In this 24 August 2026 published video, host Tucker Carlson talks with Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations at Harvard University. He is the author of The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, which examines the failures of the American foreign-policy establishment. Walt is a longtime critic of U.S. interventionism and advocates for a more restrained foreign policy focused on America’s national interests.
Walt recently warned that the world is approaching a dangerous new phase of global conflict characterized by a system-wide shift toward raw power politics and the erosion of international legal frameworks. Speaking on the Tucker Carlson Show, the prominent international relations scholar outlined how current U.S. foreign policy risks accelerating global instability.
His warnings align with broader concerns raised by experts regarding Donald Trump’s approach to the ongoing war with Iran and international alliances. International relations experts point to several factors making this era the most volatile in decades. Scholars emphasize that recent military actions, such as the U.S. and Israeli strikes on Iranian facilities, bypass traditional domestic and international legal sanctions. Rather than acting as a guarantor of the global order established after 1945, the U.S. is increasingly seen as disrupting the very rules-based system it built. Historians warn that because multiple geopolitical flashpoints are active simultaneously, a single miscalculation, naval incident, or cyberattack could trigger an unmanageable chain reaction among global powers.
