Part II: Unsettling Liberal Hegemony with Jeannie Morefield | Ep. 134

What's up gang, thanks for listening to the undiplomatic podcast, the show with undiplomatic takes about the foreign policy scene. I'm your host Van Jackson. And this is actually part two of my conversation with Dr. Jeannie Moorfield at Oxford. We go deep, deep on the sort of problems, limitations, pathologies of liberal internationalist foreign policy. We talk about a bunch of John Eichenberry's work. It's kind of an intense discussion, but really good. If you are at all into the foreign policy debates and how they intersect with international relations theory, this is for you. Enjoy. Catch you soon. Peace. Seems like it has only two modes. And you mentioned earlier how it's like there's this constant crisis mindset. There is like this perpetual crisis vibe in liberalism, but there's also like the end of history vibe, like just pure fucking like triumphalism. There is no alternative. You know, those seem like two extremes. I think that comes back to the fact that there is no there there, right? There is no actual vision of the world. So they don't have a vision of like what a kind of really integrated, non hierarchical, redistributive, functioning anti-capitalist world could be, right? So because they, and they don't, so they are always in reaction mode, and they are always throwing words out at you. So what, again, what we believe in is human rights. We believe in multilateralism. We believe in free and fair trade. I mean, again, it's a soup and it depends on the day what flavors you get. And because there is no there there, there's only things that you can gin up in the moment. So you're either ginning up crisis or you're ginning up triumph and it moves back and forth. I think the thing that's really important to know is that the crisis is always there. So even in their most imperialist Lee, and they wouldn't say this, but their most triumphalist moments and in the 90s, right? You can go back and look at articles that Dudney and Ike and Barry wrote in the mid 90s, and they're already starting to talk about what looks like crisis. So they're starting to say, okay, yeah, maybe all of this nationalism in Europe, this might make us a little nervous about the liberal world order in the West. But that is not a cause for a crisis of self confidence. So this starts really early. And then very few people have spent as much time with Ike and Barry's publications as I have. And I can tell you that at least twice a year, the word crisis appears in something that he has written since about 2000, right? Just go look it up. And it is a staunch name. So crisis is baked into the triumphalism. It's not even that there's two modes. It's that those modes are sort of dialectically related to each other. You're either the best thing that ever happened in the world, or you're on the brink of disaster. And that is always pulling at each other. And that is totally imperialist. That goes right back to the way that Britain at its apex, right, right before World War One, when it had more land mass than any other country in the world, when it had more financial power than any other country in the world was absolutely convinced it was all about to crumble. And I mean, they weren't that far wrong in this case, but it took a while, right? It took 30 years. At the same time, it is baked into each other, utter triumphalism, absolute height of power, and absolute fear of losing it all. And that is also what happens when you don't have an actual vision. When all you have is reaction, when all you have is a sense that the alternative could be worse, authoritarian is worse, Russia would be worse, communism would be worse, China would be worse, everything else would be worse. Also, yes, we've done bad things, but it was always better than the option would have been if that's all you have. And come on, I'm a non-democratic voter of a certain age, right? I've been voting since Ralph Nader, and I was voting for Ralph Nader, right, where I could say, like, this is really, this is all you're going to give me, which is that if you don't vote for me, we'll lose the Supreme Court. And I've been hearing that for 18 years old, right? That was always the threat. It was always going to happen anyway, because there was no there there. And if you don't have a there there, you don't have a vision, then at the end of the day, all you have is crisis and triumph. Yeah. George H. W. Bush, after the fucking fall of the Berlin Wall, he gave some strategy speech where he said, the enemy is uncertainty. And like, it's so good. The reason why we got to do XYZ and have this size military and like keep everything same same as it was during the Cold War is uncertainty. That's the big. Yeah. Fuck. I want to. Which is why that. Which is why that survival article was I mean that, which is why they wrote that, right? Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. I want to get to the survival article in one second. I just I had one question about like the I can bury a world safe for democracy. It's clearly of the same larger like the punchline of that book is liberal hegemony still. But there were aspects of it that seemed modified. I don't know what the right phrase is. There are some things different going on in that book, even though the punchline is the same. And so like one is he actually engaged with liberalism's imperial past a bit, which like I hadn't I had seen more sanitized in some of the previous work to he tried really hard to graft the liberal world order explicitly to FDR to Roosevelt instead of Woodrow Wilson, which is an interesting shift. And then three, like I took him as saying basically racism, imperialism, militarism. These were kind of like temporary misappropriations of liberalism or like negative externalities of liberalism that good liberals sort of figured out how to deal with and that's in the past now, liberals are