It’s Time to Stop Hunting Monsters

On May 20, I had the privilege of participating in a public debate sponsored by the Munk Debates in Toronto. My debate partner was John Mearsheimer, and our opponents were former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland. The issue on the table was “Be It Resolved: Do Not Go Hunting Monsters.” As regular readers here might expect, John and I argued in support of the resolution. You can watch the full debate by purchasing a livestream pass. For Foreign Policy readers interested in my opening and closing statements, what follows below are lightly edited versions of what I told the audience at the event. On May 20, I had the privilege of participating in a public debate sponsored by the Munk Debates in Toronto. My debate partner was John Mearsheimer, and our opponents were former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland. The issue on the table was “Be It Resolved: Do Not Go Hunting Monsters.” As regular readers here might expect, John and I argued in support of the resolution. You can watch the full debate by purchasing a livestream pass. For Foreign Policy readers interested in my opening and closing statements, what follows below are lightly edited versions of what I told the audience at the event. This is a debate between restrainers and crusaders. We all believe the United States should be actively engaged in the world and support a rules-based order. What we are debating is whether it should be a crusader state that tries to remake the world by overthrowing other governments. Our opponents say yes; we say no. In our view, the United States should use its power to deter or defeat attacks on itself and to uphold the balance of power in critical and strategic regions. For example, it made good sense for the United States to enter World War II. Japan attacked the United States and Germany declared war, and both countries were great powers engaged in vast aggressive wars. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders were right to forge and lead an alliance to contain the Soviet Union. We also believe the George H.W. Bush administration was correct in leading the effort to expel Iraq from Kuwait, to keep it from dominating the Persian Gulf. But Bush acted with restraint: He wisely chose not to go to Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein. His son, George W. Bush, made a different choice in 2003, even though Iraq was no longer a major threat and had no weapons of mass destruction. You all know how that crusade turned out. The resolution tonight comes from a famous speech given by former U.S. President John Quincy Adams on July 4, 1821. He emphasized that the United States was founded on the principle of liberty and said, “Wherever the standard of freedom … has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” To put this in modern terms, Adams is saying that America should not use its power to do regime change. We agree because toppling foreign governments to promote democracy almost always makes things worse. Replacing another country’s political system is a vast social engineering project, usually undertaken in places we barely understand, and the typical result is not a vibrant democracy but chaos, destruction, and thousands of innocent people dead. If you have any doubts, just look at what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, or consider the damage the current war on Iran has caused in just three months. Toppling foreign governments also undermines the principle of sovereignty that is the foundation for a rules-based order. If it is okay to overthrow a government that has not attacked us, then what is to stop anyone from taking territory that belongs to others, as Russian President Vladimir Putin did in Crimea or as U.S. President Donald Trump wants to do with Greenland? If it is acceptable to use force to topple a government you don’t like, it is also easy to justify assassinating its leaders, imposing sanctions that harm thousands of innocent civilians, or even torturing enemy prisoners. Remember those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison, or the approximately 120 Iranian schoolchildren killed by a U.S. airstrike two months ago? When we set out to slay monsters, we end up doing monstrous things ourselves. As realists, we know that necessity sometimes forces states to compromise their values. In WWII, for example, the United States allied with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin—who was most definitely a monster—to deal with a greater threat. But crusading to remake the world—and sowing violence and suffering in the process—does not make us safer or advance the cause of liberty. Instead of promoting freedom, we are denying it by imposing our will on others. And because we must break lots of rules to do it, this policy discredits any claim of supporting a rules-based order and encourages others to break the rules themsel

It’s Time to Stop Hunting Monsters

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