On May 20, I had the privilege of participating in a public debate sponsored by the Munk Debates in Toronto. My debate partner was John Mearsheimer, and our opponents were former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland. The issue on the table was “Be It Resolved: Do Not Go Hunting Monsters.” As regular readers here might expect, John and I argued in support of the resolution.

You can watch the full debate by purchasing a livestream pass. For Foreign Policy readers interested in my opening and closing statements, what follows below are lightly edited versions of what I told the audience at the event.

On May 20, I had the privilege of participating in a public debate sponsored by the Munk Debates in Toronto. My debate partner was John Mearsheimer, and our opponents were former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.S. Undersecretary of State Victoria Nuland. The issue on the table was “Be It Resolved: Do Not Go Hunting Monsters.” As regular readers here might expect, John and I argued in support of the resolution.

You can watch the full debate by purchasing a livestream pass. For Foreign Policy readers interested in my opening and closing statements, what follows below are lightly edited versions of what I told the audience at the event.

This is a debate between restrainers and crusaders. We all believe the United States should be actively engaged in the world and support a rules-based order. What we are debating is whether it 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 itself and to uphold the balance of power in critical and strategic regions. For example, it made good sense for the United States to enter World War II. Japan attacked the United States and Germany declared war, and both countries were great powers engaged in vast aggressive wars. During the Cold War, U.S. leaders were right to forge and lead an alliance to contain the Soviet Union. We also believe the George H.W. Bush administration was correct in leading the effort to expel Iraq from Kuwait, to keep it from dominating the Persian Gulf. But 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 tonight comes from a famous speech given by former U.S. President John Quincy Adams on July 4, 1821. He emphasized that the United States was founded on the principle of liberty and said, “Wherever the standard of freedom … has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart, her benedictions, and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.”

To put this in modern terms, Adams is saying that America should not use its power to do regime change. We agree because toppling foreign governments to promote democracy almost always makes things worse. Replacing another country’s political system is a vast social engineering project, usually undertaken in places we barely understand, and the typical result is not a vibrant democracy but chaos, destruction, and thousands of innocent people dead. If you have any doubts, just look at what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, or consider the damage the current war on Iran has caused in just three months.

Toppling foreign governments also undermines the principle of sovereignty that is the foundation for a rules-based order. If it is okay to overthrow a government that has not attacked us, then what is to stop anyone from taking territory that belongs to others, as Russian President Vladimir Putin did in Crimea or as U.S. President Donald Trump wants to do with Greenland? If it is acceptable to use force to topple a government you don’t like, it is also 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, or the approximately 120 Iranian schoolchildren killed by a U.S. airstrike two months ago? When we set out to slay monsters, we end up doing monstrous things ourselves.

As realists, we know that necessity sometimes forces states to compromise their values. In WWII, for example, the United States allied with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin—who was most definitely 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 must break lots of rules to do it, this policy discredits any claim of supporting a rules-based order and encourages others to break the rules themselves.

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 they resent and fear.

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 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 Dae-jung and then arranged for his safe return. And in 1987, South Koreans rose up on their own to demand an end to military rule. Today, South Korea one of the economies in the world and, according to Freedom House, is now a more democratic society than the United States itself.  Restraint works; crusading doesn’t.

The bottom line is that Adams was right. America can best defend its interests, promote freedom, and foster a stable world order by setting a good example, 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.

The other participants also made opening statements, followed by formal rebuttals and then by a lively moderated discussion. When it was my turn to offer a closing statement, here’s what said:

You have just heard four Americans debate what U.S. foreign policy should be. In closing, I invite you to think about this question as Canadians. Your country has long been actively engaged in world affairs and committed to diplomacy. Canadians do not go looking for trouble, but you are willing to go “elbows up” when trouble is forced upon you, as you did in WWII. And you enjoy a well-deserved reputation for being among the nicest people in the world.

Now, consider what would happen if, for some strange reason, your leaders decided that Canada should go off to slay monsters—that it should intervene in foreign countries, overthrow their leaders, and try to make these countries more like Canada. To do that, you would need a much larger military and a lot more spies. You would make a lot of new enemies, and some of them would resist your efforts to convert them, so you’d have to worry more about your security here at home and you’d have to keep a closer watch on each other to make sure enemy sympathizers weren’t conspiring. Government officials would be doing many things in secret, and they’d defend their actions by concealing the truth and telling lots of lies.

Canadians would end up dying in distant lands for reasons that had nothing to do with keeping Canada safe and prosperous. Instead of a reputation for being nice, others would begin to see you as self-righteous, judgmental, and indifferent to the lives of the innocent victims of your clumsy crusading. Even if you started out sincerely hoping to make the world a better place, you would wake up to find a world that was more suspicious and more violent. You would have become more like the countries you thought you were going to transform than they had become like you. The Canada you know today would be gone forever.

If you find that prospect unappealing, then you should vote in favor of the resolution, and you should hope that my country comes to its senses, abandons its foolish efforts to slay monsters, and instead adopts a policy of restraint. Americans will be better off if we do but so will our allies and the rest of the world. Thank you.

I am pleased to report that the audience endorsed the resolution by a score of 56-44.