Over the past few weeks, no one who pays any attention to the contemporary dialogues in political science could have escaped hearing about the controversy surrounding a paper published in the London Review of Books on March 23rd by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt analyzing the impact of the Israeli lobby on American politics. The paper has sparked a firestorm of responses from all over the globe.
I have been an admirer of Prof. Mearsheimer since my days in undergraduate political science back at Haverford College. Though Prof. Walt is at the Kennedy School, where I was a student from 1997-1999, I never met him nor studied under him while I was there.
I'll resist the temptation to weigh in on the thesis of the article (suffice to say that I found the topic very worthy of analysis, and that I found the paper well considered) and focus instead on the debate that has played out since its publication. It is an excellent case to analyze how a difficult conversation (to use the Patton/Heen/Stone phrase) can play out in the world of letters.
National Public Radio did an excellent job outlining what has happened so far. In reporting the story, Deborah Amis observed that "The paper has set off a bitter and growing controversy, with name-calling and worse. Mearsheimer and Walt said they expected criticism, but are surprised the attacks have become so personal. Both men now say they do not want to comment on the air on their research but will debate it in print."
Originally there were some discussions about the authors debating one of the most prominent responders, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, in a face to face debate. There was even some discussion about having the Kennedy School host the event. However, as the conversation has escalated, those plans have been put on hold. It's very interesting that the authors have now said they will only respond in print (a telling observation on the differences between synchronous and asynchronous communication).
Ms. Amis describes the debate as "overheated," noting that Mearsheimer and Walt's reputation as "...prominent foreign-policy analysts and theorists, and {...} A-list scholars" have provided continued fuel for the controversy.
Ms. Amis continues: "...the debate sparked by the Mearsheimer and Walt paper may not be the type of rational airing of ideas that {some} have called for, says Gideon Rose, managing editor of Foreign Affairs. 'Unfortunately, Mearsheimer and Walt stated their case so strongly and over-broadly that it has produced the foreign-policy equivalent of a cable TV shout fest,' Rose says. 'They charge dual loyalty, while others charge anti-Semitism -- and nobody gets educated on the actual issues involved.'"
The editors of the London Review provided their own perspective to accompany the second wave of letters published in response to the piece:
"Besides those published here and in the last issue, we have received a great many letters in response to John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s piece – not all of them edifying, though we haven’t received any death threats, as one correspondent from New Jersey feared we would. There have been a number of accusations of anti-semitism, as Mearsheimer and Walt predicted, and some very unpleasant remarks about Arabs, but also dozens of messages praising the article. Most readers understood that Mearsheimer and Walt were writing about US foreign policy and its effects on the Middle East, though there have also been a few congratulatory messages of an anti-semitic nature...
We don’t usually publish letters of simple praise, which meant that only letters putting the case against Mearsheimer and Walt appeared in the last number of the LRB. This led one correspondent to write: ‘Your obvious slant in the letters you have chosen to publish regarding the Israel Lobby establishes, once again, that Israeli apologists are alive and well and living at the London Review of Books.’"
The editors conclude: "It may be impossible to write or publish anything relating to Israel without provoking accusations of bias."
Perhaps there are topics so controversial that a rational, measured discussion, divorced from emotion, is impossible. In such circumstances, the strategy of withdrawing and waiting for the fire to die down might be the best one to adopt. It will be interesting to see how (and when) Mearshimer and Walt eventually respond to the criticisms that have been leveled against them.