate agents? Because limiting the supply of the labor is better for the people already in the field. But this basic economic logic doesn’t apply to the liberal hegemony types, I guess. Lots of annoying little errors like this, Steve is both disgusted by the IR experienced experts in early chapters and then claiming the state department is a bunch of amateurs in another… woof Steve, woof

[Randy · Rating 4 out of 5]

First, this is an excellent book. But I don’t intend to write a detailed review, but more like some random thoughts.

I read some of his writings before, such as The Israel lobby and US foreign policy, and felt the author is coolheaded, and has a clear and realistic view on US foreign policy.

The Iraq War was something I was totally against before it was even started, I seriously thought that I would not end well. Little did I suspect that the premises were all fake and the end was even worse than I expected.

About Middle East peace process: US has never been an impartial mediator, this largely explained why not much has happened. There was a good opportunity in the ‘90s, but it’s gone with the assassination of Rabin.

When two parties have a huge imbalance in power, it’s vital for the stronger side not trying to impose its will on the other side, it has to be willing to accept results short of his complete demand.
On WMD, it’s pretty ironic that what happened to Iraq and Libya made it almost impossible to persuade North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons.

Similar logic applied to NATO expansion. It seems US doesn’t care about what promises it made, as long as it can get away, it would do it. A related issue was the so-called Shock Therapy in ‘90s. Regular Russians had reasons to wonder if those guys intended to just destroy the Russian economy.

On the relationships with Iran, one has to wonder if US and UK had not overthrown the Iranian government in early ‘50s, what the situation would have been?

Regarding why the foreign policy community has a very narrow range of opinions and why regular people are not happy about it, what Mr. Walt described is definitely true, but I want to go deeper about the second question. The author mentioned the economics side briefly, but I would argue this is the real reason the people are not happy. It’s hard to miss the sharp contrast between their economic conditions and the foreign policy elites’ grand plan abroad. After the turmoil of ‘70s, the neoliberal economics (with the bend to libertarian ideology) started to take hold after long hiatus), as exemplified by Thatcher and Reagan. And shareholder value became the only measure of a company’s performance. This and other factors (such as money’s outsized influence in politics) have brought the widening economic gap and shrinking of the middle class.

When the Great Recession brought misery to a big chunk of the population, I hoped that the crisis would be put into good use. Unfortunately, to my deep disappointment, that never happened. One observer mentioned aptly: there were two types of leaders. One type can accept the limitations of conventional politics and try to work with available legislative and interest-group coalitions--the politics of the currently possible. Or the leader can take his case to the people, define the old order as the obstacle to what reform demands and create whole new possibilities--the politics of the aspirational. Despite his exceptional gifts as a leader and the disgrace of the old power structure, for the most part Obama has chosen the conventional path.

At that time, the war (and foreign policy) was low on the agenda, so it’s not surprising at all the same policy (with different emphasis) was pursued.

As the author mentioned, the geopolitical position of US makes it easy for US leaders to make blunders w/o suffering serious political consequences. On the flip side, these elites lack any trace of humbleness in dealing with other countries.

There are other deeper issues, such as assumptions taken for granted, however, they may not be right after all. Maybe more on this at another time.

I had high hope during the Great Recession that US still had the ability of self-correction. If the Iraq debacle and the economic crisis were not enough, I wonder what will be enough. The development since then made me seriously doubt if that ability has been permanently lost.

[Lewis Whelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stephen Walt belongs to the realist camp in the field of international relations. For our purposes, what that means is that he's critical of US grand strategy since the fall of the Berlin Wall. He argues, convincingly, that the US has pursued a disastrous, utopian foreign policy - what Walt calls "liberal hegemony" - and subsequently squandered the advantage afforded to them by the collapse of the USSR, their only peer competitor at the time. In the process, the US has perhaps irreparably damaged the good name of the liberal democratic powers, with ill-advised and idealistic ventures in the Middle East and elsewhere. Walt claims that this strategy is founded on erroneous, teleological assumptions about the ascendancy of liberal democratic political norms. And the recent geopolitical setbacks that have occurred - the war in Ukraine, the defeat in Afghanistan... the list could go on - testify to Walt's theory. Walt's big idea is that, when the Berlin Wall came down, there was no need for the US to assume the role of liberal hegemon, and attempt to project liberal power into the antipodes of the world. Walt has a number of compelling reasons for adopting this sceptical geopolitical viewpoint. One is that such a strategy appears to overemphasise the role of military might in the progress of international affairs: as became clear, even the world's most impressive military cannot force liberal democracy on peoples who lack the institutional, historical, and cultural prerequisites. Another interesting reason identified by Walt is that liberal hegemony - the commitment to eternal liberal democratic dominance championed by a militarised US - leaves little room for political bargaining. Some of the most interesting of Walt's analyses draw on the idea that idealistic visions preclude the possibility of negotiation, as they encourage politicians to frame geopolitical events in crude good versus evil narratives. After all, if liberalism is the only morally legitimate game in town, what reason is there to cede ground to illiberal regimes? Walt's view is that this approach causes unnecessary tensions, which, without the possibility of compromise, can only and will only lead to armed conflict. In contrast, Walt outlines his alternative geostrategic approach: what he calls "offshore balancing". Here, he sketches a view that sees the US take a backseat, wherein it only involves itself in geopolitical affairs to prevent another hegemon arising and dominating certain key regions. Otherwise, military might is reserved for defence and humanitarian missions of various kinds. Walt has written a damning book that tears strips out of "the foreign policy Blob" in Washington. As the cracks get bigger and bigger, and the enemies of the open society make ever bolder geopolitical moves, one wonders what will become of the liberal world order that has existed since the fall of the Soviet Union. Walt's book will provide fuel to the sceptical fire, while gesturing toward what might have been, and what may still come.

