约翰·米尔斯海默谈国际关系、强权政治和特朗普时代 [美国媒体]

John Mearsheimer on InternationalRelations, Great Power Politics, and the Age of Trump

约翰·米尔斯海默谈国际关系、强权政治和特朗普时代



约翰·米尔斯海默(John J. Mearsheimer)的《大妄想:自由主义梦想与国际现实》(The Great Delusion:Liberal Dreams and International fact)一书指出，美国追求“自由主义霸权”的努力是失败的，付出了巨大的代价

WHEN THE Cold War ended aquarter century ago, many realists expected the United States to retrench anddemobilize. Instead, while drawing down some of its military forces, thecountry did the opposite. The United States waged war to expel Iraq from Kuwait,intervened in the Yugoslav civil war and promoted the expansion of NATO toinclude Eastern Europe and—many hoped, until Russia violentlyintervened—Georgia and Ukraine. Following the Al Qaeda attacks of September 11,2001, the United States not only went to war against the Taliban regime inAfghanistan, but also engaged in “wars of choice” to topple Saddam Hussein inIraq, Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya and Bashar al-Assad in Syria, while addingU.S. participation in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen. The United States is nowengaged in more simultaneous small wars on more fronts than at any point in itshistory.

四分之一个世纪前冷战结束时，许多现实主义者预计美国将裁减军队并遣散军队。然而，这个国家在削减部分军事力量的同时，却采取了相反的行动。美国发动战争，将伊拉克驱逐出科威特，干预南斯拉夫内战，并推动北约扩大到包括东欧——这是许多人的期望。直到俄罗斯以暴力干涉了格鲁吉亚和乌克兰。
2001年9月11日基地组织发动袭击后，美国不仅在阿富汗对塔利班政权发动了战争，而且还参与了推翻伊拉克萨达姆·侯赛因、利比亚穆阿迈尔·卡扎菲和叙利亚巴沙尔·阿萨德的“选择性战争”， 同时美国也参与了沙特阿拉伯在也门的战争。美国现在在更多的战线上同时进行着比历史上任何时候都多的小规模战争。

In The GreatDelusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities , politicalscientist John Mearsheimer argues that the disappearance of the constraintsimposed by Cold War bipolarity vouchsafed the United States the luxury of tryingto reshape the world to conform to America’s domestic political creed ofliberalism. Mearsheimer, a professor of political science at the University ofChicago, has written extensively on international relations from a realistperspective, including The Tragedy of Great Power Politics .Now he offers his most sweeping analysis of America’s purpose. Any argumentabout national and world politics is necessarily schematic. But a catechisticconcision which might be a fault in others is a virtue in the case ofMearsheimer, whose prose is as perspicuous as his analysis. Accessible and yetrigorous, The Great Delusion deserves to be read bypolicymakers, scholars and the public alike.

约翰·米尔斯海默在书中认为，冷战时期两极对立所施加的制约消失了，这使得美国有能力重新塑造世界，以符合美国国内的自由主义政治信条。
芝加哥大学政治学教授米尔斯海默，曾以现实主义视角广泛论述国际关系，包括大国政治的悲剧。
现在，他对美国的目的进行了最全面的分析。任何关于国家和世界政治的争论都必须是图解式的。对于米尔斯海默来说，教义问答式的简练可能是别人眼中的缺点，但却是他眼中的一种美德，他的散文和他的分析一样透彻。《大妄想》通俗易懂，也很严谨，值得政策制定者、学者和公众阅读。

Thegravamen of his argument focuses on the exceptional circumstances that emergedafter 1989, when America was not simply primus inter pares but emerged as thesole superpower. According to Mearsheimer,
occasionally a liberal democracy encounterssuch a favorable balance of power that it is able to embrace liberal hegemony.That situation is most likely to arise in a unipolar world, where the singlegreat power does not have to worry about being attacked by another great powersince there is none. Then the liberal sole pole will almost always abandonrealism and adopt a liberal foreign policy. Liberal states have a crusadermentality hardwired into them that is hard to maintain.

他的主要论点集中在1989年之后出现的特殊情况，当时美国不仅是主要国家，而且是唯一的超级大国。据他说：
“一个自由民主国家偶尔会遇到如此有利的权力平衡，以至于能够拥抱自由霸权。这种情况最有可能出现在一个单极世界中，在那里，一个大国不必担心受到另一个大国的攻击，因为不存在另一个大国。那么，自由派几乎总是会放弃现实主义，而采取自由派的外交政策。自由主义国家有一种根深蒂固的十字军心态，很难维持。”

Thishas led the United States (the only liberal superpower in history, or one oftwo, if nineteenth century Britain is counted) to adopt a strategy of liberalhegemony, “in which a state aims to turn as many countries as possible intoliberal democracies like itself while also promoting an open internationaleconomy and building international institutions.” Mearsheimer writes:
With the end of the Cold War in 1989 andthe collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States emerged as by farthe most powerful country on the planet. Unsurprisingly, the Clintonadministration embraced liberal hegemony from the start, and the policyremained firmly intact through the Bush and Obama administrations.

这导致美国(历史上唯一的自由主义超级大国，或者是两个自由主义超级大国之一，如果把19世纪的英国算上的话)采取了自由主义霸权战略，“一个国家的目标是把尽可能多的国家变成像自己一样的自由民主国家，同时促进开放的国际经济和建立国际机构。”米尔斯海默写道：
“随着1989年冷战的结束和1991年苏联的解体，美国成为迄今为止地球上最强大的国家。意料之中的是，克林顿政府从一开始就拥护自由主义霸权，而这一政策在布什和奥巴马政府中始终没有动摇。”

Mearsheimerpredicts that “liberal hegemony will not achieve its goals, and its failurewill inevitably come with huge costs.” The chief barrier to the realization ofthe dream of a global society of liberal democracies is nationalism, “aparticularist ideology from top to bottom.” Consequently, “nationalism andrealism almost always trump liberalism.” In recognition of this fact,Mearsheimer argues, the United States should abandon its post-Cold War grandstrategy of liberal hegemony in favor of a less interventionist strategy of“restraint.”

