Michael Poznansky, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary: New Books Network

Episode: "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy"

Guest: Michael Poznansky (U.S. Naval War College)
Host: Eleonora Matiacci (Amherst College)
Date: September 16, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode features a conversation between Professor Michael Poznansky and host Eleonora Matiacci focusing on Poznansky's upcoming book, "Great Power, Great Responsibility: How the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy" (Oxford UP, 2025). The book offers a nuanced thesis on how America’s relationship to the liberal international order has shifted across different global power configurations, and how these shifts have influenced everything from intervention strategies to the use of international institutions. Poznansky discusses the origins of the project, breaks down his theoretical framework, methods, empirical findings, and responds to common critiques—providing insight for both academics and policymakers.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Origin of the Book and Initial Puzzle

• Poznansky’s intellectual journey began around 2018 amid a surge in critiques of the liberal international order, especially following the Trump administration and a reactive wave of defenses from pro-liberal order scholars.
• Noted significant debates between "proponents" (e.g., John Ikenberry) and "skeptics" (e.g., John Mearsheimer, Patrick Porter), each capturing part of the story but missing critical nuances.
• Quote:

  "[Both sides] were capturing something real about the world, but missing a lot of the nuances that I had kind of observed in working on research related to military intervention, regime change, and covert action in the past."
  — Michael Poznansky (03:37)

2. Core Theoretical Argument

• The U.S. relationship to the liberal international order is contingent, not static; compliance is shaped by two key factors:
  1. Presence of peer competition: Is there another great power challenging the U.S. for global leadership? (e.g., Soviet Union during the Cold War; China/Russia today)
  2. Burden of compliance: How hard is following the rules of the order, given U.S. security or policy aims?
• Quote:

  "The core argument in this book is that US compliance with the liberal international order...is contingent, rather than either constantly in the realm of violations or constantly in the realm of compliance."
  — Michael Poznansky (06:41)

• Peer competition heightens U.S. sensitivity to reputational costs of violating the order; when no peer competitor exists, the U.S. feels freer to violate or reinterpret norms.

3. Empirical Approach and Methodological Challenges

• The book analyzes nine case studies across three periods:
  • Cold War (peer competition)
  • Transition (late 80s/early 90s)
  • Unipolarity (post-Cold War)
• Each period includes cases where the burden of compliance is high/low, permitting analysis of variation in U.S. behavior.
• Empirical vignettes include U.S. interventions in Panama (1989), the Gulf War (1991), Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, among others.
• Big challenge: Peer competition is a "slow-moving variable," making causal inference tricky; relied on archival research and process tracing to establish patterns.
• Quote:

  "You want to see policymakers, presidents and their senior advisors kind of saying things that you would expect them to say in those periods...you can begin to look for patterns and try to rule out alternative explanations."
  — Michael Poznansky (13:36)

4. Key Findings: Complexity in Transition Periods

• Poznansky was surprised by the "messiness" of transition periods, especially between the Cold War and unipolarity. These periods didn’t map neatly onto clear behaviors.
• Policy decisions during transitions (e.g., Panama, Gulf War, Bosnia) were more complex and ambiguous—neither strictly Cold War nor post-Cold War logic prevailed.
• Quote:

  "Those cases in the book I expected to be a little bit more straightforward...but instead I ended up making them their own chapter. They’re honestly quite messy."
  — Michael Poznansky (09:33)

5. Implications for Policymakers

• The U.S. is now returning to great power competition—the first such reversal after a unipolar period. Policymakers and defense strategists need to recalibrate their tools and expectations.
• Poznansky’s research challenges assumptions drawn from post-Cold War interventionism and humanitarian action, highlighting how reputational and multilateral considerations become more salient in multipolar contexts.
• He also acknowledges the ongoing debate over the value and utility of the liberal international order: critics see it as a vehicle for overreach, proponents as a source of global stability.
• Quote:

  "The way in which US foreign policy manifested in a unipolar moment is not suited to today’s world."
  — Michael Poznansky (18:32)

