Great Delusion by John J. Mearsheimer

Author:John J. Mearsheimer
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2018-09-15T04:30:00+00:00

The Limits and Perils of Social Engineering

This abysmal record of failure should have been foreseen. Doing large-scale social engineering in any society, including one’s own, is an enormously complicated task. What is amazing is that so many American policymakers and pundits were confident they could fundamentally alter the political landscape in a host of Middle Eastern countries and turn them into democracies. The United States was intervening in countries it knew astonishingly little about—few government officials even spoke Arabic or knew that Sunni and Shi’a were different branches of Islam—and its violation of those states’ right of self-determination was bound to generate resentment. Furthermore, the countries were all riven with factions and were likely to be in turmoil once the government was brought down. Doing social engineering in a foreign country while fighting to control it is a wickedly hard task.

The problem is particularly acute when the United States invades another country, because the American military forces occupying that country inevitably end up tasked with the nation- and state-building necessary to produce a functioning liberal democracy. In the age of nationalism, however, occupation almost always breeds an insurgency, as the United States discovered long ago in the Philippines and later in Vietnam, long before it entered Afghanistan and Iraq. The occupier must then engage in counterinsurgency, which means fighting a long and bloody military campaign with high odds of failure. The difficulty of winning at counterinsurgency is clearly reflected in the December 2006 edition of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual 3-24. It not only warns that “insurgencies are protracted by nature” but also cautions that “political and military leaders and planners should never underestimate [their] scale and complexity.”44

It is clear from the historical record that the effort to impose democracy on another country usually fails.45 Andrew Enterline and J. Michael Greig, for example, examined forty-three cases of imposed democratic regimes between 1800 and 1994 and found that nearly 63 percent failed.46 Jeffrey Pickering and Mark Peceny, who investigated the democratizing consequences of interventions by liberal states from 1946 to 1996, conclude that “liberal intervention . . . has only very rarely played a role in democratization since 1945.”47 As Alexander Downes and Jonathan Monten point out, imposing democracy on another country is likely to work “if favorable internal preconditions are present. These conditions, unfortunately, are relatively rare in countries where the costs of intervention are low.”48 Great powers like the United States, however, do not invade to attempt regime change unless the costs are low, which means the necessary preconditions for liberal democracy will not be present.

Predictably, the United States has a rich history of failing to impose democracy on other countries. New York University professors Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and George Downs report that between World War II and 2004, “the United States intervened more than 35 times in developing countries around the world. . . . In only one case—Colombia after the American decision in 1989 to engage in the war on drugs—did a full-fledged, stable democracy .

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