Stephen Walt Part 2

In an external pageinterviewcall_made with Harry Kreisler in 2005, you stated that IR theory is about ‘developing general propositions, valid across time and space, explaining the behavior of internationally consequential actors’ – and you’re quick to give some examples: states, international organizations, but also terrorist groups. Now this definition – supposedly timeless – would probably have looked different, say, 25 years ago. Does this mean (1) that international politics changes over time (and space), and (2) that the purpose of IR theory shifts over time?

When I was in graduate school, there was a question on the UC Berkeley qualifying exam in IR that went something like this: “Has the fundamental nature of international politics changed in the past 400 years?’ There is obviously no right or wrong answer to that question, which is why they liked to ask it, but it did force students to think carefully about different aspects of world politics and to decide where we stood. There are obviously some aspects of international politics different now from how they were 500 years ago, or even 25 years ago, and there are also many features of international politics that haven’t changed very much at all.

Now if you go back 25 years and look at what was happening in the world, you’d discover that people were very worried about terrorism—it was a big issue for the Reagan Administration, for example—so it’s not like terrorism has just emerged on the world stage. On the other hand, the relative importance of issues does shift over time, and we are a field that does get affected by real-world events. The oil shocks in the 1970s set part of the scholarly agenda in the field for a while; so did the emergence of a set of significant ethnic conflicts in the aftermath of the Cold War. But I think the basic focus of the IR field has changed less than we think: the set of international consequential actors, or the types of actors we look at, doesn’t change as much as people often claim.

How would I sum it up? First, states have been the focus of the field and will remain so in the future. Second, international organizations are probably more important now than they were 150 years ago, but they weren’t unknown then and they are mostly a manifestation of state power anyway. Third, there are transnational organizations now that play a somewhat more active role than they might have earlier but they aren’t a completely new phenomenon either – the Roman Catholic church was one of the first transnational organizations and it’s been around a very long time. And there have been plenty of other “non-state” actors of consequence, like the international socialist movement in the 19th and 20th centuries, and various terrorist organizations all over the world. So I tend to see the landscape of world politics as changing less than people think. We are a faddish business, but I tend to see more continuity than others do.

For realists, when domestic issues start interfering with foreign policy, you have a problem – that was what The Israel Lobby was all about. So how about this financial crisis? I mean, the economy of the US, due to the status of the dollar, is inextricably bound up with that of, say, China. That hypothetically constrains what the US can say and do to China in terms of high-politics.

Your question asks whether a high degree of economic interdependence between major powers can significantly constrain the level or intensity of security competition between them. From my perspective, I think the real question is whether domestic groups in either China or the United States would be able to influence the behavior of either country because they were concerned about preserving a particular set of economic relations. Specifically, will business interests in the US press Washington to tread lightly around China, because they were concerned with what might happen if China used its economic leverage? I think the answer is “yes,” but I don’t think that will prevent the US and China from seeing each other as rivals and from engaging in various forms of security competition at the same time.

That said, I think there is no question the US and China will attempt to preserve mutually profitable economic relations over time. But if China continues to grow in terms of relative power and its strength increases relative to that of the US, the two states are going to compete in lots of other ways as well. And managing that competition is going to be difficult. That’s not to say the two states are inevitably going to go to war, but I will be surprised if we don’t have a more and more competitive relationship with China as its power increases.

Did the book The Israel Lobby have the impact you’d want it to be? Do you see any difference in the way it has been received in Europe and in the US?

The answer to both questions is “yes.” With respect to mainstream commentary in the US, I was struck by how consistently how our arguments we were misunderstood or misrepresented, and by the fact that some critics appeared not to have actually read what we wrote. This isn’t all that surprising, because almost all of the reviewers in mainstream outlets in the United States were people who had very strong views on this subject and who had previously taken positions at odds with ours. But instead of refuting our arguments with facts and logic, most of them simply misrepresented what we wrote. We made several points over and over in the book—in order to make sure that our position was crystal-clear—yet a lot of reviewers simply misread what we wrote or simply chose to attack a phony version of our argument as opposed to what we really said. For example, critics said we questioned Israel’s legitimacy or complained that we were trying to disenfranchise American Jewry, when in fact we wrote the exact opposite. Others characterized it as an anti-Israel book, despite the fact that we went to considerable lenghts to say that we thought that the policies advocated by groups like AIPAC were harmful to the United States and Israel alike. And of course we had to deal with a lot of unwarranted personal attacks as well.

As one might expect, the reaction in Europe was much more favorable—I think eight out of nine major reviews in the UK were quite positive—and we also got several very positive reviews in Israel itself, including a lengthy review in Ha’aretz.

Overall, the book had precisely the impact we wanted it to have. Our main goal in writing the book was to foster a more open discussion of a subject that had become largely – not entirely, but largely – a taboo subject in the US. There was a very powerful set of interest groups defending the “special relationship” between the US and Israel, and these groups had a big impact on US Middle East policy. Everybody in Washington knows that, but it was a phenomenon that nobody was willing talk about and certainly not to criticize. We didn’t think that situation was healthy, particularly given how badly America’s position in the Middle East had become by the time we were writing the book. So our goal was to get the subject out in the open, so that people could start talking about it. And I think that if you look at what’s been written and said since then, and at the nature of the current debate now in the US, we clearly succeeded. This is now a subject that people will talk about openly; there are far more critical conversations about the different influences on American Middle East policy, and even including popular commentators like Jon Stewart of external pagethe Daily Showcall_made – will now openly talk about this interest group, the Israel Lobby.

