An Interview With Stephen Walt

Stephen Walt is a well-respected professor of international affairs at the prestigious Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. Known for being part of the ‘realist’ movement within international relations, Stephen Walt also taught at the University of Princeton and the University of Chicago, as well as author (or co-authoring) a number of books. The most recent of these is entitled The Hell of Good Intentions which discusses America’s foreign policy and how previous modern presidents have failed to take responsibility for its failings, leading to the election of Donald Trump. Stephen Walt is a respected teacher and expert in his field.

Please enjoy my interview with Stephen Walt.

When someone asks you ‘what do you do for a living?’ – How do you respond?

I say “I teach and write about international politics and U.S. foreign policy.”  If I’m feeling playful, I might reply that “I tilt at windmills.”  In our family, we say that I “think globally,” while my wife (a politician in our town) “acts locally.”

What are you reading at the moment?

I’m in the middle of How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr, and gradually strolling my way through Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer.   I recommend both.

What’s your earliest memory of reading?

I was restless and easily bored as a child, and reading books or listening to music were among the few activities where I would sit still.  We had lots of books at home, and I used to visit the local library every week during school vacations.  According to my parents, I began “sounding out” words when I was about four, and I went through the usual children’s books (Dr. Seuss, Maurice Sendak, etc.) with enthusiasm.  I bought dozens of books through the Scholastic Book service at school.  They were mostly small paperbacks, and I’d hide them inside my school textbooks so I could read during class, instead of paying attention to whatever the teacher was trying to impart to us.  I also spent hours reading the World Book encyclopaedia, if you can believe that.  And I devoured a lot of standard male stuff: the Hardy Boys, Huckleberry Finn, books on sports or cars, adventure tales of all sorts (especially sea stories), and later science fiction.  My father was a physicist and a history buff, and we had a large collection of books on war and the military, as well as science.  I’m sure they shaped my interest in international affairs and my desire to be an academic.

If you could encourage young people to read one book in particular, what would it be and why?

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller.  It’s funny, fantastic, and horrifying, and it captures the insanity of war as effectively as any real-life battlefield memoir.  It also teaches you not to trust authority, which is an important life lesson. I read it over and over in junior high and high school.  I didn’t understand a lot of it at first, but it kept growing on me.

What is the worst job you’ve ever had?

I filled in for a friend on an assembly line at an envelope factory.  Eight hours taking envelopes off a conveyer belt and putting them in boxes for shipping. I did it for a week and hated every minute.  But at least the pay was lousy.

Do you read as much as you’d like to?

No, and often I don’t get to read what I want.  A lot of what I read today is involuntary: manuscripts for review, student papers, and academic articles of varying quality.  Some of these items are genuinely interesting, of course, but a lot of them can feel like drudgery.  What I miss is the time to read widely in different areas, including fiction.

What books do you feel are important reading for people on your career path and why?

First, an aspiring scholar of international affairs should soak up as much world history as they can, and ideally works written from different national or cultural perspectives. Graduate school will teach you statistics, research methods, and other analytic skills, but a solid grounding in the events of the past and the different ways they are remembered provides essential raw material for creative and disciplined theorizing.  Second, students need to read books that will help them learn to write.  This category includes how-to manuals like the classic A Manual of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White, or Dreyer’s English by Benjamin Dreyer, but they should also seek out the works of scholars who know how to say serious things clearly and with style.

Is there a book that you’ve read more than once? What is it and why did you revisit it?

What book haven’t I read more than once?  Plenty, in fact, but I’m an inveterate re-reader of fiction, either because there are scenes within books that fill me with pleasure every time I revisit them, or because reading a familiar text is relaxing—it’s like coming home.  I feel the same way watching movies that I’ve seen dozens of times, and especially a few well-loved scenes within them.  When I was twenty, I spent the summer traveling in Europe with just four books: The Tin Drum, Dog Years, and Cat and Mouse by Gunter Grass, and a one-volume collection of Shakespeare, and it was interesting to read and re-read them over three months.  I read the Grass books incessantly and only occasionally dipped into the Bard.

I’ve read all of Robertson Davies’ trilogies multiple times, along with the entire Sherlock Holmes canon, John Le Carre’s novels, Nero Wolfe Mysteries by Rex Stout, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk, and I dip into my favorite biographies now and again.  Other recurring guilty pleasures include authors such as Raymond Chandler, Lee Child, Dorothy Sayers, Barry Eisler, or P.D. James, or the gloomy noir-ish novels of Alan Furst and Philip Kerr.