6. Addressing Misconceptions

• Poznansky wants to correct the idea that all U.S. violations of the order are the same.
• During the Cold War, covert violations and concern for "optics" showed the U.S. was at least constrained by the order, even if not fully compliant. Post-Cold War, policymakers were less concerned about appearances, leading to more overt rule-breaking.
• Quote:

  "Skeptics don’t draw any distinction really between covert violations of liberal international order and overt violations. But I think they’re essential."
  — Michael Poznansky (22:40)

• He draws on Jan Elster:

  "To violate a norm in public shows a disdain that violating a norm in secret does not... violating it in secret signals at least...an acknowledgment that one exists within a broader set of rules and norms."
  — (23:41)

7. Evolution of Poznansky's Thinking

• Writing the book deepened his appreciation for the complexity of "in-between" periods (e.g., decline of USSR, rise of China).
• Became more attuned to the tension between liberal values (human rights, democracy) and rules (sovereignty, non-intervention).
• Quote:

  "That tension, I think, is at the heart of the criticism from the restraint crowd...because it’s both liberal in a real sense and violates some core tenets of the liberal international order."
  — Michael Poznansky (27:24)

8. Current and Future Research

• Two new projects:
  • With Leonard Maschmeyer: Framework for evaluating success and impact of cyber operations—bridging the gap between academic and practitioner perspectives, using the Russia-Ukraine context as a reference. (29:00)
  • On ‘windows of opportunity’: How fleeting advantages shape decisions to use military force; relevance for current U.S. debates over military commitments in Europe and Asia. (31:25)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Contingency of U.S. Rule-Following:

  "US compliance with the liberal international order...is contingent...on the structure of the international system...and the burden of compliance."
  — Michael Poznansky (06:41)

• On Transition Complexity:

  "In the late Cold War and into the early 1990s, policymakers are wrestling with whether the Soviet Union will collapse...and what America’s new role in the world should be."
  — Michael Poznansky (08:37)

• Policy Utility:

  "Even if policymakers aren't wedded to the rules based international order per se, the book shows how...perceptions of compliance and rule following and multilateralism serve the U.S. national interest in kind of surprising ways."
  — Michael Poznansky (19:26)

• Misconceptions:

  "All violations of the liberal international order are not created equal."
  — Michael Poznansky (21:18)

• On Norm Violation and Secrecy:

  "To violate a norm in public shows a disdain that violating a norm in secret does not..."
  — (Jan Elster via Poznansky, 23:41)

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Important Timestamps

• 01:35 – Introduction and Poznansky’s background
• 02:35 – Book’s origin story and intellectual context
• 04:20 – Main argument: conditional U.S. compliance
• 07:48 – Surprises: transition periods
• 10:22 – Empirical approach and research design
• 12:44 – Methodological difficulties
• 16:25 – Policy implications and relevance for practitioners
• 20:29 – Key misconceptions and what the book corrects
• 25:04 – How Poznansky’s thinking has evolved
• 28:56 – Current and future research projects

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Overall Tone and Language

Conversational but scholarly, with clear attempts by both host and guest to make complex international relations theory accessible and to illuminate real-world stakes. Throughout, Poznansky is forthright about challenges, ambiguities, and the provisional nature of social science in an evolving world order.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• Poznansky’s framework helps readers and policymakers understand why and how the U.S. alternately champions or circumvents the liberal international order.
• The nuances between overt and covert norm violations matter for assessing U.S. accountability.
• As the global order shifts, historical patterns—and their differences—offer tangible lessons for today’s foreign policy debates.
• The episode is rich for anyone engaging with debates on American power, multilateralism, and the future of world order.

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Transcript

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Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. I am an associate professor of Political Science at Amherst College. Today, I'm here with Professor Michael Pozanski, author of the book Great Power, Great how the Liberal International Order Shapes US Foreign Policy. The book will be published in the Summer of 2025 by Oxford University Press. Welcome.

[Michael Pozanski]

Thanks so much for having me. Really appreciate it.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Tell us a bit about yourself.

