The Crisis of Pax Americana with Walter Russell Mead

On Wednesday, November 12, 2025, Walter Russell Mead delivered the Warren and Anita Manshel Lecture in American Foreign Policy on "The Crisis of Pax Americana" at the Harvard Faculty Club. Weatherhead Center Acting Director Erez Manela moderated the conversation. Mead is the Alexander Hamilton Professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the University of Florida and the Ravenel B. Curry III Distinguished Fellow in Strategy and Statesmanship at the Hudson Institute. He is also a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. 

Below is a transcript of Mead’s talk, lightly edited for clarity. Watch the entire lecture, including audience Q&A, on our YouTube channel.

This is one of those very interesting moments in world history—not a very happy moment, but an interesting one—when the framework that Americans, with some help from some of our important allies, helped to set up after the end of World War II.
We revised it in the 1970s, when the Bretton Woods currency system collapsed, and Nixon and Kissinger reshored it and introduced a kind of trilateralism to try to boost American power from Western Europe and Japan. And after the fall of the Soviet Union, we doubled down on it. And the idea was that the kind of Western world order that had gotten us through the Cold War would be expanded in the post-Cold War era. 

And that now doesn't seem to be happening. And a lot of Americans aren't sure that they want it to happen. So we're looking at a new era, in which not only the post-1990s framework is up for grabs, but even, in some ways, the post-1945 framework is being contested. And the questions that I would like to look at tonight are a mix of, well, why is this happening? If we tried to conceive of where America might go, Americans might try to take this now, what should our response be? And how likely is it that we would succeed? 

So let's talk about why the old system is in trouble. One of the reasons is a no-fault reason: nothing lasts forever in world affairs. Everybody's always talking about how we're having an unprecedented wave of technological change. Social media is upending everything. New tech is sweeping out everything. Well, if that's true, why should the international order not also be changed? Why should the world not be in upheaval if everybody's lives in the world are in upheaval? So this part is not anybody's mistake. Human history isn't the sort of thing where you solve the problem and then live happily ever after. That's not how things work.

So we're in a new age. Old assumptions, old institutions, aren't working the way they used to. We have to think about new ones. Well, again, that's human history. And that is driving a lot of this.

Beyond that, one problem is that the adversaries of this old system are now stronger than before and working together more cohesively. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela—you can add or subtract the ones that you like—they don't agree on a lot of things. They disagree on what they would like to put in place of the world system that exists.

But in various ways, they all see—and with some real justification—that the current world status quo is not only a status quo that they dislike on aesthetic or even economic grounds. It is a threat to the power of the regimes or the people that are in power and needs to be opposed defensively. They have, I think, developed some fairly effective strategies. They are putting them together in interesting ways, and they've had a lot of success.

They've also had some failures—ask in Iran how the last couple of years have gone for them. So it isn't all winning, winning, winning. But on the whole, China, in particular, but Russia, also, has had some success in changing the international environment around them. And they want to continue. So that's one problem—the adversaries are back.

The second problem, I think, is that on our side, we have not paid sufficient attention to the relationship between public opinion and power. When I look back, particularly with the framework that I developed in [my book] Special Providence—I was warning about this back in the early 1990s. And as Special Providence came out of my head, I worried more—the American support for the Cold War was forty years, we kept voting these huge defense budgets…[for] forty years, containment was broadly accepted as a framework for American policy. A lot of our Wilsonian friends thought this was because Americans love freedom. The Cold War was about defending freedom and extending freedom. And so now that the Soviet Union has gone, we can do more. The opponent of freedom has disappeared from the stage, so we can raise our objectives. We can now start worrying about gender justice in Senegal and honest voting in Kazakhstan. Our time has come.

But actually, a lot of the support for a vigorous foreign policy in the United States came not from people who were motivated by hope to extend the American system, but had been motivated by fear to want to defend it. And as the fear faded, the Jacksonians, a very large and important element in American policy, stopped being interested in foreign policy, stopped wanting to pay for foreign policy, stopped wanting to take risks in the name of foreign policy.

In 1992, the first real post-Cold War election, you had two candidates: George H. W. Bush, architect of victory of the Cold War, winner of the Gulf War, a reunifier of Germany; and Bill Clinton, the governor of Arkansas, who didn't know that much about foreign policy per se, but thought that America should be spending more time worrying about American problems. He wanted less foreign policy, and he beat Bush.

