Recommended: The Hell of Good Intentions

Along the same lines as the previous recommendation, let me recommend Stephen Walt's 2018 book The Hell of Good Intentions: America's Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of American Primacy. As with Mearsheimer's book, Walt deals with the mess that our Washington foreign policy elites have made of things, blinded by their well-intentioned but fatally misguided ideology of "liberal hegemony", the attempt to spread American-style democracy and capitalism throughout the world and into cultures which are neither prepared for such a transformation nor want it. I continue to be amazed at how naïve our supposedly well-educated ruling elites have proven to be about the real world and other cultures. The Ivy league schools who trained most of them so poorly have much to answer for.

Walt suggests a much better, more realistic, and more workable approach is the old realpolitic balance of power approach which worked so well for the British for hundreds of years, and so well for us in the Cold War. The Washington foreign policy elite won't like this book, because it doesn't make them look very good (but then, neither do our endless unwinnable wars in the Middle East make them look very good).

Again, for those who would prefer a lecture to reading the book, Professor Walt's 2018 presentation to the World Affairs Council, which can be viewed on YouTube here, covers much of the material in the book. Also worth watching is his 2018 presentation at the Watson Institute, Brown University, which can be viewed on YouTube here, and which discusses his concept of "offshore balancing".