A Valentine From Steven Walt
Steven Walt offers us an international relations perspective on relationships:
To begin with, any romantic partnership is essentially an alliance, and alliances are a core concept on international relations. Alliances bring many benefits to the members (or else why would we form them?) but as we also know, they sometimes reflect irrational passions and inevitably limit each member’s autonomy. Many IR theorists believe that institutionalizing an alliance makes it more effective and enduring, but that’s also why making a relationship more formal is a significant step that needs to be carefully considered.
Of course, IR theorists have also warned that allies face the twin dangers of abandonment and entrapment: the more we fear that our partners might leave us in the lurch (abandonment), the more likely we are to let them drag us into obligations that we didn’t originally foresee (entrapment). When you find yourself gamely attending your partner’s high school reunion or traveling to your in-laws for Thanksgiving dinner every single year, you’ll know what I mean.
I bet Man, the State, and War could sell more copies if they wound a way to reposition it as a dating advice book.
23 Responses to “A Valentine From Steven Walt”
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February 14th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
there’s gotta be a “heart on a sleeve” gag in there somewhere…
February 14th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
We’re fortunate indeed to have brave Walt’s clear-eyed insights into the danger posed by the Cupid Lobby, perfidious elements of your own psyche that should be loyal to you but instead treacherously and yet somehow in full public view force you into relationships that aren’t good for you.
February 14th, 2009 at 5:44 pm
Sounds like a good ploy for the next Alain de Botton or Malcolm Gladwell type.
February 14th, 2009 at 6:04 pm
Man, the Date, and War: A theoretical analysis. 2nd edition: now with baseball analogies!
February 14th, 2009 at 7:21 pm
Mr. Yglesias is really scraping the bottom of the barrel in quoting anything by antisemitic goatfucking pissant Steven Walt. Next he’ll be quoting Don Black and David Duke. Foreign Policy Magazine should be ashamed of itself hosting this assholes’ blog.
February 14th, 2009 at 7:58 pm
I’d like to take this moment to ask, why MY doesn’t credit his graphics? I remember him doing it all the time on The Atlantic’s site. I’m interested in some of the photos and I’d like to see other photos by the same person (especially the transit photos).
As for the main topic, wasn’t this how many people saw marriage up until recently? Actually, even today there’s a lot of strategy in some marriages, just look at John McCain.
February 14th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
MY does realize that Kenneth Waltz and Steven Walt are not the same person, right?
February 14th, 2009 at 8:33 pm
So Kenneth Waltz’ books would sell better if recast in the style of Steven Walt?
February 14th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Actually, Henry Kissinger’s mid-1960s “The Troubled Partnership” was accidentally shelved in the relationship section in some bookstores.
There were an abnormally large number of returns.
(Actually, the first-, second-, and third-image levels of analysis could map quite cleanly onto the dating scene. More interesting would be to apply Waltzian structural realism to romantic relationships; bipolar systems, I assume, would still be the most stable, but what would a multipolar system look like?)
February 15th, 2009 at 11:21 am
I do wonder, given Israel’s hard right turn, if there is are “obligations that we didn’t originally foresee” that the U.S. would not be on board for. What would force the U.S.-Israeli divorce? Expulsions of Israeli Arabs? Full implimentation of Avigdor Liberman’s wish list? Death camps for Palestinians? Anything?
Anti-semitism has been redefined to include mentioning any notion that there is an Israeli lobby motivating U.S. foreign policy rather than than the simple recognition that Israel is all good, all right and it is our privilege to support them in all that they do (for a fine example, see, SLC’s comment, above). This evidences heavy U.S. investment in the Israeli marriage. I would, however think that there would be a theoretical stop point, one atrocity too far. What would it be?
February 15th, 2009 at 12:53 pm
“Death camps for Palestinians?”
My goodness, Godwin’s Law in action. Here we begin with a perfectly innocuous and amusing post and in only 10 comments the Nazis are invoked, thus demonstrating once again that:
“As a Usenet [or any other online] discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin’s_Law
February 15th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
I’m sure we all appreciate the referesher on Godwin’s Law, Bloix, but Nazis did not invent the death camp nor does any discussion of death camps, genocide, organized genocide, racism, colonization, expansionism, aggressive warfare, or Volkswagens implicate Nazis. But thanks for playing.
February 15th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
“Anti-semitism has been redefined to include mentioning any notion that there is an Israeli lobby motivating U.S. foreign policy…”
Shochu, you show your good sense and balance in naturally using the phrase “Israeli lobby.” The phrase that Walt popularized that raises hackles, because it is a name, which implies a (corporate) entity being named and is for that reason vaguely conspiratorial in connotation, is “Israel Lobby.” To switch contexts a bit, you said something akin to “oil companies’ lobby” as opposed to “Big Oil” or “tobacco companies’ lobby” as opposed to “Tobacco Lobby.” The connotations are quite different. Whether Walt is genuinely unaware of semantic issues like this and why they might be problematic, or is simply being disingenuous, I really don’t know. You might think the fact that he’s a professor at Harvard provided some evidence one way or the other, but it really doesn’t.
February 16th, 2009 at 1:21 am
And the corollary to Godwin’s Law is that once the Nazis are mentioned the thread is dead and the person who brought them up loses. This, you might say, is a dead thread.
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