YouSaid · the spoken record

Walter Russell Mead

lines on the record: 62
first: 2022-10-05
most recent: 2022-10-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I would like to see more of Sub-Saharan Africa. I haven't been to Lucifone Africa and Gola and Mozambique. Don't really know Francophone Africa. So I think those would be high on my list.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which can be a secular ideology perhaps in some cases, but more often is likely to be a great religious tradition of some kind. Does not, I mean, I'm a Christian. I could wish that everyone was, but my friend Shidi Hamid is a Muslim, and I think his Muslim faith actually helps him navigate and understand the world. And I certainly have lots of Jewish friends in the same circumstance. Again, we're ending up where we started maybe, but a religious faith connected to one of the great historical traditions gives you a sort of a degree of insight and potential for self-criticism that are absolutely crucial to foreign affairs.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, first of all, I'm hoping for somebody who's a lot better than me. I'm looking for someone who, what is it, whose sandals I am unworthy to buckle. And I would say that I look for, first of all, curiosity, intense curiosity. I look for an understanding that the personal and the political are mixed, that character matters, that you can learn about the world by coming to understand your own psychological flaws and distress and vice versa, that history matters a lot and that you can't know too much history. Now you have to digest it, but you can't know too much history. A hunger for travel, I think too many foreign policy types don't actually get out into the field nearly as much as they should. And curiosity about other cultures, I think a strong grounding in a faith of your own.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“aggressive self confidence of the WASP establishment meeting the Vietnam War and coming to grips, beginning to come to grips with what was going wrong. And so those two visions of the sort of the inner workings of the American foreign policy elite and then the ringside seat at the crisis of the old American foreign policy elite have been profoundly important in my thinking about the world.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Reading a lot about war profiteers in World War I, you need to know that your grandfather, etc., etc. Unfortunately, none of my grandparents had participated in such things, so there was no need to explain to me the family fortune as there wasn't one. But you got a sense of the American system from the inside and a much less ideologically blinkered one than I think that many people have in public education. And that is meant for one thing that I've been less rattled by, you know, sort of America's got racism. Yes. Okay. Now let's talk about what do we need to do. More than that, though, I was at Groton 65 to 70. Those were the years of the Vietnam War. The National Security Advisor at the time, McGeorge Bundy, was the chair of the Grotten Board of Trustees. And so I had a sort of close-up look at the”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I learned a lot there. On the one hand, Groton is a place that prides itself on its tradition of producing foreign policy leaders. Dean Achison, the Alsop brothers, Avel Harriman, Franklin Roosevelt, that wonderful book The Wiseman by David Halberstamp, actually my history teacher is in there. There's like a whole scene that could be from our fourth form, 10th grade history class. You got the sense of being part of a tradition. And since you got the kind of inside view, the way we were taught American history was in no way idealized. We just say that like reading something like the 1619 project didn't come to me as a shock. Oh my gosh, there was slavery. There was injustice in America. In fact, one of the teachers at Grotten used to take aside some of the boys. It was all boys school at the time and explain to them how their family fortune was made. So you might say, well, George, we...”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has had the experience of both being defeated and being wrong. And that's something that a lot of American political culture doesn't have. You sort of wasp Yankee patricians. I think neoconservatism reflected a sense of people who've never been wrong and never been beaten, at least in their own minds. And so there's a hubris that comes with that. Historically, one of the roles of Southern politics, think of William Fulbright during the Vietnam War, both for good and bad reasons, doubt that this American ideological project can be transferred, partly because they know America is bad at Reconstruction. The failure of Reconstruction, both in terms of the White South and the Black South after the Civil War, is a lesson that you get growing up in the South. And so you have an inherent sense of the limits of a”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the fact that I could love him while really disliking his politics helped me understand. I mean, I think it helps understand some of the divisions in America even today and gives you a more human rather than a strictly ideological.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's affected my views of America and that the intern affects my views. You know, growing up in the segregated South during the Civil Rights era, where on the one hand my father actually knew Martin Luther King and marched with him and was involved in a lot of things. But then I had relatives, older relatives, who were very much on the other side. And that gave me a certain sense of I could love my grandfather, you know, even though he voted for George Wallace. My grandmother.