Eight years later, you have Al Gore, the great statesman, the vice president who's been everywhere, the climate champion, the really smart guy, who knows the world leaders and knows the world. And then you have George W. Bush, another governor who thinks we've got too much foreign policy—we don't need to be doing this nation building abroad, America needs to focus on America first.

2008: John McCain, the great Republican statesman, the architect of reconciliation between the US and Vietnam, the man famous globally for his foreign policy credentials. And then this guy who's a first-term senator from Illinois, who thinks that really, America needs to focus more on stuff at home, and that all of this grandiose war on terror, foreign policy stuff is getting us into a bad place.

2016: Secretary of State and ex-First Lady Hillary Clinton, great world expert. And I can tell you, I've known her and worked with her on some things. She is a great world expert. Versus Donald Trump, a real estate developer from Queens, who thinks we've got too much of this darn foreign policy thing and need to be America first.

So at every opportunity from the end of the Cold War, American voters voted for less foreign policy. But one way or another, each of these presidents managed to end up giving them more. Either the message was not coming through, or the reality of the world situation was such that it was impossible to give people what they actually wanted. I'm not going to try to take a position over that, but it's significant.

So the American foreign policy system, in a sense, has been running on fumes for quite a while. And Donald Trump's embrace of much less foreign policy, the heck with all this multilateralism, reached a lot of people at a visceral level. Although, as I noted in last week's column, he's talking about regime change in Venezuela, humanitarian interventions in Nigeria, and nation building in Gaza. So we seem to be back. And this might suggest an avenue for a challenger, for a candidate in 2028. So that's part of it.

The final reason that I would draw your attention to that things are not going well with this system is that I think we got confused over the nature of power—and the relationship of soft power and other kinds of power. You could argue that the last thirty years, we've had two kinds of—that liberalism, which in my mind, the liberal mind is not a fundamentalist mind. It's a cautious mind. It looks at any programs, even its own, with a certain degree of skepticism.

But many liberals have fallen victim to two different varieties of what I would think of as liberal fundamentalism. The one we're most familiar with is what people call market fundamentalism. If we just have free trade, then the whole world is going to be fine. And the answer to any economic problem is to deregulate market forces. That's not all wrong, and there's a lot of truth in it. But like everything else, it needs to be adjusted from the blackboard to the actual world. And that sometimes makes economists unhappy, but it makes doctrinaire people even more unhappy. And I think we've had a lot of doctrinaires.

The other one is what I would call rights fundamentalism, that if we double down on human rights everywhere, everything is going to be great. And that can be the basis for world order, a quest for human rights utopia. Which, again, I like human rights as much as anybody else, and I like free markets. But when you convert these from goals that you are pursuing in a complicated world, sometimes in rather strange, crooked ways, to “I'm going to get there no matter what, I'm going to bulldoze everything,” and you have a kind of monomaniacal approach, you get in trouble.

I would say we also, even as we embrace these kinds of fundamentalisms, we also forgot the role of hard power in establishing those world systems. We did not win the Second World War because everybody thought Eleanor Roosevelt's ideas about a universal declaration of human rights were just so compelling that that was how the world wanted to live. 

We won World War II because we killed millions of people in amazing orgies of destruction and blood. We assembled violence and force. One night in Tokyo, we killed 84,000 Japanese civilians in deliberate terror attacks on civilian neighborhoods, in a country where homes were built of paper. I'm not even getting to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not even the Huns destroyed as many European historic monuments as we did in that war.

Franklin Roosevelt was advised that he should not call for unconditional surrender by Germany because that would prolong the war, increase suffering. It would unite Germans around Hitler's leadership. And Roosevelt's conviction was that one of the reasons that we were having the Second World War was that the Germans had called for the armistice in 1918 before the war got to Germany. The war was still outside. They didn't know what war was. And he said—this time, they will.

So when we talk about the beautiful world order that emerged from the ashes of World War II, we forget not only the cruelties and the horrors of the actual war, and that we won it because we were better at organizing productive powers for destruction than our enemies were. We also forget just how for years after that war, the president of the United States basically could decide how many calories everybody in Germany and Japan would get to eat.

And there was a decade of real suffering, even as their economies began to recover. So you have a whole generation of people whose worldview includes the right thing. War is terrible, and war against the United States is even worse. And fifty years later, we thought it was our moral purity and our piety that were upholding the world order. It's still not. It's still not.