米尔斯海默预言“自由主义霸权不会实现它的目标，它的失败将不可避免地带来巨大的代价。” 实现全球自由民主社会梦想的主要障碍是民族主义，一种“自上而下的特殊意识形态”。 因此，“民族主义和现实主义几乎总是胜过自由主义。” 米尔斯海默认为，认识到这一事实，美国应该放弃冷战后自由霸权的大战略，而采取一种较少干涉主义的“克制”战略。

Mearsheimerhas little trouble demolishing three reinforcing academic theories ofinternational relations invoked after 1989 to justify America’s post-Cold Wargrand strategy of liberal hegemony: democratic peace theory, economicindependence theory and liberal institutionalism. For Mearsheimer, these arerationalizations for a policy whose actual inspiration is to be sought inAmerica’s centuries-old political culture of liberalism.

米尔斯海默毫不费力地驳倒了1989年后用来证明美国冷战后自由霸权大战略合理性的三种强化的国际关系理论：民主和平理论、经济独立理论和自由制度主义。在米尔斯海默看来，这些都是对一项政策的合理化解释，而这项政策的真正灵感来自于美国数百年历史的自由主义政治文化。

Much ofthe book is devoted to a history of liberal political and social thought in theWestern world as a whole. Mearsheimer assigns—some might say shoehorns—a numberof thinkers into two categories: expansive “progressive liberalism” and “modusvivendi liberalism,” a term he borrows from the philosopher John Gray, who maybe surprised to find himself in the same bunkroom in the liberal camp asFriedrich Hayek, Adam Smith and John Locke. Mearsheimer’s emphasis on big-nameauthors from academic curricula could be criticized for leading him to neglectnon-academic traditions like Social Gospel Protestantism, which arguably hashad more influence on the attitudes of American liberal Wilsonians.

这本书的大部分内容是关于整个西方世界的自由主义政治和社会思想史的。米尔斯海默的任务——将一些思想家分为两类: 他借用了哲学家约翰·格雷的术语，后者可能会惊讶地发现，自己与弗里德里希·哈耶克、亚当·斯密和约翰·洛克在自由派阵营的同一间工棚里。米尔斯海默以学术角度强调大名鼎鼎的作家，这可能会被批评为导致他忽视了非学术传统，如社会福音新教，这可以说对美国自由-威尔逊主义者的态度产生了更大的影响。

（社会福音：19世纪末至20世纪30年代西方基督教社会运动中的一种神学主张，表达了从个人拯救转向社会拯救的思想。它摆脱传统神学仅注重个人伦理的局限而开始研究社会伦理问题，考虑基督教福音的社会意义，由此形成社会福音运动。它作为一种神学理论始于美国）

Butthese are quibbles. The case against liberal hegemony as a grand strategy forthe United States that Mearsheimer offers is compelling. Alas, Mearsheimer’sproposed alternative of “restraint” is unlikely to be adopted for two reasons.The first is the division of realists themselves among rival camps, whoseadherents would not be able to agree on a single realist alternative to liberalhegemony. The second is the increasing fusion of geopolitics with geo-economicsin areas like trade, immigration and innovation policy, a subject about whichAmerican academic realists of all denominations have had little to say.

但这些都是吹毛求疵。米尔斯海默提出的反对自由主义霸权作为美国的一项大战略的理由是令人信服的。唉，然而米尔斯海默提出的“约束”的替代方案不太可能被采纳，原因有二：
首先是现实主义者自身在对立阵营中的分裂，这些阵营的追随者无法就自由霸权之外的单一现实主义者达成一致。
其次是地缘政治与地缘经济学在贸易、移民和创新政策等领域的日益融合，而美国各大学术现实主义者对这一主题几乎没有发言权。

Mearsheimerdefends the school known as “offensive realism” against its sibling rival,“defensive realism.” Offensive realism owes its name, not to the fact thatpeople find it offensive (though liberals, libertarians, Marxists and othersdo) but to the assertion that states, given the opportunity, are likely to tryto maximize their relative power, out of fear that others will do the same, andare justified in doing so. According to Mearsheimer:
The structure of the international systemoften forces great powers to engage in intense security competition andsometimes initiate wars. International politics is a nasty and brutishbusiness, and not just because misguided liberal ideas or other malevolentdomestic forces influence states’ foreign policies. Great powers occasionallystart wars for sound realist reasons.

米尔斯海默为这所被称为“进攻性现实主义”的学校辩护，反对它的兄弟对手“防御性现实主义”。 进攻性现实主义的得名，不是因为人们认为的那种进攻性(尽管自由派、自由主义者、马克思主义者和其他一些让人觉得冒犯/进攻性)，而是因为国家的主张。要是有机会，他们可能会试图最大化自己的相对权力，因为他们担心其他人也会这么做，而且这么做是合理的。据米尔斯海默说:
“国际体系的结构经常迫使大国进行激烈的安全竞争，有时甚至发动战争。国际政治是一件肮脏而野蛮的事情，这不仅仅是因为误入歧途的自由主义思想或其他恶毒的国内势力影响了各国的外交政策。大国偶尔会出于合理的现实原因发动战争。”

Appropriately,Mearsheimer’s earlier summary of offensive realism is entitled TheTragedy of Great Power Politics . This pessimistic vision of worldpolitics as a Hobbesian bellum omnium contra omnes is rejected by manydefensive realists. Mearsheimer, for example, alludes to an article by CharlesGlaser entitled “Realists as Optimists.” He quotes Sebastian Rosato and JohnSchuessler defining defensive realism as a “recipe for security without war”and Marc Trachtenberg stating that “power is not unstable.”
The twoacademic schools of realism differ when it comes to the question of whether astate, given the opportunity, should pursue hegemony, defined as unbalanced orpreponderant power in the interstate system. The offensive realist answer is:yes, if you can get away with it. In spite of his critique of liberal hegemony,Mearsheimer is not necessarily against American hegemony or primacy as such. Henotes that the rise of China raises the possibility that the United States“would have to compete with a potential peer competitor, a situation no greatpower wants to face. It would be better to retain the unipolar world, eventhough it would tempt American policymakers to stick with liberal hegemony.”When it comes to shares of world power, offensive realists agree with Mae West:“Too much of a good thing can be wonderful.” By contrast, defensive realistsreject this reasoning, on the premise that any over-mighty power willinevitably be cut down to size by a counter-balancing coalition of other greatpowers. As evidence, they point to the coalitions that thwarted the bids forEuropean hegemony of Charles V, Napoleon, the Kaiser, Hitler and the SovietUnion.

