Both Stephen Walt and David Rothkopf are picking up on a rather inelegant Foreign Policy article launching the term ‘minilateralism.’
Minilateralism is launched as a concept opposed to multilateralism. Multilateralism, to the author, seems to mean consensus-style diplomacy between the world’s 200+ states. I would rather call it ‘UN lowest common denominator-diplomacy,’ and keep multilateralism as [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Walt’
25 Jun
Minilateralism = realism? = word games?
3 Apr
Taming American Power
I read Stephen Walt’s Taming American Power on the plane forth and back from Norway this spring. The book describes different reactions to how American uses its power (which is also eminently described), arguing that preserving and/or reinforcing US hegemony is the aim.
According to Walt, countries follow a range of strategies to either endorse or [...]
11 Feb
Do realists have monopoly on dealing with problems?
I have followed Stephen M. Walt’s blog for a while now, and I still can’t get what he means by his subtitle ‘I’m a realist in an ideological age.’
Obviously it refers to Walt being a realist, believing more in the force of material factors than ideas/ideologies. But I think his balance-of-threat theory includes too many [...]
1 Feb
The Israel lobby
Just finished skimming through The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy by the (famous realists) Mearsheimer and Walt. They ask why U.S. support of Israel is so unconditional and enormeous compared to U.S. support to other democratic states, and find that this support cannot be justified on neither moral nor security grounds alone, but must [...]
