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Stephen Walt

Professor of International Affairs, Harvard University

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).


World politics and human nature are such that you can’t assume that virtue will triumph. Human beings are flawed, they make mistakes; some of them are deeply flawed and do […]
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Walt applies both a theoretical knowledge about how international politics works and a careful analysis of particular circumstances to untangle or unravel specific puzzles that are facing foreign policy, usually […]
22 min
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Walt describes how growing up in a priveleged Northern California family with a scientist father cultivated the idea that the highest pinnacle of human achievement doing was something involving ideas, […]
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