Walter Russell Mead > Quotes

“The United States is both a conservative power, defending the international status quo against those who would change it through violence, and a revolutionary power seeking to replace”
― Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World

“We can choose not to think about our power and its meaning for ourselves or for others, but we cannot make that power disappear and we cannot prevent decisions taken in the United States from rippling out beyond our borders and shaping the world that others live in and the choices that they make. Nor can we prevent the way that others see and react to our power from shaping the world we live in and affecting the safety and security of Americans at home.”
― Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World

“Saying that Jesus was a moral teacher is like calling Winston Churchill a landscape painter; both statements are true (and Jesus was a much better moralist than Churchill was a painter) but in neither case does the description capture the true greatness of the person.”
― Walter Russell Mead

“The disappearance of American optimism would be a bad thing. Much of the dynamism of American life springs from the habits of risk taking, innovation, and entrepreneurialism that an optimistic mindset creates. A more pessimistic America might be a wiser country that made fewer foreign policy blunders, but it would be weaker, poorer, and less influential than the America we know.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Any diplomat must be able to engage people across all kinds of political and moral divide; any historian, any student of foreign policy, must come to understand a wide variety of attitudes and opinions that, often for extremely good reasons, are largely unacceptable in polite American society today. Whether the issue is racism, misogyny, jihadi ideology, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, communism, fascism, or, yes, antisemitism, the student of foreign policy must develop the capacity to engage calmly, dispassionately, and sometimes even cooperatively with people committed to utterly revolting ideas.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Yet the new anti-Israel narrative also overlooks crucial events. To take just one example, only a minority of Israeli Jews are European by origin or descent. The plurality have no European roots; they came to Israel from other countries in the Muslim Middle East.[4] Many of these Mizrahi Jews fled or were driven out of their homes by Arab governments and mobs in retaliation, it was claimed by their persecutors, for Israeli behavior against the Palestinians. Others fled brutal mistreatment and unconscionable discrimination. No one speaks of compensation for these refugees; no one commiserates with them; no one seeks to hold anyone to account for the crimes committed against them.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“This, at least, deserves to be remembered: if “the Jews” ran America, immigration would not have been restricted and Israel would likely not exist. This is part of a more general truth: Zionism only succeeded among Jews as it became clear that the options that most Jews initially preferred—integration into the countries where they lived or, failing that, free immigration into more hospitable places—had failed.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Another factor was antisemitism; a number of diplomats thought that discrimination was a proper and appropriate response to the irritating presence of importunate Jews. These reactions were typical of the State Department’s attitude throughout this period. This was the golden age of the patrician, progressive WASP at the State Department:”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“at Harvard, the bastion of Puritan scholarship in the New World, Hebrew lessons were mandatory up until 1787.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“American policy toward the Zionist movement before 1948 and to the State of Israel after that date has varied widely. In 1937 Britain issued the Peel Report and sharply limited Jewish migration to Palestine even as Nazi persecution of the Jews was intensifying. The United States put no pressure on Britain to change its policy. During the 1930s and 1940s, despite vigorous efforts, American Jews were unable to mobilize America against Hitler, unable to persuade the American public to admit Jewish refugees from Nazi persecution, and unable even to persuade Franklin Roosevelt to bomb the rail tracks leading to Auschwitz. When the Jews needed the United States most, the United States was nowhere to be seen; if there was ever a time for American Jews to demonstrate their mastery of the American political process, from the standpoint of the interests of Jews around the world, that would have been the time to do it.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Continental realism is not just the belief that “realism” rather than “idealism” is the most appropriate ideological framework within which to understand and to pursue the diplomatic life of nations. Realism, the belief that countries are driven by interests and the quest for power in international relations rather than ideals and benevolence, is widespread among Anglo-Americans as well as Continentals. In fact, many Continental Europeans have felt over the years that when it comes to putting the principles (so to speak) of realism into practice, the hypocritical and greedy Anglo-Americans have far outdone their Continental rivals.”
― Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World

“the Allied victory in Jerusalem and the promise to give persecuted Jews a chance to build a home in the lands of the Bible pointed to a meaning behind all the madness. God was mysteriously at work behind the noise and thunder of the war; a higher purpose was being fulfilled through these human events. A better world could and would emerge from the terrible slaughter. The next year, Theodore Roosevelt responded to the revival of the Blackstone Memorial by writing that “there can be no peace worth having” until “the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.”[25] The American press went wild. As the New York American commented in an editorial entitled “Christianity Has Captured Its Capitol [sic], and Jerusalem Is Henceforth for the Jews”: “Whatever else is doubtful, it is certainly true that the passage of Jerusalem into the hands of the Allies means the swift establishment of that re-gathered and redeemed Zion for which the world’s Jews have dreamed ever since the tribes were scattered in the breaking up of Israel….The Universal Jew, who for centuries has been a religion, not a nation, is to come at last unto his own.”[26]”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“To sell territory rather than losing it in battle, especially territory in the heartland of the Muslim world that contained one of the three holiest Islamic sites, would strike at the legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire among its Muslim subjects, a group who, after the progressive losses of mostly Christian territories in Europe, were increasingly powerful in what remained of the empire. There was, of course, another problem with Herzl’s proposal.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“If American Jews controlled America’s Israel policy, the U.S. embassy would still be in Tel Aviv, the annexation of the Golan Heights would not be recognized, and the United States would be pressing Israel on settlement policy. To blame the Jewish community for policies it dislikes made by presidents it rejects seems, if not virulently antisemitic, at least uninformed.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Only marginal options were left. At the Évian Conference, the Dominican Republic (seeking favorable publicity to offset disturbing stories in the press about mass murders of Haitians illegally settled on the Dominican side of their common border)[40] offered to take up to 100,000 Jews.[41] But the Dominicans lacked the infrastructure to import, much less employ, so many people. In the end, only a thousand Jews settled in the country.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“After the Israeli War of Independence, Jordan controlled the West Bank, including the Old City of Jerusalem, and Egypt controlled Gaza. Either country could have set up an independent Palestinian state in the territory they held; neither country encouraged Palestinian independence in those territories until the Israelis conquered them in the 1967 war.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“here we must note that as Jewish support for Israel became more nuanced and in some quarters less strong, support for Israel among non-Jewish Americans continued to grow. At the same time, as Israel itself became a stronger country and therefore, at least from some perspectives, a more valuable ally, the United States increased military aid to Israel and deepened its commercial and diplomatic relations.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The African villager with a solar powered smartphone has more access to more information than Louis XIV in the halls of Versailles.”
― Walter Russell Mead

