Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on February 23, 2026 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies for a lecture by Acting Director Jack Snyder. Moderated by Alexander Cooley.
Liberal great powers have been on the winning side of six out of the last six contests for hegemony in the international system. Their superiority is grounded in four “invisible hand” mechanisms that overcome problems of uncertainty and opportunism in decision making: free markets, free politics, free speech, and the liberal form of the balance of power. Illiberal powers like Russia lack these mechanisms, leading them down self-destructive paths.
However, for liberalism’s core systems to work well, these decentralized liberal systems of coordinated equilibrium need to be set up and managed by the visible hand of rule-making and regulation. Today's crisis of the liberal order is caused by the deregulation of all four of liberalism’s subsystems. Liberalism’s comeback depends on achieving a better balance between the dynamism of “creative destruction” and the equilibrium of regulated decentralized interactions.
Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs.
