Stephen Walt, the co-author of The Israel Lobby, today personally demonstrates that the third rail of American politics is on the blink. A year after the Washington Post's Dana Milbank sought to smear him as a crypto-Nazi, he's in business as a blogger for the Washington Post company, at Foreign Policy magazine. Today he has a brilliant post on What-if-it-were-the-Jews who were stateless in Palestine and hurling rockets towards Palestinian settlements–which side would we be on? The answer, of course, is that the U.S. would never have allowed the Jews of Israel/Palestine to suffer 60 years without the right of self-determination.
And here is part of his realist credo:
engineering in other countries and believe that force should be used
only when vital interests are at stake. Realists recognize that global
institutions can be useful tools of statecraft, but they also believe
that institutions require great power support to work effectively and
are not a default solution for all global problems.
Finally,
realists are skeptical of the propaganda that states invariably deploy
to justify self-interested policies, and they know that fear, greed or
stupidity sometimes lead even well-intentioned democracies to do
foolish or cruel things (see under "Iraq").
Realists arenât moral relativists and donât think all great powers are
morally equivalent, but they know better than to take any country's
idealistic rhetoric at face value.
Readers here know that I'm an old lefty contaminated by Walt's realism. That credo and Walt's post linked above, about stateless Jews, is why. Walt has shown greater concern about Palestinian human rights than just about anyone in the establishment. That he's done so with an effortless charm is now demonstrated by the fact that he's a blogger at Foreign Policy. We're coming in.
As to my contamination–despite the credo of this blog, I'm not an idea-person, I'm a writer of passion who tries to be analytical. I've felt comfortable in the company of realists because along with the left they tried to save America from the Iraq disaster. The cruel Iraq disaster. I've been drawn to their cool sense of an American interest as an antidote to the hidden-agenda culturalism of the neocons. I've been drawn to W&M personally because they're smart philosemites. And I like to think that the human-rights, anti-imperialist left is rubbing off on those guys too. Right now we need each other.