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The fact that the folks out there don't believe in us or trust us very much. Again, the message from the think tank world was free trade will make China democratic and Americans rich. That was the message. Americans look at that and they think, really? And they also think, okay, so why should we listen to you now? And what you don't hear from people in think tanks much is, okay, this is why we, the educated elite, were so wrong about so many things for so long. We've done a lot of soul searching, we've really hashed into it. We've actually gotten rid of a lot of people who haven't changed their thinking. So here's why we are now credible in a way we didn't used to be. I think this is fundamentally it. The American educated elite has gotten so much wrong for so long that public trust”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but Rand has always been a little bit different. You know, one thing is that the government has grown. It has its own in-house think tanks. And this really starts with the policy planning in the State Department. After World War II, once you set that thing up, which basically where the Marshall Plan comes from, you don't need the Council on Foreign Relations when you have your own little in-house thing. And so the institutionalization of these internal think tanks, I think, has a lot to do with it. What is the CIA, if not a very large think tank, at least not the analyst side of it? And naturally, these folks have access to classified information, so in that we humble think tankers don't. So there's that. But the role of think tanks was less, I think, in terms of influencing government than of influencing public opinion. And here it's just the generic decline in the ability of the sort of educated American professional elite.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, no. This thing is a lot harder than you think. It may not work. What they're hearing is the Americans whose intelligence is really, really good and who, if they know us better than we think, they certainly know the Ukrainians better than we do. And they think we're going to win fast. All right, that is a miserable, miserable combination of policies. But the thing is, there was no political mind in the administration that thought in terms of what's the overall impact of what we do. All right. That's, I think, what comes of people who've spent their lives in universities rather than spent their lives in the real world.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How that had really helped build the NATO coalition against Russian aggression and so on. And insofar as it goes, it's true. But I said, however, if you really look at the total message the US was projecting to Russia in those critical months, there were two messages. One is we've got great intelligence on you. We actually understand you much better than you think, all right? And it was shocking. I think it shocked the Russians. But on the other hand, we're saying, and we think you're going to win quickly in Ukraine. We're offering Zelensky a plane ride out of Kyiv. We're pulling out all our diplomats and urging other countries to pull out their diplomats. So the message, actually the totality of the message that we sent to Putin is, you're going to win if you do this. And it would certainly undercut, not that there may have been any, but any voices inside Russia telling Putin.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And internally focused and less pragmatic. I think that some of the problem, though, is not so much that in the intellectual weaknesses of conventional postgrad education, but simply almost the crime against humanity of having whole generations of smart people spend the first 30, 35 years of their lives in a total bubble where they're in this academic setting and they become socialized into the academy just as much as prisoners get socialized into the routines of a prison. And the American Academy is actually a terrible place for coming to understand how world politics works. I ever seen I had a conversation with American official who was very proud of the way that the US had sort of broken the mold by revealing intelligence about Russia's plans to invade Ukraine and point out”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't really believe in disciplines. I see connections between things. So I start from reality. I'm not trying to be anti-intellectual here. You need ideas to help you organize your perceptions of reality. But I think there's a tendency in a lot of social science disciplines. You know, you start from a bunch of really smart engaged people who have been thinking about a set of questions and say, we'll do a lot better if we stop randomly thinking about everything that pops up and try in some systematic way to organize our thinking of this. And I think you do get some gains from that. But you see, over time, the focus of the discipline has this tendency to shift. The discipline tends to become more inward naval gazing. What's the history of our efforts to systematize our thinking about this so that the discipline becomes more and more, in a sense, ideological?”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would start by trying to draw people's attention to over the last 40 years, there's been an enormous increase in the number of PhD grads engaged in the formation of American foreign policy. There's also been an extraordinary decline in the effectiveness of American foreign policy. I see we really ought to take that to heart.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I never thought of myself as a neoconservative. And I would say at the sort of height of neoconservatives, I would tell people I'm not a neoconservative. But because fundamentally I'm actually, I've always been much less enchanted by the idea that promotion of democracy is a solution to America's great power problems that has never appealed to me. There are places where you can do it great, but Eastern Europe after the Cold War, a lot of good things happen. But I never sort of believed in the end of history thesis. So in that sense, I was never enchanted, so I was never disenchanted.