By Bruno Rukavina
In this analysis, the author explains the famous metaphor in American foreign policy: hunting monsters, which refers to liberal (or humanitarian) military interventionism and interference in conflicts around the world for the purpose of overthrowing “undemocratic and illiberal” regimes. A debate on this topic was held in Canada last month, though it received little attention in Croatia, much like many other liberal–realist (conservative) debates on international relations.
The debate was organized in Canada by Munk Debates and was based on the famous argument made by John Quincy Adams in 1821 that America “does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” Opposing this argument/proposal were Mike Pompeo, former U.S. Secretary of State and CIA Director, and Victoria Nuland, former Acting Deputy Secretary of State and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. In their view, the United States should indeed go hunt monsters around the world. Supporting Adams’ argument/proposal were John Mearsheimer, professor of political science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard Kennedy School. According to them, the United States should not go hunting monsters around the world.
Initial Positions and Opening Statements
Liberal Position – Hunt the Monsters
Mike Pompeo (Opening Statement)
Monsters exist, and once they are identified, they must be hunted. If we do not hunt them, they will begin hunting us. Therefore, we would rather hunt them according to our rules than allow them to hunt us according to theirs. We do not need to create or seek enemies, but they certainly exist regardless of whether we choose them or create them. Monsters always find us. Evil exists, and when it comes, it comes intentionally and inevitably. If we do not hunt monsters, they will destroy us.
It is not important to say who the monsters are, but once we define and identify them, we must hunt them. It is the duty of sovereign leaders to protect their citizens from such evil. Monsters are all around us, as we can clearly see today. For example, the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11, 2001.
The best hunt is when you gather a hunting team because you never know whether monsters hunt alone or in packs, like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, and North Korea. Although we do not want or enjoy wars and hunts, the alternative is to do nothing while monsters grow stronger and strike even harder, which is deadly, dangerous, and un-American. One must always confront the monster.
Western civilization hunts monsters together once they emerge from the shadows. Western civilization must not become the coward of the world. Either we hunt now or we fight later, and for us the answer is clear: hunt now. Realists have never encountered a monster. But we know the eternal truth and we know how to distinguish good from evil. Monsters are real, and when we find them, we must hunt them.
Victoria Nuland (Opening Statement)
Neither the United States, nor Canada, nor any democracy can allow the world to be overrun by monsters that take the place of free nations. The U.S. and its allies are better protected when they confront those monsters before they become stronger and threaten the West or destroy the foundations of the world order the United States has built.
But realists have a different perspective. Their grand strategy focuses on balancing and the balance of power. Their key argument is this: if there is no hegemon emerging in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East, then there is no reason to station large quantities of weapons and troops in those regions.
That would be a wonderful world, but the world is not like that. Monsters around the globe are growing stronger. The professors say we should turn to regional allies as the first line of defense and only then involve the United States. But our allies need our help to keep monsters at bay.
As long as there are people on planet Earth, there will be monsters among us. Hunting does not always mean war or regime change; diplomacy should always be tried first. Monsters must be contained, deterred, or lured into traps. Practice has shown that some monsters will not stop until they are destroyed.
As practitioners, Pompeo and I know that every monster is different and each requires special tools and methods: negotiations, economic and political pressure, deterrence, and more. We also do not believe that the United States has always used its tools effectively against monsters. But inaction against monsters is more dangerous than any action taken against them.
Russia warned the United States during the 1990s about the growing danger of Al-Qaeda, but the United States did not take the threat seriously because it believed people hiding in caves could not possibly threaten America. The U.S. thought the Russians were trying to deceive them, but the lesson was learned on September 11, 2001.
Inaction and passivity toward monsters are more costly than proactive action, even if such action contains mistakes. Liberals may not agree on every monster hunt. For example, Mike Pompeo supports war with Iran, while I oppose it because more can be achieved through economic tools, aggressive diplomacy, and support for the democratic opposition. However, we both agree that Iran cannot be allowed to obtain nuclear weapons and that the Iranian regime poses a threat to the region, freedom of navigation, the United States, Canada, and global peace and security.
Iran must be pressured until it stops its monstrous behavior or collapses. Most importantly, we today enjoy peace, prosperity, and security as democracies precisely because we hunt monsters. We liberals do not want to live in the realists’ monstrous world, and neither do you.
Realist/Conservative Position – Do Not Hunt Monsters
Stephen Walt (Opening Statement)
For realists, this is a debate against crusaders, as liberals are often called. The key question is not whether the United States should be present in the world and support international law, but whether it should intervene globally and overthrow foreign governments. Realists say no; liberals/crusaders say yes.