[Mihai Pop · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a book about foreign policy. Unfortunately this is about the most virtuous element that can be said. It is not bad, and as all books, it has good points, good analysis, and some good points, but none of them are prevalent because of a few major points.
1. The book is coming from the US school of thought, where US actions are central to the world, so even if there are negative outcomes that came to US over the past three decades, these could have been completely changed by how US decision makers "should" have acted. Obviously, the US is not alone in the world, and the 1991 position was the outlier, not the current status, not the long term status.
2. The action that "should have been better" is always taken in hindsight, so it shows the immaturity under which this book is born. Also, the simplification of the complex into complicated, doesn't show experience, rather opinions, which harm, rather than build.
3. On the subjective level, the argument building is so very a posteriori, so the result is instead of building an analysis, it builds a historical record that favors the storyteller. Surely this can't be acceptable in sound policy making.
4. The way of going at the establishment is in the same rant diatribe, that if only put more excessively one gets Noam Chomsky. And this hurts, rather than builds, and instead of bringing new options in the separate moments of the history, brings a vision of the "know-it-all", again profiling someone that just doesn't get the limitations of working with hundreds, thousands, millions and billions of people.
5. The generalizations and labeling that goes across the foreign policy world where entities such as countries, sects, terrorist groups etc. act/react/behave as one is a mistake that is taken as the basis of this book, whereas this does not happen as much in the real world of acted foreign policy, which indeed sees the people, the leaders, the interest groups, the factions, and plays with vastly more pieces than this book imagines.
6. This all is not to say that US has not done mistakes, it has, many, but it has made them in the same way democracy works, opened all the wrong doors until it found the right one. Can foreign policy be done better, probably yes, but that's not for me to opine, and surely is not for the author to opine, without starting from a premise of a imperial downfall, which is easy to see when compared to the new rising power of China (at least, if not India as well).
If it’s now a mandatory reading otherwise, I fail to see why this should be read at all.

[Ellen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Excellent critical analysis of liberal hegemony. This book offers compelling arguments against liberal hegemony as a foreign policy for the United States. The what, who, why, and how are discussed in depth. I am not particularly familiar with liberal hegemony, but this book discussed its key tenets very clearly. The writing style was accessible and never boring. It was an interesting and insightful analysis of US foreign policy. While I do not necessarily agree with all the points made in this book, I learned from it and am able to understand the critique of liberal hegemony quite well. This book does have a very compelling, straightforward, well-organized, and thorough argument. Given that its purpose is to poke holes in liberal hegemony, I think Walt accomplished this task (though the final chapter is somewhat limited, and crammed into a small space, in offering an alternative).


My critiques of the book are limited, as I really enjoyed this book and learned from it. First, it was very repetitive at times, but it might help readers who are unfamiliar with concepts of IR theory understand the points better, so that was acceptable. Second, this book should be placed in the hands of those who can understand it. There are some parts of this book that could be severely misinterpreted by uneducated readers (especially the whole "foreign policy establishment" idea). Finally, the last chapter could have been better. In proposing offshore balancing, the author presented another compelling argument and one that tied together his analysis quite nicely. However, it was forced to simultaneously act as a conclusion, which made it feel rather rushed, and I felt that the defense of offshore balancing could have been stronger, because it's a really good theoretical concept.

Moreover, I would be interested in learning how the author thinks that offshore balancing could be implemented (not just the when or by whom), given the current state of US foreign policy. How does one make that change in grand strategy without some drastic impetus occurring to prompt such change? That is a question that remains unanswered, though valuable.

Overall, a very interesting real and very well written! It is quite relevant as well, seeing as it was published in 2018. This book lived up to expectations and I would certainly read it again to refresh on the arguments against liberal hegemony.

[Borislav Boev · Rating 4 out of 5]

Книгата е добър пътеводител за същината на американската външна политика, пречупена през призмата на дипломатическия корпус. Авторът адекватно развива концепцията за „либерална хегемония“, която е плод на двупартиен консенсус и трудно търпи съществени изменения, без значение от това коя партия е на власт.
Критичният анализ на грешките на американската външна политика е подплатен с конкретни примери, свързани с кадровата политика в дипломацията, толерирането на провалени експерти и отхвърлянето на аргументирано критикуващите и предлагащи по-разумни решения. Авторът изтъква и важната роля на медийната среда, която често пъти е в услуга на грешните решения, свързани с интервенционизма.

Накрая, авторът предлага и някои практични решения за преформулиране целите на американската външна политика и начините за по-добро позициониране на Щатите на глобалната политическа сцена.

The book is a good guide to the essence of American foreign policy, through the prism of the diplomatic corps. The author adequately develops the concept of "liberal hegemony", which is the product of a bipartisan consensus and hardly tolerates substantial changes, regardless of which political party is in power.
The critical analysis of the mistakes of the American foreign policy is backed up with concrete examples related to personnel policy in diplomacy, toleration of failed experts and rejection of those who reasonably criticize and offer more reasonable solutions. The author also points out the important role of the media environment, which is often at the service of wrong decisions associated with the interventionism.

Finally, the author also offers some practical solutions for reformulating the goals of American foreign policy and ways to better position the United States on the global political scene.