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problems go away, it'll make, I think, things like tribalism potentially get worse. But giving people more opportunity to improve the quality of their lives through their own efforts so far as our foreign policy can do it, I think is a very positive thing. We do also, I think, need to look a little bit more seriously at the potential of jihadi groups to destabilize large sections of the continent.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think there's a simple fix out there that just, oh, okay, turn this switch from on to off, and goodness and joy will flow. You know, I'm glad that we are engaging, but I think we probably need to defetishize democracy promotion. Not that democracy isn't a good thing, but I read about a recent election in the DRC, the Congo, that helicopters were flying ballots to remote villages. When I think of all the people that die in the DRC due to medical problems that simple medical treatment could fix, this seems to me frankly an insane misuse of resources, a murderous fetishization of ideology over reality. And so I think the key to Africa, to sub-Saharan African development, is economic success. Not that this will make all profits.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we would suddenly have a lot of conversation about what the successor institution to the UN look like. You know, if the UN didn't exist, we would actually need to invent it. Not so much because the UN gets a lot of things done as the central political general assembly and stuff, but there are all kinds of sort of problems that no one else really wants to deal with, but still want to have them dealt with, that it's very convenient to have the UN to work on them.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many ways so many ways. I think Serbia Kosovo always remains a flashpoint. I think if the war in Ukraine continues to drag on for Putin diverting NATO's attention and resources to the southern flank, to the Western Balkans makes a lot of sense. So it would probably consist of Russia perhaps with a little quiet Chinese support stirring the pot in ways that lead to a new outbreak.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pointed at the head of German business. So where do they go? It's not clear where they go. I don't think it's clear to them where they go. And that means that a fundamental element of the American alliance system is in a completely new place. So I think what we have to be doing in terms of analyzing where German foreign policy goes is to think a little bit less about ideology or, you know, sort of things like, oh, the German anti-war sentiment or these kinds of things. Yeah, these are all there. The Russian soul, all of that. It's there. But really, how is Germany going to make a living? That's the question. I said I wasn't going to hit the table. I hit the table. That's the question that has to be answered, and that will drive Germany's orientation in foreign policy.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Affluence and employment for the mass of the German people is kind of a key test of the legitimacy of the German state. And really ever since we failed to break up the large German corporations after World War II, that kind of German establishment has been the motor of the astonishing success of post-war Germany. Now, suddenly that engine is running out of fuel on the one hand, and its key customer China, regardless of anything about human rights or geopolitics, the goal of Chinese economic development strategy is to end its dependency on capital goods imported from countries like Germany by becoming an exporter of high-tech capital goods. And so China's development plan, much more than its Taiwan policy or its human rights, is a gun.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, in the sense it's been for some time I remember that Kennan's goal for Germany was to have a united neutral disarmed Germany at the heart of Europe in some ways Kennan's goal looks maybe closer than ever, but look, I think Germany is a country whose basic economic model is now under question. The German model and it's very important in understanding that country is based on the availability of cheap energy from Russia and large markets in China. And again, let's remember that the sort of German establishment is more terrified of ordinary German public opinion than even like the American liberal establishment is terrified of the Trumpists and you don't have to look all that deeply into history to see why that would be the case. And so providing stability”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I didn't do a dissertation all I have is a BA in English literature, and we didn't even have to write a senior paper. In fact, I was so lazy that one of the reasons I majored in English rather than history was the history required a senior paper, and English let you off with a senior seminar. So can't answer that one, Tyler.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically emerging as the lead partner of a strategically located set of The US to some degree, and from the rest of the region, we're seeing very incremental opportunistic moves. And so I think we can say that the future of Chinese policy toward Taiwan will reflect that same kind of thinking, which would suggest nibbling and nibbling before you finally take the big bite.