Walter Russell Mead > Quotes

“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 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

“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

“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

“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

“Rather than witnessing a return to the post–Cold War democratic euphoria, the Obama years would see a further decline in the power of liberal ideology—within the United States as well as globally—and the return of full-fledged geopolitical competition between the United States and an emerging, revisionist, and illiberal Sino-Russian entente.”
― 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

“Truman received a worrying letter from Eleanor Roosevelt: I am very much distressed that Great Britain has made us take a share in another investigation of the few Jews remaining in Europe….Great Britain is always anxious to have someone pull her chestnuts out of the fire, and though I am very fond of the British individually and like a great many of them, I object very much to being used by them.[18]”
― 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

“Eleanor Roosevelt was becoming more anti-British than ever. In a letter intended for Bevin and Attlee, she wrote in her gentle but implacably unrelenting way that I can not bear to think of the Jews of Europe who have spent so many years in concentration camps, behind wire again on Cyprus [where the British were interning illegal Jewish immigrants to Palestine]. Somehow it seems to me that the 100,000 Jews should be let into Palestine and that some real agreement should be reached with the Arabs. Willy-nilly, the feeling grows here that it is [not] just justice which Great Britain is looking for where the Arabs are concerned, but it is that she wishes the friendship in order to get more favorable consideration where oil concessions are concerned.[36]”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, far right, and Clement Attlee saw the maintenance of British rule over the oil-rich Middle East as the key to Britain’s economic survival. Fearing Arab hostility, they opposed resettling Jewish refugees in Palestine.”
― 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

“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

“Neither Kerry nor Obama seems to have understood how their own personal unpopularity in Israel changed the politics of peace among Israelis. As Russian and ex-Soviet Jews watched Putin run rings around Obama on the international stage, as Mizrahi Jews from the Muslim Middle East heard the Americans echoing the flabby liberal rhetoric of a condescending Israeli establishment that despised them, and as all Israelis saw American Middle East policy floundering from one miserable mishap to the next, association with the Americans became toxic. Right-wing politicians saw no reason to conceal their disdain for the Americans and their process; on the contrary, attacking Kerry in particular brought political dividends. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon would mock what he saw as American naïveté, messianic delusions, and arrogance to journalists. The only thing that will save Israel, he was quoted as saying, “is for John Kerry to win his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.”[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Strength is the foundation of the Jacksonian affinity for Israel. Jacksonians admire strength. They can be romantic retrospectively about past heroes and they admire courage against the odds and last stands. But they prefer winners to the “beautiful losers” favored by more sentimental observers of international politics. Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War while the United States was struggling in the quagmires of Vietnam first drew the attention of Jacksonian America to the Jewish state. The refusal of the Arabs to make peace afterward, and the adoption of terrorist tactics by some Palestinians, heightened what Jacksonians saw as a contrast between a strong and upstanding nation and, again from their particular and partial point of view, what they saw as its cowardly, incompetent, and treacherous opponents.”
― 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

“the idea that Jews and their allies exercise unique power over governments where Jewish interests are concerned has always been a cornerstone of antisemitism. The Israel lobby thesis electrified antisemites around the world as it appeared to place the authority of well-known academics behind one of the oldest, ugliest, and silliest conspiracy theories in the world.[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“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

“1975, BASIC (Black Americans to Support Israel Committee) published a full-page ad in The New York Times attacking the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution. The ad cited an article by Rustin and was cosigned by several hundred prominent Black Americans, including Congressman Charles Rangel, union leaders, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, author Ralph Ellison, and civil rights activist Rosa Parks.[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“This is the outcome Truman had been struggling for months to avoid: Eleanor Roosevelt was accusing him in public of turning his back on the United Nations. Making things even worse, the day before Austin’s statement, at the request of an old friend from St. Louis, Eddie Jacobson, Truman had met with Chaim Weizmann and reassured Weizmann that he remained committed to partition and Jewish independence. Now, thanks to the State Department’s misreading, as he saw it, of his instructions—a misreading that might well have been deliberate sabotage—Truman was taking the kind of political damage that he had struggled for years to avoid. He wrote of his frustration to his brother on March 22: “I think the proper thing to do, and the thing I have been doing, is to do what I think is right and let them all go to hell.”[13]”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“In July 1946, Ben-Gurion proposed Jewish and Arab entities, each with full control over immigration and settlement policy, but that was as far as the Jewish leadership would or could go. Under duress, Palestinian Jews might temporarily accept a solution short of full independence, but only if they could control immigration into the Jewish parts of any kind of binational confederation.[40] There was simply no way that the Jewish leadership in Palestine could accept a political solution that did not allow the hundreds of thousands of desperate, homeless Holocaust survivors into Palestine. They would choose war, even war at long odds, over immigration restriction; an abandonment of the desperate and stateless Jewish survivors of the Holocaust would be such a fundamental betrayal of Zionist values that it would destroy the cohesion and spirit of the Palestinian Jews.”
― 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

“Austin’s statement set off a firestorm in public opinion, putting liberal internationalists and Zionists on the same page just as the country was digesting Truman’s bleak call for a peacetime draft. Truman was furious. Writing to his sister, Mary Jane Truman, on March 21, the president called the State Department officials “striped pants conspirators” who had “completely balled up the Palestine situation.”[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Unable to beat the Israelis on the battlefield, the sneaky Arabs were now trying to use underhanded economic methods to undermine a brave little country and to cow the United States. One can argue whether this view of the case was entirely fair to the Arabs, but that was hardly the point politically. To most Americans, the Gulf states were backward (Saudi Arabia and North Yemen only abolished slavery in 1962; Oman abolished it in 1970),[36] bigoted (banning or persecuting non-Muslim religions), and dictatorial with little or no concern for human rights.”
― 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

“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 United Nations charter declares that member states must respect the territorial integrity of other states. This has never been enforced on Israel’s behalf—not when Britain and the United States schemed to force Israel to give up the Negev in the early 1950s,[7] not when Arab neighbors gave aid to terrorists seeking to attack Jewish targets in Israel and beyond, not when Arab countries and, later, Iran regularly announced their intention to destroy Israel and drive its citizens into the sea.[8] The United States promised Israel in 1957 that it would protect Israel’s ability to use the Straits of Tiran if Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt.[9] To enforce that commitment, U.N. troops were dispatched to the Straits. In 1967, Nasser ordered those troops to leave. They obeyed. When Israelis asked Washington to honor its promises and prevent Nasser from blocking Israeli sea traffic, the United States was too preoccupied with the Vietnam War to respond. The U.N. was equally passive.[10]”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The antisemites of the 1890s were less angry at the bearded Orthodox believers clinging to the old ways than at the elegantly mannered and impeccably dressed professional Jews who were making their way in gentile society.[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“the passions of identity politics make us angry and they keep us engaged, but they do not always make us wise.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People