Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer
By Paige Austin
Every piece of scholarship carries risks. But for Harvard Professor
Stephen Walt and University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer, the potential
fallout from their paper "The Israel Lobby", published in the March 23 edition
of the London Review of Books (LRB), was more dangerous than most. Declaring
that the extent of the U.S.-Israel alliance had "no equal in American political
history," the professors posed a distinctly uncomfortable question: "Why has the
U.S. been willing to set aside its own security and that of many of its allies
in order to advance the interests of another state?"
The United States support for Israel, the authors argued, was motivated
neither by strategic concern nor moral imperative. Instead, they identify the
Israel lobby as the primary driver of this support. Were it not for the power of
this community of pro-Israel advocates, the argument goes, the U.S. wouldn't
cling so tightly to an alliance that is, in the authors' view, detrimental to
American interests abroad. The professors, who were both early opponents of the
U.S. invasion of Iraq, hold the Israel lobby partly responsible for that debacle
as well: "Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the
decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was critical", they wrote. "The
war was motivated in good part by a desire to make Israel more secure".
The backlash to the paper was fast in coming. As one journalist later
observed, not since Samuel Huntington wrote "The Clash of Civilizations" has "an
academic essay detonated with such force". Reactions were largely critical: Even
Noam Chomsky disputed the awesome powers ascribed to the lobby by the authors.
http://canadiandimension.com/articles/2006/03/29/414/
In the New York Review of Books, reporter Michael Massing criticized
the paper's "thin documentation" and often "unconvincing" lines of reasoning.
But he also commended the professors for taking on a subject that is
traditionally shrouded in taboo, adding that "The nasty campaign waged against
[them]… has itself provided an excellent example of the bullying tactics used by
the lobby and its supporters". (Massing also offered additional reporting to
show that the lobby was indeed extremely powerful).
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/19062
How are the two professors taking all of this? Professors Walt and
Mearsheimer recently spoke with Mother Jones, defending the arguments in their
essay and parrying many of the charges leveled against them.
MOTHER JONES: Why did the two of you choose to work together on the
piece?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Steve and I had been colleagues at the University of
Chicago for a decade and we had talked a lot about American foreign policy and
Israel. So we had had a close relationship before we wrote the article. What
actually happened with the lobby piece is that in the fall of 2002, I talked
with people at the Atlantic Monthly about the possibility of writing an article
on the lobby and American foreign policy. They were very interested in getting
that piece but I told them that I would not do it unless I could get someone
else to do it with me, and that someone else would be Steve.
MOTHER JONES: That was for fear of a backlash?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes, I understood that the piece would create a
firestorm that no one person would be able to withstand. You would need two
scholars with big reputations to stand up to the withering criticism that would
be aimed at the article and especially the authors. For that reason I told the
Atlantic that I would first have to ask Steve if he would be willing to do it
with me, and if he said yes, we could write the piece together. But if he wasn't
willing to do it, I wouldn't be willing to do it alone.
MOTHER JONES: You two were criticized when the report came out for
having ventured out of your field. What was it in your background that brought
you to this topic and gave you the expertise necessary to take it on?
STEPHEN WALT: First, this is a topic in foreign policy and
international politics, and both John and I have been in that field for 25 years
or so. So we have substantial credentials already. Second of all, we had both
done research on Middle East issues earlier in our professional careers. So even
though neither of us would call ourselves a Middle East expert, we both had some
background in that subject as well. Finally, both of us had done a fair bit of
writing on different aspects of American foreign policy—including on how the
American foreign policy process operated—and had been working in those fields
for a long time. So I think the claim that we were in a field that we didn't
understand is a specious criticism.
MOTHER JONES: The report gives a quite expansive definition of the
Israel lobby. What in your opinions constitutes the lobby?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: We argue that the lobby is a loose coalition of
groups and individuals who spend a considerable amount of time working to make
sure that American foreign policy supports Israel, regardless of what Israel
does. We emphasize this is not a Jewish lobby, because it does not include all
Jewish Americans and, furthermore, it includes Christian Zionists, who are an
important part of the lobby.
MOTHER JONES: What makes the pro-Israeli lobby different from other
interest groups promoting their own agendas?
