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“The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy” is a controversial paper written by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. They talk to Steve Inskeep about their view of the influence Israel exerts on Washington. It's a view disputed by many.

Listen to Morning Edition with Steve Inskeep, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt

Stephen Walt is a faculty associate of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

The United States currently wields unprecedented global power. Americans often assume that their global role is benevolent and their dominant position unchallenged, but other states are increasingly worried about U.S. dominance and are beginning to turn their concerns into action.

In this elegant and provocative new book, Kennedy School professor and renowned scholar Stephen M. Walt analyzes the different strategies that states employ to counter U.S. power or to harness it for their own ends. These responses threaten America's ability to achieve its foreign policy goals and may eventually undermine its dominant position. To prevent this, Walt argues, the United States must adopt a foreign policy that other states welcome, rather than one that reinforces their fear of American power.

Americans normally shrug off newspaper headlines overseas, unconcerned by what the rest of the world thinks of us. But the events of recent months have turned a not-so-flattering mirror back upon the US, forcing us to think seriously about what it is the rest of the world is seeing.

The hurricanes that struck America's Gulf coast this autumn were just the beginning of a series of storms—both physical and political—that have done significant damage to the already fragile US image overseas. Seen through the eyes of an international audience, the images of destitute African Americans left to fend for themselves in a wasted New Orleans, of Tom DeLay, Speaker of the House, indicted and of a White House struggling to salvage a Supreme Court nominee and belatedly waking up to the dangers of bird flu, combined to create a powerful impression of insensitivity and ineptitude. Coming on the heels of a war that cast grave doubt on US leadership, these storms and our response threaten America's stature in the world.

The US's ability to shape world events rests on three pillars. The first is our economic and military power. The second is others' belief that we are using that power properly. And the third is confidence in US competence. When other countries recognise our strength, support our aims and believe that we know what we are doing, they are more likely to follow our lead. If they doubt our power, our wisdom or our ability to act effectively, US global influence shrinks. Even before the storms, the Iraq war was corroding all three elements of US power. Our armed forces have been weakened and our economy burdened by the costs of occupation, and the abuses at Abu Ghraib jail are a stain on the US's reputation.

The new Iraqi constitution will not end the insurgency and the bungled occupation has given others ample reason to doubt the US's ability to handle complex political challenges. At home, the aftermath of the storms has made matters worse in every way, as noted by foreign observers. The Russian newspaper Novosti described the US as "a giant on legs of clay, with one foot planted in New Orleans and the other in Baghdad". Germany's Die Zeit asked: "How can America expect to save the world when it cannot even save itself?"

Katrina reinforced foreign perceptions of the US as a wealthy but heartless country where racism is endemic and safety nets are lacking. The China Daily said these events revealed "just how fragile much of America's social fabric is" and Japan's Asahi Shimbun declared that "Katrina showed the world the seriousness and the sorrow of the racial disparities facing the US".

Finally, the inept US response to sequential natural disasters reinforced foreign doubts about America's competence. As Austria's Salzburger Nachrichten put it: "How is it possible that the country is so ill prepared?"

Thus, as Americans turn to the task of reconstruction, we must do so in a way that restores confidence in our values and our abilities. First, to ensure that the US's overall power remains intact, President George W. Bush must ask the American people to accept the full burden of their national ambitions. If we want to repair the damage the storms wrought, prepare for bird flu, maintain a military that is second to none, have world-class schools and exercise energetic global leadership, it is going to cost money—and it is going to require sacrifices from those who have it, rather than those who do not. Anyone who says differently is either lying or deluded.

Rebuilding New Orleans is also an opportunity to demonstrate our commitment to provide for all our citizens. If New Orleans is rebuilt with condominiums for the rich, financed by cutting needed social programmes, or if the reconstruction effort is derailed by corporate greed and congressional pork, the rest of the world will have even more reason to question our values and competence. But if reconstruction is swift and New Orleans becomes a showcase of local opportunity and social justice, we will begin to restore the world's faith in US leadership.

In the past, the US was respected because its public institutions could set ambitious goals and then achieve them: recall the New Deal, the Manhattan Project, the Marshall Plan and the moon landing. This stormy season produced tragedies for many but we now have the opportunity to show what America can do. The world is watching; we had better not blow it.

In this paper, the conceptual and empirical bases for the role of monetary aggregates in monetary policy making are reviewed. It is argued that money can act as a useful information variable in a world in which a number of indicators are imperfectly observed. In this context, the paper discusses the role of a reference value (or benchmark) for money growth in episodes of heightened financial uncertainty. A reference value for money growth can also act as an anchor for expectations and policy decisions to prevent divergent dynamics, such as the spiraling of the economy into a liquidity trap, which can occur under simple interest rate rules for policy conduct. The paper concludes that using information included in monetary aggregates in monetary policy decisions can provide an important safeguard against major policy mistakes in the presence of model uncertainty.

