The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Debate on Foreign Wars: opening statements

Episode Date: May 25, 2026

On this special podcast episode, we are sharing the opening statements from the Munk Debate on Foreign Wars, which took place this past Wednesday May 20th in front of a packed crowd at Toronto's Meridian Hall. Against the backdrop of America's war with Iran — and after nearly three decades of disastrous Middle East interventions — the debate asked whether the U.S. should continue intervening abroad, and what that means for the future of global order. The resolution was: Be it resolved, don't go hunting monsters.  Arguing against the motion was Mike Pompeo, 70th U.S. Secretary of State, former Director of the CIA, and four-term U.S. Congressman. He was joined by Victoria Nuland, whose 35-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service includes roles as Acting Deputy Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs, and U.S. Ambassador to NATO. Arguing in favour of the motion were two former Munk Debaters and the world's leading proponents of U.S. foreign policy restraint: John Mearsheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. Find out how to watch the full debate at www.munkdebates.comBecome a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is what human decency demands. You don't let a radical regime close off the global economy by firing Shahid missiles into nations that did nothing. Right, they're firing into civilians in the United Arab Emirates, even just this week. That's just not something that the world can accept. And so this monster is worthy of the hunt. You do know, Mike, that we started the war. No, absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Oh, no, no, no. They weren't firing those missiles. until Israel and the United States attacked Iran. You do understand that, right? Welcome to 1979, when the revolutionary regime began to kill Europeans. You do know that we overthrew the democratically elected government in 1954. Just for the record, you were talking about this. You don't think Iran has, you think Iran's forgotten about that?

No, I suspect they've not. You don't think Iran remembers that we supported Saddam Hussein in the Iran-Iraq war? You think they've forgotten about this? I know this. Other countries have history. Do you think Iran is a monster? No. Welcome to this special edition of the Monk Debates podcast.

On this episode, we are sharing the opening statements from the Monk debate on foreign wars, which took place last Wednesday, May 20th, in front of a packed audience at Toronto's Meridian Hall. Against the backdrop of America's war with Iran, and after nearly three decades of disastrous Middle East interventions, the debate asked whether the U.S. U.S. should continue intervening abroad and what that means for the future of geopolitics. The resolution was, be it resolved, don't go hunting monsters. Arguing against the motion was Mike Pompeo, the 70th U.S. Secretary of State, former director of the CIA, and four-term U.S. congressmen. He was joined by Toria Newland, whose 35-year career in the U.S. Foreign Service includes roles as acting Deputy Secretary of State, Assistant Secretary of State for Europe,

and Eurasian Affairs, and U.S. ambassador to NATO. Arguing in favor of the motion were two former monk debaters in the world's leading proponents of U.S. foreign policy and military restraint. John Meersheimer, the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, and Stephen Wall, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School. As with all of our monk debates, the live audience voted on this resolution prior to hearing the debate. Initially, 55% of attendees favored the debate motion and 45% were opposed. Let's now join the debate in progress with Stephen Walt giving his opening statement, arguing in favor of the motion, be it resolved. Don't go hunting monsters.

This is a debate between realists and crusaders. We all believe the United States should be actively engaged in the world and support a rules-based order. What we're debating is whether America should be a crusader state that tries to remake the world by overthrowing other governments. Our opponents say yes, we say no. In our view, the United States should use its power to deter or defeat attacks on the United States and to uphold the balance of power in critical regions. It made good sense for the United States to enter World War II. Japan attacked us, Germany declared war, and both countries were great powers engaged in

vast wars of aggression. During the Cold War, American leaders were right to forge and lead an alliance to contain the Soviet Union. We believe the first Bush administration was correct in leading the effort to expel Iraq from Kuwait, to keep it from dominating the Persian Gulf. But President Bush acted with restraint. 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. put Adam's 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. Topling 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...

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. And because we have to break a lot of rules to do it, this policy makes a mockery of our claim to support a rules-based order and gives others an excuse to break the rules themselves. Now, to be clear, we believe the United States should support the advance of liberty abroad, but primarily by creating a society in our own country that others will admire and want to emulate,

rather than one that they resent or fear. And here's what I mean. The United States and South Korea have been allies for 75 years. Until the late 1980s, South Korea was a brutal military dictatorship that violently repressed, pro-democracy forces and employed torture, forced labor, and occasional massacres to hold power. It wasn't North Korea, but it was far from free. Did the United States set out to overthrow it? No.