Interestingly, there are also some books that I enjoyed immensely when I read them but have little desire to revisit.  I loved the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling, but I never re-read any of them.  Ditto the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, which is an extraordinary work of imagination and genuinely terrifying, but not one I’ve felt compelled to return to.  I adored The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon, but each sits quietly on my shelf and I haven’t felt compelled to take either down and dive in again.  I don’t know why.

What book have you recommended the most to friends and family?

To colleagues, the book I’ve recommended most is Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James Scott.  Scott is a Yale professor who is both an exceptionally creative thinker but also a gifted prose stylist.  Few social scientists manage to be witty and graceful in their writing, but Scott is an exception.  The runner-up might be National Security and Double Government by Michael Glennon, a short and powerful critique of the foreign policy establishment from which I learned a great deal.  To friends and family, I suspect the book I’ve raved about most in recent years is A Pocketful of Dreams: The Early Years 1903-1940 by Gary Giddens, the first volume of his definitive biography of Bing Crosby.  I’m interested in jazz and the popular music of the 20th Century, and that book is both revelatory and beautifully written.  The runner-up here would be the multi-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.

What’s your favourite genre of book?

I would love to mention some sort of highbrow fiction here—like Thomas Pynchon or James Joyce—but honesty compels me to admit that it’s probably mysteries or espionage novels.

What do you think a world without books would be like?

To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and boring.”

Is there an author whose writing you’re such a fan of, that you’ll read everything they release?

There are many.  One of the great joys of being a reader is when you discover a new author who has already published a lot and you know you have hours of pleasure ahead of you.  It was that way with me and Robertson Davies, whom I first read in my late twenties, and before him Wallace Stegner.  I had never read anything by Philip Roth until about twenty years ago, and then a chance encounter with Zuckerman Unbound sent me on a year-long binge.  I’ll read anything by John Le Carre, and I hope Robert Caro hurries up and finishes the final volume of his monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson before too long.  Of course, there are also a few authors I was enamoured with for some time but eventually burned out on, but I’m not going to say who they were.  I am embarrassed to say that I’ve never been able to finish anything by Jane Austen, even though I loved the movies based on her books (except the deeply disappointing remake of Pride and Prejudice starring Keira Knightley) and I freely concede that Austen is brilliant.

Do you think digital books will ever completely replace real books?

Oh lord, I hope not.  I read books on an iPad when I travel, but I vastly prefer the real thing. I don’t think digital will ever replace real books, however, for two reasons.  There is a physical, tactile relationship with a real book that is missing on a screen; clicking and scrolling is just not the same as turning a page.  I feel the same way about newspapers; trying to read the daily news on a screen is awful. Equally important, a book is a nearly fool-proof technology: the battery never runs out and the software doesn’t crash. All you need to do is open the cover and find the place you left off.

What book do you feel humanity needs right now?

I have no idea.  Ideally, something that will drag us away from our screens and into more conversations with each other.  If I knew exactly what book humanity needed, I’d be trying to write it.

What is the book that you feel has had the single biggest impact on your life?

I’d have to say The Bible.  I’m a firm atheist now, but I was fairly religious until sometime in college and a lot of Judeo-Christian ethics undoubtedly seeped into my consciousness in different ways. Of course, the other book that had a huge impact on me personally was my own dissertation—subsequently published as The Origins of Alliances—because it launched my academic career.

Are there any books you haven’t mentioned that you feel would make your reading list?

Don’t get me started.

What books or subject matter do you plan on reading in the next year?

For professional reasons, I need to do some serious reading about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, so that I have a better sense of its implications.  I’m also going to be reading a lot of biographies for a podcast series I’ll be recording for Foreign Policy magazine, but also because I am contemplating writing one.  And I’d like to find a new fiction author who captivates me.

If you were to write an autobiography – what would it be called?

If I wanted to focus on the political controversies in which I’ve been involved, I’d call it Grabbing the Third Rail.  Or perhaps I Should Never Have Agreed to This, a phrase I’ve uttered many, many times and which my wife threatens to have inscribed on my tombstone.

If you’d like to learn more about Stephen Walt, you can find him on his Twitter.

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