International Law in the United States

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There's a lot of talk about Russia's hostility to America, thanks to its apparent interference in the 2016 election. But in the grand scheme of things Russia is small potatoes, explains Stephen Walt, Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. America is bigger economically, has far more friends and thus a better world standing, and has a lot more going for it, says Walt. Should the U.S. really be concerned with a country with a GDP some 15 times smaller than its own, with a rapidly aging population and no industry beside oil and gas? Stephen Walt’s weekly column can be found at ForeignPolicy.com. The Charles Koch Foundation aims to further understanding of how US foreign policy affects American people and societal well-being. Through grants, events, and collaborative partnerships, the Foundation is working to stretch the boundaries of foreign policy research and debate by discussing ideas in strategy, trade, and diplomacy that often go unheeded in the US capital. For more information, visit charleskochfoundation.org.

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STEPHEN WALT

Stephen M. Walt is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences.

He has been a Resident Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace and a Guest Scholar at the Brookings Institution, and he 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 May 2005.

Professor 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).

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TRANSCRIPT:

Stephen Walt: The United States is much stronger than Russia, and will be for the rest of my professional lifetime, and I would guess for the entirety of the 21st century unless we commit a series of almost unimaginable self-inflicted wounds.

The United States first of all has a much larger economy. Our economy is now about $17 trillion, Russia’s is less than $2 trillion and has actually been declining in recent years. So we are already close to eight or nine or ten times stronger economically.

The United States is much more powerful militarily: We spend four or five times more than Russia does on defense every year. We have much more sophisticated weaponry than Russia does. The United States is still blessed with allies in many parts of the world. These allies are for the most part rich, relatively powerful and stable. We’re talking about countries like Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and others. Russia by contrast has no allies of any real consequence. It has something of a friendly relationship with China, but it’s not really an alliance.

And lastly Russia has a terrible demographic situation. Its population is much older than ours on average, and it’s aging rapidly; the population is projected to decline dramatically by 30 or 40 million people over the next 50 years or so.

So for all of those reasons the United States has far more power potential.

Last but not least, Russia’s only real economic asset now is oil and gas. People are not lining up to buy the next Russian smartphone or anything like that, so Russia’s long-term potential strikes me as not nearly as promising as that of the United States.

Well, weaker states can still do a lot of things that cause trouble, and what Russia did in the 2016 election—the full extent of which and the importance of which we are still trying to figure out—certainly has roiled American politics in a variety of ways, so it does show that even much weaker powers can find various ways to interfere or cause problems.

Now, it was in part because we were vulnerable to that kind of manipulation, and that’s our f...

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