米尔斯海默早期对进攻性现实主义的总结恰如其分地将其命名为《强权政治的悲剧》。这种把世界政治看作是霍布斯式的全面对立的悲观主义观点，遭到了许多防御性现实主义者的反对。例如，米尔斯海默提到了查尔斯·格拉泽的一篇题为“现实主义者是乐观主义者”的文章。他引用塞巴斯蒂安·罗萨托和约翰·舒斯勒的话说，防御性现实主义是“没有战争的安全秘诀”，马克·特拉亨伯格则说，“权力并非不稳定”。
当涉及到一个国家，如果有机会，是否应该追求霸权(定义为州际体系中的不平衡或优势权力)的问题时，这两种现实主义学术流派是不同的。
进攻性现实主义回答是:是的，如果你能侥幸逃脱惩罚的话。尽管米尔斯海默批判了自由主义霸权，但他并不一定反对美国的霸权主义或霸权主义本身。他指出，中国的崛起增加了美国“必须与潜在的竞争对手竞争的可能性，任何大国都不想面对这种局面。” 保留单极世界会更好，尽管这会诱使美国政策制定者坚持自由主义霸权。当谈到分享世界权力时，进攻性现实主义者赞同梅•韦斯特的观点:“过犹不及是件好事。（Too much of a good thingcan be wonderful.）” 相比之下，防御性的现实主义者拒绝这种推论，他们的前提是，任何过于强大的国家，都不可避免地会被其他大国组成的制衡联盟削弱。作为证据，他们指出，结盟挫败了查尔斯五世、拿破仑、凯撒、希特勒和苏联对欧洲霸权的争夺。

BUTDOES history really show that attempts to amass disproportionate power aredoomed in advance? The rise of the United States would appear to refute thisview. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the British and Frenchdid not intervene militarily to prevent the United States from expanding acrossthe continent by defeating Mexico in 1846–48, thwarting Southern secessionduring the American Civil War and then establishing its own sphere of influencein North America. Following the Cold War, China and post-Soviet Russia soughtto boost their power at the expense of the United States, but America’sEuropean and East Asian allies did not band together to balance American power.
Whenone looks at world history as a whole, rather than focusing narrowly on Europebetween 1648 and 1989, the argument that anti-hegemonic balancing is a more orless automatic feature of systems of multiple states collapses. As the Britishscholar Martin Wight observed, state systems are the exception in history andempires the norm. The Warring States system of ancient China gave way to theChinese empire. The Hellenistic state was incorporated in Alexander’sMacedonian empire and then, after a period of fragmentation among Hellenistickingdoms, into the Roman empire—part of which, in the form of the Ottomanempire, lasted until World War I. Arguably the survival of multiple independentstates in a competitive state system in Europe was a fluke, owed to theintervention of flanking powers which were themselves not balanced by strongpowers—Russia, Britain and later the United States—as the German scholar LudwigDehio argued in The Precarious Balance . In other regions,successive rounds knocked out competitors until the last opponent of the powerthat unified the area was defeated. To the Mae West theory of offensiverealism, we might add the Agatha Christie theory of the high mortality rate ofcompetitive state systems: And Then There Were None .

但历史真的表明，积聚不成比例/破坏平衡的权力的企图注定要提前失败吗? 美国的崛起似乎会驳斥这种观点。在十九世纪和二十世纪初，英法两国没有进行军事干预，以阻止美国在1846至1848年间击败墨西哥，在整个美洲大陆扩张，以及在美国内战期间挫败南方分裂，然后在北美建立自己的势力范围。冷战结束后，中国和后苏联时代的俄罗斯试图以牺牲美国为代价来增强自己的实力，但美国的欧洲和东亚盟友并没有联合起来平衡美国的实力。
当我们把世界历史作为一个整体来看，而不是狭隘地聚焦于1648年至1989年之间的欧洲时，那种认为反霸权平衡或多或少是多国体系的自动特征的观点就会崩溃。正如英国学者马丁•怀特所言，国家制度在历史上是例外，帝国是常态。中国古代的战国制度被中华帝国所取代。希腊化国家并入亚历山大的马其顿帝国，经过一段时间希腊王国的分裂后，又并入罗马帝国——其中一部分以奥斯曼帝国的形式存在，一直持续到第一次世界大战。正如德国学者路德维希·德希奥(Ludwig Dehio)在《危险平衡》（The Precarious Balance）一书中所指出的那样，可以说，多个独立国家在欧洲竞争激烈的国家体系中生存下来是一种侥幸，这要归功于两翼势力的干预，而这些势力本身并没有被强大的势力——俄罗斯、英国以及后来的美国——所平衡。在其他地区，连续几轮的比赛淘汰了对手，直到统一该地区的最后一个对手被击败。对于梅·韦斯特的进攻性现实主义理论，我们可以加上阿加莎•克里斯蒂于竞争性国家体系高死亡率的理论:《然后就没了》（ Then There Were None）。

Tooffensive realists and defensive realists, “restraint” means different things.The Massachusetts Institute of Technology scholar Barry Posen has made the mostimpressively detailed contemporary case for defensive realism in Restraint:A New Foundation for U.S. Grand Strategy . Like Mearsheimer, Posenrejects liberal hegemony. But Posen goes beyond Mearsheimer to reject hegemonyin any form as a legitimate goal of U.S. grand strategy.
Earlierthis year in an essay in Foreign Affairs , Posen wrote:
Breaking with his predecessors, Trump hastaken much of the “liberal” out of “liberal hegemony.” He still seeks to retainthe United States’ superior economic and military capability and role assecurity arbiter for most regions of the world, but he has chosen to forgo theexport of democracy and abstain from many multilateral trade agreements. In otherwords, Trump has ushered in an entirely new U.S. grand strategy: illiberalhegemony.

对于进攻性现实主义者和防御性现实主义者来说，“克制”的含义是不同的。麻省理工学院学者巴里·波森为《克制中的防御性现实主义:美国大战略的新基础》(A New Foundation for U.S.Grand Strategy)提出了当代最令人印象深刻的详尽案例。与米尔斯海默一样，波森反对自由主义霸权。但波森比米尔斯海默更进一步，拒绝任何形式的霸权作为美国大战略的一个合理目标。
今年早些时候，波森在《外交事务》杂志的一篇文章中写道:
“与他的前任不同，特朗普从“自由霸权”中拿走了大部分的“自由主义”。他仍然寻求保留美国优越的经济和军事能力，以及作为世界大多数地区安全仲裁者的角色，但他选择放弃民主出口，并放弃许多多边贸易协定。换句话说，特朗普带来了美国全新的大战略:狭隘的霸权主义。”

