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Here’s a direct link to the video of this forum that you can watch at any time on your computer: http://cvp.telvue.com/player?id=T01896&video=272780

Stephen Walt’s blog: http://foreignpolicy.com/author/stephen-m-walt/

Christopher Lydon’s website: http://radioopensource.org

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National security expert Stephen Walt will tackle the question of whether the United States should keep trying to manage the rivalries and conflicts in the Middle East. His talk will be followed by a question-and-answer period moderated by popular journalist and radio commentator Christopher Lydon, the featured speaker at a 2014 forum on the future of global media.

Walt’s answer to the question: An emphatic “no”. He argues that repeated efforts by presidents of both parties to meddle in the Middle East have failed, and it’s time to pull back and reassess, recognizing what we can and cannot realistically achieve.

“The Middle East today is riven by a series of overlapping conflicts along multiple fault lines, driven in good part by protracted government failures and exacerbated by misguided outside meddling,” says Walt. “When things are this bad, the need to rethink the entire U.S. approach to the region is hard to escape.”

Walt, who calls himself a “realist” in foreign policy, has little patience with interventionists on both sides of the aisle, criticizing “liberal hawks” and “neocons” in equal measure.

“The Islamic State wouldn’t exist if the neocons hadn’t led us blindly into Iraq, and Iran would have less reason to contemplate getting nuclear weapons if it hadn’t watched the United States throw its weight around in the region and threaten it directly with regime change,” he says.

But Walt is scathing, too, in his criticism of Democrats who supported the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya only to see the subsequent collapse of that country and the rise of the Islamic State there, and he dismisses U.S. attempts to broker a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians while doubling as Israel’s “strategic ally” as contradictory and bound to fail.

“Instead of acting like a hyperactive juggler dashing between a dozen spinning plates, maybe the best course is to step back even more than we have already,” he says.

But Walt, who situates his thinking within the “realism” tradition of people like George Kennan, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr and Walter Lippmann, insists he is not an isolationist: “Realists believe military power is essential to preserving a state’s independence and autonomy, but they recognize it is a crude instrument that often produces unintended consequences.

“Realists believe nationalism and other local identities are powerful and enduring; states are mostly selfish; altruism is rare; trust is hard to come by; and norms and institutions have a limited impact on what powerful states do. In short, realists have a generally pessimistic view of international affairs and are wary of efforts to remake the world according to some ideological blueprint, no matter how appealing it might be in the abstract.”

Stephen Walt, who returns to the Cape Ann Forum for the second time, is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professsor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He previously taught at Princeton University and the University of Chicago, where he served as Master of the Social Science Collegiate Division and Deputy Dean of Social Sciences. His 2012 Forum on “The Twilight of the American Era” drew more than 100 people and sparked a vigorous discussion.

Walt has been a resident associate of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution, and a fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has consulted for the Institute of Defense Analyses, the Center for Naval Analyses, and the National Defense University. He now serves on the editorial boards of Foreign Policy, Security Studies, International Relations, and the Journal of Cold War Studies, and he is co-editor of the Cornell Studies in Security Affairs.

The outspoken professor wrote The Origins of Alliances (1987), which received the 1988 Edgar S. Furniss National Security Book Award. He is also the author of Revolution and War (1996), Taming American Power: The Global Response to U.S. Primacy (2005), and, with co-author John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby (2007), which generated considerable debate for its critical view of the lobby’s influence in Washington.