STEPHEN WALT: There is not much that the Israel lobby does that isn't
done by other groups like the Cuban-American lobby or other special interest
groups. What is different is how effective they are. They've been widely
evaluated as one of the most effective and influential interest groups in
Washington. That's certainly what politicians like Bill Clinton and Newt
Gingrich—who don't agree on very much, but agree on that—have said. So it's not
that their activities are different, it's how effective they are: it's not what
they do, it's how well they do it.
MOTHER JONES: You have been criticized from the left—by Noam Chomsky
and Stephen Zunes, for example—for assigning so much blame to the Israel lobby
in the paper that you end up absolving the United States government of any
culpability. What about factors other than the lobby that were at work in
shaping America's Israel policy, such as reliance on Middle Eastern oil?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Many people, especially on the left, believe that
American policy in the Middle East is driven in large part by oil interests—and
here we're talking about the oil companies and the oil-producing states in the
region. This is an intuitively attractive argument, but there is little actual
evidence that the oil companies and the oil-producing states are driving the
United States' Middle East policy, and there's a lot of evidence that the Israel
lobby is the main force behind the policy.
Just to take a couple of examples: if the oil companies and the
oil-producing states were driving policy, the United States would favor the
Palestinians over the Israelis. In fact, the opposite is the case. If oil
interests were driving policy, the United States would not have gone to war
against Iraq and the United States would have a much less confrontational policy
toward Iran. But in fact the lobby was one of the main driving forces behind the
war in Iraq and it is the lobby that has been pushing assiduously for a
hard-line policy against Iran.
MOTHER JONES: Couldn't America's historical affinity for Israel, or its
sympathy with the country as a fellow democracy, also explain its support?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: The main reason there is a powerful affinity between
Israel and the United States in our body politic is because we are not allowed
to have an open and free-wheeling discussion about either Israeli policy or the
relationship between the United States and Israel. For example, if we were to
have an open and candid discussion about what the Israelis are doing in the
Occupied Territories, there would be much less sympathy for Israel in the
American public. And of course this is the principle reason why Israel's
supporters go to great lengths to silence critics of Israeli policy towards the
Palestinians. In essence, America's present relationship with Israel could not
withstand public scrutiny.
STEPHEN WALT: It's not that the Israel lobby is the only thing that
shapes American support and American sympathy for Israel. But it shapes the
unconditional nature of American support—the fact that our support continues
independent of what Israel's policies are. There are a variety of reasons why
Americans tend to look favorably on the Jewish state and many of them are ones
that I would agree with myself. John and I clearly state that we support
Israel's right to exist and we also think that there are admirable features in
Israeli society, so that's not really the issue. The point of the lobby is it
drives those aspects of U.S. support that aren't in American interests.
MOTHER JONES: What makes you think that pro-Israeli forces actually
caused certain U.S. policy decisions—such as invading Iraq or, to take another
example in the report, ratcheting up pressure on Syria—rather than it simply
being the case that both groups agreed on what should be done?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Let's start with the Syrian Accountability Act, which
called for Washington to play hardball with Syria at a time when Damascus was
helping the United States deal with al-Qaeda [al-CIA-duh]. It is clear that the
Bush administration did not want that legislation—and that the lobby pushed very
hard in Congress to get it.
Regarding Iraq, we argue that the lobby—and here we are talking mainly
about the neoconservatives—was pushing hard for a war against Iraq from early
1998 on. But the neoconservatives were unsuccessful at convincing the Clinton
administration to use military force to topple Saddam. They were also unable to
sell the case for war to the Bush administration in its early days in
office.
After September 11, however, President Bush and Vice President Cheney
fundamentally altered their thinking about Iraq and concluded that war made good
strategic sense. For sure, the neo-conservatives helped push Bush and Cheney to
that conclusion, as they had a well-developed set of arguments to justify the
war—even though Saddam had nothing to do with September 11. In short, our
argument is that the lobby by itself could not push the United States to attack
Iraq; it needed help, and it got that help from Bush and Cheney after September
11. The lobby, in other words, was a main driving force behind that war, but it
was not the only driving force.
MOTHER JONES: You point to a lot of overlap between the lobby and
neoconservatives generally. Are you suggesting that Paul Wolfowitz and Richard
Perle were promoting the Iraq war from within the administration in order to
benefit Israel?