Defensiverealist proponents of a scaled-down foreign policy of “offshore balancing” wanta grand strategy other than U.S. hegemony in any form, liberal or illiberal. In2016, Mearsheimer himself co-authored an essay in favor of offshore balancingwith another leading realist thinker, Stephen Walt in ForeignAffairs . But the logic of Mearsheimer’s offensive realist approachmight lead one to conclude that some version of what Samuel Huntington in a1993 essay in International Security called “internationalprimacy” is preferable not only to liberal hegemony, which risks doing toomuch, but also to offshore balancing, which risks doing too little, too late inresponse to the rise of a regional or global hegemon outside of North America.Indeed, in their essay Mearsheimer and Walt argue that their version ofoffshore balancing would preserve American primacy.
This isMearsheimer’s own conclusion in The Great Delusion :
Moreover, realism dictates that the UnitedStates should seek to remain the most powerful state on the planet. It shouldmaintain hegemony in the Western Hemisphere and make sure that no other greatpower dominates its region of the world, thus becoming a peer competitor.Still, a foreign policy based on realism is likely to be less warlike than onebased on liberalism.

主张缩小“离岸平衡”外交政策的防御性现实主义者，希望制定一项宏大的战略，取代任何形式的美国霸权，无论是自由主义还是非自由主义。2016年，米尔斯海默与另一位重要的现实主义思想家、外交事务领域的斯蒂芬 · 沃尔特合着了一篇支持离岸平衡的文章。但米尔斯海默进攻性现实主义方法的逻辑可能会让人得出结论，结论是，塞缪尔•亨廷顿1993年在《国际安全》杂志上发表的一篇文章中所说的“国际领先地位”，不论是跟自由主义霸权还是跟离岸平衡相比都要更可取，前者所冒风险太多，后者所冒风险太少，并且面对北美外部的区域崛起或全球霸权时反应太迟。实际上，米尔斯海默和沃尔特在他们的论文中认为，他们所争论的离岸平衡模式将保持美国的主导地位。
这是米尔斯海默自己在《大妄想》中的结论:
“此外，现实主义同样要求美国应该寻求保持世界上最强大的国家地位。它应该保持西半球的霸权，确保没有任何其他大国主宰世界上的区域，从而成为它的竞争对手。即便，基于现实主义的外交政策可能没有基于自由主义的外交政策那么好战。”

Onexamination, then, the proposed American strategic alternatives of “restraint”or “offshore balancing” are defined in varying ways by different realists.Proving that the logic of structural realism extends to academic internationalrelations departments, the success of American realist thinkers in overthrowingthe dominant liberal hegemonic consensus would likely be followed by conflictamong the former allies.
Inaddition to internal disagreements, a factor that is likely to limit theinfluence on American foreign policy of a “restraint” school is the focus ofmost academic realists on traditional military threats to the neglect of trade,economic development and industrial policy. To be fair, neorealists do payattention to industrial capability as one of a number of attributes that wouldqualify a great power as a “pole” in a system. But with some exceptions,including the late Robert Gilpin, American international relations (IR) thinkershave not had much to say about industrial development.

因此，经过审视，不同的现实主义者以不同的方式定义了美国提出的“克制”或“离岸平衡”的战略选择。美国现实主义思想家推翻占主导地位的自由主义霸权共识的成功，可能会导致前盟国之间的冲突，这证明了结构现实主义的逻辑延伸到学术国际关系部门。
除了内部分歧之外，一个可能限制“克制”学派对美国外交政策影响的因素，是大多数学术现实主义者关注的焦点，即忽视贸易、经济发展和产业政策的传统军事威胁。公平地说，新现实主义者确实注重工业能力，认为这是一个大国成为一个体系中“至高点”的诸多特征之一。除了一些例外，包括已故的罗伯特•吉尔平，美国国际关系(IR)的思想家们对工业发展并没有太多的发言权。

That issurprising, given the obsession of practitioners of realpolitik throughouthistory with improving the economic capacities of their city-states, empires ornation-states. From Alexander Hamilton through Henry Clay to Abraham Lincolnand William McKinley, tariff-based import substitution and nationalinfrastructure development along with foreign policy were united in a plan toturn the United States into a major power, equal or superior to industrialBritain. Protectionist economic nationalism was also central to the realiststrategies of Otto von Bismarck and the Meiji reformers. Far from being basedon free trade and labor mobility, the world economy in the period studied mostby academic neorealists—from the seventeenth century to 1945—was the heyday ofmercantilism and colonialism, in which trade wars and military wars weretreated as legitimate and complementary tools of strategy. If you list famousWestern realists—Hamilton, Benjamin Disraeli, Bismarck, Charles de Gaulle—youwill not find a free trader among them.
LIBERALSCHOLARS tend to ignore this history, except as a chronicle of sins and errorsto be deplored. The entire liberal project, as Mearsheimer notes, has beenbased on a vision of atomistic individuals interacting freely in a societywhich, in theory, should encompass the entire human race in the form of a freeglobal market as well as supra-national institutions in other realms. Theutopian goal of liberalism—a post-national, integrated global economy—has beenshared with liberals by Marxist socialists, who, however, add the fantasy ofinternational working-class solidarity against “bourgeois” nationalism.Rejected by liberals and socialists alike, the defense of economic nationalismand state-sponsored industrial capitalism has been left to realists—with thestriking exception of IR departments in U.S. universities.
Why? The answer, I think, must be sought in the evolution ofthe U.S. research university after World War II. At that time in economics departments,neoclassical economics—a simplified, highly mathematical version of nineteenthcentury economic liberalism—marginalized rival traditions, including the morepragmatic tradition of historical or institutional economics identified withvarious kinds of economic nationalism and developmentalism.

