Citizen Conversation With…Stephen Walt
by Matt Bieber, News Writer on October 30, 2009 in Citizen Conversation with..., Features
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Photo courtesy of Taylor Chapman, MPP’11. Interview Conducted by Matt Bieber, News Writer, MPP’11.
Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Rene Belfer Professsor of International Relations. 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.
In an article and a subsequent book published a couple of years ago, you and John Mearsheimer argued that the Israel lobby exerts a power over U.S. foreign policy that can’t be explained in terms of American or Israeli interests, nor in terms of America’s moral obligations. So can you summarize your argument for our readers?
The basic argument of the book is that there is a powerful interest group—a coalition of different individuals and organizations—that seeks to maintain a “special relationship” between the United States and Israel. In particular, the special relationship means that the United States gives Israel extraordinary amounts of economic, military, and diplomatic support, and does so more-or-less unconditionally. No matter what Israel does, in short, it continues to receive economic, military, and diplomatic backing.
We argued that this special relationship was primarily due to domestic politics in the United States, and tried to explain exactly how that worked. We emphasize that the lobby’s activities were legitimate forms of political participation and far from unique– that there were lots of other interest groups that did similar things—though few groups were as influential.
We also maintained that the special relationship was not good for either the United States or Israel. It was undermining America’s interests in the Middle East and elsewhere, and encouraging Israeli policies that were not in Israel’s long-term interest. Accordingly, we argued that a more normal relationship would be better for both countries.
By writing the book, we hoped to get the subject more out in the open and get people talking about it, given that it had been something of a taboo subject for many years. Needless to say, the reaction of some of our critics confirmed that this is still a difficult subject to talk about in a calm and rational way, although I would argue that the discussion has become somewhat more open since our work was published.
Do you see Obama’s relationship with the Israel lobby as different than Bush’s was?
Maybe at the margin, but there has yet to be sharp break with past behavior. President Bush was as unconditionally supportive of Israel as any American president has ever been and yet he also did a number of things that were unintentionally quite harmful to Israel, and needless to say, to the United States as well. Not because he intended to, of course, but because the policies he pursued were not very smart.
President Obama has suggested on several occasions that he has a somewhat more nuanced view of this issue. For example, he has said that “Good friends ought to be able to disagree with one another, and that sometimes that’s the right thing to do,” which implies some recognition that US and Israeli interests aren’t identical. But I’ve yet to see him actually deliver on that sentiment. He has made some great speeches, but so far, the special relationship has not been affected one way or the other, and he has not been willing to use American leverage to try and advance the peace process in a significant way.
In your view, is there anything that American leadership can do to advance the peace process?
The United States has enormous potential leverage over most of the relevant parties. We have a lot of leverage on the Palestinians, who depend on us for economic aid and diplomatic backing because they’re almost powerless themselves. We’ve also played a constructive role in helping create a more reliable Palestinian security force. If we stopped doing that, that would be a real problem for the Palestinian National Authority.
So we have lots of leverage with them and we haven’t been shy about using it in the past. We’ve put pressure on the Palestinians for decades, both to recognize Israel’s right to exist before and then to make various concessions as part of the peace process.
We also have enormous potential leverage on Israel. Not only do we provide them with $3-4 billion in aid every year, but we’re also their principal diplomatic ally and protector. The problem is that no American president really has ever been willing to use leverage, mostly because they had been worried about the domestic political consequences of doing so. So you have this bizarre situation, where every president since Lyndon Johnson—including President Obama—says that Israel should stop building settlements. The Israeli government refuses and then all Obama says is, “Well, you know, that’s regrettable” and doesn’t do anything else.
If it wished, the United States could have actually ended this conflict a long time ago, but no American president had the political courage to do it. And that’s tragic. Dean Ellwood likes to talk about the need to “Act in Time,” and this is an obvious case where the United States has consistently failed to do so. The result is that the situation there has gotten steadily worse, and the two-state solution that Obama says he wants may no longer be possible.
Could an American president condition some portion of our support on Israel halting the construction of settlements and expect to survive the domestic backlash?
I think it would be difficult, but if an American president made it a priority and actively explained the situation to the American people—including Christian evangelicals and Jewish Americans who have been very supportive of Israel—many of them would support [the president]….Not all, but many of them would.
It would involve some use of the “bully pulpit” to explain why putting pressure on both sides was really necessary. You’d have to explain why doing so was in America’s interest but it was also in the Palestinians’ interest and in Israel’s interest. In particular, you need to point out that all of the alternatives to a two-state solution look substantially worse. If you do that, then I think an American president could succeed.
I would also argue that our current president is unusually well-equipped to do that. He’s very articulate, he’s very smart, and I think he understands the issues quite well. Unfortunately, he’s also got about nine million other things that he’s supposed to solve in the next three or four years, and they aren’t going to be easy either. So whether this issue will rank high enough on his list of priorities to get that kind of attention, I just don’t know. That’s why I’m not particularly optimistic about any real progress.
Can you describe what you think the world would look like if Iran did acquire a weapon? Are we overly concerned?
Yes, I think we are overly concerned. I don’t think an Iranian bomb would be a good thing, of course, and I would prefer Iran not acquire them. I can even make a case for why it’s not in Iran’s interest to go all the way across the threshold to a full nuclear capability. But if Iran did do that, it would not have particularly dramatic effects. They couldn’t use a weapon against anyone that we care about because we could retaliate. Or in the case of Israel, Israel could retaliate on its own.