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That will entirely depend on the Chinese assessment of their own capacities and of the international political situation. What we've seen so far is that China prefers what people have called the cabbage leaf strategy. The idea is that a cabbage starts very small and it keeps growing one leaf after another getting incrementally larger but none of its expansionist moves quite trigger an overwhelming response. And so if we think about how China has gone from, oh, we're just going to build a few peaceful islands in the South China Sea. Don't worry, there's nothing there to militarizing those bases, to then using those to further extend Chinese power, we now see in the Solomon Islands where they've recently refused to receive new naval visits from the US and Australia. China is now”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it would immediately lead to its annexation by China, which is something that I think very few people in northeastern India want. So I think there are very good reasons why the Indian Northeast is not a total hotbed of separatist sentiment. And I think that's likely to continue. It remains a really complicated part of the country, very sensitive set of issues there. But I think the Indian interest in preventing China from moving in there, in supporting its own national sovereignty, plus the very sound argument you can make to a lot of people in the Northeast. You may not be happy with New Delhi. Do you think Beijing is going to pay better attention to you? That's likely to keep Northeast India in the fold, but I don't know. It's the future.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can't tell you it's a constellation of factors, but we should not forget that the strongest single institution in Pakistan is its nuclear-armed military. And this military has a strong institutional sense of coherence and a strong loyalty to the Pakistani state. So we can't keep that out of the mix when we try to think about what's going to happen in Pakistan.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Among some elements of Pakistani society around Islam, again, sort of trying to double down on this point of unity. Now, what we are seeing is none of this has prevented a massive failure of governance in Pakistan. It's not all their fault. This is the Afghan war brought a lot of trouble, a lot of refugees to them, but Pakistan has been badly governed for a very long time. And now the schools don't work, the flood control doesn't work, the economy is in terrible shape. For a long time their relationship with the United States was sort of keeping them afloat. They had turned to China hoping that China would keep them afloat. China doesn't seem that interested in propping up expensive money-losing regimes. So now they're in real trouble. Where this goes, I...”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Groups of people are less content to live in large multicultural, multi-ethnic units and want to be ruled by people who they feel understand them. Now Pakistan is an interesting case where they've tried to hold the very disparate elements of Pakistani culture. I mean, Pakistan had never been a geographical unit before partition. And the tribal differences are enormous. Again, it's a little racist to say tribal differences. If these people were in Europe, we would call the Punjabis a nation, so not an ethnic group or something. So these national differences were deep. And in Pakistan, they tried to overcome them by emphasizing Islam as the unifying factor of Pakistani national identity and as the strains in Pakistan have grown greater.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would put that Tyler in the context much larger question, which is one of the things that my research for the arc of a covenant kind of put in my head was that from 1850 to 1950 you see these large multinational states crumbling away into individual ethnic almost monocultures and at the cost of enormous wars, fanaticism, all kinds of things, but this resorting of Europe and of the Ottoman area, the Ottoman Empire into smaller, more coherent units, it's still continuing. The war in Syria today, the war in Libya today, and it's moving past its old heartline, the wars in Ethiopia and Sudan today, the conflicts in Nigeria today are all reflecting the reality that as societies develop.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, Yogi Berra says that, what is it, prediction is always dangerous, especially when it involves the future. I think the UAE so far has shown itself to be a very resilient state. In some ways, being a small, insecure country is very good for your political intelligence, because when you feel you have an immense margin of error, then you don't really care that much. But when you feel that your survival is on a knife edge, you think hard about what you're doing and you really ruthlessly weed out incompetent people from your national security structure. And I think the UAE is worried when it looks at the world, and that gives them an edge.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do we do? And then when you add that political sensitivity to a large flow of oil income so that you actually have the resources that you need to sort of respond to people's grievances, it's not that surprising that they've lasted this long.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing. The American political studies sort of belief since World War II has essentially been democracy is the only state. Everywhere democracy is inexorably rising, and every other form of government is incredibly unstable. This bears very, very little relationship to the facts outside of sort of Western Europe. Let's say the world of NATO plus Japan and Australia. So, yeah, look, I think it's a combination of two things. One is that the monarchical tradition in Saudi Arabia and in some other Arab countries has been one of the king acting as a power broker among different tribes and clans, maintaining a balance of power, more like a feudal leader in medieval Europe than a sort of modern dictator or something like that. And so they're very good at understanding, oops, the people in the Northeast are unhappy, or oops, this tribe is unhappy, and they figure out, you know, okay, how do we rebalance?”