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Wall is the improvement of investment climates by other means clouds of it's for dummies.
The Scott Horton Show.
Taking out Saddam Hussein turned out to be a pretty good deal.
They hate our freedoms.
We're dealing with Hitler revisited.
We couldn't wait for that Cold War to be over, could we?
So we can go and play with our toys in the sand.
Go and play with our toys in the sand.
No nation could preserve freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Today, I authorize the armed forces of the United States in military action in Libya.
That action has now begun.
When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
I cannot be silent in the face of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, my government.
All right, you guys.
Introducing Stephen M.
Walt.
He blurbed my book and he teaches international relations at Harvard University.
Of course, he's famously the co-author of the article and then the book, the Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy with John Mearsheimer holding it down for the realist school.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Stephen?
It's nice to be with you.
Very happy to have you here.
I like telling the story of getting that blurb from you because only after I started getting more and more blurbs ended, I get the courage to go ahead and ask you for one.
And then I was almost ready to put the book out and I thought, well, I guess he must have just not liked it.
And that's cool kind of thing.
And, you know, I sent it to you late compared to everybody else.
And I thought, oh, well, I'll just have to do.
And then right before, like two days before the book came out, I got your blurb and it started with great job, Scott, and all this.
And I was like, all right, real score for me.
So thank you again for that, Stephen.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
All right, cool.
So tell me this, boy, did I not sign up for the wrong faction of libertarian movement here, huh?
Or I guess I did.
Libertarian billionaire Charles Koch is making a big bet on foreign policy, reads the headline in The Washington Post.
And it's about how he's giving a three point seven million dollar grant to Harvard and to MIT in order to bring in, I guess, right leaning realist and libertarian foreign policy people to what end?
Well, the purpose of the grant is primarily to support research by graduate students, by doctoral students and postdocs.
And that's where most of the money in this particular grant is going.
Barry Posen, who directs the security studies program at MIT and me in my capacity as faculty chair of the International Security Program at the Belfer Center at Harvard, came up with this idea a year, year and a half ago of providing a particular kind of fellowship support for people who were working on different aspects of American foreign policy.
So there's no political litmus test here.
What we're mostly interested in doing is getting younger scholars who care about the real world, who care about America's role in the world and who are doing interesting research on those topics and giving them a chance to spend a year at MIT and a year at Harvard.
It sort of gives their own careers a jet assisted takeoff, allows them to network with each other and with our other fellows and should help broaden the conversation among scholars and even in the real world about what the United States is doing.
Great.
Well, you know, there sure are plenty of warmonger colleges going on right now, apparently, judging by who's occupying which chairs of which think tanks most of the time.
So certainly, if anything, this seems like kind of an overdue measure, but sure is good to see their money behind it, some real money behind it, because that's what we want.
Right.
As a libertarian billionaire.
Well, there are a couple of the Koch brothers.
Right.
Well, more and more importantly, there's sort of two things going on.
I mean, first of all, getting just a broader set of ideas into the conversation would be good, but also we're hoping to encourage at least some graduate students who may have been less inclined to work on topics that are of direct policy relevance to, you know, do a dissertation that, you know, would be academic and will be scholarly, but would also provide insights into things that policymakers are actually concerned with.
There's been some tendency in recent years for a lot of academic research to be kind of off in I want to sort of in the political science hyperspace or off in the sort of pure ivory tower world.
And if we can get a few students to say, well, no, actually, I'm going to write on something that is directly relevant to U.S. foreign policy, that would be terrific as well.
All right.
Hang on just one second.
Hey, everybody, check out the show notes.
Damon's doing a great job writing up the show notes for all these interviews at the Libertarian Institute website and at Scott Horton.org.
And listen, you need to while you're at Scott Horton.org, check out all the advertisers in the right margin there.
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There's a quote in this article where it's Barry Posen saying that during the Cold War, there were often big debates over nuclear weapons and U.S. policy in places like Latin America or Asia and that that's really changed.
Is that your experience, that people used to fight a lot more openly and that there were a lot more prominent people available to take the different sides and go ahead and fight about it, say, in the Reagan years?
I think that's right.
I think what's what what you see today or what we've seen in the last 20 or 25 years is some sometimes, you know, very heated debates on small tactical questions or on issues like, you know, should the United States be more involved in Syria than it already is, where you haven't seen a really fundamental, deep debate and certainly not a wide ranging one is on sort of broader questions of American grand strategy, America's role in the world.