According to realists, the United States should use military power only to defend itself and maintain the balance of power in critical regions. World War II, the Cold War, and the First Gulf War were justified. Japan attacked the U.S. in 1941; the Cold War was about balancing and containing the Soviet Union rather than direct confrontation; and the 1991 war against Iraq aimed to stop the invasion of Kuwait without overthrowing the regime in Baghdad.
However, the 2003 Iraq War was different because Iraq was not a threat and did not possess weapons of mass destruction. We know how that crusade ended.
In short, the United States should not use military power to change political systems in other countries. Overthrowing foreign governments in order to promote democracy only makes things worse. Such endeavors are massive social engineering experiments conducted in places the West barely understands.
The result of overthrowing foreign governments is not liberal democracy, but chaos, destruction, and thousands of innocent deaths. If you doubt this argument, look at Libya, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Overthrowing foreign governments also undermines the principle of sovereignty, which is the foundation of a rules-based order. If it is acceptable to overthrow a government that has not attacked the United States, what prevents anyone else from seizing territory that belongs to others? If it is acceptable to attack another country because we dislike its government, then assassinations of foreign leaders and sanctions harming thousands of innocent civilians also become acceptable.
When we start hunting monsters, we end up doing monstrous things.
As realists, we understand that pragmatic compromises are sometimes necessary, such as the alliance between Western democracies and the Soviet Union during World War II. Expanding crusades around the world while spreading violence and suffering does not spread freedom and security. Instead of supporting freedom, it undermines it, because freedom is imposed on others through American coercion.
Crusading also undermines international law and turns the idea of a rules-based order into a mockery. The United States can promote freedom and democracy by building an attractive society within its own borders that others admire and wish to emulate through soft power, not through military force, because democracy imposed by force becomes frightening and repulsive.
Self-restraint works; crusades do not. John Quincy Adams was right. America should not go hunting monsters but should instead use its power with wisdom and restraint.
John Mearsheimer (Opening Statement)
I would begin by speaking about the costs and consequences of modern crusaders, meaning liberals. Let us start with the human cost. Since September 11, 2001, according to the Watson Institute, approximately 4.5 to 4.6 million people have died in American wars in the Middle East.
According to the medical journal The Lancet in 2025, unilateral American sanctions over a 50-year period (1971–2021) resulted in approximately 28 million deaths. These are the results once you become a crusading state.
Some people, like Madeleine Albright, considered these necessary sacrifices of crusading campaigns. Sanctions, of course, failed in Iraq, which led to the direct invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Crusading wars are always about regime change. There is extensive academic literature clearly proving that when regimes are overthrown militarily and democracy is imposed, it almost always fails. The only successful case since World War II was Panama in 1989. Since the end of the Cold War, there has not been a single country in which military intervention successfully created a liberal democracy.
If you doubt this, remember Afghanistan: the Taliban were overthrown, and now the Taliban are back in power. Academic literature clearly shows that regime change does not work. Democracy cannot be promoted with weapons.
Crusaders often claim they promote democracy. But that is not true. Crusaders distinguish between “like-minded democracies,” a phrase often used by Mike Pompeo, and other democracies. Mike wants to create a world of American-style democracies. The result is that the United States goes around the world overthrowing real democracies that are not ideologically aligned with America.
Remember that the United States has a long history of overthrowing democracies that were not considered “like-minded,” including Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, and Chile in 1973. The U.S. has a rich history of overthrowing democratic political systems simply because they were not aligned with American interests.
In short, the United States tries to establish client democracies, and this always fails.
Course of the Debate and Interesting Moments
After the opening statements, the debate shifted toward the key question: what exactly are monsters, and are preventive military actions against them necessary?
One interesting argument focused on China, which invests in its own system, technologies, soft power, and domestic development, while the United States spends trillions on wars around the world, thereby weakening its position relative to China. This raised the question: who defines monsters, and which state qualifies as one?
Mike Pompeo emphasized that not every hunt involves kinetic force or war. Building coalitions and alliances against monsters is also an instrument of hunting. For him, China is a genuine monster.
John Mearsheimer responded that realism has no issue confronting imperial powers such as Imperial Japan or Nazi Germany. However, John Quincy Adams was not speaking about that. He was referring to intervention in countries that do not have political systems resembling the American one and are therefore perceived as monsters that must be overthrown and remade in America’s image.
