Liberal wars, realist critique, and academic freedom

At the dawn of the Cold War, the realist tradition became prominent in the consolidating global/American discipline of International Relations. Nonetheless, the quasi-paradigmatic status in theorizing world politics never went without harsh resistance from within the liberal society hosting it. Hans Morgenthau felt that estrangement after his public critiques of the American military escalation into Vietnam during the early 1960s. With the later end of that bipolarity, almost suddenly, realist critique was not viewed as menacing anymore. It lost relevance, became an obsolete, annoying residue of the previous Westphalian era, or even a petty, niched professional strategy within the discipline. Studies registered the growing predominance of liberal research in IR during the 2000s. As the "end of history" itself became neatly dated by the financial crisis that doomed the world from 2007 on to the COVID-19 pandemic and the daunting Chinese performance throughout, the realist critique regained terrain, long anticipating the eventual return of the security dilemma. Still, the champions of liberal internationalism stood fast in denouncing realists, not rarely by extra-academic means. The first-order contemporary example, John Mearsheimer, has pointed to the blame for the rise of tensions that led to the crisis in Ukraine in 2014 and in 2022 on liberal foreign policies of the United States. However, it was not a recasting of that earlier moment. Liberal internationalists had become entrenched in foreign policy decision-making structures and news media outputs by then. It became the foreign policy blob, acting against realist advice for or evaluation of the country’s international performance. Besides, Mearsheimer’s experience was reinforced by today’s social media cancel culture. In both experiences, their critiques found not only academic/intellectual rebuttals but also different social constraints, with possible consequences regarding academic freedom. Specialized surveys have indeed indicated the fall of the levels of academic freedom even in Western democracies. This paper explores and compares both scholars’ experiences under the liberal democratic benchmark of academic freedom. How did the American foreign policy elite and the wider public receive their critiques on the country’s involvement in those foreign crises? It will explore how far these two groupings defined those as illegitimate positions in the American political debates, eventually trying to scrap them from the public space. Given any existential threat, internal fragmentation is often undesirable. The defense of the international liberal order may trump the realist critique. However, the resulting limitation of these thinkers’ academic freedom may harness not only the already weak social scientific credentials of the discipline but also the political conditions necessary for its practice – not only the necessary meticulous reflection on prudent paths that should be followed to preserve national security and other vital interests but the nation’s very condition as a healthy liberal democracy.