Recommended: The Great Delusion

The past few administrations, of both political parties, have pursued a policy of "liberal hegemony", which aimed to use America's dominate power in the world to spread liberal democracy - American style - to all sorts of nations, often at the point of a gun. This has been the guiding philosophy of the Washington foreign policy establishment up until the current administration, and it has generally been a disaster, leaving us locked in endless Middle Eastern wars. Professor John Mearsheimer has undertaken to examine the fallacious philosophical underpinnings of this ideology in his new book The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities.

The short version of his argument is that liberals don't understand that nationalism and realism are far more powerful in the real world than the liberal dream, and so "liberal hegemony" as a policy (or perhaps, ideology) not only was bound to fail, as it has, but in fact has actively impeded the spread of liberal societies in the world.  This book is well worth reading and thinking about.

For those who would rather watch a lecture than read the book, let me suggest  John Mearsheimer's 2018 presentation to the Bonn Center for International Security and Governance, which can be seen on YouTube here, and which summarizes the contents of the book.