STEPHEN WALT: The neoconservatives are a faction
within the loose coalition or loose community of groups that are strongly
pro-Israel. They tend to have pretty close ties to the Likud party and other
more hard-line or right-wing groups within Israel itself. And I believe the
policies that they were promoting were partly intended to create a strategic
environment that would be good for Israel; partly to give Israel more of a free
hand in dealing with the Palestinians.
But I want to make very clear that I
believe these people also felt that these policies were in the American national
interests. We do not accuse anyone of disloyalty or trying to harm American
interests on behalf of Israel. I think they were trying to advance American
interests and Israeli interests at the same time.
MOTHER JONES: How do you think U.S. policy in the Middle East would differ,
if its current level of attachment and support for Israel were diminished?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: First, I think we would have a
much more even-handed approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I think we
would bring great pressure to bear on both sides to reach an agreement that
would give the Palestinians a viable state. I also think the United States would
return to its traditional strategy of acting as an off-shore balancer in the
region—in other words, the United States would get its troops out of Iraq, and
out of the Middle East more generally, and maintain an over-the-horizon
capability the way it did during the Cold War. I think that one of the principle
reasons the United States has been so deeply involved militarily in the Middle
East since the Second Persian Gulf War in 1991 is because of pressure from the
Israel lobby. I also think the United States would have a less-confrontational
approach to dealing with Iran if the lobby were much
weaker.
MOTHER JONES: Even some defenders of the report have said that your
extensive use of secondary sources rather than say interviews or donation
records gives the report a "secondhand feel". Why did you two choose to rely on
the sources that you did?
STEPHEN WALT: There are limits to what any set of scholars can do. We
thought there was a lot of information available through journalistic sources
and from testimony that other people had reported. We were also particularly
interested in tracing how these pro-Israel groups operated within certain policy
debates, and those were things that one couldn't necessarily find in available
primary sources.
It's worth emphasizing that we relied heavily on both Israeli sources
and Jewish newspapers like the Forward, as well as mainstream U.S. sources like
the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. John and I aren't investigative
reporters: we have day jobs. So we weren't in a position to go and spend a lot
of time interviewing people in Washington. Others have done that, though.
Michael Massing has done a quite impressive body of investigative reporting on
this [in the New York Review of Books] and his research shows that in terms of
our central claims, we are entirely correct. What he provides is a complementary
body of evidence that supports the same picture that we presented from a
different set of sources.
MOTHER JONES: But without yourselves tracking the mechanism by which
pressure is exerted on U.S. policymakers, how could you be certain that the
lobby caused them to make certain decisions?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: We did show evidence of the lobby at work. For
example, we talked about how the lobby worked hard to defeat Illinois Republican
Senator Charles Percy (
http://www.nndb.com/people/231/000041108/), who was up
for re-election in 1984. We also showed how the lobby forced President Bush to
back down in April 2002, after he had told Ariel Sharon to remove his troops
from the Palestinian areas they had just re-occupied. The fact is that there are
countless examples we could have used to make our point had it not been for
space limitations.
Michael Massing is correct when he says that it
would have been nice if we could have discussed in greater detail how the lobby
works. But the fact is that we had roughly 14,000 words in the London Review of
Books and we were covering wide swaths of history and a variety of topics. There
were just limits to how much we could say about any part of the story.
MOTHER JONES: In the Foreign Policy roundtable on your paper, Shlomo
Ben-Ami criticizes
(http://www.foreignpolicy.com/story/cms.php?story_id=3501)
your argument for the lobby's primacy by citing examples of times when U.S.
administrations have acted contrary to Israel's wishes. He mentions Madrid;
Reagan's recognition of the PLO; Clinton's decision to hold Camp David. How do
you account for what appear to be these occasional failures of the lobby?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: There are a handful of cases in the past where the lobby
lost, but almost all of those cases date from the 1980s and the early 1990s. The
lobby has grown increasingly powerful with time and it rarely loses
nowadays.
STEPHEN WALT: We never said that the lobby was all-powerful, or that it
dictated every single thing that American presidents do. There are a number of
situations that you can point to where the lobby has pushed on a particular
issue and didn't get its way. But these issues often tend be pretty peripheral:
they're not central, critical issues for Israel and they are ones where it's
fairly obvious where the American interest lies.