考虑到历史上现实政治的实践者一直痴迷于提高其城邦、帝国或民族国家的经济能力，这一点令人惊讶。从亚历山大·汉密尔顿到亨利·克莱，到亚伯拉罕·林肯和威廉·麦金利，以关税为基础的进口替代、国家基础设施发展以及外交政策，在一项计划中被结合起来，目的是把美国变成一个大国，与工业化的英国势均力敌或更胜一筹。保护主义的经济民族主义也是奥托•冯•俾斯麦和明治维新的现实主义战略的核心。世界经济远非建立在自由贸易和劳动力流动的基础上，17世纪至1945年，学术界新现实主义者研究最多的时期是重商主义和殖民主义的鼎盛时期，在这个时期，贸易战和军事战争被视为合法的、互补的战略工具。如果你列出着名的西方现实主义者——汉密尔顿、本杰明•迪斯雷利、俾斯麦、夏尔•戴高乐。你就不会在他们中间找到一个是自由贸易者。
自由主义学者往往忽视这段历史，除了它是一部罪恶和错误的编年史，值得痛惜。米尔斯海默指出，整个自由主义项目是建立在原子主义个人（atomistic individuals）在一个社会中自由互动的设想之上的，从理论上讲，这个社会应该以自由的全球市场以及其他领域的超国家机构的形式囊括整个人类。自由主义的乌托邦目标——一个后国家的、一体化的全球经济——已经被马克思主义社会主义者与自由主义者分享，然而，他们让国际工人阶级团结起来反对“资产阶级”民族主义多了一份幻想。在自由主义者和社会主义者的共同抵制下，捍卫经济民族主义和国家支持的工业资本主义的任务留给了现实主义者——除了美国大学的国际关系学。
为什么?我认为，答案必须从二战后美国研究型大学的演变中寻找。
在当时的经济系，新古典经济学——十九世纪经济自由主义的一个简化的、高度数学化的版本，边缘化的对立传统，包括与各种经济民族主义和发展主义相一致的更为实用的历史或制度经济学传统。

At thesame time, in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, American neorealism as a disciplineemerged as a reaction against prewar international relations schools, which hadbeen dedicated to idealistic schemes for world leagues, world courts and thelike. Influenced by “classical realists,” many of whom were continentalEuropean refugees like Hans Morgenthau and Henry Kissinger, Americanneorealists in IR departments sought to develop rigorous and systematictheories of realism which met the standards of positivist American socialscience, unlike the belletristic and aphoristic wisdom literature penned by theclassical realist Herr Professors.
So itwas that academic neoclassical economics and academic neorealism divided the worldamong them. Neoclassical economics ignored war and diplomacy and neorealistsignored trade, immigration, finance and state-sponsored industrialization, subjectsleft to the IR discipline of international political economy, which, however,approached them with a liberal rather than nationalist bias. Academic economicswas based on stylized thought experiments involving generic firms orindividuals; in the next seminar room, much IR theory was devoted to similarabstract thought experiments about “polarity.” Drawn toward the idea ofexplaining society in terms of the action of social forces or structures onindividuals, neoclassical economists and defensive realists in different waysfetishized equilibrium—defined as the clearing of prices in economics and asmore or less automatic power-balancing in world politics. Push an element ofthe system, and it will wobble until balance is restored.

与此同时，在20世纪50年代、60年代和70年代，美国的新现实主义作为一门学科出现，是对战前国际关系学派的一种回应，这些学派致力于世界联盟、世界法院等的理想主义方案。受到“古典现实主义者”的影响，其中许多人是欧洲大陆的难民，比如汉斯·摩根索和亨利·基辛格，美国国际关系学中的新现实主义者们，寻求发展符合美国实证主义社会科学标准的严谨而系统的现实主义理论，不同于古典现实主义先生笔下的百家争鸣和警句式的智慧文学。
因此，学术界的新古典主义经济学和新现实主义将世界一分为二。新古典主义经济学忽视了战争和外交，而新现实主义经济学忽视了贸易、移民、金融和国家支持的工业化，这些学科都留给了国际政治经济学的国际关系学科来研究，然而，国际政治经济学对待这些学科的态度是自由主义的，而不是民族主义的。学术经济学是建立在涉及普通公司或个人的程式化思维实验的基础上的; 在接下来的研讨室里，许多国际关系理论都致力于类似的关于“对立”的抽象思维实验。新古典主义经济学家和防御性现实主义者倾向于用社会力量或结构对个人的作用来解释社会，他们以不同的方式崇拜均衡——均衡在经济学中被定义为价格结算，在世界政治中或多或少被定义为权力自动平衡。推动系统的一个元素，它将摇摆，直到平衡被恢复。

Withinthe post-1945 American university system, in which the prestige of a disciplineincreases the more it resembles physics, trying to turn messy world politicsinto a parsimonious social science may have been a good career move. Butacademic neorealists, in their focus on states as coherent, rational actors,have been woefully blind to the centrality of integrated transnational empiresand blocs in world politics.
In anessay in this magazine entitled “Blocpolitik,” this author has made the casethat it is impossible to understand contemporary relations among, say, theUnited States, Germany and Japan on the assumption, shared by classicalrealists and neorealists alike, that they can be treated as similarindependent, “full-spectrum” states. Instead, Germany and Japan continue to beboth semi-sovereign states, dependent on U.S. military protection andeconomically specialized in manufacturing in an American-led bloc. The EuropeanUnion, with its Franco–German core, is itself a lesser hierarchical bloc withinthe larger hierarchical bloc led by Washington. As the hegemon of the bloc, theUnited States specializes in unique services to its dependents, including notonly unreciprocated military protection, but also the provision of a commoncurrency and access to the American market to the exports of other blocmembers, often to the detriment of America’s own manufacturers. The fact thatthe American Cold War alliance system did not dissolve after the Cold War canbe explained by the thesis that, by 1989, it had ceased to be a traditionalmilitary alliance and had become a deeply-integrated military-industrial bloc—aquasi-federation bound together by supply chains and administered, in theUnited States and its dependencies, by officials who could not imagine theirnations existing outside of the Pax Americana.

在1945年后的美国大学体系中，一门学科越像物理学，它的声望就越高。在这种体系中，试图把混乱的世界政治变成一门吝啬的社会科学，或许是一个不错的职业选择。但是，学术界的新现实主义者把国家视为连贯、理性的行动者，却可悲地忽视了一体化的综合跨国帝国和集团在世界政治中的中心地位。
在这本杂志的一篇题为《集团政治》的文章中，作者提出，要理解当代美、德、日之间的关系，不能以古典现实主义者和新现实主义者都认同的假设为基础，认为它们可以被视为类似的完全独立的国家。相反，德国和日本仍然是半主权国家，依赖美国的军事保护，在经济上专长于美国主导的制造业。以法德两国为核心的欧盟，本身是一个级别较低的集团，隶属于华盛顿领导的更大的集团。作为欧元区的霸主,美国专业独特的服务,不仅包括单边军事保护,也提供一个共同的货币和进入美国市场的出口集团,尽管这往往损害美国自己的制造商。美国冷战联盟体系在冷战结束后并没有解体，因为1989年，它已不再是一个传统的军事联盟，而是一个高度一体化的军工集团- -一个由供应链联系在一起并受管理的准联邦，在美国及其附属国，官员们无法想象他们的国家存在于“美国治下的和平”(Pax Americana)之外的样子。

