The Real M/W Problem

Via Henry comes the good news that Jacob Levy is back to at least intermittent blogging, with a definitive take on the Mearsheimer/Walt controversy. Levy notes that “Mearsheimer and Walt are among the country’s leading scholars of security and of international power relations…it’s very far afield from being specialists in interest group politics, or in the nexus between interest group politics and policy formation, or in the domestic political sources of foreign policy. (Indeed, they’re committed to not being specialists in that last, which is part of the problem.)” That, I think it the fundamental problem; not anti-Semitism, but a quite remarkably unsophisticated take on how interest group politics affects policy-making. Consider this footnote, which Levy calls “the worst paragraph of political science I’ve read in many years”:

The mere existence of the Lobby suggests that unconditional support for Israel is not in the American national interest. If it was, one would not need an organized special interest to bring it about.

That is indeed profoundly embarrassing; not because it’s being used as a cover for anti-Semitism, but because it makes clear that M/W fail to grasp even the most rudimentary insights of the contemporary literature of the field they’re working within here. As Levy says, they’re working within a theory that discounts the effects of domestic politics, and the paper just doesn’t take the nature of domestic policy-making seriously, which leads them to obvious howlers.