The key thing to observe is that no matter what Israel does the United
States continues to back them. They continue to build settlements even though
every president since Lyndon Johnson has thought that was a bad idea. They spy
on us routinely. They've given or sold American military technology to other
countries. Also, according to Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and
B'Tselem, they have conducted a wide variety of human rights violations, and yet
none of those activities ever slow down American support.
MOTHER JONES: You write in the report that the U.S. has a terrorism
problem "in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel" and that U.S.
support for Israel is a major cause of anti-Americanism abroad, especially in
the Middle East. To what extent do you think that those problems would be
alleviated by a diminishment in our support for Israel?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: There is no question that American support for
Israeli policy in the Occupied Territories is a principle source of our
terrorism problem, but it's hardly the only one. If the United States were able
to put pressure on Israel and the Palestinians and actually solve the
Arab-Israeli conflict, we would still have a terrorism problem—although we would
have much less of one. The 9/11 Commission report, for instance, makes clear
that Osama bin Laden's thinking about the attack was influenced by Israel's
behavior towards the Palestinians. He even considered moving up the date of the
attack to coincide with a visit to Washington by Ariel Sharon, and he wanted to
ensure that Congress was targeted, because he believed that Israel's staunchest
support came from Capitol Hill.
And it's not just bin Laden—people in the Islamic world more generally
are deeply hostile to the United States because we support Israel at the expense
of the Palestinians. As a consequence, huge numbers of people in the Middle East
tend to be more sympathetic to bin Laden than would otherwise be the case. As
long as the United States continues to support Israeli policy vis-à-vis the
Palestinians, it will be impossible to win hearts and minds in the Arab and
Islamic world and solve the terrorism problem.
MOTHER JONES: Have either of you experienced consequences at Harvard or
the University of Chicago for publishing this report?
STEPHEN WALT: Nothing substantial. There have been a few things I know
about—invitations that were cancelled and things like that. But one of the
reasons we wrote this is that John and I were both in a position where we could
do this without losing our jobs.
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: There is no evidence that I've suffered at the
University of Chicago as a consequence of the article. What the actual long-term
consequences will be for my professional career are hard to say. My sense is
that Steve and I will pay a significant price, but it's hard at this early date
to point to evidence that supports that conclusion, and hopefully I will be
proven wrong.
MOTHER JONES: In what sense do you imagine paying a price?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I think that in the wake of the piece it would be
almost impossible for either of us to ever be appointed to a policy-making
position in Washington. It's also difficult to imagine Steve becoming a
high-level academic administrator, despite the fact that he just completed a
distinguished tour of service as the academic dean at the Kennedy
School.
MOTHER JONES: And you anticipated that?
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: Yes. There's no way anyone can study how the lobby
operates and not appreciate that he or she will pay a significant price for
taking it on.
MOTHER JONES: Do you think that the paper has been ignored in the
mainstream media?
STEPHEN WALT: What was most discouraging was not that it was ignored
but rather that much of the mainstream coverage was simply not very substantive.
One of the reasons we did not do a lot of media interviews or appearances when
the story first appeared was simply that we did not want attention focusing on
the authors—we wanted attention focusing on what we wrote.
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: What is interesting here is that a good number of
people, including some who were very critical of the piece, concede that many of
our main points are correct, especially the claim that the lobby plays a key
role in shaping American foreign policy. Given that and given the trouble facing
the United States in the Middle East, one would expect that the mainstream media
would be much more interested in grappling with our piece. But the issue of
whether our Israel policy is in our best interest is rarely discussed in the
mainstream media.
MOTHER JONES: Are you glad you wrote it?
STEPHEN WALT: Yes. We are not going to be able to deal with the
Israel-Palestine conflict, the implications of Hamas being elected, the
situation in Iraq, our policy with Iran, or any number of other truly vexing
challenges if we can’t have an open discussion about these issues.
JOHN MEARSHEIMER: I feel very good about having written the piece, and
if I had to do it again, I would do it with enthusiasm. I think that the Israel
lobby and its influence has been a taboo subject for too long. It is very
important for the national interest that this matter be discussed at length and
in a serious way in the media and on Capitol Hill. Too much is at stake to
continue treating the lobby and Israel like two elephants in the room.