Thereis no evidence that Donald Trump wishes to disintegrate the highly-integratedAmerican bloc he inherited from his predecessors. Instead, his goal appears tobe to force American military dependencies to contribute somewhat more to blocdefense, while somewhat rebalancing the distribution of manufacturing withinthe bloc in favor of American producers—two objectives, it should be noted,that he shares with earlier presidents. In the Trumpist version of realism, itseems that this rebalanced American bloc incorporating the industrial triad ofNorth America, Europe and East Asia—not the United States alone—will respond toChina’s challenge on all fronts, economic as well as military.
Blocismcan be viewed as a successor to old-fashioned imperialism, and is inspired bythe same zero-sum mercantilist logic. Military power depends on having advancedcivilian industries. The most important of these for national power aremanufacturing industries characterized by increasing returns to scale—that is,the larger the captive home or colonial market, the larger the production runsand the more efficient the industries. Hype about rapid prototyping and “StarTrek replicators” to the contrary, technology is unlikely to eliminateeconomies of scale in production in the foreseeable future. The importance ofscale is reflected in the fact that a disproportionate number of successfultransnational corporations have nearly half of their sales in the home marketsof the three most populous capitalist countries—the United States, Japan andGermany. The home market effect helps to explain why Boeing and Airbus are thedominant players in global jetliner construction, and why search engines andsocial media platforms are dominated by American companies like Google, Amazonand Facebook.

没有证据表明唐纳德•特朗普希望瓦解他从前任那里继承下来的高度一体化的美国集团。相反，他的目标似乎是迫使美国的军事依赖国在一定程度上为集团防务做出更大贡献，同时在一定程度上重新平衡集团内的制造业分布，使之有利于美国制造商——应该指出的是，这两个目标是他与前几任总统都认同的。在特朗普的现实主义版本中，这个重新平衡的美国集团，包括北美、欧洲和东亚的工业三位一体，而不仅仅是美国，似乎将在经济和军事各个方面应对中国的挑战。
集团主义可以被看作是旧式帝国主义的继承者，它也受到同样的零和重商主义逻辑的启发。军事力量依靠先进的民用工业。对国家力量而言，最重要的是以规模效益递增为特征的制造业，也就是说，受限制的国内或殖民地市场越大，生产经营规模越大，工业效率越高。
相反，在可预见的未来，技术不太可能消除生产规模经济。规模的重要性反映在这样一个事实上:不成比例的成功的跨国公司，在美国、日本和德国这三个人口最多的资本主义国家的国内市场的销售额占其销售额的近一半。本土市场效应有助于解释为什么波音和空客在全球喷气式飞机建设中占据主导地位，以及为什么搜索引擎和社交媒体平台被谷歌、亚马逊(Amazon)和Facebook等美国公司所主导。

Thebenefits of scale for modern industrial production undermine theargument—shared by many offensive realists and defensive realists alike—thatthe United States should focus only on near-term military threats fromalready-developed industrial countries and forego competing with rivals forinfluence in undeveloped areas. Echoing most realists, Mearsheimer writes:
This means the United States should notfight wars in Africa, Central Asia, or areas of the Middle East that lieoutside the Persian Gulf. During the Cold War, for example, realists maintainedthat American policymakers should avoid wars in the “Third World” or“Developing World” because it was populated with minor powers that were oflittle strategic significance.
BUTSEVENTEENTH- and eighteenth-century mercantilists, nineteenth and twentiethcentury colonialists and American and Soviet strategists during the Cold Waroften sought to incorporate poor populations and territories into their blocswhile denying access to them to their rivals. They did so, not on the basis ofimmediate contributions of these areas, if any, to the wealth and power of themetropole, but rather with an eye to their future potential as captive marketsfor national manufactured exports, sources of raw material and—in some cases—sourcesof civilian or military labor. Formal and informal colonialism has often beenimmoral but not irrational. It is much easier for a great power to expand its relativepower by incorporating foreign nations into its alliance system and its extendedhome market than it is to boost its power by purely internal nationalpopulation or productivity growth.

现代工业规模生产的好处，削弱了许多进攻性现实主义者和防御性现实主义者所认同的观点，即美国应该只关注来自发达工业国家的短期军事威胁，放弃在不发达地区与竞争对手争夺影响力。米尔斯海默写道：
“这意味着美国不应该在非洲、中亚或波斯湾以外的中东地区作战。例如，在冷战期间，现实主义者坚持认为，美国的政策制定者应该避免在“第三世界”或“发展中世界”发生战争，因为那里充斥着没有什么战略意义的小国。”
但是十七、十八世纪的重商主义者、十九、二十世纪的殖民主义者以及冷战期间的美苏战略家，常常设法把贫穷的人口和领土纳入他们的集团，同时拒绝向他们的对手开放这些地区。他们这样做,不是建立在这些领域的直接贡献的基础上,而是着眼于未来潜在作为国家制造业出口垄断市场,原料来源以及某些情况下一些民用或军用劳动力来源。

Likedefensive realists, anti-imperialists in the past have often argued that thecosts of empire outweigh the benefits. But that depends on the time frame. TheBritish, French and other European colonial powers who extended their controlover much of Africa, Asia and the Middle East in the late nineteenth centuryand between the world wars assumed that their empires would exist forgenerations. They were willing to pay initial costs as down payments on futurecontributions to the military and economic might of their empires. They did notforesee that the two world wars would cripple them, nor that they would beeclipsed by the United States and Soviet Union, which for reasons of liberaland socialist ideology, respectively, sought to phase out European colonialism.
Nordoes popular nationalism inevitably doom empires and their modern successors,transnational blocs. On the contrary, multi-ethnic regional empires have beenthe norm in world history. National independence movements tend to succeed onlywhen the imperial power is weakened by war or when its rival intervenes onbehalf of the rebels. The United States exists because France intervenedagainst Britain during the American war of independence. The Confederate Statesof America do not exist because Britain refused to intervene in the AmericanCivil War.