There, I think there's been a very powerful bipartisan consensus, Democrats and Republicans alike, many people in academia and especially academics who are sort of involved in the policy world, all agreeing that the United States was, you know, the indispensable nation that had to exercise 24-7 global leadership and had the right and responsibility to intervene in lots of places around the world.
And I think that track record of that effort has not been particularly positive.
We've seen that in lots of different places.
And so having a debate that isn't just happening between the 48 yard line, which I think is what we've had happen, but is somewhat broader, you know, maybe gets between the 30 yard lines would be a positive step forward.
Hey, by the way, does this seem strange to you that after the Cold War, that it was just Chalmers Johnson and a few others, a real small minority group of his ilk who said, hey, now that the emergency is over and the Soviet Union is gone, we're supposed to abolish NATO and bring all the troops home.
We're not supposed to be a world empire, the leader of the world.
We're supposed to be a republic.
And this, you guys promised this was just for the emergency.
It seems to me like that's a pretty obvious kind of point of view to have that you shouldn't have to be Chalmers Johnson or Pat Buchanan to see it that way.
And yet, like you're saying, the consensus is that like Soviet Union, Shmoviet Union, America is supposed to lead the world no matter what, always, forever.
And by lead, that means have 140 bases in 140 countries, etc.
In a sense, you're right.
It was interesting that there was not a more open public debate on these questions.
There were a few people who raised these issues, as you say, but it was certainly not a big debate in the United States.
In a sense, it's not all that surprising.
I mean, first of all, there was this sense of hubris and self-congratulation at the end of the Cold War.
You know, we'd won it.
Obviously, that proves that our way of government is the best that's ever been invented and everyone else should adopt it right away.
So there's a certain amount of that, a certain amount of overconfidence that it would be easy to spread these ideals in lots of places.
Therefore, we should stay in all the places we are and maybe bring some new places into our various security partnerships and networks.
I don't think that's all that surprising.
And then there's one final thing, which, of course, doing that was in some ways a full employment policy for the people who had been waging the Cold War.
And no organizations like to go out of business or like even to close itself down or shrink even by, you know, 30, 40, 50 percent very readily.
So for all of those reasons, we kept doing most of the things we had been doing.
And in fact, we started doing a bunch of new ones because we could, because we thought it would be easy, because we thought it was the right thing.
I don't question most of these people's sincerity, but after 25 years or so, I think one also does have to look at what they were able to achieve, the problems it often caused and the costs it's inflicted on the United States, and maybe consider doing some things a little bit differently.
All right.
Now, I know we're out of time, so people, if you're confused why some right-wing oligarchs like the Kochs would be anti-war, you need to do a little bit of research.
Turns out they've always been anti-war.
They used to be extremely libertarian.
They helped bankroll the effort to abolish the draft back in the 1970s.
They spearheaded the effort to found the Libertarian Party or, you know, bankrolled it.
And of course, they're behind the Cato Institute, etc.
Doug Bandow and all our heroes over there.
So they're actually really good on this stuff.
Now, if someone was a listener to this show and they were young and they were interested in going to Harvard and studying peace, how would they go about pursuing this?
Well, first of all, wherever they're in school now, they should try and get really good grades because we really try to take only the very, very best people.
And then, you know, given the program that we're putting together, they want to get into a good graduate school, get advanced to candidacy, have a dissertation topic that bears on some aspect of American grand strategy or statecraft, and then submit an application.
All right, great.
Well, and I'm sorry, where would they submit the application?
Just at the Kennedy School?
Yeah, either to the International Security Program at the Kennedy School or the Security Studies Program at MIT.
Great.
All right.
Listen, thank you so much for coming back on the show.
Steve, really appreciate your time.
Nice talking with you, Scott.
All right, you guys, that is Stephen M.
Walt.
You got to read his book.
Him and John Mearsheimer wrote this thing, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.
It's 10 years old now, but I think you'll really enjoy the insights in there.
And in fact, he wrote a thing back and forth over at The Forward a few weeks back on the marking the 10th anniversary of that book and its subject matter as well.
You guys might want to check that out.
I'm Scott Horton.
And keep all the stuff at scotthorton.org, foolserend.us for my book.
Buy my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, foolserend.us.
I run the Libertarian Institute at libertarianinstitute.org and I'm the editor of antiwar.com.
Thanks.
