John Mearsheimer & Ron Paul Invade Washington, Blast Permanent War State: “Social Engineering At The End Of A Rifle Barrel”

The man who for decades had been an almost lone Congressional advocate of non-interventionism in American foreign policy is former Congressman Ron Paul. When he ran for president in 2008, he took what the late Justin Raimondo called “libertarian realism” to the masses in the famous moment wherein he tangled with Rudy Giuliani on the GOP debate stage. Paul described that “blowback” resulting from Washington militarism and adventurism abroad was a contributing cause of 9/11. But for a population fed on a steady diet of the world-saving messianism of Wilsonian internationalism, in which America’s mystic destiny is to “make the world safe for democracy” (to quote Raimondo)—Rep. Paul’s policy positions were deemed somehow ‘too radical’ for American voters to swallow at the time (or rather, the mainstream gatekeeping pundits assured their viewers of his “fringe” views). Fast forward to well over another decade of the failed GWOT later, and now a common refrain heard on social media and even in the halls of Congress and occasionally the State Department is: Ron Paul was right. 

The US ‘forever wars’ in the Middle East led to a jaded, war-weary, and questioning public which tends to be ever-more skeptical anytime the political class starts talking a new major foreign intervention. This is perhaps why, ever since the Obama presidency Washington has shown a preference for covert and proxy wars, or involvement from the shadows, instead of Bush-style ‘shock and awe’ outright invasions. But currently, the Pentagon and US intelligence are involved in two disastrous hot wars (on a proxy and covert level) which could escalate into massive regional wars, or even world wars, at any moment: Ukraine and Gaza.

Back in 2014, another realist accurately predicted the tragic and disastrous Russia-Ukraine war which would eventually erupt in February 2022 when he said in a University of Chicago lecture: “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked.“ Professor John J. Mearsheimer’s now famous 2014 hour-and-fifteen minute lecture, once it was popularly ‘discovered’ on YouTube after the Russian invasion of 2022, has since racked up nearly 30 million views. We wrote about his insights and forecasts in Mearsheimer’s Ukraine Crystal Ball. And now in 2024 more and more people continue to say: John Mearsheimer was right. 

It was perhaps only a matter of time before these two great thinkers who have done so much to expose the follies and dangers of US interventionism abroad would meet and share the same stage.

This past weekend that’s exactly what happened. They addressed the Ron Paul Institute’s Liberty Platform Conference in the Washington D.C. area, with an audience of several hundreds of people in attendance. It was Dr. Mearsheimer’s first time at the annual Ron Paul Institute conference hosted in Dulles, VA.

Paul in delivering his usually strong “end the Empire and end the Fed” liberty message agreed with Mearsheimer’s words, who said of Washington action in the world, “We decided we are going to use that awesome military power that we had to run around the world and do social engineering.” The University of Chicago professor further pointed out: “And of course it’s social engineering in many cases at the end of a rifle barrel.”

Both also agreed, as the nation enters a charged election in November, that fundamentally there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats on the question of foreign policy and Washington’s penchant for constant military interventionism.

Dr. @RonPaul today at the 8th Annual @RonPaulInstitut Peace and Prosperity Conference on what he learned from Ludwig von Mises:

“…there has to be people who know how to take those complex ideas and make them palatable to the people and that’s what I work on daily, trying to… pic.twitter.com/u27Md61E1z

— Liberty Seeds (@Libertyseedsco) August 31, 2024

Mearsheimer explained that when he references the foreign policy establishment, “your talking about tweedle dee and tweedle dum.”

He also observed, “Both the Republicans and the Democrats love their ‘color revolutions’.” But given that nation-states do not like other countries running around interfering in their affairs, the enduring blowback and forever wars has led to a “permanent state of emergency”: 

“People who don’t understand the limits of what you can do with the military… and think that we have the right and responsibility and the capability to reorder the world in our image, are going to end up creating a highly militarized society. Remember I said that in international anarchy the United States is always going to have a large military. But that’s different from saying we are always going to have a large military that’s fighting wars,” Mearsheimer told the Ron Paul Institute audience.

Interestingly, though Mearsheimer has lectured all over the world, the only time he ever had to cancel a trip and event altogether due to potential threats to his life was when he was set to give a talk in the NATO ‘eastern flank’ country of Poland. He told ZeroHedge that “they could not guarantee my safety”—in reference to the event organizers and Polish police.

