Stephen Martin Walt (born July 2, 1955) is an American political scientist serving as the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of international relations at the Harvard Kennedy School.

[6] In 2012, Walt took part in a panel at the one-state solution conference at the Kennedy School, along with Ali Abunimah and Eve Spangler.

[10] On the twentieth anniversary of the war against Iraq, Walt characterized the rules-based world order as "a set of rules that we [the US] had an enormous role in writing, and of course which we feel free to violate whenever it's inconvenient for us to follow them.

"[11] In the comprehensive 2005 article "Taming American Power", Walt argued that the US should "make its dominant position acceptable to others—by using military force sparingly, by fostering greater cooperation with key allies, and, most important of all, by rebuilding its crumbling international image."

"[12] In a late 2011 article for The National Interest, "The End of the American Era", Walt wrote that the US was losing its position of world dominance.

He also characterized the US as lacking "diplomatic skill and finesse" and advised Europeans "to think of themselves and not rely on the US for guidance or advice on solving their security issues."

The arguments in favor of a more restrained grand strategy are far from silly, and the approach makes a lot more sense than neoconservatives' fantasies of global primacy or liberal hawks' fondness for endless quasi-humanitarian efforts to reform whole regions.

[17] Walt argued that NATO must be sustained because of four major areas in which close co-operation is beneficial to European and American interest.

[18] In 2015, a year after Russia invaded Crimea, Walt wrote that extending invitations for NATO membership to countries in the former Soviet bloc is a "dangerous and unnecessary goal" and that Ukraine ought to be a "neutral buffer state in perpetuity."

[23] Walt has been a critic, along with his co-author John Mearsheimer of the offensive neorealism school of international relations, of the Israel lobby in the United States and the influence he says that it has on its foreign policy.

He wrote that Barack Obama erred by breaking with the principles in his Cairo speech by allowing continued Israeli settlement and by participating in a "well-coordinated assault" against the Goldstone Report.

[5] Walt suggested in 2010 that State Department diplomat Dennis Ross's alleged partiality toward Israel might make him give Obama advice that was against US interests.

"[25] After the Itamar attack, in which a Jewish family was killed on the West Bank in March 2011, Walt condemned the murderers but added that "while we are at it, we should not spare the other parties who have helped create and perpetuate the circumstances."

Ditto the constant fretting about minor-league powers like Syria, North Korea, Muammar al-Qaddafi's Libya, and other so-called 'rogue states.'"

Nonetheless, Libya appears to be more open than contemporary Iran or China and the overall atmosphere seemed far less oppressive than most places I visited in the old Warsaw Pact.

" Bernstein also found it ironic that "Walt, a leading critic of the friendship the US and Israel, concludes his piece with the hope 'that the United States and Libya continue to nurture and build a constructive relationship.'

[34][35] In 2011, Walt argued that China will seek to gain regional hegemony and a broad sphere of influence in Asia, which was comparable in size to the US position in the Western Hemisphere.

"Mr. Snowden's motives," wrote Walt, "were laudable: he believed fellow citizens should know their government was conducting a secret surveillance programme enormous in scope, poorly supervised and possibly unconstitutional.

History, Walt suggested, "will probably be kinder to Mr Snowden than to his pursuers, and his name may one day be linked to the other brave men and women—Daniel Ellsberg, Martin Luther King Jr., Mark Felt, Karen Silkwood and so on—whose acts of principled defiance are now widely admired.

They defined the Israel lobby as "the loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer US foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction".