The affirmative’s attempt to “maintain” a “liberalized” international order inevitably generates failed states and forces interventions abroad while replicating costly foreign policy.

Let me start with the bad news. You’ll all remember the unipolar moment of the 1990s. The United States is dominant, the wind is at our back. Our only problems are a few pesky dictators, who haven’t really gotten the memo yet. The United States is on good terms with all the major powers, including Russia and China. Iraq was being disarmed. Iran had no nuclear enrichment capacity. We thought we had capped North Korea’s nuclear program as well. Globalization is proceeding rapidly with the formation of the World Trade Organization. NATO and the European Union are expanding, democracy is spreading worldwide. We have the Oslo Accords, meaning that we think we’re on the brink of a final peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. The American military seems unstoppable. The American economy’s actually doing pretty well.

Now, you fast forward to today. China’s power and ambitions have grown steadily. Russia has seized Crimea, relations with Moscow now are worse than at any time since the Cold War. Of course, Moscow and Beijing are increasingly aligned and cooperating against us. Democracy is now in retreat. According to Freedom House, a New York-based think tank, 2017 was the 12th consecutive year where global freedom declined. Since 1993, North Korea, India, and Pakistan have all tested nuclear weapons. Iran has acquired the capacity to build nuclear weapons if it ever wants to. It has all the technological capabilities it needs.

Needless to say, Middle East peace did not occur. Various efforts to finally broker a solution, were all failures. The United States is attacked on September 11th, we respond by invading Afghanistan and then Iraq. Both of these wars ended up being costly, open-ended disasters that among other things, means the U.S. military no longer seems quite so invincible.

Indeed, much of the Middle East is in turmoil now with our interference helping create failed states, in Libya and Yemen and Somalia and Syria. Now, one consequence is that back in 2016 when Donald Trump ran for president, he said in his first foreign policy speech that American foreign policy was a complete and total disaster. The problem was that a lot of Americans nodded their heads in agreement, and when they thought about the record there. I argue in the book that the taproot of many of these failures, was the strategy of liberal hegemony. I say liberal, not in the sense of being less doing or progressive, but because it seeks to promote these classic liberal values, democracy markets, rule of law, human rights. It’s one of hegemony, because it sees the United States as the indispensable nation that is uniquely qualified to lead that process and bring other states into a sort of web of institutions where those values are reflected.

When you think about it, this is a highly revisionist grand strategy. We’re not just defending American territory, and perhaps upholding a balance of power in a critical strategic region. Liberal hegemony sought to remake the world in America’s image. Change the political status quo in lots of parts of the world. Ideally through non-military means, but if necessary in some circumstances by using military force.

This sounds great to Americans, because we like all these values and we think others would be better off if they had them, but it actually turns out to be fundamentally flawed as a strategy. At first, it greatly inflates America’s defense requirements.

By 2016, for example, the United States was formally committed by treaty to defending more countries than at any time in the nation’s history. That protection allows our allies to free-ride, which many of them do. Well, and in some cases even to act recklessly, to do various things knowing that the United States will bail them out if they get into trouble.

Secondly, trying to spread liberal values all over the world threatens countries that aren’t democratic, that aren’t liberal already. They of course stand together to try and slow us down, stop us, fold our efforts in various ways. Most importantly, this strategy assumed that we knew how to create stable and effective democracies in the wake of regime change.

When we succeeded in toppling a dictator, instead of creating a flourishing democracy, we ended up with failed states and costly military occupations. We should have known better. Creating a workable democracy is a very difficult thing to do, particularly in a poor, deeply divided society with no democratic traditions. The belief that we could do this in places like Iraq or Libya, Afghanistan or Somalia or Yemen, I think, was just delusional back then.