good at updating was kind of like the punchline. I mean, am I summarizing it correctly to your understanding? Like, why do you think it's like slightly different than the others but still the same? Well, for one thing, I think he couldn't get away from the fact that there were too many people doing this work. And because I think John, I can actually someone who is not so far gone down the rabbit hole of, I think he is a scholar, I think he knows and is aware that in the universe, there are more and more people writing in history and in IR, and in about the connections between imperialism and liberal internationalism. So not just imperialism and liberalism, but specifically the world view that he's concerned with. Strategically, I don't, he and dude, he couldn't do anything but abandon Wilson, right? Woodwell Wilson School is no longer called the Wilson School. It hurts in 2022! And they hung on a really long time. But at the end of the day, it's not just that he was a domestic racist. People have proven that his international vision was from the very beginning based on the global color line. That is, and that is not refutable. So I think quietly abandoning him and simply moving to Roosevelt as if this had always been the obvious choice. I mean, come on, these were people who committed themselves to Neil Wilsonianism. They only abandoned him because it was proven beyond a reasonable doubt that he was not a good model for what they were thinking. So anyway, they had to do that strategically. But also I think because it was very hard to ignore the work that's being done on this. And so John Eikenberry went on what amount is who are listening to her where he went and read a lot of people. He read, you know, he read Duncan Bell, he read Uday Mehta, he read me thinly, he read Adam Gadichu, he read a variety of people, right? And he cited us all and came to the same conclusions. And he gets to the same conclusions by doing one really important thing, which is he is constantly turning imperialism, the question of liberalism and imperialism into a question of essential value. So he'll say, so he'll say, does liberalism have to be imperial, right? And then if you can say, it doesn't, because I can show in a myriad of examples why it hasn't been, that never has to be, which means it's always useful, right? And that all means that anytime liberal states or liberal world hegemons or liberal empires act imperialy, it's exceptional. So the number of times in that book, he says, okay, liberal internationalism from the very beginning comes in on the tail of imperialism. And yet, liberal internationalism is not inherently imperialist, would make your eyes just go out of your head, right? He just, he does this again and again. Because for Eikenberry, liberalism is not about historical connections. So it's not about the fact that liberals throughout most of anything, anytime that people have been calling themselves liberal have been involved in imperialism. It's the fact that it doesn't essentially have to be so. Because in fact, there can be liberals who are anti-imperialists. Right? So if it doesn't essentially have to be so, we can always say over and over and over again, that's not the way it has to be. And if that's your commitment, right, if we can say, despite the fact that liberalism and liberal imperialism have largely been connected to imperial endeavors, but they don't have to be, then we're just going to keep hitching our wagon to this train. Or as someone said, you know, at a workshop that I was at with him, you keep riding this bicycle of liberalism and you keep weighing it down with all of these things. You keep weighing it down with the empire, you keep weighing it down with like racism. And yet you keep driving, right? And you keep riding it and riding it. And my reaction was like, well, it's not just that you keep riding it, but you keep riding it and you keep screaming at people who are getting hit. Get out of the way. This is the only way forward, right? This is the alternative, right? So I think the thing about that book is I think he went into it, prepared to find what he wanted to find. And what he wanted to find is that liberalism is salvageable, that is not inherently imperial. And that's what he found. So this might be a good moment to turn to the survival piece. So I guess it was maybe last, I can't remember the exact date, but it was last year, I suppose, Daniel Dunney and John Eikenberry write this journal article for the journal Survival, which is an odd bird of a journal. It's academic, it's peer reviewed, but it's also not peer reviewed. Like some pieces don't get peer reviewed. And so the level of scrutiny that a piece gets, it's, you know, editorial discretion kind of thing. So in that context, they publish this piece called misplaced restraint, the Quincy Institute versus liberal internationalism. So I read them a is saying basically that the Quincy Institute was the only meaningful challenge to liberal internationalism, which, which is not true. And then B, so like if they vanquished Quincy in those pages, then the problem is solved. Once again, there is no alternative. But then B, you wrote an essay response that I got the chance to read. It was really sharp. And like, I wanted to get you to kind of like talk, talk through that or talk that out here. Because I want to, I wrote an essay response that survival refused to publish. Yeah, that's interesting. Because I think we already had a response. They had a response from a Quincy Institute realist. And then I think that they can only recognize two positions, realism and liberal internationalism, and some, you know, anti imperialist historically minded theorist comes in and what's that some lady. So anyway, I didn't get a chance. It doesn't count. Yeah. What was your, it was, it was like a very full throated critique and response to their hit piece, you know, like you were hitting back at