“Vulcan Theory exists at many degrees of sophistication. In its simplest and most naive forms it is indistinguishable from Protocols of the Elders of Zion–style propaganda mixed with the kind of disinformation about the United States and liberal capitalism that the USSR and Nazi Germany once competed to produce. More intellectually elaborated forms of Vulcan Theory avoid the crudest stereotypes and caricatures but still offer radically oversimplified accounts of U.S. policy and politics.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“In the 1930s, the combination of the economic depression and the poisonous doctrines of Stalin, Hitler, Spain’s Francisco Franco, and Italy’s Benito Mussolini created an increasingly dangerous and hostile environment, one in which Jews were particularly vulnerable. The Americans stuck to the Lodge consensus even as its limits imposed higher costs on the Jews: no to immigration, and only token diplomatic responses to oppression abroad. The State Department said little and did less as anti-Jewish laws and policies were imposed not only in Germany but in Poland, Hungary, and other countries. Much of American public opinion sympathized with the plight of Europe’s Jews, and a number of politicians protested, but to little avail.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“One American president after another has tried and failed to persuade Saudi leaders to provide equal rights for women, to introduce more democratic reform into the kingdom, and to soften the harsh nature of the dominant form of Islam preached in its mosques. While Saudi officials know that the United States has been the kingdom’s protector of last resort for seventy years and its most reliable source of weaponry, American pressure is only one of the forces the Saudis must negotiate, and they will continue to resist American pressure that, in their view, threatens their hold on power at home.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Optimistic American missionaries in the nineteenth century believed that their work among the Armenians and other Christian minorities in the Ottoman Empire would promote harmony between Christians and Muslims and, eventually, lead Muslims to convert to Christianity.[5] In reality, the missionary work contributed to the national and sectarian conflicts that led to genocidal massacres of Middle Eastern Christians and brought some of the world’s oldest Christian communities to the brink of extinction.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“In 1917, Balfour himself visited America to float his idea with an explicit eye to this dynamic.[16] Shortly thereafter, with the approval of the British War Cabinet, Balfour as Britain’s foreign secretary sent his famous letter to Lord Rothschild: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object.”[17]”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“While there is an unthinking perception among many that the United States and Israel have “always” been allied, history tells a very different story. Under presidents Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, the focus of American policy in the Middle East was Egypt, not Israel. In the hope of developing a relationship with Nasser, the United States worked to make Egypt its preferred partner in the Middle East at Israel’s expense.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“back burner, with intervals of détente, reversals of alliance, and many changes in fortune. After the failure of the Armada in 1588, Spain could not attack England at home. English forces were never strong enough to wage sustained warfare on the Spanish mainland. Instead, the intermittent conflict moved indecisively through what we would now call the third world—the scattered colonial dependencies of the two powers and over the trade routes and oceans of the world. English hawks, often Puritans and merchants, wanted an aggressive anti-Spanish policy that would take on the pope while opening markets; moderates (often country squires uninterested in costly foreign ventures) promoted détente.”
― Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World

“The Blackstone Memorial was the first draft of America’s proposed answer to the international Jewish Question. Blackstone would live to present a new version of his petition to Woodrow Wilson in 1916, see his principles enshrined in American law in 1922, and, by the time he died in the 1930s, see the establishment of a flourishing Jewish community in Palestine.[13] Had he lived longer, he would have seen President Harry Truman stubbornly stick to the Blackstone principles in the face of bitter criticism until he was able to recognize the existence of a Jewish state that, with American diplomatic (but not economic or military) assistance, had been voted into being by the United Nations.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“If American Jews controlled America’s Israel policy, the”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The historian assesses that the investment of the wealthy classes in the Bank of England wedded them to the fate of the nation as a whole and to the maintenance of its stability.”
― Walter Russell Mead

“No umpire is capable of issuing an objective and infallible ruling about which of the possible courses is actually correct; historians, we can be sure, will debate the merits of important American foreign policy choices for years to come without necessarily reaching a consensus. If historians often do not agree about whether our policies in the past were effective and wise, what kind of agreement can we expect from policymakers and politicians today about whether a given policy will work?”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The lack of political freedom in much of the Middle East combined with the failure of most countries in the region to provide rising living standards and good jobs for young people made radical ideology attractive, and as long as those conditions persisted, terror groups would find support.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People