A Revolt the Realists Never Saw Coming

One of the great joys of the Arab uprisings in Egypt and Libya is seeing self-styled realists like Stephen M. Walt proved so wrong.

Steven M. Walt, one of the authors of The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy is at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.  The thrust of his book --that the Israeli Lobby is pernicious and all powerful -- is nonsense and he and his co-author do terrible harm to American foreign policy whenever they are heeded on that subject.  But one of the great joys of the current Arab rising is to see a self-styled realist proved so wrong so often on things he wrote recently.

As Wikipedia notes, Jonathan Chait of The New Republic calls him an “ultra-Nixonian realist.”  Now the tricky one had a lot of faults, personal anti-Semitism among them, but he was always pro-Zionist.  Not so Walt.  Realists of his kind are always promoting some evil policy that we are told we are too stupid to understand is in American’s best interest.  This is called “realism.”  In the Reagan administration -- opposed to détente, moral equivalence, and “convergence” -- they had a saying: “Realism doesn’t work.”

Walt’s recent writings for Foreign Policy magazine bear this out.  This first hilarious entry from January 2010 mentions Libya giving up its WMD programs without once noting that it was the invasion of Iraq which scared Qaddafi into so doing (there is a bridge in Brooklyn for sale to the first person who believes with Walt that “multilateral sanctions” did it).  The telltale moral equivalence is there, undermining the fact of Libyan involvement in the Lockerbie bombing and offering praise for governments that kissed up to Qaddafi.

Then in January of this very year, a month ago, Walt explained why the upheavals in Tunisia would not spread to say Egypt, or other Arab nations.  Oops!  But when they spread to Egypt the so-called realist was suddenly not for the American backed strongman (as is the way with Nixonians) but positively happy about democracy.  Why?  Because it would hurt Israel when the Egyptian mob tore up the peace accords!  What joy to be a realist.  Support anti-Israeli strongmen like Qaddafi and predict they will rule a 100 years but when pro-American strongmen begin to fall look for the silver lining of more war on the Jews.

In fact, if a correct theory has predictive power when tested, Walt is the foreign policy equivalent of a Lamarckian.  George W. Bush predicted that Arab strongmen rode the tiger and proposed freedom to get them off of it.  A realist sees them as the best bet and is indifferent to regime type.

Stephen M. Walt has been consistently wrong on predicting outcomes in his chosen field.  He calls this realism but his ideas never meet the test of reality.  The freedom agenda, including support for other free peoples, like the Israelis, does.

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