The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities.

• Author: Mearsheimer, John J.

U.S. foreign policy is widely debated and contested around the world, and the main reason for this is the fact that U.S. foreign policy decisions have had global consequences for a long time. So much so that International Relations (IR) is claimed to be an American social science. Despite this widespread interest, however, there is no consensus on what variables actually determine U.S. foreign policy. John J. Mearsheimer's The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities provides a convincing explanation of what drives U.S. foreign policy, and sets the ground for a fruitful debate. Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony has shaped U.S. foreign policy in the post-Cold War period and that this strategy has produced nothing but failure at the end of the day. The main reason for the failure of this strategy, he argues, is that liberal political theory is based on erroneous assumptions about human nature, and it ignores the role of nationalism and realism in shaping the way international relations flow (p. viii).

The book consists of eight chapters. The introductory chapter defines concepts such as political liberalism and liberal hegemony and, in a nutshell, explains what happens when a state adopts the liberal hegemony strategy. Accordingly, liberal hegemony as a grand strategy aims to turn countries into liberal democracies, promote an open international economy, and build international institutions. However, the strategy fails because of the role of nationalism and realism in international relations (p. 3). Chapter 2 demonstrates that key assumptions about human nature determine theoretical arguments in politics. The author embraces two assumptions: that human beings have limited capacity to discover inclusive thrusts about what constitutes good life and that they are social beings. Driven by survival and as members of social groups positioned in anarchy, the groups often have fundamental disagreements about the first principles regarding good life. Consequently, there is a high propensity toward conflict in the world (p. 17). Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how progressive liberalism, a social engineering-prone variant of liberalism, triumphed over modus vivendi liberalism and assess liberalism as a political ideology. In Chapters 5 and 6, the author asks the question of what happens when liberalism goes abroad and argues that it turns into liberal militarism, renders diplomacy harder, undermines sovereignty rights, and causes...