Stephen Walt

By AI Staff

Stephen Walt is professor of international affairs at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He earned a B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. A scholar of the realist school, he is the author of balance of threat theory (as opposed to conventional balance of power theory).

Among the books he has written are, The Origins of Alliances, Taming American Power, and, in 2018, The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy. Walt is known to be critical of America’s propensity for military intervention, and has wondered why it is that American citizens find it so difficult to approve funding for improvements to public infrastructure, schools and health care, but don’t question how much is spent to prop up world governments.

He also points out what he sees as the flaw of American foreign policy—that it is too prone to overestimate threats (perhaps a reflection of the trauma of September 11, 2001), and that it is far too biased towards activism. Walt has been a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 2005.

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