反帝国主义同防御性现实主义者一样，在过去常常主张帝国的代价大于利益。但这是过去的考量。英国、法国和其他欧洲殖民列强在19世纪末以及两次世界大战之间扩大了对非洲、亚洲和中东大部分地区的控制，使他们认为自己的帝国将世代相传。
他们没有预见到两次世界大战会削弱他们，也没有预见到美国和苏联会使他们黯然失色，而这两个国家分别出于自由主义和社会主义意识形态的原因，寻求逐步消除欧洲殖民主义。
流行的民族主义也不会不可避免地毁灭帝国及其现代继承者——跨国集团。相反，多民族区域帝国已经成为世界历史的准则。民族独立运动往往只有在帝国权力被战争削弱或其对手代表的叛乱分子进行干预时才会取得成功。美利坚合众国（USA）之所以存在，是因为法国在美国独立战争期间干涉英国。而美利坚联盟国（CSA）之所以不存在，也是因为英国拒绝干涉美国内战。

The empiresof the defeated powers in World War I were liquidated by the victors, while theempires of the victors remained intact. Decolonization after World War II wasaccelerated by the Cold War and the weakened condition of the metropoles; thereis no reason to believe it would have happened as rapidly absent those factors,if it had happened at all. The United States was driven out of Indochina, notby Vietnamese nationalism alone (there were anti-communist as well as communistnationalists), but by the constant resupply of North Vietnam and its southernallies by the Soviet Union and China, and Washington’s fear of provoking directChinese entry, as in the Korean War. In Malaysia and the Philippines, communistinsurgencies lacking external sanctuaries and great power sponsors weredefeated, as they were throughout Latin America, with the sole exceptions ofCuba and, for a time, Nicaragua. Nationalist rebellions in the Soviet Unionsucceeded only after Gorbachev’s liberalizing reforms weakened the center; Moscowand its satraps had been quite capable of crushing nationalists in East Germanyin 1953, in Hungary in 1956 and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Mearsheimercites the work of Peter Liberman, who breaks with the consensus of Americanrealists by providing a qualified “yes” to the question posed by the title ofhis book Does Conquest Pay? But most of Mearsheimer’slimited discussion of economics in The Great Delusion is acritique of the liberal theory that economic interdependence promotes greatpower peace, as opposed to questions such as whether it makes sense or not forChina and the United States to compete to build African infrastructure, in thehopes of incorporating growing African workforces and consumers in the futureinto their own rival geo-economic blocs. To say, as too many academicneorealists do, that Africa presently contains no countries capable ofmilitarily threatening the U.S. misses the point of the competition.

第一次世界大战中战败国的帝国被战胜国消灭，而战胜国的帝国却完好无损。第二次世界大战后的反殖民化由于冷战和大都市条件的削弱而加速; 我们没有理由相信，如果没有这些因素，情况会如此迅速地发生。美国被赶出印度支那半岛的原因,不是仅仅靠越南民族主义,而是靠对越南北部不断补给的苏联和中国,和华盛顿激怒中国的恐惧导致,如朝鲜战争的局面。
在马来西亚和菲律宾，缺乏外部避难所和大国赞助的GC主义叛乱被击败了，就象整个拉丁美洲一样，只有古巴和尼加拉瓜有一段时间例外。只有在戈尔巴乔夫的自由化改革削弱了中央集权之后，苏联的民族主义叛乱才获得了成功;1953年，在东德，1956年在匈牙利，1968年在捷克斯洛伐克，莫斯科和它的总督们已经相当有能力粉碎民族主义者。

Mearsheimercites the work of Peter Liberman, who breaks with the consensus of Americanrealists by providing a qualified “yes” to the question posed by the title ofhis book Does Conquest Pay? But most of Mearsheimer’slimited discussion of economics in The Great Delusion is acritique of the liberal theory that economic interdependence promotes greatpower peace, as opposed to questions such as whether it makes sense or not forChina and the United States to compete to build African infrastructure, in thehopes of incorporating growing African workforces and consumers in the futureinto their own rival geo-economic blocs. To say, as too many academicneorealists do, that Africa presently contains no countries capable ofmilitarily threatening the U.S. misses the point of the competition.
What isneeded in American foreign policy is an alliance of realism with economicnationalism. This should follow from the replacement of liberal hegemony withnational primacy as the basis of U.S. grand strategy. The hegemon would not bethe United States as an isolated nation-state, but a hegemonic bloc led by theU.S. and maintaining most of its present allies, with a certain amount ofrebalancing within the bloc.

米尔斯海默引用了彼得·利伯曼的作品，他打破了美国现实主义者的共识，为他的书名所提出的问题《征服的代价？》提供了一个大大的肯定答复。
但米尔斯海默在《大妄想》中对经济学的有限的讨论大多是对自由主义理论的批判。例如：经济上的相互依赖促进了大国之间的和平，而非中国和美国在非洲基础设施建设方面的竞争是否有意义这样的问题。中国和美国希望在未来将不断增长的非洲劳动力和消费者纳入其相互竞争的地缘经济集团。
就像太多的新现实主义学者所做的那样，如果说非洲目前没有任何国家有能力对美国构成军事威胁，那么这种说法就是没有抓住竞争的关键。
美国外交政策需要的是现实主义与经济民族主义的结合。这应该从以国家主导取代自由主义霸权作为美国大战略的基础开始。霸权国将不是美国那样的孤立的民族国家，而是由美国领导的霸权集团，并维持其目前的大多数盟友，在集团内部实现一定程度的再平衡。

TheAmerican bloc can grow incrementally by the accession of new countries, but theneoconservative and neoliberal attempt to incorporate the entire planet into asingle market and a single “rule-based order” policed by the U.S. militarythrough a combination of wars of regime chance and “shock therapy” liberaleconomic globalization has been a catastrophe. In the future, the Americanbloc, based chiefly on North America and, if possible, Europe, may have tocoexist with a Chinese bloc and perhaps an Indian bloc, along with a minorMoscow-centered Eurasian bloc, in the absence of Russian-American entente. Onthe global level, the United States and its allies should pursue a“concert-balance” strategy, attempting to maintain harmonious relations amongregional great power blocs, while ensuring that, in the event of inter-blocconflict, Uncle Sam is chair of the board of the great-power coalition with thegreatest concentrations of population and resources and industry, as it wasduring the three world conflicts of the twentieth century. This is a strategybased on a preponderance of unbalanced power for Washington and its allies anddependencies, as an alternative to three other grand strategies: liberalhegemony, a minimal defensive realist strategy in which the United States is an“offshore balancer” intervening rarely as a deus ex machina in Eurasianconflicts and—by far the worst option—a neo-isolationist strategy that mightpermit the United States to be the friendless object of balancing coalitions.
Therejection of liberal hegemony in favor of national primacy in the realm ofsecurity strategy would be accompanied, in the economic realm, by the rejectionof the liberal ideal of a rule-governed global free market in favor ofstrategic trade, investment and immigration policies. The United States wouldnot, and should not, retreat into autarkic protectionism; on the contrary, itshould try to be part of the largest and most productive economic bloc in theworld. But the United States should minimize its financial and industrialinteractions with military rivals and potential rivals by means of embargoes,sanctions or managed trade. And while taking the economic interests of otherbloc members into account, it should not allow economic interdependence evenwith allies to undermine the industrial capacity on which U.S. military powerdepends. That includes maintaining the capacity for quick surges inmilitarily-relevant industrial production on U.S. soil, not leadership intechnological innovation alone.

