Responding to my post on Walt and Mearsheimer, Ross cited a number of reviews of their book that he thinks should dissuade its defenders from so easily dismissing the mostly hostile critics. The first, by Leslie Gelb, came to my attention when it first came out. Because it was not hysterical, Gelb’s review was treated as if it fit the bill of a critical response that addressed the arguments that the authors actually made. However, as Daniel Levy noted at the time, Gelb’s review counted as one of the very shoddy responses that I was talking about. In Levy’s words, it was the “most disappointing and inexcusable” example of the book’s treatment. Levy’s discussion of the book’s shortcomings in his introductory post is very much worth reading, as is his review in Haaretz, which Prof. Walt has cited among the generally favorable reviews the book received.

The Lazare review from The Nation largely faults the authors for failing to take seriously enough the role of oil and empire in their arguments, which is to say that they failed to take up the arguments most frequently found in The Nation and in this magazine. There is a small problem in invoking Gelb and Lazare together, as Ross does, since it is all but certain that Gelb would reject almost everything in Lazare’s claims about empire and oil reserves, and Lazare would probably find Gelb’s position even more blind to reality than he found Walt and Mearsheimer. It is fine to cite the anti-imperialist left-wing critic to dispute all the ways in which Walt and Mearsheimer seem to maintain their fidelity to mainstream assumptions about U.S. regional hegemony, but to cite at the same time the center-left establishment figure to repudiate any flirtations with a radical critique of U.S. foreign policy in the region doesn’t add up. If Lazare is right, the book is lacking because it was an incomplete indictment of the causes of misguided U.S. policy in the region, while Gelb finds the entire argument to be off-base and wrongheaded. However, if Lazare is right, Gelb would be even more in error in his view than Walt and Mearsheimer. To read Lazare’s review is to come away with the impression that Walt and Mearsheimer were definitely on the right track, but made a mistake in limiting their argument to just one highly controversial subject. Of course, had the authors been inclined to go the route recommended by Lazare, Ross and a great many others would find the book to be even more unacceptable. The irony is that the things that Lazare finds troubling or simplistic in the book would not be contested by most foreign policy realists. One of the things that Lazare finds most troubling is the frequent claim that U.S. policy in the region would, all else being equal, be inclined to diplomatic engagement:

The United States as inherently diplomatic and nonconfrontational? Few people, on either the right or left, would take such a notion seriously.

In fact, almost everyone outside of the far left and far right would assume that this is the case, or would at least claim in public that they believe this. This is the myth of the reluctant superpower that Prof. Bacevich critiques so effectively in American Empire coupled with the myth of the benevolent enforcer of Pax Americana that I assume most realists would accept. What is so amusing about Ross’ inclusion of Lazare’s review is that Walt and Mearsheimer are proving their mainstream, realist bona fides in taking a position that appears to Lazare (and to me) as incredible.

As Lazare says before he begins his critique:

So, yes, there is a pro-Israel lobby in Washington. Yes, it is powerful. And yes, critics like Mearsheimer and Walt are hardly out of bounds in asking if the lobby, which they go to great pains to demonstrate is composed of both Jews and gentiles, is truly serving what the authors consider to be the American national interest.

To hear most of the authors’ other critics tell it, though, the lobby either does not exist or is not all that powerful, and they maintain that the entire exercise certainly is out of bounds and also tantamount to echoing, as Ross put it, “tropes of classical anti-Semitism.” So, it’s true that there are serious critiques of the book–Lazare and Levy would have to be counted among them–but if you take the arguments in either of those critiques seriously you cannot simultaneously dismiss Walt and Mearsheimer as “fundamentally unserious” (that’s Ross again). It is not enough to say, “Even The Nation reviewer didn’t like the book,” while neglecting to mention that the reviewer accepted the main thesis of the book almost as a given.

Filed under: foreign policy, politics