It's a good thing. I'm all for moral piety and purity and all those things. But again, the reason that China doesn't attack Taiwan today is because it's not quite sure what would happen if it did. The reason Russia hasn't nuked anybody in Ukraine or Europe has more to do with their fears of what would happen if they did, than to any admiration of the moral example that we're setting by not nuking anyone.

So that doesn't mean that soft power has no place. And it certainly doesn't mean that morality in international life has no place. But we've missed it. We've tried to do too much. We have failed to understand the sources of strength. We have allowed ourselves to turn elements of our ideology into idols, so that we have become liberal fundamentalists rather than liberals. And these things have gotten us into trouble.

Well, where can we go from here? I'll try to be quick. I'll try to sketch out a new world order in just a few minutes. I would suggest that what the United States got kind of lured into after the end of the Cold War was we became what you might call an “offshore hegemon.” That is, we were doing things that an offshore balancer does by trying to prevent any country from dominating Europe, any country from dominating Asia, any country from being able to interrupt the flow of oil from the Middle East, those classic, hard-power things.

But we tried to then set up a political order in our own image in each of these theaters. So we promote democracy, and so on and so forth, all of which is fine, no principled objection. But we didn't have the power. We didn't have the push. I think we need to go back to being more of an offshore balancer, where we're not going to try to tell every country in the Middle East how to live. We're not going to try to tell every country in Southeast Asia what their policy on elections should be.

I mean, our civil society can and will continue to do this, but we focus our attention much more on some of the classic and really very limited goals that Anglo-American diplomacy has sought. I think we would also, in economic terms, need to take much more seriously the degree to which the Chinese abuse of the world trading system and the inept construction of the world trading system that created something that was so vulnerable to abuse.

The problem with this is not simply that China has a balance of trade surplus with the United States. I worry about that less than some people in Washington do. But that in a sense, China monopolized the beneficial consequences of industrialization and growth, so that there hasn't been industrialization, say, in Egypt comparable to what we've seen in China. Because China managed a combination of state subsidies, state policies, and some good work and good thinking—this is not all evil Chinese, insidiously, blah blah. I’m not trying to take us in that direction at all.

In a sense, this great tree grew up, and nothing could grow in the shade. Many of the economic and social problems that Africa, parts of Asia, and certainly the Middle East have, have some connection to this. A global trading system in which, say, the Europeans could have said, it's really important to us that to the extent that our economic market is going to help promote development and stability, we do it across the Mediterranean, where that really has a big impact on us, and that we might have been a little bit more attentive to trying to make our own neighborhood a bit more prosperous, and so on.

So I think we would move away from the idea of a global, one-size-fits-all approach to a lot of these policy things and a theory-driven approach. Free trade is good. This looks like free trade, therefore this is good—I wouldn't disagree that free trade is good, by the way, I don't want to make that argument. But like everything else, you have to do it in a practical, pragmatic way, with a careful thought for the political, economic, social, and geographical and geopolitical consequences of what you do.

But I'd say, America, we're stuck with a global foreign policy. The fact that Trump was adjudicating disputes between Cambodia and Thailand and Azerbaijan and Armenia, that the isolationist restrainer America-first president gets drawn into these things should remind us that in a sense, no matter what somebody wants, this is where you end up going a lot of times as an American.

So you need to try to go there intelligently and try to think very hard, not just about what you can do, but about what you can avoid doing. So a more nuanced, grand strategy that does take into account historic American interests and priorities—that is less doctrinaire, more pragmatic—this is not going to be a recipe for universal joy, or you get this—most of the time, most foreign policy doesn't work very well.

It was Henry Kissinger who said that a lot of the time, your alternatives are you're trying to avoid the catastrophic and get to the merely bad. And this is not going to go away. So again, foreign policy is not like a test. If you do the homework and study and apply the right principles, you'll get an A. It doesn't work like that. It's much more like an athletic contest, where even the best athlete in the world will go out there and screw things up, commit fouls, miss easy shots, get hornswoggled by some opponent.

And your success today doesn't mean you're going to be successful tomorrow. It's much more of an engagement than it is an academic exercise. Well that's, at least, a quick overview. I'll be happy to get any questions or comments that come my way. Thank you.