1) What is Liberal Hegemony?
Individualism and alienable rights give rise to liberal hegemony when these individual natural rights become universal rights (Mearsheimer, 2018). When liberals believe that essential individual rights should not be limited to a single state, but should be promoted and safeguarded throughout the world, liberalism becomes an imperialist ideology. When governments become defenders of individual rights in the world rather than just their own national interests, liberalism becomes liberal hegemony, as well as when states try to impose their values and ideals on other states.
2) Roots of Liberal hegemony:
In the postwar era, the United States led the liberal hegemony. Wilsonianism appeared to have triumphed by the beginning of the twentieth century’s last decade. In typical Wilsonian language, President Bush expressed his ambition for a new world order: “We have a vision of a new partnership of nations that transcends the Cold War.”
Consultation, cooperation, and collective action, particularly through international and regional organizations, were the foundations of this alliance. A collaboration based on shared values and the rule of law, as well as an equitable sharing of both cost and commitment. A cooperation with the goals of increasing democracy, prosperity, peace, and arms reduction. (Bush, 1990, p.152).
President Bill Clinton, Bush’s Democratic successor, articulated America’s ambitions in similar terms, focusing on the concept of “enlarging democracy”: In a new period of hazard and opportunity, our overarching goal must be to extend and strengthen the world’s community of market-based democracies. We tried to contain a threat to the survival of free institutions during the Cold War. Now we want to expand the number of countries that live under those democratic institutions, since our vision is of a world where everyone’s thoughts and energies are fully expressed in a world of healthy democracies that work together and live in peace (Clinton, 1993, p.650).
3) US Foreign Policy and Liberal Hegemony:
Following the end of the Cold War, the international system’s power structure shifted. The globe became a unipolar world, with the United States as its leader (Mearsheimer, 1990). There were no peer competitors in the first two decades of the Millennium to challenge US dominance (Nye, 1992). The Soviet empire fell apart and was engulfed in internal strife. China was still a developing nation.
Japan, after all, was not a military force and partnered with the US after WWII. As a result, the unipolar international order allowed the US to ignore the balance of power politics and its raison d’être in order to pursue a liberal foreign policy. As a result, in a unipolar world, the US preferred global dominance over off-shore balance, containment policy, or isolationism (Mearsheimer, 2011).
The two major themes of the early 1990s dominated American foreign policy. Francis Fukayama endorsed the first proposal. In his book “The End of History and Last Man,” he argued that liberal democracy and capitalism had triumphed. Furthermore, he said that Nazism and fascism were vanquished in the first half of the twentieth century, but communism was crushed in the second half of the century (Fukuyama, 1989). As a result, there is no other ideology that can compete with liberalism. Hence, it is the end of history in terms of ideological rivalries. With the passage of time, every state would accept democracy and capitalism as its political and economic systems.
Charles Krauthammer’s thoughts are another factor that influenced US foreign policy. In his key article “Unipolar Moment,” he argued that the United States is not only a powerful economic power but also the world’s strongest military power (Krauthammer, 1990). As a result, the United States should promote its beliefs and interests throughout the world, even if it means using force. Furthermore, the concepts of Francis Fukayama and Charles Krauthammer would be married together, becoming US foreign policy in the post-Cold War era.
Both major political parties in the United States, the Liberal Democrats and the Neo-Conservative Republicans, would pursue liberal hegemony in foreign policy. As a result, in the post-Cold War age, the United States would rule the entire planet and promote human rights, democracy, capitalism, and international institutions as ideas for promoting global progress and peace.
4) Liberal Hegemony and spreading democracy:
Promoting democracy in the Middle East has been cited by the U.S. as a key foreign policy objective post Cold War. As a result, the U.S. has intervened in numerous countries and conflicts, particularly since 9/11 and the subsequent declaration of the War on Terror. However, this has not been without controversy and its actions often aid imperialism rather than the country it claims its intervention is benefitting.
