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Stephen Walt

Professor of International Affairs, Harvard University

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences.

He has been a Resident Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as Co-Editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.

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 U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007).

How much of a threat Is Russia to the United States?

There’s a lot of talk about Russia’s hostility to America, thanks to their apparent interference in the 2016 U.S. election. But in the grand scheme of things, Russia is small potatoes.

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How American Foreign Policy Inspires Resistance, Insurgency, and Terrorism

The #1 problem with America’s mission to spread democracy? We don’t know how to do it.

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9 min

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Does Israel get a disproportionate amount of attention?

The key is not to focus disproportionate attention on Israel, but to ask why Israel gets as much aid as it does, says Walt.

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5 min

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What needs to change in academia?

Walt worries about the “cult of irrelevance” in universities.

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Where is America headed?

We need to be realistic about our goals, says Walt.

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4 min

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The Digital Revolution

What used to be the provenance of the wealthy and powerful is now much more democratized, says Walt.

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Global Governance in a New Era

Are the post-War structures sufficiently inclusive of new powers?

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Aid and Development

One of the problems Walt foresees is how to convince the most advanced societies that are consuming most of the resources to use less.

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The global income gap

There is an issue of equality and inequality on a global scale which is compounded by the fact that, increasingly, people who are further down the scale are increasingly aware […]

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The Environment

Walt speaks to the growing immediacyto address the planet’s carrying capacity.

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Stephen Walt on Terrorism

A broader world view suggests that the end of the Cold War left the United States in a position of unprecedented great power unseen since the Roman Empire.

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What is human nature?

Despite our common traits, we divide ourselves up into different tribes, says Walt.

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U.S. Foreign Policy

American military power, says Stephen Walt, should be first and foremost defensive.

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What is America’s biggest challenge?

Walt predicts that America will have to do a lot of adjustment in the next 30 or 40 years.

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Is the Israeli lobby that different?

The Israeli lobby does not do anything substantially different from other special interest groups, Walt says, but they do tend to go after their critics with special zest.

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On Wiemar Intellectuals

Walt learned early on that Wiemar intellectuals behaved irresponsibly by disengaging from politics.

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The Influence of AIPAC

Over time, the Israel lobby has come to play a very influential role in American politics—and has had a pretty dramatic effect on what the United States does in the […]

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18 min

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What is your question?

We are living in a world now which forces us to change more rapidly than we used to.

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What is your counsel?

Open discussion is critical, says Walt.

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What is your outlook?

We shouldn’t be expecting perfection, Walt says.

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World politics and human nature are such that you can’t assume that virtue will triumph. Human beings are flawed, they make mistakes; some of them are deeply flawed and do […]

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What inspires you?

The underdog.

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How many people can the planet fit?

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What is your contribution?

Walt aims for the non-polemical approach to opening discussion.

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What do you do?

Walt applies both a theoretical knowledge about how international politics works and a careful analysis of particular circumstances to untangle or unravel specific puzzles that are facing foreign policy, usually […]

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Walt describes how growing up in a priveleged Northern California family with a scientist father cultivated the idea that the highest pinnacle of human achievement doing was something involving ideas, […]

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