America's interventionist zeal

In Walt's view, 'both liberal and neoconservative proponents of liberal hegemony assumed that the US could pursue this ambitious global strategy without triggering serious opposition'

Stephen M Walt, who teaches international relations at Harvard’s Kennedy School and writes a column for Foreign Policy magazine, is no stranger to controversy. In September 2002, at a moment when both liberal hawks and neoconservatives were cheering for the George W Bush administration to topple Saddam Hussein, he helped organise an open letter signed by over two dozen international relations scholars that appeared as an advertisement on the New York Times Op-Ed page, declaring “War With Iraq Is Not in the US National Interest.” Next, in 2006, he and John J Mearsheimer published a lengthy essay in The London