Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - “Back in the USSR” with The Wall Street Journal’s Walter Russell Mead

Episode Date: January 15, 2022

In these conversations, we’ve talked a lot about tensions on the Russia-Ukraine border. But what we haven’t talked about is whether Putin is actually trying to re-assemble the former Soviet Union, whether the US and NATO are prepared to arrest his march, and whether Putin has successfully driven a wedge between the US and Europe. What are the stakes for us? Walter Russell Mead joins us. He is the Global View columnist for The Wall Street Journal. His column appears weekly. Walter is also at the Hudson Institute, Bard College, and at the Council of Foreign Relationship he was the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He has authored numerous books, including “Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World”, which you can purchase here: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/special-providence-walter-russell-mead/1126488390

Putin's classic modus operandi has been to identify the gap between the West's sort of narcissistic inflated self-perception of itself and its strength and its unity and its confidence and what it's actually willing to do. And he finds that gap and he exploits it, which allows him both to push the West back and himself look good. And he's been able to run this play over and over without us learning anything. In these conversations, we've talked a lot about tensions on the Russia-Ukraine border. But what we haven't talked about is whether Vladimir Putin is actually trying to reassemble the former Soviet Union, whether the U.S. and NATO are prepared to arrest his march, I'm doubtful,

and whether Putin has successfully driven a wedge between the United States and Europe, to the point that Europe, as a force in geopolitics, is over. What are the stakes for us? Well, to help us think it through, Walter Russell Mead joins us. Walter is the Global View columnist for the Wall Street Journal. His column appears weekly in the journal. I highly recommend making it part of your regular media diet. The great thing about Walter is the historical sweep he calls back on in his analysis, so he's a perfect fit for this podcast. Walter is also at the Hudson Institute.

He teaches at Bard College, and at the Council on Foreign Relations, he was the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy. He's authored numerous books, including one of my favorites called Special Providence, American Foreign Policy and How It Changed the World. Is Russia heading back to the USSR? This is Call Me Back. And I am pleased to welcome my friend Walter Russell Mead of the Wall Street Journal to the conversation. Walter, thanks for joining. It's great to be here, Dan. Walter, I want to begin by quoting from one of your recent Wall Street Journal columns.

You wrote, Mr. Putin is having a great crisis so far and seems to have little to fear. His successes in Belarus and Kazakhstan have thoroughly cowed domestic opposition. The run-up in energy prices gives him a cash cushion. The crisis has again put Russia at the center of world politics, demonstrated Western weakness, terrified Ukraine, and highlighted Mr. Putin's mastery of the game of thrones close quote so if you if what you write here walter is accurate then putin has already won like why go any further or do you believe putin is bent on going to war against ukraine that everything else right now the talks in geneva this, further talks in Vienna, are just diplomatic jawboning on the path to what both sides,

the West and Putin, know is inevitable? I think we have to start, Dan, with just the realization, the honesty to acknowledge that basically since 2008, Putin has been repeatedly rolling the West with a much weaker hand. He invaded Georgia. George W. Bush was sort of flabbergasted, and essentially the responses were minimal and clearly insufficient. He annexed Ukraine, attacked the Donbass in 2014. Again, a lot of huffing and puffing and sanctions and the Europeans and the Americans congratulated themselves on their unity and so on, but he kept Crimea, didn't retreat in the Donbass and moved on. So he's, you know, this works for him and he's doing it again and it's working again. That's where we have to start. And do you think war with Ukraine is inevitable?

I think it's, I mean, I think it's entirely now up to President Putin, Vladimir Putin. If he thinks it's advantageous to him to attack Ukraine again, he'll do it. If he doesn't, he won't. But he's made it absolutely clear that the West has no ability to stop him from doing it. There are a lot of scenarios that you can see, ranging, He could try to establish a land bridge from Russia to Crimea. There have been some problems with the Ukrainians cutting off the water supply into Crimea. He could make that impossible, reduce the costs of keeping Crimea. His probably maximum objectives at this point would be to annex or occupy Ukraine west, east of the Dnieper and maybe the Black Sea coast, Odessa, land corridor to Transnistria, the part of Moldova, which is essentially under Russian control at this point already. That would give him a boundary with NATO. In Romania, it would, Moldova is a country that has sort of hesitated between Russia and the West.

