Second goal is we want to integrate more and more countries into the open international economy. This is where we have an emphasis on free trade, lots of economic intercourse, right? Free capital flows, and so forth and so on, you know, the whole story. And then third is we want to integrate more and more countries into international institutions, like the World Trade Organization, the IMF, NATO think NATO expansion, the TPP Trans Pacific Partnership, which the Obama administration was building in which President Trump cashiered okay. The liberal story places a great emphasis on institutions. It places a great emphasis on an open international economy, and most importantly, on spreading democracy. Just to give you feel for this, Donald Trump ran against liberal hegemony. Right, and liberal hegemony, to be clear, was supported by both Republicans and Democrats, as I like to say, the Republicans especially but the Democrats also like to make the argument that there's a big difference between the two parties on foreign policy. This is not a serious argument. This is Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Hardly any difference between the Republicans and the Democrats. There's a real difference between Donald Trump and both of them. Remember, Donald Trump ran the table in the Republican primaries by criticizing the Republicans performance on the foreign policy front for decades and criticizing the Democrats in the general election. Donald Trump said, I'm not interested in spreading liberal democracy across the globe. And in fact, he was quite comfortable making nice with dictators. Second, he was not interested in supporting an open international economy. In fact, he is showing today that he is willing to put tariffs on China, Canada and our European allies. And as far as international institutions are concerned, he said NATO is obsolete. He was contemptuous of the World Trade Organization. contemptuous of the European Union does not like the IMF does not like the World Bank does not like NAFTA, cashiered, the TPP that's Donald Trump, he ran against this, but Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George HW Bush, they embrace this after the Cold War ended. And by the way, it was the failure of this policy. It's the failure of American policy that helped put Donald Trump in the White House. For those of you who say to yourself, how could this man have ever been elected president, the United States, I'm telling you an important part of the story. Right? It's the failure of the foreign policy elites in this country to produce over the past 30 years. Okay. What are the benefits of liberal hegemony is very important. And why didn't go down this road and part is due to the fact that foreign policy elites in the United States had a story to tell about how this was going to lead to all sorts of wonderful consequences. First of all, if you turn every country on the planet into a liberal democracy, you basically eliminate significant human rights violations. We don't need our to pee or any more of these policies that are designed to run around the world, protecting human rights because human rights are no longer threatened, because the world is comprised of nothing but liberal democracies. Second, and maybe even more importantly, liberals tend to believe and again, I'm using liberals to include Democrats and Republicans. They believe in what's called Democratic Peace theory. That is that liberal democracies don't fight each other. So if you can create a world of nothing but liberal democracies, they don't fight each other. breaks out. And problems like proliferation and terrorism are taken off the table. And it's just the world peace, love and dope. Can't get much better than that, right. And then finally, it makes the world safe for liberal democracy. As you all know, inside every liberal democracy, there are going to be elements who don't like liberal democracy. When I was a kid, this was the Communist Party in the United States. Well, if there's no Soviet Union out there, that's a communist state that can interact with those communists in the United States, that you don't have to worry about those communists in the United States getting support from abroad. So what we do is we make the whole planet, nothing but liberal democracies, and that really ameliorates the problems that any of these liberal democracies have On the homefront, because there's no foreign power that can assist them. This is a Woodrow Wilson like argument made by the likes of George Bush, right? So these are the three great benefits of liberal hegemony. And this is what propelled people to pursue this policy of remaking the world in America's image, which mainly means spreading liberal democracy. Now, why did the US pursue liberal hegemony?