Stephen Walt on liberalism and presidential election

Remarks

STEPHEN WALT: Great. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm grateful for the opportunity.
My reputation as a realist notwithstanding, I come here not to bury liberalism but to praise it. I share its values. I'm grateful to live in a liberal society. I even think most countries would be better off if they embraced those same principles. So I'm taking no pleasure in the problems that the liberal project is now experiencing.
I want to try and use my time to briefly describe what is happening, building on what David has already said; explain why I think it's happening now; and then say a few words about what might happen to the liberal project after November.
First, as David suggested, one of the best ways to understand where we are today is just to compare where we were in 1993 or so. Communism had collapsed; the Velvet Revolution had taken place; serious people (Frank Fukuyama) had said we'd reached the end of history; Tom Friedman was writing books telling us globalization meant everyone had to put on the "golden straitjacket" and basically become like the United States; the Clinton administration's grand strategy was one of engagement and enlargement, expanding NATO eastward, spreading democracy where it could. This was a period of tremendous optimism.
Today liberalism is under threat on multiple fronts. Roger Cohen of The New York Times writes: "The forces of disintegration are on the march. The foundations of the postwar world are trembling." The World Economic Forum says: "The liberal world order is being challenged by powerful authoritarian movements and anti-liberal fundamentalists." Democracy expert Larry Diamond at Stanford points out that, "Between 2000 and 2015 democracy broke down in 27 countries, and many already authoritarian regimes became even less open and less responsive to their citizens."
Efforts to build stable democracies in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Balkans mostly failed. The Arab Spring quickly turned into an Arab Winter almost everywhere. Britain has now voted to leave the European Union, signaling disenchantment with the most ambitious liberal project in Europe. Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Israel—all headed in illiberal directions. A right-wing party in Germany beat Angela Merkel's coalition in local elections last week. And, not to forget, the Republican Party in the United States has nominated a presidential candidate who openly disdains the tolerance that is central to liberal societies, repeatedly expresses racist beliefs, and cottons to baseless conspiracy theories.
So the question is: What went wrong between 1993 and today? I blame this on several interrelated factors.
The first is that we overpromised what liberalism could deliver. Promoters of the liberal experiment argued that spreading democracy, spreading human rights, spreading open markets, and all of these things would guarantee peace and prosperity everywhere and largely for everyone. But of course that turned out not to be the case.
Just thinking of how the spread of markets works, it creates winners, often far more winners than losers; but it does create some losers, people who do not do well, at least in the short term. As a result, the latter are rarely happy about it and the latter can use the same institutions of democracy to make that discontent known.
To make matters worse, liberal elites in a number of places made some serious policy blunders. My favorite list, apart from the invasion of Iraq in 2003: the creation of the euro in Europe, widely forecast to be a disaster, and proven to be indeed; mismanaging the American economy, leading to the financial crisis of 2008; and then, especially in Europe, overdoing the politics and the policies of austerity after 2008, therefore prolonging the economic crisis.
Third, some liberal states used non-liberal means to try and spread liberal values, with a predictable lack of success. Here the classic example is the Iraq War, but it's also true of the Western interventions in Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and elsewhere. The key lesson to draw from that is that military force turns out to be a terrible tool for spreading liberal values.
Finally, although liberals are generally supportive of the idea of national self-determination, they failed to appreciate just how persistent and powerful nationalism would be and how these local identities of various kinds would remain even in the midst of the liberal project. The European Union was supposed to transcend nationalism, create a new pan-European identity, where national identities would really only emerge, say, during the European Soccer Cup, or something like that. But it's clear, of course, in 2016 that this did not happen.
The United States failed to appreciate that creating the formal institutions of democracy was not enough to create a liberal society without norms of tolerance and other embedded social values. And again, that's especially true if you try to do that with armed force.
Finally, it turns out that many people in many places care as much about national identities, historical enmity, territorial symbols, traditional cultural values as they do about freedom or as they do about purely economic benefits. Those sentiments, I think, loom especially large when change is very rapid and when mostly homogeneous societies are forced to assimilate people whose backgrounds are different in a very short span of time.
Again, I think we know from American history, which we always extol as the successful melting pot—but we know that in fact there have been many moments of tensions when new arrivals have experienced resistance and that blending cultures within a single polity has never been particularly smooth or simple. When that happens, and especially when it's happening rapidly, it provides grist for populist leaders who promise to defend traditional values or "make the country great again." Nostalgia ain't what it used to be, but it is still a very formidable political motivation.
And then finally, I would place some blame on ruling elites in a number of liberal societies, especially the United States, where the operation of money in our politics and special interests have created—not to be too candid—an essentially corrupt political class that is increasingly out of touch with ordinary people, interested in enriching themselves, and largely immune to accountability. The sense, in short, that the game is rigged in favor of the 1 percent is where a lot of this populist anger comes from, and I think is reflected not just in the Trump campaign but was also reflected in the surprising success of Bernie Sanders on the other end.
Let me just close with a couple of thoughts about what might happen after November.
If Trump wins—and I neither expect nor want that to happen—the liberal order will fray even more. His own commitment to liberal values seems paper thin. He has promised to play "hardball" with a lot of traditional American allies, and he has little knowledge, no experience, and hardly anyone advising him who knows much of anything about foreign policy. In short, a Trump presidency would be a social science experiment of historic proportions [Laughter], and it's one I have no desire to participate in.
Now, if Clinton wins, many people expect her to be a much more enthusiastic liberal interventionist than, say, Barack Obama. Now, it's true she has been pretty hawkish in the past and she has made some boneheaded foreign policy judgments. But let me just go out on a limb and say that I think she may be much more restrained in her conduct of foreign policy and her activist promotion of the liberal agenda than you might think. You'll recall that Bill Clinton, whom I believe she still talks to occasionally, talked big on foreign policy, a very ambitious set of foreign policy goals, but he tried to do it all on the cheap and was very risk-averse about using American military power. Hillary, I think, wants to be a domestic president and a very large, ambitious foreign policy agenda isn't consistent with trying to do a lot of things here at home.
Moreover, if you look around the world, there are hardly any possible interventions, particularly military interventions, that look really promising. Instead, they all look like potential quagmires, and you would have to be a real enthusiastic liberal humanitarian to want to do a lot of them.
And finally, remember that she was a big promoter of the so-called "pivot to Asia" during Obama's first term, and you can't pivot to Asia in a serious way if you are trying to do a lot of nation-building in places like Yemen or Iraq.
So I think Clinton will talk a lot about defending and spreading liberal values, but again, like her husband, she will do it as gingerly as possible.
Now, does that mean that the liberal order will continue to erode? Maybe not, because if you're like me and you think the best way to promote liberal values around the world is to set a really good example here in the United States, then a successful domestic agenda and less military intervention abroad might do a better job of selling the liberal ideal than some of the things we have done over the past 25 years. And, needless to say, I hope I'm right.
Thank you very much.