[Michael Pozanski]

I'm a professor at the U.S. naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. And because of that, I gotta state my usual disclaimer that the views expressed during our conversation are my own and don't represent those of the Naval War College or the Navy.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Great. Thanks for doing that. Before we dive into the specifics of the book, could you tell us the about the origin story of the book, sort of what puzzle observation first sparked your interest in the topic?

[Michael Pozanski]

Absolutely. So around 2018, I started noticing a pretty substantial uptick at least in my perception of articles and books that were fairly critical of this concept of the liberal international order. Some of those were in International Security by John Mearsheimer and Charles Glaser. There was a book from Patrick Porter called the False Promise of Liberal Order. And I found these articles and books interesting and compelling in their own ways. But I sort of started trying to piece together why I was seeing this surge in criticisms of the liberal international order. And my guess is that it was inspired in part as a response to a wave of liberal order proponents putting out their own articles and books about their fears that the first Trump administration would radically change the course of U.S. grand strategy. And so my best guess is that these books and articles were kind of a response in challenging those views. And I thought each of those perspectives, both the deep skeptics of the liberal international order and the kind of stalwart proponents of the liberal order were both capturing something real about the world, but missing a lot of the nuances that I had kind of observed in working on research related to military intervention, regime change, and covert action in the past.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Great, that makes sense. The sort of wave that you described right there. Your book presents an original argument on the liberal international order. And could you walk us through your argument in broad strokes?

[Michael Pozanski]

Sure. So, as I was kind of alluding to, there are these two camps. You might think of them as the liberal order proponents and the liberal order skeptics. Obviously, there's a lot of variation within age camp, but in the interest of parsimony, the proponents basically argue that in the aftermath Of World War II, the United States established this dense array of institutions, norms, rules, and legal procedures that were meant to govern both the United States behavior, that of its allies, and ideally, those of major powers in other states around the world. And that the United States has been a champion and a leader of this liberal order or this system for the last 80 plus years or so. The skeptics take the radically opposite view, that the liberal international order has always been a little bit of a fiction. And when it was convenient for the United States to abide by these rules nor norms, procedures and what have you, policymakers would do it. But the second, it was inconvenient for the United States to follow the rules and norms, they basically abandoned any pretense and violated them. And so the core argument in this book is that US Compliance with the liberal international order, in other words, when, whether and when the US Follows its rules and norms, is contingent, rather than either constantly in the realm of violations or constantly in the Realm of compliance and what is it contingent on? I basically argue it's contingent on two factors. The first is the structure of the international system at any given time, and specifically whether the United States faces a peer competitor. In other words, another great power vying for control over international order, trying to court adherence to its side and tarnish the other. During the Cold War, the United States obviously faced a peer competitor in the form of the Soviet Union. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we had the unipolar moment where there was no peer competitor, and today the United States faces a peer competitor in China and to a lesser degree, Russia. And so that variable in the book I say the presence of a peer competitor makes US Policymakers worried that violating the core tenets of the liberal international order would result in costs, mostly reputationally and otherwise, and that the absence of a peer competitor reduces their sensitivity to violations. The second factor that I argue explains whether the U.S. and how the U.S. complies with the liberal order is what I call the burden of compliance. And I define this in the book as whether it's easy or difficult to do what the liberal order prescribes in a given moment and still accomplish core goals when the burden of compliance is high. In other words, the US can't achieve its national objectives or its particular interests and follow the liberal order. Policymakers are more inclined to want to violate the order, and if the burden of compliance is low, they'll capitalize because there's lots of legitimacy benefits and they can still pursue their interests. And so these factors together combine to produce different strategies of compliance in different periods.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Great. So what I hear you say that the U.S. compliance with the lira, international order is contingent, and you identify two factors that this compliance is contingent on. And my next question for you is, were there any surprising turns in your thinking as you developed this argument?

