![]() ![]() In any case, the fear of nuclear war has been around since the time of Hiroshima, but also, there are other fears. The playground consensus was that we were targeted. MEAD: Well, we believed that we would be, because the vital UNC planetarium is where they trained NASA astronauts. ![]() 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.ĬOWEN: The answer is no. 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. MEAD: Well, I think the most important way is that it has diminished our coherence as a society and undermined the psychological strength of individuals in our foreign policy world. I think the idea that the existence of nuclear weapons means that we can all forget international politics just doesn’t work.ĬOWEN: How has the decline of American religiosity influenced US foreign policy? 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 them? He absolutely would. Well, if you believe that people are rational actors, perhaps. Say we kept half our nuclear weapons, cut the defense budget in half. MEAD: 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.ĬOWEN: But now we have nuclear weapons, so that won’t happen again. It’s really great to see you.ĬOWEN: A simple and very general question: What does an average working-class American actually gain from American hegemony? WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: It’s good to be here, Tyler. And he has a new and excellent book called The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. Walter is a professor at Bard College, foreign policy columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a fellow at the Hudson Institute. Today, I’m very happy to be here in person with Walter Russell Mead. Welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. You can also watch a video of the conversation here. He joined Tyler to discuss how the decline of American religiosity has influenced US foreign policy, which American presidents best and least understood the Middle East, the shrewd reasons Stalin supported Israel, the Saudi secret to political stability, the fate of Pakistan, the most likely scenario for China moving on Taiwan, the gun pointed at the head of German business, the US’s “murderous fetishization of ideology over reality” in Sub-Saharan Africa, the inherent weakness in having a foreign policy establishment dominated by academics, what he learned from attending the Groton School, and much more. foreign policy in general”, according to a New York Times review. “less a history of U.S.-Israel policy than a sweeping and masterfully told history of U.S. Mead’s latest book, which explores the American-Israeli relationship, is characteristically wide-ranging and multidisciplinary, resulting in A leading expert in foreign policy, Walter Russell Mead believes his lack of a PhD - and interest in actually going places - has helped him avoid academic silos and institutional groupthink that’s rendered the field ineffective for decades. ![]()
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