It would, you know, the sanctions, I think it's clear that the Biden administration and the Europeans are looking at some pretty tough sanctions. But, you know, Putin will weigh in his own mind whether he thinks the gains are worth it or worth the price. I think it's not impossible that he'll say, yes, I'm going to do this. Okay. So I want to come back in a minute to the U.S. and NATO response. But you also wrote in a different column in The Wall Street Journal that Putin has used his time as president to, quote, rebuild the Soviet Union under the nose of a feckless and distracted West. West because Russia has an annexed breakaway republics, many observers underestimate how successful Mr. Putin's reassembly of the USSR has been. But it is hegemony, not uniformity, that he wants. So explain what he's up to with regard to reassembling the former Soviet Union

or not. What is the bigger sort of grand strategy here? Well, let's take the example of Belarus, where basically the president of Belarus was on the ropes with civil society in a wave of demonstrations, pro-democracy demonstrations. And Putin basically said, I've got your back. I'll do what it takes to keep you in power. If the West sanctions you, don't worry. I'll be there for you. And Lukashenko was able to hold off the demonstrators and stay in power. But clearly he rules Belarus by the grace of Vladimir Putin. In the same way we saw last week in Kazakhstan, you had what appears to be rioting and so on based on two factions, different factions in the current and former leadership. Russian troops came in at the

request of the current president, re-established order, and appear now to be leaving. Again, Putin is the supreme arbiter of Kazakhstan. He decides who runs Kazakhstan. If you go back to the Soviet times, you can look and see in a lot of the Central Asian republics, and for that matter, even in places like Azerbaijan and Armenia, the Kremlin's role was basically to put a strong man in to rule that republic. And it was kind of a feudal system. The emperor in Moscow appoints the Duke of Azerbaijan, and the Duke has a lot of autonomy, but resources flow in a way that supports the monarch and the czar in Moscow.

With the fall of the Soviet Union, in many cases what happened was that the former Soviet official simply renames himself the president of an independent republic and sets up shop. So the same guy ended up running Azerbaijan after it left the Soviet Union. His son rules it now. So what Putin has been doing, he's been reasserting his control over these regional hegemons and has reasserted the kind of a neo-feudal structure. And that's much more similar to the late Soviet Union than a lot of people understand. I want to go through the signals that have been sent to Putin and the signals that Putin has been sending both within his sphere of influence, if you will, and to the West. So the first is back in July. I mean, there's sort of four events that I think are important. I want to start with back in July. He published an essay, a lengthy essay titled On the Historical Unity of the Russians and Ukrainians, that he was contemplating some kind of takeover

of Ukraine along the lines of Nazi Germany's 1938 Anschluss of Austria. Now, I'm not for a moment comparing Hitler to Putin, or I'm not for a moment comparing Putin to Hitler, but the strategy of basically laying the groundwork for the unity of two countries as a glide path to making the case for why those two independent countries have to be unified, or as Putin would put it, reunified. I know that's a provocative comparison. Tell me if I'm wrong. Well, I don't think he wants, again, I don't think he's necessarily looking for a formal annexation of Ukraine. But even back in the Soviet Union days, Ukraine figured nominally as an independent republic. It had its own representative at the United Nations.