Below are key excerpts from John Mearsheimer’s address given to the Ron Paul Institute’s “Liberty Platform” conference on Saturday Aug.31. [Transcribed by ZeroHedge with subheadings added]

* * *

US power & international anarchy

It’s great to be here. I appreciated all the people who come up to me and talk to me, and I look forward to talking to you about international anarchy and limits of military power. What I want to do here is I want to explain to you why I believe that international anarchy means that the United States will always have a very large and powerful military. And then I want to talk about what the limits are regarding how you use that military.

So to start, what do I mean by international anarchy. As I’m sure many of you in the audience know international anarchy is a catchword for saying that in international politics there is no higher authority that sits above states that can rescue them if they get into trouble. The international system is basically comprised of states – states are the principle actors in international politics. So anarchy, in the lexicon of international relations scholars is the opposite, it’s the opposite of hierarchy. If you live inside the United States you have hierarchy – you have a state that is very powerful that sits above you. It has a police force associated with it, it has courts and so forth and so on. In the international system there’s not higher authority.

Furthermore, it’s very hard to know the intentions of other sates and it is impossible to know the future intentions of other states, because you don’t even know who’s going to be running China, or the United States, or Russia – in five years. So how can you know what their intentions are going to be? So you’re in an anarchic system there’s no higher authority to rescue you if you get into trouble. And there are states out there that may have malign intentions, and furthermore there may be states out there that are really powerful.

China demonstrated what happens to a weak state

So if a really powerful state decides it’s going to come after you, and you dial 911, you know who’s at the other end: nobody. And in a system like that you have no choice but to have a powerful military. Your goal is to be the most powerful state in the system. And you want to be the most powerful state in the system because you understand that if you’re weak and you get into trouble, nobody can help you. It is what we call a ‘self-help system’.

If you have any doubts about this go to China and ask them about the ‘century of national humiliation’. The Chinese were very weak from the late 1840s until the late 1940s: they call it the century of national humiliation. What happened then? China was weak and it was preyed upon – it was preyed upon by the United States, you know the open door policy – Japan, and the European great powers. The Chinese are never going to let that happen again. They want their own state and they want that state to be powerful.

US History: a voracious appetite for conquest

The same basic logic applies to every other state in the system. And this includes the United States of course. The United States you all understand worked very hard to become powerful. It started out as thirteen measly colonies strung out along the Atlantic seaboard. We marched across North America all the way to the Pacific Ocean, acquiring and conquering territory all the way. We invaded Canada in 1812 for the purpose of making it part of the United States. And all those island countries in the Caribbean today would be part of the United States were it not for the slavery issue, because the northern states did not want more slave-holding states admitted into the Union. And course because of the sugar industry there were a huge number of slaves in the Caribbean. So the Caribbean did not become part of the United States.

But we had a voracious appetite for conquest and we built a very powerful military once we became the dominant state in the Western hemisphere. This is just the way international politics works. Now for most of you that’s bad news. But from my point of view that’s not the really important issue. The really important issue is how you use that military power. What I’m telling you is we’re always going to be powerful militarily – the question is what do you do with it? And this is where the United States has gone off the rails – at least since the end of the Cold War and many would argue, before the Cold War.

America’s Unipolar Rise

And what’s happened since about 1989 when the United States became the unipole. You all remember remember the unipolar moment, when we were incredibly powerful relative to every other state on the planet? What the foreign policy establishment in this country decided it was going to do is that we decided we were going use that awesome military power that we had to run around the world and do social engineering. What we were gonna do is we were gonna try and remake the world in our own image. We were gonna spread democracy here, there, and everywhere.

We were gonna spread capitalism and economic independence all over the planet. We were going to take these institutions that we created during the Cold War and we were going to integrate countries all around the world into those institutions, and turn them into ‘rule-abiding citizens’. But the most important thing we were interested in doing was spreading Liberal Democracy. And when I say the foreign policy establishment it’s very important to understand I’m talking about Republicans as well as Democrats. As far as the Republicans and Democrats go on the issue of foreign policy, you’re talking about tweedle dee and tweedle dum [laughter]. 

