Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer professor of international affairs and faculty chair of the Belfer Center’s International Security Program at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. 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 is presently a contributing editor at Foreign Policy magazine, where he writes a weekly online column. Walt is the author of numerous books, including The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, cowritten with John Mearsheimer, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, and Taming American Power: The Global Response to U. S. Primacy, among others. Diwan interviewed Walt in mid-July to discuss the impact of the Gaza war on U.S. power and on Israel, particularly in a changing international context in which the United States is being challenged by countries of the global South.
Michael Young: The war in Gaza has been going on for nine months. How would you define Israel’s performance in this conflict, and that of the United States?
Stephen Walt: The war has been a disaster for Israel and for the United States, although of course it is the citizens of Gaza—including the tens of thousands who have been killed—who have suffered most. Israel believed it could create a “greater Israel” and forever deny its Palestinian subjects—who comprise roughly 50 percent of the population in these lands—all political rights. And then it failed to detect or prevent Hamas’s assault on October 7. Since then, it has waged a brutal war whose ostensible purpose was to eradicate Hamas, and it has failed to achieve that goal. In the process, it has waged a genocidal campaign against the civilian population, doing enormous damage to its claim to moral legitimacy and reinforcing the growing divisions within Israel itself.
The Biden administration’s handling of the war has been appalling. It has backed Israel with billions of dollars of additional weapons and consistent diplomatic protection, even as Israel conducts indiscriminate attacks on a helpless civilian population, denies them access to humanitarian aid, and commits other war crimes. It has offered the mildest of criticisms of Israel’s actions and failed to use the leverage at its disposal to end the carnage. The administration’s claim to support a “rules-based order” has been exposed as hollow and has given ample ammunition to critics and adversaries around the world. And is this policy making American stronger or safer or more popular? No. Sometimes strategic necessity requires states to pursue morally questionable policies, but in this case U.S. policy is a strategic blunder and a moral disaster.
MY: You wrote a very stimulating book a few years ago titled The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, in which you argued that the United States was engaged in what you called “liberal hegemony.” Your point was that America has sought to spread democracy, free markets, and other liberal values around the world. Yet wholehearted U.S. military support for Israel’s campaign in Gaza, which some have described as genocide, has shown strikingly illiberal behavior. Do you believe Gaza has the capacity to undermine this concept of “liberal hegemony,” at least in terms of how it is perceived outside the United States?
SW: Support for “liberal hegemony” was waning long before the Gaza war erupted, although the Biden administration still embraces some key elements of this approach. Democracy has been in retreat worldwide for fifteen years, and there is little enthusiasm today for U.S.-led regime change or other heavy-handed efforts to spread democracy. Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden retreated from the earlier U.S. commitment to unfettered “hyper-globalization” and placed important limits on free trade. Yet Biden still draws a sharp distinction between democracies and autocracies, and both he and Secretary of State Antony Blinken have condemned Russia and Iran and some other countries for violating international norms. The Gaza war makes such charges look deeply hypocritical, of course, and that helps explain why the United States isn’t getting much support for the war in Ukraine from many countries in the global South.
MY: All the signs today are that Donald Trump may again be elected president of the United States. In The Hell of Good Intentions, you addressed whether Trump during his first term was able to challenge the consensus around “liberal hegemony,” and concluded that the system ultimately managed to contain him. How do you feel that Trump might act if he were to be elected for a second time, particularly with regard to the Middle East?
SW: During Trump’s first term, the foreign policy establishment (sometimes referred to as “the Blob”) was able to contain many of his initiatives because he was inexperienced and not very knowledgeable, and he did not have a team of like-minded people to place in key positions. As a result, he had to rely on familiar figures such as John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, and H. R. McMaster, all of whom had hawkish but mainstream views of U.S. foreign policy. Trump was also too lazy and mercurial to do the hard work necessary to implement a far-reaching change in U.S. strategy, except perhaps in U.S. trade policy.
If he is reelected, however, the establishment will have more trouble reining him in. He’ll be more confident in his own judgments and the Make America Great Again movement has had four years to put together a long list of people whose views are aligned with Trump’s to fill key positions. The permanent civil service may still resist his efforts, but influential Republican groups are working overtime on ways to overcome this.
That said, I don’t think it will affect Trump’s approach to the Middle East very much. He gave Israel everything it wanted during his first term, vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance thinks the United States ought to be doing even more to help Israel destroy Gaza, and Trump wants to curry favor with rulers such as Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia. That’s also what Biden has been doing, of course. Trump won’t reach out to Iran or lift a finger to encourage peace between Israel and Palestine. He simply doesn’t care about those issues and is solely interested in cutting deals with ostensibly friendly governments. The good news—such as it is—is that he will be disinclined to intervene militarily in the Middle East, even if his other actions make a regional conflict more likely.
MY: With your colleague John Mearsheimer, in 2007 you wrote a much-discussed book on the Israel lobby in the United States. Looking at the behavior of supporters of Israel since the outbreak of the Gaza war, how would you describe their effectiveness today, and do you see differences with the situation you described in 2007?