Stalin basically insisted on Ukraine and Belarus having their own UN representative so he'd have extra votes in the General Assembly. So I think, you know, Putin's vision is that he would control Ukraine, but not necessarily that Ukraine would join the Russian Federation, but that Ukraine's foreign policy would be aligned with Russia's economic policy. There would be a common space there. That's really the vision that he has. And I would guess that in the Russian view, Solzhenitsyn, I think, once said that it made him sick to admit it, but that the Ukrainians had been so alienated by the crimes of the Soviet Union that west of

the Dnieper, they were lost to us. There's a river that goes more or less through the middle of Ukraine. Kiev is on the West Bank. And on the Western part of Ukraine, maybe that's lost. But to the East, even Solzhenitsyn saw this as somehow being part of the Russian space. And we have to, you know, Ukraine was, except for a brief period around the end of World War I, Ukraine has been under Moscow's control since the, what, 16th, 17th century. And so 300 years of history from Moscow's point of view and from the point of view of a lot of people in Russia, that's, which was the sort of capital of the first state that people recognize as part of kind of the Orthodox Slavic Russian sphere, was in Kiev. So it's on the cradle, like the Philadelphia or the Boston of Russia, to a lot of Russians, feels like it's in Kiev. So this is all Putin. There was nothing groundbreaking or earth shattering in terms of the way Russians look at the world

in Putin's essay. But you're right to see it as a statement of intent. So then on December, so that was in July. And by the way, at that affairs, testified on Capitol Hill, basically laid out how the U.S. would respond to military action in Ukraine from Russia. And she basically, I mean, you know, she got into all these different, you know, day one response, day five response, but basically she made clear that violence would be responded to with sanctions uh not military action and then december 8th president biden ruled out sending u.s troops to deal with the situation and then december 17th putin issues proposes two security agreements one between russia and nato and then and one between russia and the US, which were pretty, by my reading, aggressive, right?

He lays out a number of demands. One, NATO must not accept new members, including Ukraine. Two, the US and NATO must not deploy short or intermediate range missiles within range of Russian territory. Three, the US must not station nuclear weapons abroad. Four, NATO must not deploy forces or arms to member states that joined after the so-called founding act, which was 1997. And this would include all former Warsaw Pact states, such as Poland, and obviously such as the former Soviet Baltic states. Five, NATO must not conduct

military exercises above the brigade level, so above 3,000 to 5,000 troops. And by the way, within an agreed upon buffer zone. And then six, the US must agree not to cooperate militarily with post-Soviet countries. So here he's being very provocative and aggressive, Russia is. The State Department basically says we won't respond with military force. We'll respond with sanctions. Now, those sanctions could be tough, and we can get to those. Then Biden says the U.S. will not deploy U.S. troops, not saying deploying is a good idea or a bad idea, but he makes clear that that threat is being taken off the table. And then Putin issues what some, some pretty, like I said, some pretty aggressive demands that if implemented, I don't think they will be if, if met, if agreed upon, it would be

sort of like a, a, a recreation of the Yalta agreement, uh, of, uh, of, of post-World War II. How would you evaluate these statements made by U.S. administration officials and the signal they sent to Putin? And then we'll get to these demands he's making. Well, I think sadly, the responses from U.S. officials reflected reality in the United States. I would say at the moment, there is virtually zero appetite in the United States for fighting Russia, fighting a war with Russia in Ukraine. I don't think you could get an authorization to use military force in Ukraine through Congress. And I suspect that if you tried to do that, you would have a lot of Republicans as well as a lot of Democrats against it. You know, I think what we have to kind of do is step back.

Putin has realized the weakness of the United States and of the Western alliance. He understands that the United States is deeply divided internally, that the Biden administration is politically weak. There's not a real common vision in the United States, a bipartisan vision about what our foreign policy should be or what our policy vis-a-vis Ukraine should be. And that what we've been doing is we've been sort of coasting on the sense of power that we had at the end of the Cold War. And we've uttered a lot of things and taken a lot of steps that we're not actually prepared to back up. And Putin's

classic modus operandi for a very long time now has been to identify the gap between the West's sort of narcissistic inflated self-perception of itself and its strength and its unity and its confidence, and what it's actually willing to do. And he finds that gap and he exploits it, which allows him both to push the West back and to make the West look ridiculous and himself look good. And he's been able to run this play over and over since at least 2008 without us learning anything. Each time the cost of our inability to counter him increases. But as far as he's concerned, it's just, you know, there's no reason

not to keep running this play. And again, he started off small and cautiously in Georgia. His invasion of Georgia came, you know, as the Bush administration was low in the polls and it was at the height of the financial crisis in 2008, the surge in Iraq, and it was a very sort of small territorial advancement. But since then, he has steadily increased the scale of his challenge. And again, I think Neville Chamberlain will look at our generation and scoff and scorn at us.