And if you look at other countries that have acquired nuclear weapons, having a bomb didn’t suddenly give them extraordinary global influence. It didn’t let the Soviet Union blackmail anybody, and it didn’t let China blackmail anybody. It hasn’t made it possible for the United States [to] simply tell people what to do and get them to obey.
You occasionally hear this idea that if Iran got nuclear weapons, it would begin throwing its weight around and telling all these countries in the Middle East to do what it wanted….[B]ut no other nuclear power has been able to do that, so it’s fanciful to think Iran would be able to wield enormous influence just because it tested a nuclear device.
So again, an Iranian bomb would not be a good thing; I’d rather they didn’t [acquire one]. We ought to be looking for different ways to persuade them not to go all the way. But if they did, we would immediately find ways to live with it. In fact, we would start telling everyone that it didn’t matter very much.
I’d like to push back a bit in two ways. One, there are those who argue that if Iran acquires a nuclear weapon, it would immediately inspire an arms race among Iran’s neighbors in the region. What do you make of this argument? And two, do we need to worry about the possibility that Iran could use a nuclear capability against Israel in a way that would make Israel incapable of responding? Elliott Abrams used the phrase “a one-bomb country” to describe Israel when he spoke in the Forum several weeks ago.
A regional arms race might happen, but that isn’t inevitable. If you look at when other countries have acquired nuclear weapons, it hasn’t immediately led to regional arms races, either. North Korea is now testing nuclear weapons, but South Korea is not building a bomb and Japan is not [pursuing] a bomb. The Philippines aren’t trying things like that. So you don’t see this sort of “proliferation chain” happening automatically.
By the way, the possibility of a regional arms race is one reason why Iran might actually be better off not going all the way to an active nuclear capability. They are the most populous country in the Persian Gulf. They have the most economic potential there. Over time, they are likely to be the dominant power in that part of the world, which means if it remains a nuclear-free area, they’re going to have more influence than they would have if countries like Saudi Arabia acquired nuclear deterrents of their own.
You could make the argument that Iran ought to have the capacity to go nuclear if it ever had to but it should refrain from exercising that capability - the condition of nuclear latency.
As for the one-bomb argument, Israel is not so small that you drop one bomb on it [and] it would destroy everything, though it would certainly be a horrific event. But more importantly, Iran is not going to attack Israel because the Israelis would undoubtedly have ways to retaliate. The Iranians could never be certain that a dozen, two-dozen Israeli bombs wouldn’t find their way back to Tehran, completely destroying their society.
There’s never been any evidence whatsoever to suggest that Iran’s leaders are suicidal, and you’d be committing suicide if you attacked Israel with nuclear weapons. And for what? If you dropped a bomb on Jerusalem, you destroy the third holiest site in all of Islam. If Iran is led by a bunch of people who take Islam seriously, as we are led to believe, it’s hard to imagine that this is what they would do if they were to acquire a nuclear capability. So I think this is another case where we’ve suffered from a certain degree of threat-mongering.
One final topic: Afghanistan. Do you oppose the notion of sending more American troops to Afghanistan?
Yes.
What’s the best course of action for President Obama at this point?
I think President Obama should be looking for ways to end America’s military involvement in Afghanistan as rapidly as possible, but that can’t be done instantaneously. It doesn’t mean that our presence there would go to zero, but that basically, we should not be trying to fight a counter-insurgency war against the Taliban. We should be letting Afghanistan settle its own problems.
Our major objective in Central Asia should be to focus on anti-American terrorists, and especially Al-Qaeda. We should not be trying to determine the political fate of 32 million Muslims in Afghanistan, along with the 180 million Muslims located in Pakistan. We don’t have the knowledge or the capacity to socially engineer either of these societies and we are as likely to make things worse as to make things better, and at considerable costs to ourselves.
It sounds like you think that despite America having intervened in Afghanistan, we don’t have any ongoing moral obligation to stay.
No. There can be circumstances where there’s some moral responsibility involved, but there are clearly limits as well. In particular, the moral obligation is limited when you don’t really have the ability to improve the situation. I tend to analyze this situation in very straightforward cost-benefit terms. [The] costs there are substantial and rising. [The] benefits, even if we succeed, are relatively minimal. For Americans, the primary benefit would be helping to lower the risk of Al-Qaeda-based terrorism, and I don’t believe victory in Afghanistan makes much difference one way or the other. Victory will not eliminate Al-Qaeda and defeat isn’t going to make Al-Qaeda substantially more powerful.
Finally, we have to ask, “What’s the likelihood of success?” You’re not morally obligated if there’s nothing you could do that would actually make things better. In my view, waging a large-scale counter-insurgency campaign there is ultimately going to fail, and it is not going to make things better in Afghanistan.
There are things we can and should do, along with other members of the international community. We can continue to do economic development projects in the areas that are relatively stable. We can continue a modest effort to train Afghan security forces, but our presence should be as small as possible. I’d be aiming to try and have us out of Afghanistan about as rapidly as we’re getting out of Iraq, and make it clear that Afghanistan’s fate will be determined by the Afghans, not by us.
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