Stephen Walt

He wisely chose not to go to Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein.

His son, George W. Bush, made a different choice in 2003, even though Iraq was no longer a major threat and had no weapons of mass destruction.

You all know how that crusade turned out.

The resolution today, as Rudyard said, comes from a famous speech given by former President John Quincy Adams in 1821.

To put Adams' remarks in modern terms, he was saying that America should not use its power to do regime change.

We agree.

As John will explain, toppling foreign governments to promote democracy almost always makes things worse.

Replacing another country's political system is a vast social engineering project, usually done in places we barely understand.

And the typical result is not a vibrant democracy, but chaos, destruction, and thousands of innocent dead.

If you have any doubts, just look what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, or Libya, or consider the damage the war on Iran has caused in just three months.

Toppling foreign governments also undermines the principle of sovereignty that is the foundation of a rules-based order.

If it's okay to overthrow a government that hasn't attacked us, then what's to stop anyone from taking territory that belongs to others, as Putin did in Crimea or as Donald Trump wants to do with Greenland?

If it's acceptable to use force to topple a government you don't like, it's easy to justify assassinating its leaders, imposing sanctions that harm thousands of innocent civilians, or even torturing enemy prisoners.

Remember those pictures from Abu Ghraib prison with 108 Iranian schoolgirls killed by a U.S.

airstrike two months ago?

When we set out to destroy monsters, we end up doing monstrous things ourselves.

Now, as realists, we know that necessity sometimes forces states to compromise their values.

In World War II, for example, the United States allied with Joseph Stalin, who was a monster, to deal with a greater threat.

But crusading to remake the world and sowing violence and suffering in the process does not make us safer or advance the cause of liberty.

Instead of promoting freedom, we are denying it by imposing our will on others.