In more than a decade, we have not learned anything. And Putin continues to just run this play. What do you believe the tools at our meaning the u.s the west more generally and and nato's uh the tools at our disposal for responding i don't want to get into red lines yet we can we can talk about that later but i just want to like we talked about it on previous podcasts with with just want to, like, we talked about it on a previous podcast with Richard Fontaine, where we talked about the very specific non-military

tools, but obviously there's some new ones. Senator Menendez, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, introduced legislation this week where he specified some very, I think, tough sanctions. So what are the real tools? Actually, I think probably not as much as one would like in that, you know, it's hard for me to see Europe boycotting Russian oil and gas in the middle of the winter. You know, even, you know, even on Nord Stream, there's, you know, a lot of people in the German, the largest party in the new German coalition, the SPD, are against not going forward with Nord Stream, even if Russia invades Ukraine. We've got some high

ranking SPD officials say they don't want to do that. Yeah. Can you just explain for our listeners what Nordstrom is? I mean, it's in the news, but it's right. It's a pipeline that basically goes would pump gas from Russia to directly into Germany, skipping past Ukraine and other bordering countries. So that, you know, and the U.S. has opposed this because it would reduce Ukraine's leverage. Ukraine had a certain amount of leverage over Russia because it could threaten to interrupt supplies through pipelines that pass through Ukrainian territory. It also got some revenue from the transit fees associated with those pipelines. But at the same time, it also would increase Europe's

long-term gas energy dependency on Russia. So, I mean, you know- And the Biden administration for now has sworn off efforts to sanction and all but shut down Nord Stream 2, right? Well, it has, right. It has, in its view, basically for the sanctions, essentially would be on Germany, not on Russia, because Germany wants the pipeline. And so, you know, do you sanction your most important European partner over something that's likely to happen at this point almost regardless? That was the decision they were looking at. I'm not sure they made the right decision there. That's a different question. But this is the real point about all of these magnificent sanctions that you hear this much about.

The U.S. has hardly any trade with Russia. But this is the real point about all of these magnificent sanctions that you hear this much about. The U.S. has hardly any trade with Russia. Europe has a lot of trade with Russia. Essentially, the sanctions punish Europe. Economic sanctions against Russia fall disproportionately heavily on Europe compared to the U.S. And what that means, and the energy is obviously a big part of it, but not the only part. So again, from Putin's point of view, the sanctions actually will deepen the transatlantic rift. His game here, he wants to break up the Atlantic alliance and break up the EU into quarreling factions. And from his point of view, in the first place, oil and gas are unlikely to be

excluded for long from Europe just because Europe needs it. Then he's got China, which appears to be more than willing to support his play against the United States. So he sees a certain, and he can look at countries like Iran and North Korea that have been under far more stringent sanctions for a very long period of time without their regimes falling, or for that matter, Cuba with the U.S. embargo. I think he does not think that we can accomplish with sanctions what we would like to think we can accomplish with sanctions. Yeah, I mean, European Union, to your point, its dependence on Russian natural gas accounted for something like 40, just north of 40% of the EU's total gas imports in 2020. So it's extraordinary.

So in light of that, obviously, our ability to keep the Western alliance united in this standoff is limited. And I'm looking at events and wondering, is Europe's role as a major force in geopolitics on behalf of the West and united with the West over? Has Putin effectively either driven a wedge between Europe and the U.S. or at least revealed these cracks that he's exploiting? But one way or the other is to net out that, to be a little glib, that Europe just doesn't matter anymore, at least in terms of helping to advance U.S. security interests globally? Well, Europe is not prepared to sacrifice its own vital economic interests for the sake of a U.S. agenda. One could put it that way. And it's probably useful to make it a little bit less ideological here. It's interesting in some ways that Europe has moved toward U.S. positions on China, at least to some degree in the last couple of years, even somehow the world after 1990, that history really had ended.