SW: A great deal has changed since we published our book in 2007. Back then, it was still a taboo subject. You couldn’t talk or write about the political influence of the Israel lobby without facing a firestorm of false charges and vituperation. Now, people talk about the lobby quite openly and its influence is widely acknowledged. Indeed, hardly anyone questions our central argument anymore! Support for Israel used to be bipartisan and nearly unanimous; today, there are prominent voices in the Democratic Party who recognize that unconditional support for Israel is bad for the United States and Israel alike, as well as catastrophic for the Palestinians. Even Senator Chuck Schumer—who is as pro-Israel as they come—has criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the floor of the U.S. Senate. Furthermore, the emergence of social media and alternative news sources have made it much harder for the lobby and its supporters to control discourse and suppress information that is critical of Israel. We can all see with our own eyes what is happening in Gaza or the West Bank and there’s no way of keeping those videos and reportage out of circulation.
Lastly, there is a sea-change underway among younger people, who are much more critical of Israel and of Zionism in general than older Americans. This is true even among many younger American Jews, who do not see Israel as a model or an inspiration in the same way their parents did. For some, in fact, Israel’s behavior is seen as a betrayal of Jewish values. Israel’s steady drift toward the political right and the growing influence of the ultra-Orthodox are reinforcing this development and Israel’s campaign in Gaza is making the problem even worse. So, a great many things have changed since 2007.
Unfortunately, as the Biden administration’s response to the Gaza war shows, these changes have not led to a significant shift in U.S. policy. The lobby has lost the moral high ground and is losing the rhetorical fight, but it still has considerable leverage over politicians and policymakers, largely due to its ability to steer huge amounts of money toward its preferred candidates in U.S. elections. To take but one example, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and others spent a record amount—roughly $14 million—to defeat Representative Jamal Bowman in a recent primary election, solely because Bowman had criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza. Similarly, pro-Israel donors have put enormous pressure on U.S. universities over the past year, trying to get them to silence or marginalize students and faculty who are critical of Israel, usually by leveling false charges of anti-Semitism. The bottom line is that much has changed since we wrote our book, but the Israel lobby still has a great impact on U.S. Middle East policy, especially regarding the Palestinian issue.
MY: One thing that is striking to me is the very large difference that exists between attitudes among elites within the United States, and more broadly the West, and those outside the West over interpretation of what is going on in Gaza. The Western elites have tended to back Israel, while much of the rest of the world seems horrified by what is happening. Do you agree with this observation, and if so, is this a foreshadowing of how the model of liberal hegemony in the world, defended mainly by the United States, is likely to fare down the road?
SW: There’s no question that there is a huge gap between U.S. and Western elites and the global South over this issue. There are several reasons for this. There was enormous and wholly understandable sympathy for Jews in the aftermath of the Nazi Holocaust, and thus considerable Western support for Israel from its founding to the present. At the same time, few people in the West have had much sympathy for the Palestinians who were displaced, or even knew very much about what was happening to them. After 1948, pro-Zionist groups in the United States, Canada, and Europe worked overtime to encourage Western support and make it politically risky to criticize what Israel was doing.
For the rest of the world, however, Israel’s founding looked like an old and familiar story: a group of people coming from the West to displace or rule over (or both) a local population that had been there for centuries and wanted to govern itself. Israel was created at a moment when the anti-colonial movement was gathering steam, and its founding was completely antithetical to that movement. And then Israel conquered Gaza, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights in June 1967, expelling more Palestinians in the process, and began to colonize these territories in direct violation of international law.
Over time, Israel created an apartheid system to control the Palestinian populations that remained there. Maintaining that system has required repeated acts of violence, the incarceration of thousands of prisoners, and other heinous acts. Not surprisingly, states that gained their independence by throwing off colonial rule see Israel’s conduct as deeply objectionable.
The gap between Western views and policies and the views of the rest of the world is one of the reasons why “liberal hegemony” failed, but in my view it is not the most important one. Liberal hegemony assumed the United States had found the magic formula for how to run a country, that history was moving in the direction of liberal democratic capitalism, and that the whole world would eventually embrace these principles and live in peace and harmony. It also assumed that spreading liberal ideals would be relatively easy, and that other states would welcome America’s benevolent domination. As we have seen, this view turned out to be wildly off the mark and indeed has backfired on us.
MY: On a more personal level, you’ve written that foreign policy thinking in the United States is characterized by conformity. What is it like for a person like you, who has often avoided conforming, to take the positions you’ve taken? Have there been costs in doing so?
SW: That’s a somewhat tricky question. On the one hand, I have an endowed professorship at Harvard University; I write a regular column for Foreign Policy magazine; I belong to the Council on Foreign Relations; and I like to think I have a decent reputation as a scholar. Although my views are outside the mainstream, I have been very fortunate indeed.
But on the other hand, there’s no question that I have paid a price for some of my views, and especially for co-writing the book on the Israel lobby. It made it impossible for me to be appointed to a position in the U.S. government, for example, and I would have liked to serve my country in some capacity at some point in my career. It also made it impossible for me to hold an important leadership position at most universities, and it’s worth noting that I have never been asked to serve in an important leadership position at Harvard after stepping down as academic dean of the Kennedy School in 2006, the year before our book was published. I know I’ve been blackballed for fellowship positions and speaking engagements on a few occasions, and of course I have no way of knowing if there were other opportunities I might have had if my views were more in line with the conventional wisdom.
I have no regrets about any of this, however. My goal was simply to write what I believed was true and to provide analyses and commentary that would improve the quality of U.S. foreign policy and help create a more peaceful world. I wish I had been able to do more in that regard, but I like to think that whatever influence I have had has been for the good.