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some years is higher than their production, but also the Biden administration's attempt to sort of be a leader in climate change action, which is aimed specifically at driving fossil fuels out of the market. If American policy is to make Saudi Arabia's one valuable source of income worthless as quickly as possible, what are the reasons for them to help bail us out? I actually think we need Saudi Arabia. We need a balance of power in the Middle East, and they're an essential part of that balance. I think the relationship can be reconfigured, but we've got some work to do on our end.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, what they would say is, you know, Iran is our biggest threat. What are you actually doing? And their view, we're not doing enough. Now, we might say your view is crazy, but it's still their view. So that's part of it. But also, you know, Biden comes into office saying, I'm going to make MBS by name a pariah. I'm going to end our relationship with this relationship with Saudi Arabia. It's a disaster. It needs to fundamentally change. And then a few months later, you know, he looks at the price of gas, and this is the key to his re-election. He comes to the side and says, help me stay in office. Return to our eternal friendship. They don't trust him at all, nor should they, really. But also, we should look at the way that two developments have changed the relationship. One is fracking, where the US is now a price competitor with the Saudis in a way it didn't used to be, where our production actually”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And new things, and if you're a Mormon, that means a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints. It means the LDS is on the right track. And if you're an evangelical, American evangelical is going back 200 years have been arguing that the Bible prophesies a return of the Jews to Palestine at the climax of history and in a time that feels a lot like the climax of history, nuclear bombs, etc., the Jews return, whoa, whoa, whoa. this Bible written 2500 years ago must know something must be only a supernatural intelligence could have revealed 2500 years ago what's happening today so in both cases the rise of Israel is seen as underwriting the truth of their core religious faith”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, we're talking about millions of people in both cases, and nobody's a homogenous bloc. But in general, I think American Mormons have consistently seen the rise of the state of Israel, in many ways as confirming some key Mormon tenets. And in the same way, many evangelicals in the U.S. have seen the rise of Israel as confirming some of their theological ideas. So in both cases, what you have is people supporting the state not necessarily out of traditional foreign policy reasons, but because they think it's a sign of God working in the world. And this both reassures them in our very dangerous and terrifying world, that there is somebody, a benign, omnipotent deity is in charge of our destinies. But also it just, it says, well, you know, we believe that in these latter days, God is doing great things.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good question. Yes and no. It's a technology used in some cases. I think it's being misused, as is much technology. I think a better thing to say would be, is the promotion of technology like Pegasus fundamentally that different from what everybody else is doing? I would say the answer there is no. The United States sells a lot of weapons around the world. Russia sells a lot of weapons around the world. India sells a lot of weapons. Do we always control the way these things are used effectively? No. So I would say it's pretty much in the ballpark with the rest of us”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“U.S.-British relations that Stalin was rubbing his hands in glee. At the same time, the fact that the British were basically unable to prevent the rise of a Jewish state in Palestine radicalized Arab public opinion throughout the Middle East and resulted ultimately in Egypt in the fall of the pro-British monarchy and everywhere undermined the British imperial position. So Stalin, you know, hoped to gain quite a bit from it, and he did.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Soviet Union, we needed to work with the Soviet Union in the UN to make peace possible. And that was the big controversy in America. Stalin saw that by pushing the question of the emergence of a Jewish state in the Middle East, he could drive a wedge between the US and Britain and basically destroy British power in the Middle East. Because on the one hand, in America, support for Zionism was pretty strong. Among Jews and non-Jews at that time, there was real support for it. So when Britain is seen as banning Jewish desperate survivors of Nazi concentration camps, pleading to go to Palestine, and the British are literally turning them away and keeping them essentially in concentration camps, this was so damaging to”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They also saw that in the US political opinion was sharply divided between people who were worried about the Soviet Union and thought we needed an alliance with Britain and France in order to counter the Soviet Union. And people who thought that actually an alliance with Britain and France would commit us to colonialism, imperialism, and basically wreck our future in the developing world open doors to communism, but also thought that we could