Matt Yglesias

Steven Walt Blogs

If Jon Chait thinks I’ve veered into some kind of objectionable “moral equivalent” (incidentally, if he doesn’t like using those buzzwords, which he shouldn’t, then it seems to me he shouldn’t use them), then he’s really not going to like this from Steven Walt’s new blog.

Also: Steven Walt has a new blog as part of the new Foreign Policy website.

I think that’s a gutsy move by Foreign Policy and a great one. There have been about a million posts in the blogosphere lamenting the lack of pundit accountability — the tendency of the media landscape not to shift at all no matter how bad some people’s forecasts turn out to be. This is the reverse of that. The sort of “realist” perspective that Walt comes from (and helps define) is definitely one that looks better in light of the past eight years worth of events. And yet there’s been precious little media interest in giving it more exposure — in part because it leads to conclusions that aren’t necessarily what candidates for office want to hear. But it’s crucially important to expand the conversation on national security issues and this is an important step toward doing so.