September 4, 2006
Walt and Mearsheimer revisited
The great Walt/Mearsheimer debate continues to reverberate around Washington. For those of you who haven’t been following, the argument revolves around an article published this year by two eminent American academics - Steve Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of Chicago University - which argued that American foreign policy is dangerously in hoc to the “Israel lobby”. This kind of thing has often been said before. But it is an unusual argument to hear from an establishment figure like the former dean of the JFK school (Walt) - and it excited a firestorm of comment. Walt and Mearsheimer were lauded by some for their courage and - more often - trashed by others for everything from “pisspoor monocausal social science” (to quote their fellow academic, Daniel Drezner), to alleged anti-semitism (passim). But perhaps the most extraordinary hatchet job yet appeared in The Washington Post last week. The author, Dana Milbank, is remarkable in his willingness to throw almost anything that comes to hand to discredit the two academics: a mispronounced name, a lectern gripped too tightly, a willingness to appear on al-Jazeera. It seems particularly inappropriate for Mr Milbank simultaneously to hint continually that the two authors are racists and then to sneer at them for having German-sounding names and blue eyes.