Republicans & Dems are the same on Foreign Policy

Just think of the Bush doctrine – and as you all know George W. Bush was a Republican. The Bush doctrine, right, which was enunciated after the Afghanistan war – that was in 2001 – and before the Iraq war, which was of course was March 2003. The Bush doctrine said that what we’re gonna do is gonna go into the Middle East. We’re gonna topple the regime in Iraq, right, we’re going to put in its place a democracy. Right, we’re gonna create democracy, get rid of Saddam, just as we had done in Afghanistan? Remember? […laughter]  We toppled the Taliban and we put Hamid Karzai in power in Afghanistan.

We’re gonna do that in Iraq, and then maybe we have to do it in one more country: Syria maybe? Iran? And pretty soon everybody in the region would get the message, they’d throw up their hands for fear that the United States would come after them, and they’d all turn into Liberal Democracies. That’s what the Bush doctrine was about. This is Republicans, and of course the Democrats were no better.

Below: AntiWar.com News Editor Dave DeCamp (with Mearsheimer, right) spoke during the conference’s Friday session…

Just a couple dudes chatting about foreign policy pic.twitter.com/HmPGWbpvwf

— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) August 31, 2024

Color Revolutions & Social Engineering by force

Both the Republicans and the Democrats love their ‘color revolutions’. What color revolutions? This is where you run around the world, overthrowing regimes, and putting in place pro-Western Liberal Democracies. It’s social engineering. And of course it’s social engineering in many cases at the end of a rifle barrel. That’s what the Bush doctrine was – it was social engineering at the end of a rifle barrel. And you ought to think about what’s going on here. You’re pursuing… a policy which me and my friends call liberal hegemony.. you’re saying you can take this big stick that you have and you can use that big stick – you can use military force – to turn a political tide inside particular countries in ways that are favorable to you.

Nationalism is the fly in the ointment 

There’s a fundamental problem with this approach to dealing the world. The fundamental problem is political. Clausewitz said war is an extension politics by other means… he’s telling you that it’s the politics that really matter… Now that’s the real fly in the ointment that the foreign policy establishment faced. That is that the most powerful political ideology on the planet is nationalism… a remarkably powerful force. It’s very hard for Americans to understand this… It basically says the world is divided into nations. The highest social group that we identify with is the nation. Sam Huntington talked about the ‘clash of civilians’. Civilians are not the highest social unit that people will really identify with in a meaningful way: it’s the nation. And what nations want is their own state… think about the concept of a nation-state… that’s nationalism. It has nationalism embedded. 

Theodore Hertzel, who was the father of Zionism… his most famous book is called “The Jewish State”… nation-state.. Jewish nation state.. Jewish state. The Palestinians want their own state. They view themselves as a nation, as in they want their own state. You live in a liberal state, in a liberal country… you live in a liberal nation-state. Madeline Albright who was a card carrying liberal of the first order, she was famous for her statement that we are an exceptional nation, we stand tall, we see further than other nations. She understood that we were a nation-state. She was not only a liberal, she was a nationalist par excellence…

And the problem that you face is that nationalism has deeply embedded in it the concept of self-determination: ‘we’re sovereign’. And nation-states do not like the idea of other nation states coming into their territory and doing social engineering. You know how exercised American get when there’s talk about the Russians interfering in our elections? [laughter]…this is American nationalism at play. Countries around the world… they don’t want us doing social engineering… can you imagine us allowing someone doing social engineering inside the borders of the United States? Well as my mother taught me as a little boy what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Unsurprisingly people outside the United States don’t like that at all. 

Vietnam: not about Communism, but Nationalism

In Vietnam… we weren’t fighting communism, we were fighting nationalism. The Vietnamese wanted their own nation state, they wanted self-determination. They drove the French out at Dien Bien Phu in 1954 and they had every intention of drive us out. They didn’t want a bunch of Americans in their country telling what color toilet paper they could use [laughter]. They thought they could figure that out for themselves – that’s nationalism. You go into Afghanistan, you go into Iraq, you are really asking for big trouble. You think you’re gonna do social engineering in those countries? You think you’re going to be able to tell them what kind of political system they can have? It’s not gonna work! [clapping]

Putin doesn’t want Western Ukraine

Take the Russians. The Russians during the Cold War – as many of the old dogs in this audience like me remember – occupied a huge portion of Europe. Most of it Eastern Europe… they were up to their eyeballs in alligators dealing with protests. They had huge trouble in east Germany in 1953. In 1956 they had to invade Hungary. In 1968 they had to invade Czechoslovakia. They almost invaded Poland three separate time. And the Albanians and Romanians were a total nightmare for the Soviets. They were glad to get out of there! [laughter].

