Blogging, Stephen Walt, and Israel

On Monday I noted that the international affairs journal Foreign Policy has just announced a major relaunch of its website. The magazine has added longtime foreign affairs blogger Daniel Drezner to its blogging masthead, as well as a number of other top scholars, some of whom are just now apparently breaking into the blogosphere.

One of those joining the Foreign Policy stable is Harvard's Stephen Walt.

Walt wasted no time in jumping right into the thick of the flame wars. He wrote a provocative post yesterday using counterfactual analysis, "What if Egypt, Jordan, and Syria had won the Six Day War?" Walt asks us to imagine what it'd be like if Israel walked in Palestinian shoes, that is, what if the Jewish state was defeated in the 1967 Six-Day War - and "a million or so Jews had ended up as stateless refugees" and abandoned to a strip like Gaza - what would American policy look like? Would "the United States be denouncing those Jews in Gaza as "terrorists" and encouraging the Palestinian state to use overwhelming force against them?"

Well, this intellectual exercise generated a little dust-up, of course, with Ross Douthat firing a response at Walt with a direct attack on the "realist" paradigm in international relations, of which Walt is a central contemporary practitioner:

The odd thing is that by Walt's own account, the answer would seem to be "Yes," since presumably the rump Orthodox Gaza - run, perhaps, by Verbover Jews - wouldn't have an all-powerful lobby shaping U.S. policy and public opinion to its specifications. Or am I missing something? ...

... this analogy ... is a reminder of why when I say that the American Right needs a new realism, I really do mean a new realism, because so many of the old realists have failed to distinguish themselves in the debates of the decade just passed. That failure is the subject for an essay, rather than a blog post, but for now let me just say that on the one hand, you had figures in the broad realist firmament (from Henry Kissinger to George Will to Chuck Hagel) lining up to support the invasion of Iraq at a time when the Bush Administration could have used a serious critique from the right (and then acquitting themselves less-than-impressively, in Hagel's case especially, in the debate over what to do with Iraq once things had fallen apart) ... while on the other hand you had figures like Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer deciding that the best way to promote legitimately important "realist" ideas (like, say, that America should be pushing Israel harder to abandon the West Bank settlements, and that American Jews ought to play a more constructive role on this front) was to wrap them up in a farrago of oversimplifications and half-truths, ride the ensuing attention up the bestseller list, and then cry "persecution!" when anyone called them on it.

In turn, Douthat's critique of Walt generated this intellectually dishonest response from L'Hôte:

Douthat is someone who I've admired, but to make a drive-by accusation of anti-Semitism using the stunningly empty "Jewish conspiracy" slander diminishes both him and the Atlantic, and as is always true of frivolous and politicized accusations of anti-Semitism, hinders our ability to fight the real thing. There is a real enemy of anti-Semitism in this world, it is particularly virulent in the Arab world, and those who throw around such accusations withough cause, explicitly or implicitly, do no favors either to the Jewish people or to Israel.

And with that, folks can see how viciously out of control such debates become.

I don't see any "slanders" or allegations of "Jewish conspiracy" mongering in Douthat's post. In fact, Douthat raises one of the most important questions that writers at the nexus of blogging and international relations theory must address: How can a morally competent and responsible theory of American power and foreign policy be developed in post-Bush era? The arguments of Walt and those of the realist paradigm have come to resemble in toto the antiwar left's screaming smears against the "evil BushCo neocons." The key difference is that they ground their attacks on the administration in the scholarly apparatus of "narrow national interests," mounting prestigious yet familiar calls for the "restoration" of constitutional legitimacy and America's "moral standing in the world."

Today's realists, frankly, combine longstanding unhinged leftist attacks with a more surreptitious "traditionalist" idelogical agenda common on the "paleoconservative" right, a paradigm David Frum has identified as comprising "unpatriotic conservatives."

One excellent example of antiwar dogma masquerading as sophisticated scholarhip is Michael Desch's lead article at International Security from Winter 2007/08, "America's Liberal Illiberalism: The Ideological Origins of Overreaction in U.S. Foreign Policy." Desch's piece, not unlike the most vile netroots smears, was egregiously unbalanced (if not blatantly dishonest) in its attacks on the Bush administration. I submitted a detailed research rebuttal to the editors - roughly 3,000 words in length, with full citations - but they declined to publish my response, and did not tender an offer of "revise and resubmit" (copies available by e-mail upon request).

Let me note something about all of this from a professional perspective: My dissertation, completed in 1999, built on some main research findings in the realist balance-of-power paradigm, of which Walt is a leading scholar. His book, The Origins of Alliances (1987), offered one of the most important emendations to the balancing and alliance literature since the work of Kenneth Waltz in the late-1970s. I've loved the realist paradigm - with its grounding in rationalism and the primacy of the national interest - since my days as a political science undergraduate. Walt, as well as his coauthor John Mearsheimer (who I met in 2002 at the APSA annual meeting in Boston), are great political scientists, worthy of emulation.

But I became increasing less enamored of Walt and Mearsheimer in 2003, with the publication of their attack on the Bush administration's build-up in Iraq in 2003, "An Unnecessary War." It became clearer to me over time that realist academic political scientists were basically antiwar peaceniks with mortarboards and tassels.

Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, have become central players in the debates on U.S. foreign policy toward Israel. Most folks are familiar with the huge controversy over their article a few years back at the London Review of Books, "The Israel Lobby." I had just started blogging at that time, and didn't get too wrapped up in the debate. I read some flurries of the controversy in the pages of Foreign Policy, "The War Over Israel’s Influence," and I recommend Michael Massing's powerful essay reviewing the debate at the New York Review, "The Storm over the Israel Lobby." See also, Richard Baehr and Ed Lasky's, "Stephen Walt's War with Israel."

Yesterday afternoon I picked up a copy of Walt and Mearsheimer's book that grew out of that debate, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I read the preface and introduction last night, and will continue reading this afternoon. I figured I might as well read the whole thing. With Walt now a major blogger at the Foreign Policy website, who will likely provide ample fodder to the nihilist leftists of the online fever swamps, it seemed like now's a good time to consume the full argument in preparation for even more intense debates in the months and years ahead.

Just a look at Walt's page this morning gives one a heads-up on what to expect. In an essay entitled "It's Time to Redefine 'Pro-Israel'," Walt glowingly cites the well-known Bush administration nemisis and eminent sockpuppet Glenn Greenwald:

Over at Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald has posted some typically sharp and forceful comments on the gap between American public opinion on the conflict in Gaza and the public stance taken by our politicians.

I'm telling you, if Stephen Walt - who is the Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government - describes Greenwald, who is perhaps the most loathed hardline leftist blogger among conservatives across the blogosphere, as "typically sharp," then there really is something strange going on in academic political science. To put Walt's blogging endorsements in perspective, see Rick Moran's, "Glenn Greenwald is a Pathological Liar."

It's kind of sad, actually, but this is the postmodern world we live in nowadays. Good thing I became a blogger, I guess.

I'll have more on all of this as things develop. For more on my take on Israel and blogging, click here.