Should the United States invade Iraq and depose Saddam Hussein? Over the past few months, advocates of war have advanced a number of reasons why toppling Saddam is desirable. He is a bloodthirsty tyrant. He has defied the United Nations on numerous occasions. He has backed terrorists in the past. Removing him will reinforce respect for American power and spark democratic reform in the Middle East. If you're looking for a reason to support a war, in short, there are plenty from which to choose.

Most of these reasons are not convincing, however. True, Saddam is a cruel despot, but plenty of other leaders have bloody hands and we aren't thinking about going after them. Yes, Iraq has defied numerous UN resolutions, but so have a number of other countries and this sin is hardly sufficient justification for war. Granted, Iraq has harbored terrorist organizations in the past, but the groups it has supported do not pose much of a threat to the United States and eliminating Saddam would not eliminate them. A successful war might trigger a wave of democratic reforms in the Arab world, but a bitter anti–American backlash is more likely. If these reasons were the only ones that advocates of war could offer, their campaign would never have gotten off the ground.

The terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center and damaged the Pentagon triggered the most rapid and dramatic change in the history of U.S.foreign policy. On September 10, 2001, there was not the slightest hint that the United States was about to embark on an all–out campaign against "global terrorism." Indeed, apart from an explicit disdain for certain multilateral agreements and a fixation on missile defense, the foreign policy priorities of George W. Bush and his administration were not radically different from those of their predecessors. Bush had already endorsed continued NATO expansion, reluctantly agreed to keep U.S. troops in the Balkans, reaffirmed the existing policy of wary engagement with Russia and China, and called for further efforts to liberalize global markets. The administration's early attention focused primarily on domestic issues, and newinternational initiatives were notably absent.

This business–as–usual approach to foreign policy vanished on September 11. Instead of education reform and tax cuts, the war on terrorism dominated the administration's agenda. The United States quickly traced the attacks to al–Qaeda — the network of Islamic extremists led by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden — whose leaders had been operating from Afghanistan since 1996. When the Taliban government in Afghanistan rejected a U.S. ultimatum to turn over bin Laden, the United States began military efforts to eradicate al–Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban itself. The United States also began a sustained diplomatic campaign to enlist foreign help in rooting out any remaining terrorist organizations "with global reach." U.S.officials emphasized that this campaign would be prolonged and warned that military action against suspected terrorist networks might continue after the initial assault on al–Qaeda and its Taliban hosts.

This article analyzes how the campaign against global terrorism alters the broad agenda of U.S.foreign policy. I focus primarily on the diplomatic aspects of this campaign and do not address military strategy, homeland defense, or the need for improved intelligence in much detail. These issues are obviously important but lie outside the bounds this essay.

I proceed in three stages. The first section considers what the events of September 11 tell us about the U.S. position in the world and identifies four lessons that should inform U.S. policy in the future. The second section explores how the campaign on terrorism should alter the foreign policy agenda in the near–to–medium term: What new policies should the United States pursue, and what prior goals should be downgraded or abandoned? The third section addresses the long–term implications, focusing on whether the United States will be willing to accept the increased costs of its current policy of global engagement. I argue that this decision will depend in part on the success of the current campaign, but also on whether the United States can make its dominant global position more palatable to other countries.

On March 23, 1983, President Ronald Reagan shocked the national security establishment by calling upon the nation's scientific community, "who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents to the cause of mankind and world peace: to give us the means of rendering these weapons impotent and obsolete." Seventeen years have passed since that speech, and the United States has spent more than $60 billion trying to develop a defense against ballistic missiles. The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, or "Star Wars") and its successors have cost more than twice as much as the Manhattan Project (in constant dollars), but these programs have yet to produce a single workable weapon. This "achievement" is probably a record in the annals of defense procurement: never has so much been spent for so long with so little to show for it. Explaining how this happened—and why—is the main aim of Frances Fitzgerald's Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars, and the End of the Cold War. The "Star Wars" saga, according to Fitzgerald, is the story of how the United States came to chase a chimera. For Fitzgerald, "Star Wars" illustrates "the extent to which our national discourse about foreign and defense policy is not about reality—or the best intelligence estimates about it—but instead a matter of domestic politics, history, and mythology."

As with any president, it is easy to think up ways that Clinton's record might be improved. But on the whole, he does not deserve the chorus of criticism he has received. Clinton's critics fail to appreciate how changes in the international position of the United States have complicated the making of its foreign policy. The next president will fact similar pressures.

The past decade has witnessed a growing controversy over the status of formal approaches in political science, and especially the growing prominence of formal rational choice theory. Rational choice models have been an accepted part of the academic study of politics since the 1950s, but their popularity has grown significantly in recent years. Elite academic departments are now expected to include game theorists and other formal modelers in order to be regarded as "up to date," graduate students increasingly view the use of formal rational choice models as a prerequisite for professional advancement, and research employing rational choice methods is becoming more widespread throughout the discipline. Is the increased prominence of formal rational choice theory necessary, inevitable, and desirable?