斯蒂芬·沃尔特

斯蒂芬·M·沃尔特（英语：Stephen Martin Walt，1955年7月2日—）是一位美国政治学家和国际关系学者，哈佛肯尼迪学院教授，主要作品有《以色列游说集团与美国对外政策》（The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy，与约翰·米尔斯海默合著）、《联盟的起源》（The Origins of Alliances）、《驯服美国权力：对美国首要地位的全球回应》（Taming American Power: The Global Response to US Primacy）等。

Stephen Martin Walt (born July 2, 1955) is an American political scientist serving as the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

A member of the realist school of international relations, Walt has made important contributions to the theory of neorealism and authored the balance-of-threat theory.

Books that he has authored or coauthored include Origins of Alliances, Revolution and War, and The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.

Early life and education

Walt was born in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where his father, Martin Walt, a physicist, worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. His mother was a school teacher. The family moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when Stephen was about eight months old, and he grew up in Los Altos Hills.

Walt pursued his undergraduate studies at Stanford University. He first majored in chemistry, as he was planning to become a biochemist, but he then shifted to history and finally to international relations. After earning his BA, Walt began graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with an MA in political science in 1978, and a PhD in political science in 1983.

Career

Walt 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. As of 2015, he holds the Robert and Renee Belfer Professorship in International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Other professional activities

Walt served on the board of directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists from 1992 to 2001. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005.

Walt is frequently invited to speak about foreign policy issues at universities. He spoke at the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University in 2010. In 2012, Walt took part in a panel during the "one-state solution" conference on Israel and Palestine at the Kennedy School, along with Ali Abunimah and Eve Spangler. Walt delivered the Harrington Lecture at Clark University in April 2013, as well as the 2013 F. H. Hinsley Lecture at Cambridge University. On December 20, 2013, he gave a talk at the College of William & Mary entitled, "Why US Foreign Policy Keeps Failing".

Views

American power and culture

On the twentieth anniversary of the war against Iraq, Walt characterized the rules-based world order as "a set of rules that we [the US] had an enormous role in writing, and of course which we feel free to violate whenever it's inconvenient for us to follow them." In the comprehensive 2005 article "Taming American Power", Walt argued that the US should "make its dominant position acceptable to others—by using military force sparingly, by fostering greater cooperation with key allies, and, most important of all, by rebuilding its crumbling international image." He proposed for the US to "resume its traditional role as an 'offshore balancer'", to intervene "only when absolutely necessary", and to keep "its military presence as small as possible." In a late 2011 article for The National Interest, "The End of the American Era", Walt wrote that the US was losing its position of world dominance.

Walt gave a speech in 2013 to the Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies, "Why does US foreign policy keep failing?" The institute later described him as seeing "an overwhelming bias among US foreign policy institutions toward an activist foreign policy" and "a propensity to exaggerate threats, noting the chances of being struck by lightning have been far greater since 2001 than death by terrorist attack." He also characterized the US as lacking "diplomatic skill and finesse" and advised Europeans "to think of themselves and not rely on the US for guidance or advice on solving their security issues." Ultimately, he argued that "the United States is simply not skilled enough to run the world."