All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
And our next guest on the show today is Stephen M. Walt.
He is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Relations at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
He's been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution.
He's also served as consultant to the Institute of Defense Analysis, the Center for Naval Analysis, and National Defense University.
And on and on like that, all the journals and what have you, he keeps a blog at foreignpolicy.com.
And of course, is the co-author of the article and the book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy with John J. Mearsheimer.
Welcome back to the show, Stephen.
How are you doing?
I'm just fine.
How are you?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us here.
So here's where I'm coming from things.
I'm a non-interventionist in the Ron Paul mode.
And yet, I look at foreign policy in the discussion, not the website, but in general in New York and DC.
And it seems like what we have are the liberal interventionists on the left, the neoconservatives on the right, and the realist represented, I believe, by yourself and your school of thought on foreign policy matters more or less in the center there.
My people don't really have a seat at the table.
And it seems like, especially in the case of this intervention in Libya, as you've written at your site, we have this confluence of interest between these pretty hardcore rightists, at least in foreign policy on the neoconservative side and the liberal interventionists to come together and, I guess, overwhelm your argument and what was Secretary Gates's argument that we ought to be very cautious about getting into adventures like this new war in Libya.
Is that about right, how it works there?
I think that's right.
There is a pretty strong consensus in Washington, DC and certainly in the foreign policy establishment about the rather energetic use of American power.
And although I wouldn't say that neoconservatives and liberal interventionists agree on everything, for example, they disagree on the role that international institutions like the United Nations should play, both groups tend to favor the use of American power to promote not just American security, but a broader range of interests, in particular, the promotion of democracy, the defense of human rights, things like that.
And in my view, they're often not very bashful about that and often overly optimistic about what can be accomplished by the use of American power and in particular, the use of American military power.
People of sort of my intellectual persuasion, realists are certainly not isolationists and certainly not opposed to the use of American power, but we tend to see military power as a particularly crude instrument that often has unpredictable and unintended consequences and therefore really should only be used when there are vital American security interests at stake or when you're trying to head off a really major humanitarian disaster, like a potential genocide or something like that.
And in our view, that situation didn't obtain with respect to Libya.
Well, like Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back, I've got a bad feeling about this one.
How about you?
Well, I think there is some possibility that this will all turn out fine.
I think when we first got involved, I said it was the diplomatic equivalent of a Hail Mary pass, and Hail Mary passes sometimes succeed, right?
So it's possible that Qaddafi's forces will melt away relatively quickly.
He'll leave power by one mechanism or another, and the rebels will be able to constitute some minimal degree of public order in Libya, at which point NATO and the United States will all give each other high fives and we'll have seen this as the right thing to have done.
There are lots of ways in which that scenario, and that's the best case scenario, it seems to me, doesn't work out.
If it turns out the rebel forces aren't able to dislodge Qaddafi, if you get some kind of stalemate or a division of the country, you start getting more civilian casualties as a result of continued military action, and you reach a point where Western air power really can't do very much more to help the rebels, and that will be the case once we get into any kind of battle for cities, particularly, say, the capital city in Tripoli.
And at that point, the United States and its allies will face the question of whether they do anything more or do they allow a stalemate to continue.
And I think all of those scenarios are certainly still in play, and we won't know which one we're dealing with for some time.
Well, I mean, knowing the argument and the arguers as well as you do there among the foreign policy establishment, can you see these people backing down?
Say, for example, part of this news that's trickling out now is that some of the guys that we're fighting on the side of in Libya are actually veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars fighting against the Americans there, friends of Osama, or at least one or two of them anyway, and certainly many veterans.
And so I wonder whether they're going to be able to say, if they can, best case, overthrow Qaddafi, won't they just have to turn, quote, unquote, have to then turn around and say, well, we can't quite let these anti-American jihadist types take over, so now we got to do something else, and now a suicide bombing went off, and so now we got to do something else, and on down that chain, it seems like.
Yeah, I mean, your point just underscores how little we really know about the groups that we are supporting right now.
Some of them undoubtedly have worthy goals and objectives, others much less so, and international politics is one of those realms where you often find yourself in bed with people who don't agree with you in every particular.
I think the greater concern, though, is that we've now committed ourselves pretty strongly towards regime change in Libya, and I think despite what the president said last night, that is, in fact, the American goal, and that's what Western military power is being used to further, and if we're unable to get a quick resolution on the terms that we now want, namely his departure in some fashion, then we have to decide if we're willing to do more, and despite all the times that the president has said that our engagement will be limited and we won't be sending ground troops and all of that, it's not clear to me that he's going to be willing to accept a situation a month or two from now where Gaddafi is still in power and the United States turns around and says, well, we tried, it didn't work, and now we're gonna come home.
Again, it's usually easier to start these things than it is to finish them.
Well, and I guess the best case would be to try to turn him into Milosevic and have him basically give up autonomy to the east, like Kosovo, something like that, declare independence in another decade from now, that kind of thing, but Gaddafi's not gonna go along with that.
