Stephen Walt on "Where is U.S. Foreign Policy Headed?”
This fall, foreign policy expert Stephen Walt gave a talk, "Where is U.S. Foreign Policy Headed?" which explores the future of U.S. foreign policy under President Trump. In the lecture, Walt argues that Trump was elected in part because there was growing public dissatisfaction with U.S. foreign policy. He adds that this dissatisfaction is not surprising because U.S. foreign policy has had many failures and few successes since the end of the Cold War.
"When Trump described U.S. foreign policy as 'a complete and total disaster' (and when Bernie Sanders made similar complaints from the left), many Americans nodded their heads in agreement," says Walt. "During the campaign, Trump promised to 'shake the rust off' and chart a new course, but his policies as president soon reverted to the familiar status quo. His bellicose tweets notwithstanding, Trump is gradually being captured, co-opted, and constrained by the foreign policy establishment. Under Trump, therefore, U.S. foreign policy is likely to be an even more inept version of our recent follies."
Stephen Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs. He has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and has also served as a consultant for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He presently serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and Journal of Cold War Studies, and he also serves as co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs, published by Cornell University Press. Additionally, he was elected as a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. Walt is the author of The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author J.J. Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007).