The United States aspired to reshape the globe in its own image during the post-Cold War era (Mearsheimer, 2018, p.120). Other countries were encouraged to adopt liberal ideas by the United States. The United States pushed liberal democratic values around the world. Following the fall of the Soviet empire, the United States would assist Eastern European countries in adopting democracy as their political system. Furthermore, the US employed force in Iraq in 2003, justifying their unilateral intervention by claiming that they wished to free Iraq from Saddam Hussein’s autocratic dictatorship and install a democratically elected administration (Mingst and Arregguin-Toft, 2018, p.76).
Similarly, the US intervened in Libya in 2011 under the Obama administration, justifying its engagement as a humanitarian operation (Daladier, Stavridis, 2012, p.2-3). The goal of the military intervention, according to American officials, is to protect Libyans from genocide, to preserve Libyans’ human rights, and to install a democratically elected government in Libya (Jacobs, 2015, p.2-4, 5). China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs recently produced a 42-page study alleging the National Endowment for Democracy, a congressionally financed nonprofit formed in 1983 to promote democracy and human rights around the world, of financing a revolution in Hong Kong (Myers, 2020).
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States’ aggressive participation in the Middle East has continued to cause instability in the region, and the country appears to have learned nothing from its prior failures. The Taliban were formed as a result of the Soviet-Afghan conflict, and their perceptions of national security deteriorated as a result of 9/11. However, this did not stop the US from getting engaged in Iraq when it was unwarranted, allowing terrorism to proliferate in the Middle East.
Since the demise of the Soviet Union, the United States has created numerous players as threats in order to justify actions that will enhance its global hegemony. By ignoring the long-term consequences of its actions, the United States has persistently influenced Middle Eastern affairs to suit its own interests rather to those of the people who live there. The Syrian civil war is the most recent example of this, and it does not appear to be ending anytime soon. The fact that Russia has challenged the US to grow its own strength shows that the international system’s structure, rather than a state’s morals, is the reason of its behavior.
So liberal hegemony utterly failed in spreading democracy and it was just an attempt by the US to gain hegemony over the world rather than make the world in their image, free as them and prosperous. Rather they disrupted the world and created more conflict than ever before.
5) Why is Liberal Hegemony doomed to fail?
To begin with, if nationalism and liberalism were to compete, nationalism would always prevail. Almost every state is a nation state, but only a few are liberal states, demonstrating the force of nationalism. Nationalism takes precedence over liberalism in international affairs. State governments prefer nationalism to liberalism. States are worried about their national interests and sovereignty. State sovereignty refers to a country’s refusal to allow other countries to interfere in its internal affairs. The United States attempted liberal hegemony after the Cold War misjudged the power of nationalism, resulting in a retreat in US foreign policy. As a result, liberal hegemony is in a state of crisis.
Second, states in anarchic societies are primarily concerned with their own survival. States compete for power in order to ensure their survival. Every state strives to increase its power. States do not trust the motives of other states when competing for power. States rely on self-help strategies as a result. States must have offensive and defensive military capabilities in order to achieve security.
When a state’s interests are at jeopardy, however, force is used to protect those interests (Mearsheimer, 2007, p. 73-75). The ideas of these realists were, however, misunderstood by liberal American governments. The US officials’ paints were down when Putin employed force in Ukraine, and they couldn’t understand what was going on. Thus, Ukrainian crisis shows why US liberal foreign policy is in a crisis phase and the power of realism.
Third, the overselling of individual rights contributed to the United States’ foreign policy failure. To reiterate, nations are more worried about their national interests in international relations, and individual rights take a back seat when it comes to state survival and security considerations. This point is shown by Russian activity in Ukraine, Syrian regime policies in the Syrian civil war, and the Chinese government’s behavior in Hong Kong.
As we move away from America’s failing liberal hegemony, we see the growth of China and the rebirth of Russian strength on the one hand, and the loss of US power on the other, resulting in power diffusion in the global power configuration and the birth of the Post-American World.