Liberal hegemony is an ambitious strategy in which a state aims to turn as many countries as possible into liberal democracies like itself while also promoting an open international economy and building international institutions. In essence, the liberal state seeks to spread its own values far and wide. My goal in this book is to describe what happens when a powerful state pursues this strategy at the expense of balance-of-power politics.

Many in the West, especially among foreign policy elites, consider liberal hegemony a wise policy that states should axiomatically adopt. Spreading liberal democracy around the world is said to...

Beliefs about human nature are the building blocks of theoretical arguments in politics, and liberalism is no exception. Its core claims are based on a set of assumptions about human nature, meaning those attributes that are common to all people, as opposed to those that vary among individuals. Thus, to assess liberalism, we must first describe what it says about human nature and determine whether those claims square with what we know about the human condition.

The conservative French thinker Joseph de Maistre maintained that “there is no such thing asmanin the world. In my lifetime I have...

We can think of political liberalism as coming in two variants: modus vivendi liberalism and progressive liberalism. They share a common view of human nature, which emphasizes individualism as well as the limits of our critical faculties to discover collective truths about the good life. Both stress the importance of inalienable rights (rights that cannot be taken away or voluntarily given up), tolerance, and the need for a state to maintain public order.

There are two key differences between modus vivendi and progressive liberals: they think differently about the content of individual rights and about the role of the state....

Two of political liberalism’s most salient features are also its two significant flaws: the prominence it accords individualism, and the weight it places on inalienable rights. Contemporary liberalism, as we saw, is largely synonymous with progressive liberalism, although modus vivendi liberalism still affects the contours of political life. My criticisms of political liberalism in this chapter apply equally to both variants, as there is little daylight between them regarding the importance they ascribe to individualism and rights. In this chapter I am concerned with assessing liberalism as a political ideology. A liberal democracy’s foreign policy, and international relations more generally,...

The previous two chapters focused on describing and analyzing political liberalism as it applies to politics at home. It is time to shift gears and address the question at the heart of this book: what happens when a powerful state adopts a liberal foreign policy? In other words, what happens when a country that is deeply committed to individual rights and doing social engineering to promote those rights employs that template in the wider world?

That formidable state will end up embracing liberal hegemony, a highly interventionist foreign policy that involves fighting wars and doing significant social engineering in countries...

The costs of liberal hegemony begin with the endless wars a liberal state ends up fighting to protect human rights and spread liberal democracy around the world. Once unleashed on the world stage, a liberal unipole soon becomes addicted to war.

This militarism arises from five factors. First, democratizing the globe is a vast mission that provides abundant opportunities to fight. Second, liberal policymakers believe they have the right, the responsibility, and the know-how to use military force to achieve their goals. Third, they often approach their task with missionary zeal. Fourth, pursuing liberal hegemony undercuts diplomacy, making it harder...

Liberal hegemony is built around three missions: increasing the number of liberal democracies in the world, facilitating an open economic order, and building international institutions. The assumption is that achieving these goals, especially the first one, is a formula for international peace. I argued in the previous two chapters that such a policy is not only enormously costly both at home and abroad but also likely to fail. States that pursue a liberal foreign policy invariably find themselves worse off.

In this chapter I will examine liberal hegemony’s purported benefit: that it will bring peace and wealth and effectively end...

My central mission in this book has been to examine what happens when a powerful state pursues liberal hegemony. That mission was motivated, of course, by U.S. foreign policy in the post–Cold War era. But to understand how liberalism works in international politics, it is necessary to understand how it relates to nationalism and realism, both of which profoundly affect the interactions among states. At its core, therefore, this book is about the relationship among those three isms.

The analysis in the preceding chapters implies a number of recommendations for the future conduct of American foreign policy. First, the...