美国集团可以通过新国家的加入而逐步发展，但新保守主义和新自由主义试图通过美国军方的政权偶然性战争和自由经济全球化的“休克疗法”相结合，将整个地球纳入单一市场和单一“基于规则的秩序”已经是一场灾难。
在未来，主要以北美为基础的美国集团，如果可能的话，还包括欧洲，可能不得不与一个中国集团、或许还有一个印度集团，以及一个以莫斯科为中心的欧亚集团共存，并且俄美之间目前没有达成谅解。在全球层面上,美国及其盟国应该追求一个“协同平衡”战略,以试图保持和谐关系的地区大国集团,同时妥善处理集团内部的冲突,山姆大叔是大国联盟的董事会主席，人口、资源和工业最集中的大国联盟，就象二十世纪三次世界冲突期间那样。
这是一项以华盛顿及其盟友和附庸的不平衡权力优势为基础的战略，是其他三项重大战略的替代方案: 自由主义霸权是一种最低限度的防御性现实主义战略，在这种战略中，美国是一个“海上制衡者”，很少在欧亚冲突中作为解决手段成功进行干预过——它是迄今为止最糟糕的选择——一种新孤立主义战略，可能会让美国成为平衡联盟里被孤立的对象。
在经济领域，反对自由主义霸权，支持国家在安全战略领域的首要地位，同时也反对自由主义理想，即建立一个受规则支配的全球自由市场，支持战略贸易、投资和移民政策。美国不会，也不应该退回自给自足的保护主义;相反，它应该努力成为世界上最大、最富有成效的经济集团的一部分。但美国应通过禁运、制裁或有管理的贸易，尽量减少与军事对手和潜在对手的金融和工业往来。哪怕是考虑到集团成员国，也不该允许相互之间的依赖，因为这会削弱美国军事力量的工业实力。这不仅仅是美国在技术创新方面处于领先地位，也包括保持本土与军事相关的工业生产快速增长的能力。

Hereticalas this seems to modern liberal hegemonists, it is an approach that would havebeen familiar to Alexander Hamilton and the two Roosevelts. Needless to say,any legitimate American nationalism would be liberal, constitutional anddemocratic at home, even though the United States abandoned misguided crusadesto topple non-threatening undemocratic regimes abroad by force or subversion.
Mearsheimermight not favor such a version of a grand strategy of national primacy. Amongother things, the extensive state intervention in the economy required for itto succeed would make it more like Mearsheimer’s “progressive liberalism” thanthe small-government classical liberalism which he calls “modus vivendiliberalism” and seems to prefer. But a case can be made that the strategy thisauthor has outlined is compatible with Mearsheimer’s offensive realist view ofworld politics.

尽管这在现代自由主义霸权者看来是异端邪说，但亚历山大•汉密尔顿和两位罗斯福对这种做法应该很熟悉。不用说，尽管美国放弃了误入歧途的十字军东征，即放弃了以武力或颠覆国外不具威胁性的不民主政权，但任何合法的美国民族主义在国内都将是自由、符合宪法和民主的。
米尔斯海默可能不赞成这种国家主导的大战略。此外，要想成功，政府对经济的广泛干预更像是米尔斯海默的“进步自由主义”(progressiveliberalism)，而不是他称之为“权变自由主义”(modus vivendi liberalism)的小政府古典自由主义(他似乎更喜欢后者)。但我们可以证明，作者所概述的策略与米尔斯海默进攻性的现实主义世界观是一致的。

Becauseof its emphasis on acquiring and keeping unbalanced, preponderant power,however, such a synthesis of realism and nationalism would probably be rejectedby the kind of defensive realists who reject Trump’s strategy as “illiberalhegemony.” Defensive realists oppose liberal hegemony, but few, if any,question the anti-nationalist free market economics at the core of the liberaltradition. This makes possible alliances among defensive realists and libertarians,who for their part tend to oppose large militaries and foreign intervention onthe basis of anti-statism and radical individualism rather than realpolitik.Unfortunately for those who support a realist-libertarian alliance, the numberof Americans who favor a combination of dramatically lower defense spending,more offshoring of industry and low-wage immigration is negligible, equivalentto supporters of the Libertarian Party, which gets no more than a few percentof the vote at most in elections.
Aprudent attempt to preserve or expand an American-led bloc with preponderantwealth and power is likely to be repudiated by many defensive realists andtheir libertarian allies. But those who favor replacing liberal hegemony withnational primacy as the guiding principle of U.S. foreign policy can findinspiration as well as insight in The Great Delusion .
Michael Lind is a visiting professor at theLyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas andauthor of The American Way ofStrategy .

然而，由于它强调获取和保持不平衡的优势力量，这种现实主义和民族主义的结合很可能会遭到防御性现实主义者的反对，他们认为特朗普的战略是“非自由主义霸权”。 防御性现实主义者反对自由主义霸权，但很少有人(如果有的话)质疑作为自由主义传统核心的反民族主义自由市场经济。这使得防御性的现实主义者和自由主义者之间的联盟成为可能，他们倾向于以反国家主义和激进的个人主义为基础，而不是以现实政治为基础，反对大规模的军事和外国干预。对于那些主持现实-自由主义联盟的人来说，不幸的是，支持大幅削减国防开支、增加工业外包和低工资移民的美国人的数量可以忽略不计，相当于支持自由党(liberal Party)的人数。自由党在选举中最多只能获得几个百分点的选票。
一个以美国为首、拥有大量财富和权力的集团，若要保持或扩大其规模，其谨慎努力可能会遭到许多防御性现实主义者及其自由主义盟友的否定。但是，那些主张以国家至上取代自由主义霸权的美国外交政策指导原则的人，可以从《大妄想》中找到灵感和洞见。
——迈克尔·林德是德克萨斯大学林登·b·约翰逊公共事务学院的客座教授，着有《美国战略之路》(the American Way of Strategy)一书。