The great powers that dominate the international system are constantly engaged in security competition, that sometimes lead to war, according to John Mearsheimer, the American political thinker and a leading exponent of the realist school. In order to avoid this and to achieve their foreign policy goals, actors involved in international politics are, in his view, pursuing three world-views – liberalism, realism and nationalism.

Emerging victorious from the Cold War, the United States became the sole great power in the world, and as a deeply liberal country, its objective was to spread liberal democracy, which is the basis for peace, because liberal democracies do not want to go to war with each other. The book focuses on the interpretation of this political (mis)concept(ion): on the one hand, it aims to explain recent US foreign policy, and on the other, it highlights the often harmful consequences of liberal foreign policy, elaborating on the impact of the interaction of the above three isms on international politics.

However, “the Great Delusion says little about the virtues of liberal democracy and non-liberal democracy (...). The focus of the book is liberalism as a foreign policy theory, not whether liberalism is the right recipe for building a political order in any country, including Hungary”, the author tells Hungarian readers in the introduction.

The author is a researcher at the Eurasia Center of John von Neumann University