[Michael Pozanski]

Absolutely. So the great power competition variable, or the presence or absence of a peer competitor suggest kind of two stark geopolitical periods that are possible. One, the United States faces a peer competitor like the Cold War. The other, it doesn't like the unipolar period. And today we face a peer competitor, the United States in the form of China and again to a lesser extent, Russia, as I mentioned. But what I hadn't really thought about in the book, or until I started working on the book, rather, are how policymakers wrestle with transition periods from one moment, one geopolitical circumstance, to another. And the one I really tackle in the book in detail is the transition from the Cold War into the unipolar period. So a transition from having a peer competitor to not having a peer competitor. And in the conclusion, I take up what it looks like to have a return to peer competition after kind of decades of unipolarity. But the book focuses mostly on the Cold War transition to unipolarity. And it was in those moments that policymakers had the most interesting responses, I would say, in the book, and honestly the most complex from the standpoint of the theory's core predictions. And that's because in the late Cold War and into the early 1990s, policymakers are wrestling with whether the Soviet Union will collapse, whether Mikhail Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War, will be replaced by hardliners. Once the Soviet Union does finally collapse In December of 1991, the Bush administration and then the Clinton administration are left wrestling with what America's new role in the world should be. And the kind of unilateral impulse that we often associate with the unipolar moment hadn't yet materialized. And so those cases in the book I expected to be a little bit more straightforward and have kind of a clean break between the Cold War and the post Cold War. But instead I ended up making them their own chapter. So this is the US intervention in Panama in 1989, the first Gulf War against Saddam Hussein in 91, and then the case of intervention in Bosnia. And I thought, you know, kind of the 89 and 91 cases would be the Cold War period, and then Bosnia would be post Cold War. But it turned out that those ended up being a transition period chapter that have really complex and interesting predictions. They're honestly quite messy.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

That's great. Sounded like an adventure. Could you tell us a bit about your empirics, how you approached gathering and analyzing evidence?

[Michael Pozanski]

Absolutely. So the book contains nine case studies. Three from the period of high levels of great power competition, the Cold War, three, as I just mentioned, from the transition period from the Cold War to the unipolar moment, and then three at the height of unipolis polarity. And the argument has, just as a reminder, two variables. One is the presence or absence of great power competition or peer competition over order, and the other is the burden of compliance. The first variable, the presence or absence of peer competitors, is really slow moving. Right. So during the Cold War, you have this period from 1945 until essentially 1989, 90, 91, where the value of that variable is a 1, the US faces a peer competitor over international order. There's a brief period of transition, let's call that anywhere from three to five years. And then the unipolar moment is 20, 25 years, depending on how you count the rise of China and the return of great power competition. The second variable, the burden of compliance, is a variable that, that kind of changes on a case by case basis. So at any given moment, when the US is contemplating the use of force, which is the primary focus of the book, the burden of compliance can be high or low. And so I had to think about an empirical strategy that can capture the presence or absence of a really slow moving variable like the presence, like the presence of a peer competitor vying for international order and a variable that, that kind of changes on a case by case basis. And so what I ended up doing was selecting three periods. And I kind of alluded to this, but just in terms of research design. One where peer competition was present, one where there was a transition, and one where it was absent. And then within each period I tried to identify cases where the burden of compliance varied, whether it was high or low. And that kind of allowed me to look at patterns of compliance and non compliance and secret versus open violations over time to kind of get at the core argument.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

That's great, that's a great plan to do just that. Usually at this point I ask if there were some challenging methodological obstacles that you faced. And that sounded very challenging too. I don't know. Do you have anything to add?

[Michael Pozanski]

Yeah. So the slow moving nature of peer competition over order, as I mentioned, is a challenge because you're looking for the causal effect of this variable, the presence or absence of a peer competitor, when the value of that is kind of constant on the order of decades rather than months or even years. And obviously I'm not the first international relations scholar to face this problem. Studies of the balance of power or polarity, for example, are multipolar systems more conflictual than bipolar systems? Those face a similar challenge in that they're looking at a variable, multi or bipolarity, that is often constant for long periods of time. And so they're looking for patterns. And essentially what it looks like in practice is during periods of peer competition, you're looking at multiple cases where that variable doesn't change. And so you want to see policymakers, presidents and their senior advisors kind of saying things that you would expect them to say in those periods. And when you have another period like unipolarity, you want to see policymakers consistently behaving, acting and speaking differently. So it's a little bit difficult with high fidelity to say yes, the presence of a peer competitor caused Lyndon Lyndon Johnson or Dwight Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy to behave in this way, because all Cold War presidents were dealing with the presence or absence or the presence of the Soviet Union and then the absence in unipolarity. But you can begin to look for patterns and try to rule out alternative explanations to help validate the argument. So that was a little bit of a challenge, but archival work and process tracing kind of helped to tease that.