You think Vladimir Putin wants to go back there? Putin, as I’ve said on numbers occasions, did not want to invade Ukraine, he knows what happens when you start invading other countries. And he’ll take a big chunk of territory in Eastern Ukraine but he’s not gonna take a big chunk of territory in Western Ukraine cause it’s filled with ethnic Ukrainians.

And you know what that means? That if he goes in there he is going to have an insurgency that is gonna be impossible to stamp out. Because those ethnic Ukrainians are as nationalistic as you can get, and they don’t want Russia running their politics. One of the principle reasons that the Ukrainians are fighting so fiercely – it’s truly remarkable how they’ve been able to stand up to the Russians – is because of nationalism… this is the way the world works. 

Israeli plan didn’t work

And just one final example: look at the Israeli case… The Israelis long thought they could use a big stick, they call it the iron wall, to beat the Palestinians into submission to get the Palestinians to accept that it is a Jewish state, that Israeli Jews run the place, and that Palestinians are third class citizens. They have been unable to win with that policy. And what happened on October 7th is just the latest manifestation of Palestinian resistance – which is another way of saying Palestinian nationalism. 

Blindness of foreign policy elites spells more trouble ahead

What’s really amazing is the foreign policy elite does not seem to have gotten the message. There’s just no healthy appreciation of the power of nationalism inside the American foreign policy establishment, be they Democrats or Republicans. The end result is we are likely in the years ahead to have more trouble because of our inability to conceptualize just what a powerful force nationalism is. 

Blunt killing machines & social engineering? 

Militaries are good at breaking things [laughter]. These are giant killing machines. For anybody who spent any time in a military organization, it’s very important to understand: that’s what their good at. You want lots of people who are good at killing people on the other side. When you go to war you have these two huge organizations clashing into each other, armed to the teeth with all sorts of sophisticated weapons. And the A’s are trying to kill the B’s and the B’s are trying to kill the A’s. They’re trained to do that. Well, do you think that that military – just think of the people who will be at the front lines of that military – is gonna be good at doing social engineering in a foreign country… where nobody knows the culture, nobody speaks the language. Really? A bunch of American GIs running around in south Vietnam… what do you think that’s going to end up doing? You are more likely to get a Mai Lai massacre with Lieutenant Calley than you are… and have successful social engineering. Furthermore, even if you brought in a bunch of trained people, and you replaced those GIs with trained experts at social engineering, and you set them at the task of doing social engineering in south Vietnam or Afghanistan. Do you think they’d succeed? I don’t think so [laughter].

Think about the United States. Think about doing social engineering in our own country. Our system is broke and we can’t even fix it. But we’re going to go into Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. …The Soviets figured this out in Eastern Europe… This is the way the world works [nationalism as the driver]… and it’s a relative recent phenomena – you don’t want to lose sight of that, but it is the most powerful political ideology on the planet. 

Permanent State of Emergency

People who don’t understand the limits of what you can do with the military… and think that we have the right and responsibility and the capability to reorder the world in our image, are going to end up creating a highly militarized society. Remember I said that in international anarchy the United States is always going to have a large military. But that’s different from saying we are always going to have a large military that’s fighting wars. That’s they key distinction you want to keep in mind. 

And what’s happened to the United States over time is that we not only have a large military but we’re fighting wars all the time. And the end result is that we’re in a permanent state of emergency… it happens to be worse now than it was two years ago or four years ago… but we’re in a permanent state of emergency… when you’re in a permanent state of emergency liberalism begins to erode in serious ways [that is, the classical Liberalism which undergirds the rise of the modern West]. …Liberalism is in my opinion under threat in the United States, and what’s quite remarkable here is that the foreign policy elite, Republicans and Democrats – that have taken us into these wars – have had a worldview that is thoroughly infused with liberal values and liberal thinking… and as I said to you… [they] missed the importance of nationalism. So these people are not anti-liberals at heart, but the policies that they are pushing this country to pursue… those policies are undermining liberalism in the end, which in my opinion is a great tragedy.