their hit piece. What did you find problematic in that survival piece? Or even on a meta level, did you find like, what was, what was your beef there? So my beef was, I wasn't even the, my, my take on it was that I did not want to engage with all the ways that it was wrong in terms of its characterization of what we were doing. The line by line. Yeah. The line by line. So I didn't want to go through the way that it was, that it basically just mirrored a kind of Trumpian false equivalencies, the way that it really threw people under the bus. It essentially said that if you don't support liberal internationalism and you're on the left, then you are basically enabling Trump. Or so I just didn't want to like engage that. So I, what I did was say, I'm going to look at the rhetorical resemblance between this and liberal imperialism and tell you the ways in which this resembles liberal imperialism and in particular resembles a kind of shutting down of discourse that again gets us to that there is no alternative position. And, and so I sort of walked through the ways that it echoes a kind of, again, the familiar strategies, though, the alternative is always worse at the liberals have always been at the forefront of all the best things. And so if you don't recognize that, then you must be a fascist. There's just varieties of language that they use to close the aperture on our capacity to, to, to think otherwise, right? That, that piece was about shutting down thinking otherwise. And what's so, I mean, interesting, and I, and I, one of the reasons I think I take a bit of hope from that piece is that I think they might be scared. So I, I, they wouldn't have written that if they hadn't had some sense that this very strange coalition of realist libertarians and anti imperialists were like, basically onto them. In some ways, all of us were saying there has got to be a different way to think about this and that we need to open up international security discourse to the point where we can have full throated conversations about both alternatives and critiques that incorporate more voices. I mean, reasonable. Why, why would you not want to publish that? Well, if you want there to be no alternative, maybe, I don't know. Or you want to say the alternative is realism and we can accept that because it's within a bandwidth that resonates with our understanding. Yeah, the field more comfortable with you. So the thing that catalyzed this episode is I can various foreign affairs essay, which was called why American power endures. And amazingly, we have not talked about it yet. But in a way, it's kind of all we've talked about because it's kind of the same through line. So, you know, re reading that essay, it made me supremely uncomfortable because it described a world situation and it prescribed a role for the US that to me does not resemble reality anymore. If, you know, if ever arguably, and you can kind of sense that he's trying to rally the troops of like the liberal international order to like hold the line, no matter how things are changing, no matter what kind of negative feedback comes in. The answer is just more cowbell, you know, like don't don't look behind the curtain kind of thing. Like, I mean, so what was your reaction when you saw this piece? How did this hit you? I mean, so I have to say, I am angrier and angrier anytime I read anything where he writes about empire, because he is he digs himself deeper and deeper into this. So the big takeaway from that piece is that critics of American who call America an empire, come at it with a narrative that sees empires in terms of an arc of rise and decline. And so what they are seeing is that America is on the decline. So the only imperial, so there can't be any critical anti imperialist lens, which is not already attached to a kind of teleological history that ends with decline, right? Like there can't be a critical take you could get on the world that you could get through anti imperialism, you can you can only get decline as them. And so it once again, the piece ended up being everything he has ever written ever, ever, right, ever, which is to say, at the end of the day, America is the best way forward. And even though we might be feeling insecure at the moment, really, this is not true. And we are full on the best thing for the world. And and yet, modest about it in 2022. Right, exactly in 2022. And so, but I think it is, it's shockingly tone deaf. It's shockingly tone deaf to all of the people all over the world who are trying to say from a variety of anti imperial locations, right, from indigenous activists to anti capitalist activists to people all over the world who are trying to say there are other ways of thinking about democracy, about power, about global organization, about the war in Ukraine, about all of this like for the love of God that like all of we the fact that we somehow are not talking about nuclear weapons, when we're somehow talking and I there was very little engagement with that question in that is America on the plane. It's just shocking to me, it is tone deaf. It's irresponsible. And I mean, I don't even know what to say, because it's so it's so political without deciding it's political, if that makes sense, it can declare itself neutral and of goodwill. But it is deeply, deeply partisan and political. And I am at in 2022 have no tolerance for it. Hey, the thing that gets me is like, anybody who subscribes to a sort of liberal hegemonic worldview, whether it's like to the letter that I can bury prescribes it as or it's like some other, you know, modest variant. How in what world does aligning with a fucking hegemon? How is that apolitical? What the fuck are you talking about? You know, like the idea that that's nonpartisan or like beyond the political like, come on, man, come on. Well, that's the only way that works, Van, is if you say that America is in fact, the good, you have to fall on exceptionalism. Yeah, to fall on exceptionalism. There is no other way to make sense of it. You know, I don't put a lot of stock in frequency analysis. But I did. I there was like, Empire was kind of like emanating off of the page as I was reading it. And so like I did the little frequency count. And the word empire or imperialism was used 32 times in one essay . This is not a journal article. It's not a book. It's a foreign affairs piece. 