win Stalin over, we could gain Stalin's trust, and thought that the United Nations should replace great power politics we did World War I, then World War II, which ended with nuclear weapons, World War III would be a disaster. The UN is the only possible place to fight it, to prevent it. So instead of engaging in imperial schemes with Great Britain against the Soviet Union,”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There were a lot of reasons Stalin was a clever guy, and one of the things I say in the book, Ark of a Covenant, is that actually Stalin had a lot more to do with the independence of Israel than Harry Truman or the United States, Soviet policy was significantly more influential. And this came out of Stalin's vision of Russian Soviet interests at the start of the Cold War. First place, the U.S. at that time was not actually a major Middle Eastern power. We were a global superpower, but in the Middle East, Britain was far more important than the United States. We had a good relationship with Saudi Arabia, but the other Gulf states, Iran, Egypt, Iraq, and others were essentially almost British colonies at that time.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“of cost competition from new immigrants. So you had this sort of long controversial immigration culminating in really draconian restrictions in 23 and 24, 1923, 1924. And then once you hit the depression as European persecution of the Jews gets worse, and the Depression with unemployment in the United States of 25%, it's really, really hard to get any political consent for migration generally. But meanwhile, you might say, well, okay, fine, but what about Jews in a special category because of their persecution? What you'd then have is people say, well, wait a minute, my relatives are in Greece, and things are terrible in Greece and they're starving in Greece. Are the Jews going to jump the line? That was the expression a lot of people used. And so there was zero support for more immigration and even less than zero support.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“to Hamburg and to the United States in eighteen eighty in a way they just couldn't in eighteen twenty, and this mass immigration which changed the demographics of the US came at just the time US society was experiencing a major sort of economic shift. The Industrial Revolution and the decline of the family farm were sort of leading a lot of people to think that the era of American affluence was over, that American institutions couldn't cope with these new things. And so you have the combination of the sort of the cultural pressure, the economic pressure of immigrants, labor unions originally were very much in favor of immigration because many of the members of the labor unions were from these countries and wanted their friends and relatives to come over. But by 1920, labor had shifted strongly against immigration because”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. But again, I think that's not the main problem is the 30s, the 20s and 30s, really. And in some ways, actually German Jews had better access to the U.S. than Jews in other parts of Europe at that time, particularly Poland. The problem is that mass immigration to the United States, which really begins around 1880, we've always been a country of immigrants. But in 1790, the immigrants who got here got here on very small sailing vessels that required several weeks to cross the Atlantic and couldn't come during whole seasons of the year because of the weather. It became much cheaper for immigrants. Plus, you started having railroad networks across Europe so that people could get from central Russia”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ballooning of the National Security Bureaucraties in the Cold War and then even beyond, we now have these sort of ossified institutions. There's always the question, how many analysts of China do you need? The answer is one, if you find the right one. And bureaucratic groupthink, I think, tends to dominate the products of both the State Department and the CIA in ways that often obscures the best of the thinking that's being done inside them.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There, I think you have to talk about individuals in both institutions. There are some of the smartest minds in the country and people who've studied the region deeply and think hard about it. One of the interesting consequences for me of the WikiLeaks gables was you see just actually how good a lot of the State Department observers are, the cables they're sending home are really quite perceptive. But institutionally, to some degree, I think both institutions are troubled by a problem that goes far beyond them and it's the problem of bureaucratization of knowledge. You know, if you compare the world of American foreign policy today with what it was like, say, before World War II, in those days you had really quite small institutions where sort of an individual genius, someone like George Kennan, could really have an influence with the sort of”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, in some ways, Eisenhower was deeply delusional about the Middle East, thinking that somehow there was a way the US and Nasser could become the sort of cornerstone of a Middle Eastern order. But the consequences were not great of that mistake. I would think nobody really thought in 2008, as George W. Bush left office, that you could possibly mess up the Middle East worse than the Bush administration. President Obama proved that that was wrong and that you could actually take the Middle East at the end of 2008 and make it almost infinitely worse both for American interests and for the safety and happiness of the people in the region. So I think probably President Obama wins the crown.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source