Restraint vs Liberal Hegemony

1) What is Restraint?

Professor Barry Posen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expresses this view in his new book, Restraint: A New Foundation for US Grand Strategy. He identifies a pretty constant pattern of activist conduct that he refers to as a “Liberal Hegemony Grand Strategy.” He claims that this method has been inefficient and counterproductive in ensuring US national security goals, and he proposes a different vision for US national security policy.

Posen defines Liberal Hegemony as a strategy for securing the United States’ superpower status by actively promoting democracy, free markets, and Western ideals around the world. Liberals and neoconservatives on both sides of the political divide have pushed for variations of this method. Restraint, his counterproposal, is a realist-based grand strategy that focuses US military strength on a restricted set of objectives, depends on “command of the commons” to maintain worldwide access, avoids foreign conflicts, and actively urges allies to turn to their own security. Posen promotes a maritime-centric approach to managing the world’s commons.

2) Why is Restraint better than Liberal Hegemony:

With the backing of US power, “liberal hegemony” was a policy of using the US’s immense power in the post–Cold War world to globalize a liberal international order, promote democracy and liberal principles, build a free and open global liberal economic order, and expand multilateral international institutions.

The US did not simply promote an open and rule-based order. It rose to become the order’s hegemonic organizer and manager. As a result, the United States was given specific hegemonic management obligations as well as perks within this liberal hegemonic order. The recent fall and disruption of this liberal hegemonic order has sparked intense debate over the causes and scope of the disruption, as well as disagreement over how “liberal” and “orderly” it was in the first place.

In summary, Mearsheimer argues that liberal foreign policy during a period of US hegemony failed to expand democracy or provide international stability because it enraged nationalist and realist counter-hegemonic power politics wherever liberal objectives were pursued.

Furthermore, Mearsheimer claims that liberal principles and ambitions have resulted in norm-based imperatives for military interventions, as well as diplomatic tensions and quarrels between liberal democracies and non-democracies. The costs of liberal hegemony begin with the unending wars a liberal state ends up fighting to safeguard human rights and extend liberal democracy around the world, Mearsheimer and other realist critics argue.

In 1932, Niebuhr published Moral Man and Immoral Society, which lays out the foundations of his realist vision, which he had already developed. Individuals and states are inherently egoistic,

according to the core argument. At the individual, national, and international levels, the brutal postwar era demonstrated how egoism impacts all human social interactions. Individuals fight to overcome egoism, but states have a far more serious problem, he noted. Individual acts of selflessness among members of a family, town, or other small community are so rare in international relations because the social urge that might inspire individual acts of selflessness among members of a family, town, or other small society is so weak between societies.

Even if such feelings existed, national leaders do not have the same freedom to act morally as regular people. Individuals can choose to overcome their egoism via acts of self-abnegation, but statesmen, burdened as they are with the conflicting ambitions and aspirations of their fellow citizens, do not have this authority.

This difficulty is exacerbated, not alleviated, for democratic leaders, who have even less leeway than their authoritarian counterparts: the institutions that make their societies more just, ironically, limit their ability to act for justice on the global arena. Individuals’ capacity for self-criticism, which is required for ethical action, is also lacking in nations.

The fundamental focus of Niebuhr’s picture of international relations was essentially raw human egoism. Because humans are naturally egoistic, society is continually brimming with competing interests. Domestically, a highly concentrated coercive authority, especially the state, controls opposing interests. On a global scale, this concentration of coercive power poses a threat to other countries, resulting in insecurity.

Fear is created as a result of international uncertainty, which exacerbates nations’ innate desire for dominance. Niebuhr was outlining what would eventually be known as the security issue (sometimes attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau) and recognizing it as a distinguishing element of international human existence.

Niebuhr held a skewed perspective of human reason, emphasizing how self-interest and “moral pride” warp foreign policy, making such activities irrational. He believed that humans typically fail to recognize the powerful effect of self-interest in their reasoning, and that seemingly sensible foreign policies almost invariably mask some deeper egoism.

Niebuhr did not believe that the use of force was always justified. He fought almost all subsequent US military interventions, including those directed against Chinese Communists as a result of the US’s Liberal Hegemony. Two of Niebuhr’s most vehement cautions concerning the United States’ role in the globe after WWII: The United States has a tendency to (sometimes gross) overconfidence in its ability to evaluate the needs of other cultures and accomplish the reforms that Washington seeks.

The subject of military interventionism as it is understood in the context of twenty-first-century U.S. foreign policy discussions is larger in Niebuhr’s study of America’s place in the world. It serves as a cautionary note on the limitations of the United States’ efforts to build a more secure and affluent world order in general, particularly around American principles alone. As a result, liberal hegemony was never and will never be the answer. Right now, Restraint is the only viable option.

3) Why should the US have adopted Restraint?

In the early to mid-1990s, the United States was truly on top of the world, and it was a time of immense hope. Their relations with the major countries, including Russia and China, were positive. Eastern Europe and Latin America were becoming more democratic. The economy was growing. In the first Gulf War, Iraq was de-armed, and Iran lacked nuclear-enrichment capabilities. The peace process in Oslo had begun. So there was a popular conviction that American ideas would spread throughout the world, and that it would be quite simple to do so.

When we consider the current scenario, we can see that American relations with Russia and China are strained, and that the two countries are currently working together to undermine the US. In many parts of the world, democracy is on the decline, and in places like Poland and Hungary, it is in jeopardy. Worse, democracy in the United States is becoming increasingly dysfunctional. During this time, India, Pakistan, and North Korea have all conducted nuclear weapons tests.

The Oslo peace process was a catastrophic failure, and the two-state solution that we advocated is now further away than it has ever been. And countries like Iran are now on the verge of becoming nuclear weapon powers if they so choose. Given where the United States was in the early 1990s and where it is now, it is evident that American foreign policy did not achieve what the US had hoped.

Despite repeated and sometimes costly efforts, the United States has been unable to influence politics in many regions of the world. Even though the United States is extremely powerful, it has little control over the evolution of local politics and political alignments in the majority of the world. They have some clout, but they haven’t been able to shape events in the Middle East. They haven’t been able to dictate the fate of Afghanistan after 17 years of war, and they haven’t been able to influence the politics of Hungary or Poland, both of which are moving in an illiberal direction. If the world’s most powerful country is unable to do so, other countries will be unable to do so as well. The United States contributes significantly to the balance of power in important areas, but their ability to impact regional politics and tell other countries how to construct their societies is severely constrained.

If the US had chosen caution over liberal hegemony, NATO would not have been pushed indefinitely eastward, and relations with Russia would be significantly better. In truth, the US would have gradually reduced its commitment to Europe over time, encouraging Europe to take greater responsibility for its own defense. I believe Europe would be in better situation now if the United States had done so beginning in the 1990s.

In the 1990s, the US would not have chosen the twin containment strategy in the Persian Gulf, which required them to deploy troops in Saudi Arabia to discourage Iran and Iraq at the same time. Because of their presence, Osama bin Laden decided to strike the United States, and September 11 may not have occurred. If the United States had taken a more balanced approach

throughout the Oslo process, they might have been able to achieve a two-state solution. Without a doubt, the United States would not have attacked Iraq in 2003. It would also have made sense to take a more controlled approach to globalization. It’s simple to see how a less ambitious and more realistic foreign policy strategy would have left the United States and much of the rest of the globe in better shape today.

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