Hidden Forces

In Episode 93 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Harvard University's Professor of International Affairs Stephen Walt, about the arch of American foreign policy and the decline of U.S. primacy.  The conversation begins by addressing the major arguments made by America’s foreign policy elite in favor of US engagement and American military leadership abroad. Before the end of World War II, there was no foreign policy “community” in the United States, as there was in the United Kingdom or France. The US was still largely an isolationist country, and the expectation was that it would return to isolation after the allies signed the Paris Peace Treaties in 1947, just as it had after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Though demobilization started in earnest shortly after the conclusion of the war, the process was arrested soon after it began as the allies came to realize that the Soviet Union presented an altogether new type of threat to Western countries. In 1946, George Kennan, the American charge d’a