That, according to Mearsheimer, is the central problem today. It is social engineering, not resistance to imperial aggression. Iraq and Afghanistan were not serious threats to the United States. On the contrary, attempts at Americanizing those countries produced catastrophic consequences at enormous cost.
When Nuland and Pompeo asked the realists whether there was any monster the United States should confront—perhaps not militarily but at least through deterrence—Stephen Walt answered clearly:
“China is the obvious rival of the United States.”
He argued that the U.S. should build alliances, maintain a military presence in Asia, invest resources in technological competition with China, and avoid wasting time and resources on peripheral conflicts in the Middle East and Europe—precisely what China wants.
Walt added:
“China will not interrupt its rival while the rival is making mistakes.”
He asked the audience to imagine what the United States could have achieved against China with the six to eight trillion dollars spent on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Another major topic was the Russia–Ukraine conflict. While liberals/crusaders such as Nuland and Pompeo described Russia as a monster and argued that NATO expansion had nothing to do with the war, realists such as Walt and Mearsheimer viewed Russia as behaving the same way the United States would if placed in a similar strategic position.
They asked how the U.S. would react if another military alliance expanded toward American borders while refusing to include the United States itself. Even if NATO is defensive, they argued, the key issue is how Russia perceives NATO.
They pointed out that the United States sent half a million troops to Vietnam in order to maintain influence in a country thousands of miles away. Therefore, they asked whether Russia may have acted out of similar fears regarding Ukraine, which lies directly on its borders.
According to the realists, the Russia–Ukraine war is essentially a preventive war against Ukraine joining NATO. Although preventive war violates international law, they argued that the United States also bears part of the responsibility because it ignored repeated Russian warnings regarding NATO expansion.
Liberals strongly rejected this interpretation and continued to view Russia as the principal aggressor.
The Author’s Understanding of the Debate and Unspoken Arguments
It is important to emphasize once again that criticism of post–Cold War liberalism does not target the internal policies of liberal democracies—such as minority rights, freedom of speech, the rule of law, or the separation of private and public spheres—which remain major civilizational achievements of the West.
Rather, the criticism focuses primarily on post–Cold War liberal foreign policy, which advocated violent regime change in stable but non-liberal-democratic states through protests, color revolutions, and military interventions.
Even liberals themselves increasingly recognize this issue, which is why many now speak about the need to return to realism, including Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Finnish President Alexander Stubb.
What Are Monsters, and Do They Even Exist?
The author argues that monsters do not exist in the real world, but rather within a liberal dichotomous construction of the world. This reflects the liberal use of constructivist international relations theory to portray other political systems as monstrous in order to justify wars against them.
In this framework, Western liberal democracies define non-liberal systems as monstrous and therefore believe they have the right to attack or “humanitarily bomb” them, often under the guise of moral duty.
However, this becomes problematic when one realizes that if one attacks a state merely because it is illiberal or undemocratic, then the same logic should apply to all such states. What distinguishes Syria, Libya, Iraq, or Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia or North Korea?
Perhaps, the author suggests, the answer lies in strategic interests rather than universal values.
This leads to the conclusion that liberalism and “freedom” may sometimes function as ideological cover for geopolitical or oligarchic interests.
The author also criticizes Pompeo’s portrayal of political systems in metaphysical terms of good and evil, describing it as a misuse of religion for political purposes.
Political systems, regardless of their form, possess no metaphysical legitimacy that would make them inherently good or evil. Christianity, the author argues, sees the struggle between good and evil within individuals rather than between political systems.
No part of the Bible or the Catechism of the Catholic Church speaks of defending liberal democracies or autocracies as metaphysical duties. Therefore, invoking such moral dichotomies for political objectives is hypocritical and potentially closer to evil than to good.
Outcome of the Debate
According to the votes of the Canadian audience, the conclusion was clear:
DO NOT HUNT MONSTERS!
Otherwise, two outcomes are possible:
- The monsters will retaliate, potentially with catastrophic consequences for humanity.
- You will become the very monster you sought to destroy, a process the author calls monsterization.
As Stephen Walt stated during the debate:
“The United States became more like the monsters it set out to hunt than the monsters became like the United States.”
What is the alternative?
A balance of power, peaceful coexistence, and rational diplomatic understanding of “the other,” rather than endless bloodshed driven by the crusading belief that liberal democracy is superior to all other political systems and therefore must be imposed universally.
The author concludes by comparing ideological superiority claims to historical examples of destructive political regimes built on notions of superiority. Every form of superiority, he argues, will eventually be humbled.
As the Gospel states:
“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (Matthew 23:12; Luke 14:11)