32 times. Yeah, yeah, there's not that much words to. So I don't even know what to do with that observation to be honest. But it's like, Empire is sublimated in the pros. Like it's there, even though it's not there. Like at the end of the day, it is all about imperialism. And you can only keep you can only tamp that down for so long. And it's expanding with each thing he writes, he has to keep in this hypostatic way, sort of saying it isn't that it isn't that it isn't that it isn't that the more it looks like it. So there's one thing I want to quote. There's like a paragraph or a couple sentences. He says, Yes, the United States has at times resembled an old style empire, but its role in the world rests on much more than its past imperial behavior. US power draws not only on brute strength, but also on ideas, institutions and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity. The global order the United States has built since the end of World War Two is best seen not as an empire, but as a world system. Is that not literally trying to rebrand empire while also taking credit for the world system while also not taking responsibility for the deep structures of exploitation and under development in said world system? What the fuck? Like I have he's I don't know him personally. I have nothing against him personally. You know, to be honest, this podcast will probably get me in trouble career wise. You know, like I know I have friends who are co authors with him, but like just at a purely analytical rhetorical level is he it seems like he's describing a liberal empire, but B, he wants the good of what happens in the world and to take credit for it while not taking credit for the bad. And like, I can't right, I'm looking at this quote right now, as you sent it to me and it is so and I remember reading this. So when he says, Yes, the United States has at times resembled an old style empire, but its role in the world rests on much more than Imperial behavior. US power draws not only on brute strength, but on ideas, institutions and values that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity, that is literally the definition of empire. Go meet Edward Said. That is imperialism is not just about with about brute strength. Imperialism is about institutions, values, ideas that are complexly woven into the fabric of modernity into the history of modernity itself, imperialism. This is what drives me out of my mind. I mean, that was my reaction to there's I see analytical discrepancies and problems, and it evokes pathos in me because it's like, there's like real world injustice implications on the back of this analysis that is incorrect. I mean, like, this is telling a story that justifies power, you know, and powers the root of our problems. So like, what? Yeah, this is not innocent, right? And I think what's hard, what's really always very hard about criticizing liberals is that they are frequently really good, thoughtful people who understand themselves to be good, thoughtful people who are frequently some of the nicest people you will meet, who are frequently people who do good things for the people around them, right, but who are also putting forward ideas that I happen to think are dangerous for the world, right. So you have to hold to those two things together, right, that liberals frequently can be extraordinarily nice people who think they are doing good, and also really are saying things that are dangerous, and they are both. There were things about this piece that there were several there were like specific things that seemed to like not not apprehend what was happening in the world kind of like in real time, like even separate from like logical arguments, you know, he's he's like, he says, the world system that America built word into action against Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And the world the world, a quarter of the planet is against us sanctions on Russia. I have no problem sanctioning Russia or whatever it'd be like, that's the global south is on a totally different wavelength, you know, the General Assembly voting patterns are like erratic and like strategic non alignment, I think you mentioned this or strategic non alignment in his view does not exist, like it's not happening. It's not right. I mean, part of this is an absolute unwillingness in capability of seeing the world from any other position, right. So seeing the world, seeing American power from the standpoint of its victims, or in the words of Said, like understanding the world from the position of person on whom the bomb is about to fall, right. They are incapable of doing that they cannot, which is why, because they won't let themselves go there can't let themselves go there have never had no practice doing it. They can't. They are all the American power and global hegemony always seems for the good, because for them it does seem for the good. But you are like, if you are anyone from the global south who has ever experienced, you know, like counterinsurgency, if you are a personal caller in an American city who's experienced the blowback from counterinsurgency as it works in American cities, if you are like any like if you are someone in at a wedding in Yemen who was about to be bombed by a drone, all of these things if you are anyone who was like in Chile in 1974 in any part of it's just it blows my mind that they seem to have forgotten that so many people suffer, so many people suffer for the world that they say is better than