Instead, it worked patiently to persuade South Korea that there was a better way. We sheltered pro-democracy exiles like Kim De Jong, and then arranged for his safe return to his home country. And in 1987, South Koreans rose up on their own to demand an end to military rule. Today, South Korea is the 10th largest economy in the world, and according to Freedom House, it is a healthier democracy than the United States itself. The lesson is clear. Restraint works. Crusading doesn't. Bottom line is that John Quincy Adams was right. America can best defend its interests, promote freedom,

and foster a stable world order by setting a good example and not by engaging in an endless search for some new monster to slay. We should not be crusaders, but instead use our power with wisdom and restraint. Thank you. Well done. Stephen, all that time in the Harvard Lecture Hall. You still had 17 seconds on the clock. We appreciate that. Mike Pompeo, you're up with six minutes for your opening statement.

Great, thank you, Rudyard. And thank you for hosting us here and appreciate you all being here tonight. It's wonderful. By the way, it's a little awkward to be the furthest to the left of anything tonight, but I'm going to work my way through it. So the resolution talks about not hunting monsters. It says we're not going to go hunt them. But at least we heard our opponents acknowledge that monsters exist.

That's a good start. But, of course, what history shows us is if we don't, once monsters are identified, and we know who they are. If we don't pursue them, they'll come pursue us. We'll talk about those tonight at great length. And I, for one, and I think Toria would agree, we'd rather hunt them on our terms than on theirs. Professor Samir and Walt tried to frame the debate tonight in a way. And there's so many things we do agree on.

Western democracies should not go provoking. We should not go pick a fight. We shouldn't go look for a fight. We should not be in the business of creating enemies or searching for them. For our collective well-being, I hope we can all agree that there is, however, an existence of monsters, whether we pick them, create them, or otherwise they find us. You know, you all like country music here in Canada, right? Chenaya Twain, Katie Lang, Terry Carter.

I have a favorite country music song. It's called Coward of the County. Kenny Rogers popularized it in the United States. And in Coward of the County begins with the words. It says, everyone considered him. him the coward of the county. His mama named him Tommy, but folks just called him yellow. He always turned the other cheek. And according to the lyrics, his daddy told him, walk away from trouble if you can, you do not have to fight to be a man. He was bullied for years.

He was thought to be a coward. But then his wife was raped by three men, and he shot them dead. Now, I'm not suggesting for a moment that vigilantees should exist and that individuals aren't different than sovereign nations, but we have to remember that evil exists. One must acknowledge that, and when it comes for you,

it comes intentionally, it comes to hurt. That is the goal, that is the raison d'et for these organizations. It's what they do. And if we do not hunt monsters, they will destroy us. It's that simple. Even Adams knew that.

It doesn't require us tonight in this resolution to defend the process of figuring out who monsters are. But make no mistake, when we identify them, when they show their true colors, we must hunt them. It's our duty as sovereign leaders to protect our citizens from this evil. Monstrous acts are all around us. We see it today. Take Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Before the war started, our opponent said that Vladimir Putin didn't really want to destroy Ukraine. ask a Ukrainian mother if that's true. They said Putin didn't have imperial ambitions.

He claims he does. And he's evidenced that in every single action and his complete refusal to accept any of the terms that have been proffered. Then it was said that Ukraine couldn't hold the line that they could not fight back against the monster. And now four years on, they have demonstrated unequivocally that they can.

And how about the monster? who killed 3,000 people on September 11th. It's not only fair but necessary that we pursue those monsters. A number of them, Canadian families who were killed that day, in the absence of the work that was done by Canadians and Americans alike to hunt that monster would have yielded only more terror, more risk, and more death. Now, hunting's an interesting term. It doesn't imply that one needs to always use violence or deploy the 82nd airborne.

There are many methods of achieving that outcome, I was the sea. The eye director, I knew a few. And hunting does indeed work best when you create a hunting party, when you want friends with you because you never know if the monster himself is hunting in a pack like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, North Korea are doing today. And as much as we don't want to hunt, I'm a former soldier, no one likes war, the alternative letting the monster grow until it has much greater capacity for destruction is deadly and dangerous and un-American.

One way or another, you must confront the monster. You know, I've been to Dover, Delaware, where we transfer the remains of our fallen soldiers, and looked the families in the eye and told them that these young men and women did what was noble and decent in helping America and the world, Canada. Western civilization hunt monsters. When they come from the shadows, we have work to do.

You know, it was a monster who held the two Michaels. He held them captive. These Canadians did nothing wrong, but Xi Jinping didn't care one iota about that. In the same way that he lost no sleep when millions of people died as a result of a virus, that he refused to allow the world to do the good work necessary to protect against.

