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

“Well, I think what they saw in the Middle East is that America has both hard power goals and what you could call soft power idealistic goals in the Middle East, that our hard power goals are vital and they are achievable. Our soft power goals are important but largely unachievable. And so what they did was they set about dealing with what was essential. They both did it pretty successfully.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Interesting. Nobody's gotten it totally. I'd say George H. W. Bush and Richard Nixon probably are the two in my mind who best understood what they were dealing with.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For example, many of the resources that you need for any kind of EVs and battery technology are in places where these conflicts are very real. So we are not winning against jihadism on a global scale, but it's also true that a reduced American military”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think time will tell in general am I happy that fewer people are dying as a result of attacks, especially civilians? Absolutely. But is the terror threat to the United States and other countries on whom we depend diminishing? Well, that kind of depends. Certainly in the Arab world, the Middle East, Islamism, and just call it jihadi ideology more broadly is seen to have failed, like socialism, like Arab nationalism. It sort of won more in a long list of failed ideological movements. Not that there still aren't terrorists or for that matter Arab socialists, but it's not the same. However, if you look at Sub-Saharan Africa, what we're seeing is state after state, and these are fragile states to begin with being undermined or being assaulted. We're seeing larger-scale conflicts developing. You know, these are not sort of of no interest to us.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of lose a class of liberal Democrats saw their faith in American ideology permanently wounded by Vietnam. I don't think that was as true among Republicans.”
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 to some degree you can say it's historical that the Democratic Party believes in, as people like President Biden or Secretary Kerry would say, learning the lessons of Vietnam, that over-reliance on hard power is dangerous, that soft power really is where it's at, and that America needs to sort of accommodate to different regime types and so on around the world. The Republican, which of course again, both parties are contested. There are different groups in both parties. Vietnam did not have as great a consequence for Republicans. If you think about people like James Baker, George Schultz, the great Republican foreign policy figures of the last thirty, forty years, the legacy of Vietnam for them was quite different and the sort of cultural impact. Democrats tended to 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
“impact no matter what you did. There are just too many of us. What makes democracy work under those circumstances tends to be senses of identification with elites, with different social political groups, the glue that holds a democratic society, the cultural glue, intellectual glue, spiritual glue, become much more important. And I think in our society, the ebbing of religion among some, certainly not all Americans, has tended to dissolve these bonds and leads in all kinds of ways both on the left and the right to some of the sense of suspicion, of paranoia, a lack of trust, and declining support for democracy. All of that together makes it much harder for the United States to do foreign policy well, at least in my judgment.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“the planet, can we save human civilization? When people face those kinds of questions without some kind of grounding and some kind of religion and faith, it's actually there are individual people who can keep their psychological balance in the face of that. There are not many. And in terms of mass societies and democracies and large cultural groups, it's profoundly destabilizing. So you have that problem. An existential fear, which some people respond to by denial. Some people fall into extremism. Lots of responses. But you can see that. Then the other thing is that in a large democratic society like ours, 300 plus million people, if political power was divided equally among all three hundred million Americans, it would mean that no one had any power. An American society, the American government, would simply be a force.”
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 believe that we would be because the vital UNC planetarium is where they trained NASA astronauts. So the playground consensus was that we were targeted. But in any case, the fear of nuclear war, which has been around since the time of Hiroshima, but also there are other fears. If we don't get climate policy right, will we all be cooked or will climate-induced disruptions lead to great power war, nuclear conflict? Will changing technology, will the AIs take over, whatever? So we live in a time of existential fear. And foreign policy and all kinds of national policy questions get invested with these ultimate questions. So politics is less about, you know, if we raise the sales tax half a percent, is that a good thing or a bad thing on balance? It's more about can we save”
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 the most important way is that it has diminished our coherence as a society and sort of undermined the psychological strength of individuals in our foreign policy world. And what do I mean by that? If you think about what it's like to do foreign policy or even think about foreign policy in today's world, what are we looking at, existential threats to human existence. You let us off with nuclear weapons. In the book, I talk about how as a 10-year-old, my friends and I used to stand around on the playground debating whether our town, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, would be destroyed in a nuclear attack.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, cut the defense budget. Well, you know, if you believe that people are rational actors, perhaps, but when I think about nuclear weapons, I ask myself if Adolf Hitler had had a couple of nuclear weapons in the spring of 1945, would he have used him? He absolutely would. So I think the idea that the existence of nuclear weapons means that we can all forget international politics just doesn't work.”
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 can ask yourself maybe better what do they lose if we don't have it. For example, World War II when Germany and Japan tried to break the international system, working class Americans in the millions were conscripted into a war had their lives disrupted.”
2022-10-05 · Conversations with Tyler · Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source