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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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 […]

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

Open discussion is critical, says Walt.

We shouldn’t be expecting perfection, Walt says.

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 […]

The underdog.

How many people can the planet fit?

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

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 […]

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, […]

“Economics is a social science.”

“It’s the number of people.”

We should be thinking more about the “we” than just about the “me.”

Democracy in Cuba will be a work in progress for some time.