The Influence of AIPAC | Stephen Walt | Big Think

The Influence of AIPAC

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Over time, the Israel lobby has come to play a very influential role in American politics—and has had a pretty dramatic effect on what the United States does in the Middle East

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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:

Question: Why did you decide to write about the Israel lobby?

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Stephen Walt: Well, I had done work on Middle East politics previously. My first book and dissertation was about the Middle East from the perspective of alliances. And I'd actually written about the Israel lobby in that book, although not in as much detail and not with as much of a critical eye, I think is one way to put it. We decided to write on this for two reasons. First, after September 11th, like many other Americans, and indeed like lots of other people around the world, we realized that something had gone badly off the rails in American Middle East policy—just understanding why the United States was so unpopular there; why a group like Al Qaeda could organize and decide to attack the United States. So we started... John and I both started thinking a lot more about this, and I actually wrote an article or two about the specific problem of what American foreign policy should be. Second, the more we thought about it, the more we realized there was an aspect of American Middle East policy that was very important and very influential. It was the role of different pro-Israel groups in the United States, but it was a topic that not very many people wanted to talk about. It was a real third rail question, because anybody who did try to bring it up usually got attacked and often got smeared in various ways. And we decided that we were in sufficiently secure and prominent positions that we could try to bring this up. And one of our purposes was to simply break the taboo and make this a subject that one could actually talk about the same way you would talk about the farm lobby, or the oil lobby, or the, you know . . . National Rifle Association, or the American Association of Retired Persons. These are all important public . . . important interest groups, and they get talked about all the time; but the Israel lobby is one that nobody wanted to debate, and we decided that wasn't a good idea. So we wrote a book.

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Question: What is the central conclusion of your book?

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Stephen Walt: The basic argument is that there is a loose coalition of groups that don't agree on every issue; that are not all predominantly Jewish American, but are all committed to trying to maintain a special relationship between the United States and Israel. And that over time these groups have become more influential; that what they were doing was entirely legitimate; just good old-fashioned interest group politics. But like some other interest groups, they'd gotten to be quite . . .

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