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

“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

“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 volcano has not yet gone dormant; the wars of ethnic survival continue to break out. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and the Syrian, Kurdish, and Ukrainian conflicts of the following decades demonstrate that the old dynamics are still there.”
― 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 African villager with a solar powered smartphone has more access to more information than Louis XIV in the halls of Versailles.”
― Walter Russell Mead

“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

“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

“With regard to Europe, both the Jeffersonian neo-isolationists and the Jacksonian hawks were angry at what they saw as freeloading behavior by wealthy NATO allies like Germany who refused, as many Americans saw it, to take serious responsibility for their own defense while stiffing America on trade”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“American culture is fundamentally an optimistic culture. The American experience for more than three centuries was one of material and social progress. An entrepreneurial, forward-looking people set in a rich continent, most Americans have been drawn to optimistic readings of history and of the human potential for improvement. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this cultural optimism was reflected in the development of a benign vision of a peaceful and gradual transformation of human history in a new kind of progressive march to a utopian future. As we’ve seen, many Americans came to believe, either as a religious idea or as a secular vision, that the gradual improvement of economic and social conditions that they saw taking place around them would culminate in a universal reign of peace. Liberal Christians interpreted this through the lens of scripture, arguing that human progress would eventually lead to the peaceful return of Christ and the establishment of a millennial kingdom. For secular thinkers, visions of the utopian future looked to a democratic world in which the nations of the world would renounce war, embrace democracy, and cooperate to establish universal equality and prosperity.”
― 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

“What Beatrice was to Dante, Guinevere to Lancelot, business has been for millions of English-speakers. They have wooed her as assiduously as Paris wooed Helen.”
― Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World

“by 2016 the wealthy, selfish countries of the European Union were rich enough to take care of themselves. Jeffersonian neo-isolationists wanted the United States to define its interests as narrowly as possible, to withdraw from contested theaters like the Middle East, to scale back and even to eliminate the American commitment to Europe, and to avoid military engagement wherever possible.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Perhaps ideological competition is one of the forms of international competition that must be discarded if humanity is to survive. President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy of détente with the Soviet Union and opening to Maoist China was based on the belief that the United States did not have the ability to produce a global liberal order”
― 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