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[Eleonora Matiacci]

Yes, the book is empirically very, very rich, which makes the eye even all the more convincing, if I may say so. Can you so you told us how the project came about. You told us about the theoretical statement you make. You recounted the empirics for us. Can you tell us how how can practitioners and policymakers use your research to inform their work?

[Michael Pozanski]

Sure. So to state a point that I'm sure your listeners will all be familiar with but maybe haven't quite thought about in exactly these terms, is that this we are living through the first time in modern history that a great power has transitioned back into a moment of competition after unipolarity. So the unipolar moment, it's worth kind of reflecting on, as we put a kind of bow on that chapter of, of history, was pretty unique. And there was a lot of literature in the late 1990s. William Woolforth with the stability of a unipolar world. And then Nuno Montero's excellent book on theory of unipolar politics. The US moment in the aftermath of the Cold war, up until the 2010s sometime, depending on how you date it, it's not a stark divide was pretty unique. And policymakers became accustomed to a world in which they didn't face peer competitors. And you saw this in the way U.S. foreign policy and defense policy kind of manifested Most obviously after 911 with the focus on counterterrorism and nation building in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the 1990s, this was humanitarian interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo and also some others in Somalia and Haiti and elsewhere. But that environment where the United States major challenges or counterterrorism or humanitarian catastrophes, rather than peer competition over the fate of international order and regional hegemons and things like that, it just looks very different. And so a lot of policymakers now in power, both the Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump administrations, grew up in a period of unipolarity. Doesn't mean they don't understand this history. I'm sure a lot of them do, but they came up professionally through this moment when the United States lacked a peer competitor. And I think they're all tracking that the world is different. You see continuity in national defense strategies. But hopefully the book sheds some light on how policymakers trying to promote advance, defend the rules based international order behaved during the Cold War period. How and why that changed during unipolarity, but why the way in which US foreign policy manifested in a unipolar moment is not suited to today's world. And this comes with a big caveat. There's a huge debate going on in grand strategy about whether the rules based international order is fit for purpose, whether it's outlived its usefulness. The the in grand strategy, the kind of restraint crowd would say liberal internationalism led to, you know, trillions of dollars in, in spending and blood and treasure in Iraq and Afghanistan and lots of overreach. There's a new emergent grand strategy called prioritization, which talks about the fact that the United States can no longer be the prime defender in Europe and that European countries have to provide more militarily for their own security to deal with Russia. So the US can allocate resources towards China, but contingent on policymakers believing that U.S. leadership A is important, that B, the way U.S. leadership kind of manifests is through its commitment to the rules based international order. The book has lessons there. And I think even if policymakers aren't wedded to the rules based international order per se, the book shows how during periods of pure competition over international order, sensitivity to the optics or perceptions of compliance and rule following and multilateralism serve the U.S. national interest in kind of surprising ways that they might not have thought about otherwise if they weren't looking at these patterns.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Let's talk about how this book was received so far. I mean it's, it's not out yet. We're recording this interview. It's July 2025, but I'm sure you've presented it before. What is one of the misconceptions about your topic that you most hope this book will correct?

