Achievement

I’ll leave a fuller discussion of Jeffrey Goldberg’s rant against Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer to someone else, but this point in particular deserves some attention:

The Judeocentric understanding of America’s foreign policy is now the special province of two ostensibly reputable scholars, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of Harvard University. The two men gained their fame–which is wildly disproportionate to their achievement–last spring, after the publication of an article in the London Review of Books that condemned the activities of Jewish-American supporters of Israel and argued that those activities are responsible for an astounding number of world-historical developments.

Umm…. no.

I don’t quite understand why critics of Walt and Mearsheimer want to insist that the two were virtual unknowns who wandered in unheralded from the wilderness to start attacking Jews for no good reason. Perhaps the point is to discredit them as fame-seeking publicity hounds, and their work as nothing more than an effort at bomb throwing. I’m not really sure. In any case, the argument is simply indefensible. John Mearsheimer would by almost any account have been named one of the five best known international relations specialists in the discipline, even before the London Review of Books article. For my part I don’t think that his book, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, is all that great, but it certainly was an important scholarly and popular account when it came out, meriting attention in Foreign Affairs and other non-academic publications. Stephen Walt is less well known outside the discipline, although I daresay that it would be nearly impossible for someone to pass a field exam in international relations without being familiar with Walt’s work.

I know it’s asking too much, but it would be nice if TNR found someone at least halfway familiar with the histories of the two authors to review their book. Failing that, the reviewer might concentrate less on attacks on their background and more on the substance; there is ample room for complaint, although I’m not sure that arguing (as Goldberg more or less does) that Walt and Mearsheimer are more anti-semitic than Osama Bin Laden will win any awards for journalistic accuracy.

… yoav suggests that Goldberg’s line is a throwaway, and notes that Walt and Mearsheimer have no expertise in domestic political analysis. That’s fair enough, and no one should make the mistake of taking the analysis of a pair of realists as authority on the internal dynamics of foreign policy making. But this brings up another point; if in the course of reviewing someone’s work I were to make a dispositional accusation- claiming, for example, that the author is anti-semitic- I would certainly make some effort to investigate the author’s past work to see if the accusation was justified. Even the most cursory google search for either Walt or Mearsheimer would have revealed to Goldberg a large body of work and a large set of reviews of that work that would have belied the implication that they lacked achievement. Moreover, I’d have to say that anyone who purports to be a critic or analyst of American foreign policy should have at least a passing acquaintance with the work of John Mearsheimer; as noted above, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics is a very well-known book.