Opening up the discussion creates a space for new policy, and U.S. policy has clearly shifted somewhat under President Obama. I’m certainly not going to claim credit for that shift, but I do think that having a more open discussion has made it easier for policymakers, other concerned citizens, and even many strong supporters of Israel to start to rethink the current relationship, and ask whether our policy of unconditional support has been good for either the United States or Israel.

Does the EU have any influence in pressuring the two-state solution for the Middle East, or is US pressure the only one that matters here?

The European Union has an enormous potential leverage, if it spoke as one and if it used its economic influence towards both the Palestinians and the Israelis. If the EU wanted to exercise influence, it would be taken quite seriously. It has not been willing to do that, however, partly because the United States has always leaned pretty hard on the EU not to put any pressure on Israel and to not play too active a role. If the US were willing to push the EU to take a different stance, or if the EU would be willing to do so independently, than it could have a quite considerable positive influence. But until recently the EU has done pretty much whatever Washington wanted it to do, and it has refused to do anything that the United States strongly opposed.

One more question on the EU: there seem to be two groups of people thinking about its international influence and how that should evolve. On the one hand, there’s the economic power/human security group as represented by, for instance, Mary Kaldor in external pageTheory Talk #30call_made , and on the other there’s the military power-group, as represented by for instance Antonio Marquina in external pageTheory Talk #25call_made , calling for hard power in order to be able to attain ‘soft’ goals.

In a sense, they’re both right. If the Europeans want to exercise relatively little global influence and focus primarily on European affairs, economic issues, and the maintenance of current social welfare benefits, they can. Europe doesn’t face any imminent and serious security problems, mostly because the US has been willing to shoulder a lot of the global burden, and seems willing to keep on doing that. In that sense, Mary Kaldor is right: the EU can probably go on for quite some time, doing relatively little in the hard power department.

But there is a price to pay for that: when things like the Balkan Wars happened, ultimately, the Europeans had to call on the Americans to solve the problem. I don’t think this situation will last forever; the US shouldn’t have to keep solving local European problems. Secondly, the current situation means that Europe will not have a particularly powerful voice on lots of other issues, whether it is Central Asia or the Middle East or Africa. So the European states face a choice: if they want to wield greater global influence, they will have to muster greater capabilities for doing so. On the other hand, if they’re not interested in doing that anymore, they can pretty much continue as they are.

We’ve been waiting for a new NATO Strategic Concept for a decade now. Why is it lagging and what do you think it will look like?

I think nobody really knows what NATO’s mission is now that the Cold War is over. Yet for various reasons, the alliance has held together. One reason is to maintain a certain stability in the immediate post-Cold War; another was the U.S. desire to retain influence in Europe, a third was the sheer “stickiness” of a heavily bureaucratized alliance structure. Lots of efforts have been made to re-organize NATO and to prepare it for out-of-area missions, that is, missions outside of the traditional European theater. You can tell there hasn’t been enormous energy or enthusiasm behind those efforts, however, and the United States keeps doing most of the heavy lifting in places like Iraq or Afghanistan.

This situation reflects a more fundamental shift in world politics: Europe simply doesn’t matter as much anymore in comparison to other parts of the world. If you look at where the strategic attention of the US is going to be over the next twenty or thirty years, it is going to be on the Middle East, Central Asia and East Asia. From 1945 to 1990, by contrast, Europe was really the main focus of the US’s strategic attention, for all the obvious reasons. That’s going to be less and less the case over time, and thus getting out a new Strategic Concept for NATO, simply isn’t a top priority for Washington at this moment.

Is Obama a realist? And, if so, what kind of realist?

I’m reasonably sure that Obama has never read Mearsheimer, Waltz, external pageKrasnercall_made or Morgenthau, and he probably wouldn’t describe himself in those terms, but I do think he is a realist in the sense that he is essentially a pragmatist – he’s not wedded to a powerful ideological agenda. Like all American politicians, he invokes certain liberal values like liberty and democracy, but his foreign policy decisions don’t seem to flow from a particularly ideological worldview. I don’t think he is someone who believes in trying to spread democracy at the point of a gun the way neoconservatives in the Bush administration did.

Furthermore, Obama has emphasized the need to deal with both allies and adversaries—even if you have differences with the latter—and that is clearly consistent with a realist view of the world. Realists recognize that power is important but also a pretty crude instrument, and that there are inherent limits to what any state can try to do. You can’t try and transform everything that you don’t like about the world; indeed, most of the time states are just trying to advance their interests in the face of enormous constraints. In short, realists recognize that we mostly have to live with circumstances that aren’t perfect, because we don’t live in a perfect world.

Stephen M Walt is the Robert and Rene Belfer Professsor of International Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Professor Walt is the author of The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy (2005), and, with co-author JJ Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007).