Stephen Walt

Stephen Martin Walt (born July 2, 1955) is an American political scientist currently serving as the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

A member of the realist school of international relations, Walt has made important contributions to the theory of neorealism and has authored the balance of threat theory.

Books that he has authored or coauthored include Origins of Alliances, Revolution and War, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Walt was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where his father, a physicist, worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

His mother was a teacher.

The family moved to the Bay Area when Walt was about eight months old.

Walt grew up in Los Altos Hills.

He pursued his undergraduate studies at Stanford University.

He first majored in chemistry with an eye to becoming a biochemist but then shifted to history and finally to international relations.

After attaining his B.A., Walt began graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated with a M.A. in political science in 1978 and a Ph.D. in political science in 1983.

Walt 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.

In 1998, Walt wrote that "deep structural forces" were "beginning to pull Europe and America apart."

Walt argued that NATO must be sustained because of four major areas in which close co-operation is beneficial to European and American interest.

The institute later described him as seeing "an overwhelming bias among US foreign policy institutions toward an activist foreign policy" and "a propensity to exaggerate threats, noting the chances of being struck by lightning have been far greater since 2001 than death by terrorist attack."

He also characterized the US as lacking "diplomatic skill and finesse" and advised Europeans "to think of themselves and not rely on the US for guidance or advice on solving their security issues."

Ultimately, he argued that "the United States is simply not skilled enough to run the world."

Walt was elected a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.

In the comprehensive 2005 article "Taming American Power", Walt argued that the U.S. should "make its dominant position acceptable to others – by using military force sparingly, by fostering greater cooperation with key allies, and, most important of all, by rebuilding its crumbling international image."

He proposed for the US to "resume its traditional role as an 'offshore balancer, to intervene "only when absolutely necessary", and to keep "its military presence as small as possible."

He spoke at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University in 2010.

In a late 2011 article for The National Interest, "The End of the American Era", Walt wrote that America is losing its position of world dominance.

In 2012, Walt took part in a panel at the one-state solution conference at the Kennedy School, along with Ali Abunimah and Eve Spangler.

Walt said in December 2012 that America's "best course in the Middle East would be to act as an 'offshore balancer': ready to intervene if the balance of power is upset, but otherwise keeping our military footprint small. We should also have normal relationship with states like Israel and Saudi Arabia, instead of the counterproductive 'special relationships' we have today."

An article by Walt entitled "What Should We Do if the Islamic State Wins? Live with it."

Walt spoke at Clark University in April 2013.

He gave a talk at the College of William & Mary in October 2013: "Why US Foreign Policy Keeps Failing."

He delivered the 2013 F. H. Hinsley Lecture at Cambridge University.

On the 20th anniversary of the war against Iraq, Walt characterized the rules-based world order as "a set of rules that we [the U.S.] had an enormous role in writing, and of course which we feel free to violate whenever it's inconvenient for us to follow them."

Walt gave a speech in 2013 to the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, "Why does US foreign policy keep failing?"

In 2013, Walt asked "Why are Americans so willing to pay taxes in order to support a world-girdling national security establishment, yet so reluctant to pay taxes to have better schools, health care, roads, bridges, subways, parks, museums, libraries, and all the other trappings of a wealthy and successful society?"

He said that the question was especially puzzling given that "the United States is the most secure power in history and will remain remarkably secure unless it keeps repeating the errors of the past decade or so."

A critic of military interventionism, Walt stated:

"'Hawks like to portray opponents of military intervention as 'isolationist' because they know it is a discredited political label. Yet there is a coherent case for a more detached and selective approach to U.S. grand strategy, and one reason that our foreign policy establishment works so hard to discredit it is their suspicion that a lot of Americans might find it convincing if they weren't constantly being reminded about looming foreign dangers in faraway places. The arguments in favor of a more restrained grand strategy are far from silly, and the approach makes a lot more sense than neoconservatives' fantasies of global primacy or liberal hawks' fondness for endless quasi-humanitarian efforts to reform whole regions.'"

As of 2015, he holds the Robert and Renee Belfer Professorship in International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

In 2015, Walt wrote that extending invitations for NATO membership to countries in the former Soviet bloc is a "dangerous and unnecessary goal" and that nations such as Ukraine ought to be "neutral buffer state(s) in perpetuity."

From that perspective, he believed that arming Ukrainian armed forces after the annexation of Crimea by Russia "is a recipe for a longer and more destructive conflict."

appeared on June 10, 2015, in Foreign Policy magazine.

He explained his view that the Islamic State was unlikely to grow into a longlasting world power on Point of Inquiry, the podcast of the Center for Inquiry in July 2015.

Walt has been a critic, along with his co-author John Mearsheimer of the offensive neorealism school of international relations, of the Israel lobby in the United States and the influence he says that it has on its foreign policy.

He wrote that Barack Obama erred by breaking with the principles in his Cairo speech by allowing continued Israeli settlement and by participating in a "well-coordinated assault" against the Goldstone Report.