the other option. And the absolute incapacity, the hubris, the unwillingness to even stop for a moment and look there is criminal to my mind. It really is. That is the thing that's sickest about this world view. And so while on the one hand I can say that these are very nice people, their unwillingness to stop being just nice guys and like think that they might not know everything is wrong. It's distressing. And I don't know what to do about it other than to keep pointing it out. And if I keep pointing it out I get accused of being mean to John Eikenberry. So this is the trouble to like I some of my friends who are in the Biden administration I keep saying they're friends but like I think we're not friends anymore for the most part. Like I've heard very recently that like they think my views of foreign policy are too extreme. And in DC, there's nothing worse than to call somebody extreme. I mean that's and it doesn't matter what the substance of it is. It doesn't matter that I'm talking about arms control and reducing military spending and not heedlessly risking fucking wars in places and like not inadvertently spiking anti-Asian fucking hate crimes. I mean like the if you look at the substance of like what I advocate for on foreign policy, it's like the only sane agenda. But in defense of liberal hegemony, it's portrayed as extreme. Anything extreme is unacceptable. And there's no substantive engagement with it. You know, this is where we are now. The theory what strikes me and what your work sort of conveyed to me was like the theory of liberal hegemony is like functionally a ruling class ideology. And that's a problem. That means that when you talk about foreign policy for the middle class and that kind of stuff, it's just it's like the politics of deflection almost like it's a rhetorical strategy, but the shit is going on the same as it ever was, you know, it is it is a politics of global autocracy that's dressed up as a politics of, I don't know, of all the things again, the liberal soup, global engagement, right. And it is it's fundamentally imperial. It is fundamentally based on on irrational and destructive foundations. So if you spend if you are a society that has no healthcare system and is spending a trillion dollars a year on your security state, that is irrational and immoral. That's not extremist to call that into if you are if you live in a world where, you know, nuclear weapons still exist and we had a chance to denuclearize in the 90s. And we said no, no, that's immoral and irrational. Right. That is not extremist. The only way that this makes sense is if you say some people are really, really invested on like a like a sort of deep level, both material and and and in terms of their subjective identity to their status as a global hegemon to a kind of global hierarchy, then that that's the only thing that makes sense out of this. And what's I the handyman of this I have that on our one of my chapters is on Jan Smuts and that empires without imperialism book and he was called empire's handyman because in some ways he went around and fixed things for liberals when things looked rough. Like when you couldn't quite square apartheid and liberalism, you call you call Jan Smuts when you can't quite square empire and the leg of nations you call Jan Smuts. I think that's essentially John Ike and Barry and Dan Dooney. They are empires handyman. Like what is the difference between a theory of liberal hegemony and like emperor Palpatine's theory to justify the galactic empire. They both require global basing infrastructure. They both require obscene defense budgets. They both require like fucking pan glossing over forever wars. I mean, like they both require surveillance surveillance. Yeah. But you know what? You and I are the ones who are out of touch. We're extreme. We are the ones who are out of touch and we don't understand reality. Yeah. And we're radical. Extreme and radical. What could be radical? Yeah. Out of touch. Do you have any parting thoughts? I feel like we've really emptied the chamber on this one. No. I mean, in some ways I think I told you this. I can empty the chamber because I have nothing invested in this. To a certain extent, the vast majority of the people I know who are IR scholars of any ilk cannot piss off this cadre of liberal internationalists because they are relatively powerful, because they are kind of king makers, because they are also known as nice people and are nice people in this weird insular world in which we travel. I have nothing invested there because I don't do IR. I'm an anti-imperial scholar. This kind of critique is like dicier for me professionally, but I take my cues from Edward Said, like representations of an intellectual. I have internalized it. That's why I wanted to reach out to you aside from the fact that we seem to mind meld in the way we reacted to that essay initially. But I think the reason we react similarly is in part at least because of maybe you internalize Said too. We have a kind of common thing there. I don't know. I mean, sometimes I have a hard time knowing kind of where Said ends and I begin. I think writing the book on him and thinking that way means it was so funny because I end my last book on Said with a chapter on I can bury. I was in a round table on the book and Bob Vitalis said, "Oh, I get. You did a Said thing where you ended it just like he ends it in Orientalism." And I thought, "Oh, I did?" And then I'm like, "Yeah, I did. You're right." That's exactly what I did. Even though I hadn't known that's what I was doing, but I think I just, yeah, I drank the Said Goulay. Same. All right. Well, this has been awesome. Thanks for coming on the show. I'm really glad that everybody gets to hear you speak on this. And above all, people need to know that there is an alternative. Yeah. There's not no alternative. Yeah. There is always an alternative. Yeah. Thanks, man. All right. Thank you.