October 17, 2018: DEFP hosts an educational, congressional staff briefing: "The hell of good intentions: America's foreign policy elite and the decline of U.S. primacy." Harvard professor Stephen Walt argues that the root of America's dismal post-Cold War record is the Washington foreign policy establishment's stubborn commitment to a strategy of "liberal hegemony." Since the end of the Cold War, the establishment has tried to use U.S. power to spread democracy, open markets, and other liberal values into every nook and cranny of the planet. This strategy was doomed to fail, but its proponents in the foreign policy elite were never held accountable and kept repeating the same mistakes. The best alternative, Walt argues, is a return to the realist strategy of "offshore balancing," which eschews regime change, nation-building, and other forms of global social engineering.