He's got a whole Sahara Desert to hide in, too.
Well, the Kosovo example is actually instructive in several ways.
On the one hand, it did ultimately succeed in a sense that the Serbs eventually capitulated and the NATO goals were achieved.
On the other hand, it took longer and was more expensive than we anticipated going in.
And in fact, it was the launching of the NATO war against Serbia that led to the biggest increase in civilian casualties and the largest increase in expulsions of Kosovars, who were able to come back later, but in a sense, the American intervention actually triggered some of the humanitarian problems that we were allegedly supposed to deal with.
So it just illustrates the degree to which these sorts of things are inherently very hard to forecast going forward.
I think your point is basically right, that when Gaddafi is well, he does not have a lot of attractive options other than fighting this out to the end.
He's not popular in the Arab world.
There aren't a lot of places he can go and he's got an enormous amount at stake here.
So persuading him to leave voluntarily is likely to be pretty difficult.
Well, you know, it seems like, I don't know about as far as using NATO and the UN Security Council and all that, that's one thing, but it seems like the precedent set in the difference between what's going on in Libya now and Kosovo then too was at least, then they had to pretend that 100,000 men, women and children had been put in mass graves and we had to do something.
Here they're saying, well, it could happen if we don't, is the best they got, right?
That's right, this was a case of essentially preventive action on the United States part.
It's not that a sufficiently horrible set of things had already occurred and then we were going then in to stop them from continuing.
It was rather that we were worried that first of all, if Qaddafi regained power in Benghazi, he would impose some kind of massacre on the citizens there, you know, tens of thousands of people being killed.
There's no guarantee that that would ever have happened, but it was something we were worried about.
All right, now I'm sorry, we're gonna have to save second of all and maybe the rest of first of all till after this break.
It's Stephen M. Walt from Harvard and foreign policy, walt.foreignpolicy.com.
We'll be right back, y'all.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton, I'm talking with Stephen M. Walt from the John Kennedy School at Harvard and walt.foreignpolicy.com.
And sorry, Stephen about the hard break interrupting us there but we were talking about the precedent set comparing contrasting Kosovo and Libya for what's ultimately a preemptive intervention in the internal affairs of another nation.
Yeah, the other point I was gonna make was I do think what was driving Obama's thinking on this was also that the Libya case would set something of a precedent for the other upheavals that are happening elsewhere in the Arab world, which the United States has for the most part been in favor of.
And the fear I believe was that if Gaddafi was able to sort of crush the revolt here, that would inspire other Arab autocrats to use similar tactics everywhere.
And the Arab Spring that people had been observing and had high hopes for might be dashed.
I think that that's probably not the case that in fact what's happening in Libya was not gonna have a huge impact elsewhere that other Arab countries were really much more important to how this plays out itself in the Arab world.
But the basic point here is that we went to war not because there was an immediate or imminent danger of a threat to American interests, but because we were worried of possible humanitarian problems elsewhere and possible repercussions in other parts of the Arab world.
Well, yeah, in fact, in Obama's speech last night when he said it threatened America's interests, he didn't even have an argument.
He just went on to the next assertion after that.
Yeah, I mean, that's right.
Now, to be fair, what he is trying to do is characterize this as a very unusual situation.
He put in a whole series of caveats about this was true and we had international support and there was an imminent danger of this, et cetera, suggesting that this is not sort of the Obama doctrine that you shouldn't expect us to start doing this sort of thing all over the place and all the time.
I think my counter would be that if you look at the United States over the last 20 or 30 years, we've actually done a fair bit of this, whether it was Kosovo in 1999, Bosnia in 1995, 1996, the first Gulf War in 1991, then, of course, the second Gulf War in 2003 and our long involvement in Afghanistan.
We've been actually quite busy trying to mold other societies in various ways and despite all the caveats that he put in the speech last night, I think there's no reason to believe that the same people who called for American intervention here are not gonna be just as vocal about calling for American action the next time something like this happens.
Right.
Well, and there's also the precedent set.
I wanna get back to the part about they favor these revolutions in general, but what was concerning me was the precedent set that both Liebermans, Avigdor in Israel and Joe in the U.S. both seized on, which was, hey, if we can do this in Libya, we can do it in Syria, and I was hoping that you could tell me that no, no, no, that's not gonna happen, though.
Oh, well, I've gotten to the point where I can't rule anything out because there are a number of things we've done in the last decade that I never thought the United States would do, but no, I think it's unlikely that you'll see something like that happen in Syria, but if there is some kind of major crackdown and a lot of blood is being shed there, there will certainly be calls.
There is another danger here, by the way, and it's essentially a moral hazard problem that if a dissident group or a rebel group understands that by creating enough trouble and provoking a government crackdown, they can then maybe get the United States Air Force on their side.
There is some danger that groups will try to do this even if these groups are not particularly savory or desirable or democratic themselves.
