A conversation with Professor John Mearsheimer

There are few scholars whose predictions have proved as consistently accurate — and as consistently ignored — as Professor John Mearsheimer. Long before the war in Ukraine, before the war in Iran, and before the return of genuine great-power competition, Mearsheimer was warning that liberal hegemony would fail, and that its failure would come at enormous cost.

In a conversation on my Peacemonger channel, we discussed his 2018 book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities — a work that remains, in my view, essential reading for anyone trying to understand the catastrophic state of Western foreign policy.

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The book was written at the tail end of the unipolar moment, that brief and unique period after the collapse of the Soviet Union when the United States stood alone as the sole great power.

With no peer competitor, balance-of-power politics was temporarily taken off the table. Washington was free to pursue what Mearsheimer calls liberal hegemony: an ambitious project to remake the world in America’s image.

The strategy had three core goals. First, spread liberal democracy everywhere. Second, deepen economic interdependence and globalise capitalism. Third, build and expand international institutions so that every state would become a “responsible stakeholder.”

The intellectual foundation was Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis — the idea that humanity was marching inexorably toward a world of liberal democracies.

As Mearsheimer told me, this required a highly interventionist foreign policy. And the results have been disastrous.

Instead of a more peaceful, democratic world, the United States found itself trapped in endless wars that it could not win. Worse, the militarism required to sustain liberal hegemony began eroding liberal values at home.

“Liberalism abroad,” he wrote in 2018, “leads to illiberalism at home.”

That sentence looks prophetic today.

The unipolar moment, Mearsheimer argues, ended around 2017 with the rise of China and the return of Russia as a great power. Multipolarity is back. Great-power politics is back.

And yet the habits of liberal hegemony have proved extraordinarily difficult to break.

We discussed Donald Trump’s complicated relationship with this worldview. In his first term, Trump ran explicitly against liberal hegemony. The 2025 National Security Strategy, Mearsheimer notes, is in many ways a realist document. Yet in practice Trump has repeatedly reached for the same tools of social engineering he once rejected — most dramatically in Iran.

Regime change by force of arms is not liberal hegemony in the classic sense (Trump has no interest in exporting democracy), but it is still the same fatal delusion: the belief that a foreign society can be reshaped at the end of a rifle barrel.

History, Mearsheimer insists, is unambiguous on this point. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran — the common denominator is not communism, terrorism or theocracy.

It is nationalism.

Nationalism remains the most powerful political ideology on the planet. People will fight and die in extraordinary numbers to preserve their right to self-determination. Any power that forgets this runs into a buzzsaw.

The same logic applies to Ukraine. Mearsheimer traces the roots of the current war directly to the decisions of the unipolar moment — specifically NATO expansion. The drive to push the Western institutional order eastward was not primarily about containing a Russian threat that barely existed in the 1990s. It was an expression of liberal hegemony.

The Russians eventually drew a red line.

The result has been a catastrophic war that has already shattered Ukrainian statehood and will likely produce a frozen conflict accompanied by ethnic cleansing on both sides of the new front lines.

What makes the conversation particularly valuable is Mearsheimer’s insistence on the deeper theoretical tension between liberalism and nationalism. Liberalism, with its emphasis on universal, inalienable individual rights, has a powerful universalist impulse. Taken to its logical conclusion, that impulse struggles to justify national borders at all.

Nationalism, by contrast, is particularistic. It is about “us” versus “them,” about national identity, culture and sovereignty.

This tension plays out in immigration policy, in the European Union’s battles with figures like Viktor Orbán, and in the growing backlash against “Davos Man” — the thoroughly internationalised elite that feels more at home in global institutions than in any particular nation.

Mearsheimer is frank that people like himself (and, he notes, people like me) are in many ways Davos men. The difference is that we do not treat the rest of the world as a mission field for liberal conversion.

The tragedy of the past thirty years is that Western elites became so intoxicated with the idea of liberal hegemony that they lost the ability to see the world as it is. They dismissed nationalism as a spent force, treated realism as a dirty word, and convinced themselves that social engineering was both possible and moral.

The bill for that hubris is now being paid in blood in Ukraine, in Iran, in Gaza and in the growing domestic polarisation across the West.

Mearsheimer does not argue that liberalism and nationalism are oil and water. He believes they can coexist — and historically have coexisted — in liberal nation-states such as Britain and the United States.

But the balance has to be struck carefully. Liberalism can temper the sharper edges of nationalism; nationalism can prevent liberalism from dissolving into universalist overreach.

Getting that balance right is the task of any serious statesman. And, right now, there is a statesmanship vacuum in the west, as I have noted many times before.

As always, talking to John Mearsheimer is both bracing and clarifying.

He does not offer comforting illusions.

He offers a framework for understanding why so many of our foreign-policy disasters were not accidents, but the predictable consequences of a particular set of ideas.

The Great Delusion should be required reading for anyone who still believes that the West can simply will a liberal world order into existence.