“We are far off course,” the development guru Jeffrey Sachs laments in his new book. The curmudgeonly geo-strategist John Mearsheimer agrees: “Something went badly wrong.” So does Stephen Walt, the dissenting realist at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “Pursuing liberal hegemony did not make the United States safer, stronger, more prosperous, or more popular,” Walt concludes. “On the contrary, America’s ambitious attempt to reorder world politics undermined its own position, sowed chaos in several regions, and caused considerable misery in a number of other countries.”