I think one can make a case that this is precisely what happened back in Kosovo.
The Kosovo Liberation Army had at one point been on America's terrorist list.
It was not a particularly savory group of people at all, but they were able to cause enough trouble and were able to provoke an admittedly excessive Serbian response that the international community ultimately rallied.
Again, it's just another reason to be very wary of jumping into political situations where we don't know all the actors and we don't necessarily have a good idea what the end game really is gonna look like.
All right, now, I wanted to get back to your comment about the Obama administration in general has been supportive of this Arab Spring.
I was wondering if you could count them for me because that doesn't quite sound right.
I thought, for example, they did everything they could to try to back Mubarak until they couldn't anymore without promoting just a mass slaughter in the streets, and then they want to replace him with Suleyman, the torturer.
I think that's not quite right.
I think the Obama administration, like every previous American administration, was very wary of instability in the Arab world precisely because we do have some more significant strategic interests, particularly in places like the Gulf, and so they were not about to sort of jump to the head of the line and push this whole thing, but I do give them credit for having recognized relatively quickly that the genie wasn't going back in the bottle here and the clock wasn't going to be turned back, and then being willing to embrace the idea of political change in Egypt and in some other countries, and that's been easier to accept in Egypt and in Tunisia than it is in places like Bahrain where you suddenly start worrying about trade-offs between strategic interests and some of our sort of idealistic or moral preferences, but so far, I guess I think they have managed this fairly prudently and have managed to get the United States positioned on what I would call the right side of history here without getting dragged into these conflicts directly.
Libya's the exception because, of course, we are now directly engaged there and we will therefore bear some responsibility for the outcome, whether it's good or bad.
Well, you know, it seemed to me that the reason that they chose Qaddafi basically was for PR, that whether it's Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Egypt, Iraq, or any of the states on the Arabian Peninsula, these are all American-backed kings and so-called presidents, dictators here, and the narrative around the world was these people are rising up against their local states, but also it was pretty clear that these are all, you know, Uncle Sam is the bad guy in all these, we're on the wrong side of all these, and it seemed like, you know, the argument was probably, I mean, I'm just speculating, but it seems pretty obvious that, you know, we gotta get out ahead of this thing.
Qaddafi's, you know, not that loyal to us or anything.
He's the new guy back in the fold just for the last few years, and we can successfully take the side of the little guy in Libya and change this narrative.
And now we're on the side of the revolutionaries when, of course, we're not.
Well, to be fair, we are clearly now positioning ourselves on the side of the rebels in the Libya case.
Right.
I'd sort of distinguish maybe between three sets here.
One was the American reaction to Egypt, where we'd had a long relationship with the Mubarak government, and when the, you know, revolt or the demonstrations began, we initially talked about, you know, sort of peaceful reform.
We made some statements indicating support for Mubarak, but also encouraging him to start moving in the directions that the demonstrators called for.
That didn't work, and in fact, it was a brief attempt by the Mubarak government to crack down, which the United States did not support.
And once it became clear that things were really changing in Egypt, then I think we did shift rather quickly and, I think, successfully to embrace the process of reform.
So we haven't faced a big backlash in Egypt.
In the Gulf, it's been a little bit different because strategic interests are more at play there, and, you know, this whole, our reaction to Egypt, for example, has caused some significant strains with Saudi Arabia.
And there, we've, I think, adopted a more delicate, less principled approach.
And then finally, it brings us to Libya, and Libya's interesting because, despite the recent warming between the United States and Qaddafi's government in the last few years, we were not particularly close, and he doesn't have a lot of friends elsewhere in the world.
So if there was going to be a place where you could sort of take more direct action, this was probably the one where it had the fewest possible repercussions elsewhere.
In that sense, I agree with you.
The danger, of course, is that even in the Libyan case, you may find yourself walking in to trouble that you were unable to anticipate, and you'll find that getting out turns out to be a lot harder than you thought when you started.
All right, now, I'm really sorry that we don't really have enough time.
I wanted to ask you a little bit about the fifth anniversary of the article at the London Review of Books, the Israel lobby, and U.S. foreign policy that really finally brought antiwar.com's argument out into the mainstream.
And I guess, maybe quickly, we could at least touch on the fact that they tried very hard to smear you and your co-author, John Mearsheimer, and yet, you came out all right.
People don't believe that you're an anti-Semite, do they?
No, no, I don't think so.
And there's good reason for that, which is that I'm not, and there's no evidence to support it.
I think, after five years, my co-author and I are proud of what we did, and we think we opened up a topic for discussion that needed to be, and now we're just hoping that American policy continues to shift in ways that will benefit the United States, Israel, and everybody else in the region.
All right, well, we'll have to leave it there.
I really appreciate your time on the show today, Stephen.
Nice talking with you.
All right, everybody, that's Stephen M. Walt from the Kennedy School at Harvard University, and the foreign policy website, that's walt.foreignpolicy.com.