[Michael Pozanski]

Perhaps the biggest one, I think is a lot of critics of U.S. foreign policy over the last 80 years. So these aren't all what I would call lio liberal international order skeptics. Many of them are. But critics of U.S. foreign policy will hear the argument that the United States is the leader of the rules based international order, the leader of the free world, with a little bit of bewilderment. And the reason they'll be bewildered is they'll say, well, during the Cold War, the United States undertook lots of interventions, including many oriented towards regime change, many of which were in Latin America, but also Asia and Africa and elsewhere in the post Cold War period. The United States intervened in Bosnia, which of course did have UN Security Council and NATO authorization. But Kosovo in 1999, as I show in the book, lacked UN Security Council authorization, although it did have NATO backing. And then of course, the Iraq war was conducted over the objection of both close allies and the UN. And so they kind of look at this 80 year sweep of history and say the United States has never really been beholden to the rules and norms and that those arguing that the conventional wisdom is that the 80 years of unbroken commitment to it, they're kind of missing the point. And I hope this book corrects the perception that all violations of the liberal international order are created equal. And what I mean by that is during the Cold War, I argue in the book, when the burden of compliance was really high, in other words, it was difficult to meet the core tenets of the liberal order and pursue what policymakers viewed as pressing national interests because the United States faced A peer competitor. Policymakers were really sensitive to the perceived the perception that they would be violating the liberal international order. And so that didn't necessarily prevent them in all cases from refraining from the pursuit of what they saw as the national interest, which often meant resisting com communist regimes or what policymakers perceived as left leaning regimes. But it did mean that they often concealed violations. In the post Cold War period. The types of interventions look different a little bit, but policymakers were far less concerned with the perception that they were violating the liberal international order, even when those were in pursuit of what they viewed as worthy liberal goals like Kosovo and combating tyrants and things like that and the liberal order. Skeptics don't draw any distinction really between covert violations of liberal international order and overt violations. But I think they're essential. And I think the book shows that sensitivity to the perception of compliance or the optics of compliance actually did push policymakers to pursue covert action even when the pursuit of secrecy was less likely to achieve their objectives. It was more inefficient, it was less militarily effective. And so it did operate as a real constraint on US Policymaking, even if it didn't always prevent them from doing what they ultimately wanted to do. And we don't see those constraints later. And so I think what that shows, and I kind of draw on Jan Elster's work, which is not, not related to international security in this case book is called the Cement of Society. But he's got this really interesting passage where he's talking about societal norms and he says something to the effect of to violate a norm in public shows a disdain that violating a norm in secret does not. And violating a norm or disregarding a norm in secret signals at least two things. One, an acknowledgement that one exists within a broader set of rules and norms and, and structures, and two, a sensitivity to violating them. And so I hope that readers will come away with perhaps a greater appreciation for the nuances of how policymakers steered U.S. foreign and defense policy in periods of pure competition in ways that weren't totally compliant with the liberal order in all times and places, but were sensitive to the optics of compliance. And that that is fundamentally different from how US foreign policy was practiced and manifested in the public.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

That's a great point. That's an important distinction. I'm glad you made it. And connects to your previous work on secrecy as well, if I'm correct. Yeah. So how has your thinking on this topic evolved since completing the book?

[Michael Pozanski]

