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Podcast: Walter Russell Mead on Looking Past the Ups and Downs of Daily Politics and World Affairs

The veteran columnist and scholar of foreign affairs joins our podcast to talk about how he sees the state of the world.

John McCain in discussion with Walter Russell Mead at the Hudson Institute on July 21, 2015. Alex Wong/Getty Images.

John McCain in discussion with Walter Russell Mead at the Hudson Institute on July 21, 2015. Alex Wong/Getty Images.

Observation
Dec. 20 2019
About the authors

A weekly podcast, produced in partnership with the Tikvah Fund, offering up the best thinking on Jewish thought and culture.

Walter Russell Mead is a distinguished fellow at Hudson Institute, professor of foreign affairs and humanities at Bard College, and editor-at-large of the American Interest. His books include Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World (2004), God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (2007), and The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (forthcoming 2017).

This Week’s Guest: Walter Russell Mead

 

It’s tremendously hard to look past the ever-churning news cycle and think more deeply, more strategically, about what’s driving the ups and downs of daily politics and world affairs. But that’s exactly what Walter Russell Mead does, week after week, as a columnist for the Wall Street Journal and as a scholar at the Hudson Institute and Bard College.

Now Mead joins our podcast to talk about how he does it, and how he sees the world. The conversation runs both broad and deep, covering everything from Israeli-Turkish relations and Chinese cyberwarfare, to what the Trump presidency means for our political culture, to the story of how Theodor Herzl met the Kaiser. Three years into the Trump administration, how is America doing, Mead asks? What does Israel’s current electoral instability mean for its foreign policy? How should the rise of China affect the way the U.S. thinks about projecting global power?

Musical selections in this podcast are drawn from the Quintet for Clarinet and Strings, op. 31a, composed by Paul Ben-Haim and performed by the ARC Ensemble, the original Broadway cast recording of Fiddler on the Roof, and “Above the Ocean” by Evan MacDonald.

Background

 

For more on the Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic, which appears roughly every Thursday, check out its inaugural post here.

If you have thoughts about the podcast that you’d like to share, ideas for future guests and topics, or any other form of feedback, just send an email to [email protected].

More about: Politics & Current Affairs, Tikvah Podcast at Mosaic