Western civilization, indeed basic decency, demands that our nation not be cowards of the world. And just as Tommy did his best for years to avoid picking a fight, there comes a moment. We either hunt now or fight later. And to us, the answer is clear. These folks have never met a monster that they weren't willing to downplay, deny, or explain away.

But we recognize the eternal truth. In Isaiah 520, it says, woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness. Monsters are real, and when we find them, we must hunt them. Right on the nose, Mike, well done. Up next, John Mearsheimer, your six minutes. Let's have your opening statement, sir.

It's a great pleasure to be here, and thank you all for coming out to hear this debate tonight. What I'd like to do is pick up where Steve left off and talk about the costs and consequences of being a crusader state. And let me start first with the costs, the human costs of being a crusader state. Let me give you two examples. First has to do with a study that was done by the Watson Center at Brown University that looked at the number of people who have been killed, either directly through combat or indirectly, as a result of the various wars that the United States has been deeply engaged in

in the greater Middle East since 9-11 or since 2001. And what the Watson Center discovers is that between 4.5 million and 4.6 million people have been killed in the greater Middle East since 9-11 as a result of these wars. Let me give you another example. And this has to do with sanctions. As you know, the United States is addicted to sanctioning countries. all over the world, and sanctions are often used for the purposes of regime change, which, of course, is what crusading is all about. There is a magazine called The Lancet, which is one of the most prestigious medical journals

in the world. And last August, this is August 2025, it issued a study which reported that unilateral sanctions by the United States over a 50-year period. This goes from 1971 to 2021. Over that 50-year period, unilateral sanctions by the United States resulted in 28 million deaths. Just think about those numbers. This is what you get when you turn into a crusader state.

Now, some people may argue that this makes good sense that these horrendous costs are justified by the end result. This is an argument that Madeline Albright made in a famous conversation with Leslie Stahl of CBS. Leslie Stahl said to her, do you know that 500,000 children have died in Iraq as a result of U.S. sanctions? This was in 1996.

And Leslie Stahl asked Madeline Albright if she thought that was justified. And Madeline Albright, shockingly said that she thought it was the right thing to do, to, in effect, murder 500,000 Iraqi children for the purposes of crusading. Of course, it didn't work out that way, and what happened is that we had to invade Iraq, as you all remember, in 2003. The sanctions didn't work. This brings us to the whole question of the consequences of these acts where we crusade around the world.

The consequences of regime change. Just to start, we have a rich literature in academia which shows that when you knock off regimes and you try to promote democracy, it fails almost every time. The only case since World War II where we succeeded in regime change was in Panama in 1989. This means we have not succeeded in producing a regime change that led to a democracy since the Cold War ended, since 9-11. This is a policy that fails almost every time. If you have any doubts about that, think about Afghanistan. We knocked off the Taliban.

Who's in control in Afghanistan now? The Taliban. Think about Iraq, one of the greatest foreign policy disasters in American history. We went in there in 2003. Obama took us out in 2011. We had to go back in 2014 to deal with ISIS, and we're still there. And then there's Iran. I believe that Iran will eventually be proven to be the most disastrous foreign policy decision in American military history. So if you look at Afghanistan, you look at Iraq, and you look at Iran, you see, as the academic literature says, that regime change does not work.

It's remarkably difficult to promote democracy at the end of a rifle barrel. One final point. One might think that crusaders are in favor of promoting democracy, period. But that's not true. Crusaders distinguish between like-minded democracies, this is a phrase that Mike often uses, and other democracies. And Mike is interested in producing a world with like-minded democracies. And, of course, the end result of this is that we go around the world

and we knock off democracies that we do not consider to be like-minded. So you should remember, as we go through this debate tonight, that the United States has a rich history of knocking off democracies that are not like-minded around the world. Iran, 53, Guatemala, 54, Chile, 73. I could go on and on. We have a rich history of knocking off democracies. These are not like-minded democracies.

These are, in effect, monster democracies. So what we have here, the bottom line, is we have a situation where the United States tries to, promote like-minded democracies and fails. Thank you. Thank you, audience, for keeping our debaters on time and on their toes. Our last opening statement goes to Toria Newland. Well, thank you, Monk, team, for the opportunity to join this great audience

and my colleagues here on the stage for an important conversation. Let me start where Secretary Pompeo finished. Neither the United States nor Canada nor any of the great democracies can afford to cede the world to monsters or allow them to upend the global order that has benefited free nations for 80 years. Mike and I believe, as he said, that the U.S. and our allies are far better protected by confronting those monsters before they grow powerful enough to threaten us at home or to destroy the foundations of the world that we have built. But as you've heard, our opponents have a different view.