Yeah, so I definitely, as I kind of alluded to have a greater understanding for the complexity of transition periods and how difficult it is for policymakers when a peer competitor is declining like the Soviet Union or a new peer competitor is rising like the People's Republic of China. How difficult it is for them to kind of navigate those situations and figure out how to maximize or optimize, in this case, US national interests in ways that they haven't been accustomed to dealing with for decades. And then in, in the unipolar period. One of the things that I kind of wrestled with in this book is that a lot of the policies that decision makers were pursuing, I'm thinking Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq to some degree. Those, of course, became quite controversial as they dragged on. Iraq was controversial at the time, of course, given the justifications, but a lot of those policies were liberal in some real sense. So obviously the intervention in Kosovo where Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs were going after the Kosovar Albanians, that was a liberal cause. It was kind of a humanitarian intervention. The U. Why didn't the UN support it? Because Russia and Milosevic at that time were fairly aligned. And Yeltsin was deeply worried about the expansion of US Power and in Eastern Europe. And so out of the Kosovo operation and the failure of the international community respond in Rwanda, you get responsibility to protect. In Iraq, it's a, it's pitched by the Bush administration as a preemptive war, but it's, it's pretty well known that it was preventive war in the sense that it wasn't about an imminent attack from Saddam Hussein, but it was about fear that he would or did have weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons. And many people weren't shedding tears for Saddam Hussein, who in his own right was a brutal tyrant that used chemical weapons and biologic weapons. And the intervention was still quite controversial because it was done outside of the auspices of the UN Security Council. It was done over the objections of allies and in violation of kind of core tenets of non intervention associated with the liberal order. And so I, I think writing this book has helped me understand these tensions at the heart of the liberal international order between maybe its values and norms. So human rights, democracy, freedom, self determination and its rules of the road, the non intervention principle, sovereignty, multilateralism and the primacy of institutions like the UN Security Council and so forth. And that tension didn't manifest that, that much during the Cold War because policymakers were most concerned with the threat of communism. And so that kind of took priority over the forcible advancement of human rights and democracy, which which policymakers kind of viewed as too risky in that context. But during the post Cold War period, policymakers just felt free to pursue these often liberal projects, but that still violated the liberal international orders rules. And that tension, I think, is at the heart of the criticism from the restraint crowd and many others, and why a lot of proponents of liberal international order have somewhat of a difficult time, I think, dealing with the unipolar moment, because it's both liberal in a real sense and violates some core tenets of the liberal international order in another. And this book has just helped me think through that. I don't have any clear answers, but it's an interesting tension.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

You presented it very well. Thank you. We have taken enough of your time. I'll ask you one more question. What are you working on right now?

[Michael Pozanski]

So I'll mention two projects so I don't bore the listeners. One is a project with a colleague, Leonard Maschmeyer, and that's focusing on providing a framework for how to think about success and failure and also the impact of cyber operations. So this is a bit of a left turn, not from my broader research agenda, but from the book. And Leonard and I hope that this project will help academics and practitioners of cybersecurity better understand one another. And this has come up a lot in the recent debate over the role of cyber in the Russo Ukrainian war. So there was a lot of expectation prior to the Russian invasion of Ukraine that cyber would play a pretty big role in the war. And although there was significant Russian cyber activity, a lot of academics didn't view it as strategically meaningful, whereas practitioners saw it as quite impactful, whether its effect on satellites or the battlefield and so forth. And Leonard and I basically think that part of the problem is academics and practitioners are talking at different levels, one at the more strategic political level, one at the more operational level. And there's also a distinction between the impact of a cyber operation and whether it was, quote, successful, which requires knowing something about intent of the sponsor. So we hope that paper, which, which kind of illustrates this framework will help these two communities better understand each other. And the second project I'll. I'll mention is this broader research agenda that's pretty new on what you might think of as windows of opportunity, maybe, or how states think about the use of military force during periods when there are fleeting or momentary advantages to be gained by initiating force and how they balance these risks. And obviously this shows up quite saliently in the current debate over Europe and Asia for the United States. You probably just saw in the news. We're talking In July of 2025, the Pentagon top policy chief, Elbridge Colby, had halted weapons to Ukraine for fear that US Stockpiles were running low. Trump, of course, reversed that. But at the heart of that entire debate is whether the United States can continue to support Ukraine while also preserving enough capabilities for other contingencies, potentially in Asia or elsewhere. And part of that logic I'm kind of wrestling with rests on this idea of windows of opportunity. If we're too bogged down in one region or theater, it will create incentives for other adversaries to make a move while they have a chance. And exploring empirically, does that actually happen and how often? How has it affected defense planning and how has it affected war initiation and crises and escalation dynamics and things like that? So hopefully a series of projects.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

And that's great. If a book comes out of either or both, you must come back and tell us all about it.

[Michael Pozanski]

I would love to.

[Eleonora Matiacci]

Thank you so much for talking to us today. My guest has been Professor Michael Posanski, author of the book Great Power Great how the Liberal international order shapes US foreign policy. The book was published in 2025 by Oxford University Press. I'm your host, Leonora Matiacci. Until next time.