They called it offshore balancing, a realist grand strategy and a piece that they co-authored in 2016. And here's the key tenant of that strategy, and I quote, if there is no potential hegemon in sight in Europe, in North Asia, or in the Gulf, then there's no reason to deploy ground or air forces there and little reason for a large military establishment at home. As the great crooner, Sam Cook would say, ladies and gentlemen, what a wonderful world that would be, right? But it's not our world.

From Putin's four years of vicious war against Ukraine to China's coercion of Taiwan and its neighbors, to Iran's refusal to give up its nuclear weapons capability and its dominance now of the Straits of Hormuz, the dangers the monsters seeking to dominate Europe, northeast Asia, and the Gulf are growing stronger. The professors suggest that the U.S. turned to regional forces as the first line of defense. If those powers cannot contain a potential hegemon

on their own, however, the U.S. must help get the job done. Thank you both for that. That's precisely where we are now on all three continents, and it's been that way for most of the last 80 years. Our allies need our help. keeping monsters at bay. Maybe each could do more, but we are not, sadly, professors in your

wonderful world. We should have learned that lesson in the last bloody century. As long as humans roam the earth, monsters will emerge among us. In the 1930s, we offshore balanced our way into letting Hitler take over, almost take over Europe, and the Japanese imperial forces almost dominate Asia. But when Americans, Canadians, and free nations everywhere joined forces to vanquish those monsters and then built institutions like NATO, the EU, and the UN, we ushered in the longest period of security and prosperity the world has ever known. But as Mike has said, hunting doesn't necessarily mean going to war or regime change, as they're trying to accuse us of.

As a career diplomat, I will always choose to plan. But it's got to be backed by power, to deter, to contain, to constrain the monster, to dig a ditch that he falls into if we can't reach a settlement that neutralizes him or keeps him in his lair. War must be the last resort, but history shows some monsters will not stop until they're vanquished. As practitioners, Mike and I also know that each monster is different. Each requires a different set of tools, ranging from inducese, to negotiations, to deterrence to political and economic pressure and combinations of those.

As strong nations, we have a full toolkit. But locking away those tools or watching from the sidelines is not the right answer. Nor will Mike and I argue that the U.S. has always deployed its tools right, or in the right way, or gotten the right outcome. But not acting is often more dangerous, waiting not just for the monster to appear at our door, to get into the house. I personally remember vividly a time when we acted, did not act, and paid dearly for it.

During countless conversations that I witnessed in Moscow in the 1990s, including with Putin, senior Russians warned us about the growth of al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and its potential threat to the United States. U.S. intelligence didn't take it seriously. How could some dudes hiding in caves actually threaten us?

The Russians must be trying to trick us out of our offshore armchair carefully balanced. We learned our lesson on September 11th. Inaction, in attention to the monsters in our midst can often be more costly than the mistakes we inevitably make during a complex monster hunt. Here's another thing. Mike and I will not always agree with each other

on every aspect of every monster hunting expedition. Tonight you'll hear Secretary Pompeo support our current course of action in Iran, and you'll hear me oppose the war and argue that we could have and still should do much more with economic tools, support for the democratic opposition, and forceful negotiations. But we both agree Iran must never have a nuclear weapon, and unto the Mullahs and the IRGC, it poses an unacceptable risk to the region, to the freedom of navigation, to the U.S., to Canada, and to global peace and security. We have to pressure this regime until it stops its monstrous behavior or it falls.

We're going to talk about all these things tonight, but here's the bottom line. We enjoy the peace and prosperity and security we have today as democracies because we hunt the monsters before they take over. I can't speak from Mirschimer and Walt, but Secretary Pompeo and I don't want to live in their monster world. And nor should you. Thank you. That wraps up today's edition of the Monk Debates podcast. If you'd like to watch the rest of the debate and find out how the audience voted after listening to 90 minutes of fast, furious, back and forth debate. Go to our website, triplew monkdebates.com. That's MUNK Debateswithan S.com. I want to thank our participants, Mike, Toria, Stephen, and John for a civil and substantive debate, one of the most pressing issues of our time.

If you have feedback or reflections on what you've just heard on this or any of our podcast, please send us an email to info at Monk Debates. Thank you for helping us bring back the art of civil and substantive dialogue one conversation at a time. I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are a project of the Aurea and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gerwitz are the producers. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for listening.