And we were in this beautiful post-historical space where ugly things like hard power weren't important anymore. And it was, you know, the world just spontaneously fell in love with our values and the, you know, that Russia, you know, the, the, the shining power of our example would draw people to want to be like us and our, and, and because we had the only path to wealth, everyone would feel the need to be with us. That all turned out not to be true. And so not only European, but American foreign policy has been based on fundamentally false ideas for 30 years. And Putin has read, and I think Xi Jinping in his way, have read the world more accurately than we have. Not in terms of ideals, or I'm not saying that they are better morally than we are, etc., etc., but they've had a keener sense of geopolitical realities.

And as a result, they are just tripping us up right and left. Some commentators and analysts have pointed out that it would be folly for Russia, given how weak it is these days generally, despite the high price of oil, it would be folly for Russia to go any farther because of the weak shape that Russia's economy is in. And, you know, Russia's GDP is just like 20% of American GDP based on, you know, purchasing power parity. But, you know, if you consider the size of some of the aggressor states during, you know, during World War II or the outbreak of World War II. Angus Madison, who you know, the British economic historian, estimated that the Soviet Union's GDP then, the outbreak of World War II, was about half that of the U.S. Germany's was about 40 plus

percent of the U.S. Japan's was close to 25 percent. Italy's was under 20 percent of U.S. GDP. And as our mutual friend Neil Ferguson has pointed out, you don't need to be Goliath to start a war. It's also worth thinking that at the start of the wars between Britain and France in 1689, France had three times Britain's population and double its GDP, but Britain ultimately won. Britain had 5% of India's GDP, but the Indians didn't establish the Indian Raj in Britain. So this kind of naive, vulgar economic determinism is, you know, is a very poor guide to world history and to geopolitics. a hold, and I would say among many conservatives as well as among many liberals since 1990, has been this unearned confidence in the supremacy of our model for basically all possible purposes. I want to leave other hotspots out of this next question, but I know it's hard to actually evaluate what I'm about to ask you in isolation, but that said, I'm asking you to do it.

As it relates to the crisis in Russia, what do you think are our red lines? Like, how would you, if you had to, based on your keen observer of these events, you're in touch with, you know, officials both in the U.S. and around the world. What do you think our red lines are? Like that if Putin did X, we would actually deploy American forces. One thing I think is very important to understand is that there's a difference between NATO and traditional military alliances in that in a traditional military alliance, it sort of reads, you know, if my ally is attacked by country X, I will go to war, you know, to defend them. It's called automaticity. They attack, we respond. But in the NATO treaties are actually written differently. What we're committed to do is to

consult our constitutional processes if a NATO ally is attacked and invokes Article 5. And that was put in there in the original treaty because the Senate would refuse to ratify a treaty which took away from Congress the final power of declaring war. So, in fact, you know, the president would have to go to Congress for authorization if we were attacked, which means to say, ultimately, you know, which is true, really, of any treaty, but maybe more clearly here, it's a political document, the NATO treaty. And one of the big issues in the early years of NATO was whether, in fact fact the United States would honor this treaty. And that was why American forces were put,

were on the front lines of the treaty and in West Berlin. Why it was so important that if the idea was if the Russians attacked, the Soviets attacked, they would have killed American troops at the point at which this was being debated in the United States, the tripwire. And so I think there's always been this idea that NATO, you know, it's not 100% guaranteed that any Russian attack on a NATO ally would necessarily lead all or perhaps even any NATO allies to come to its aid. So one of the things we need to, and I think as Putin looks, you know, would President Trump have honored the NATO treaties? I'm not sure who could give a confident answer on that.

Would Congress have supported him had he tried to do it? So we would like to say, oh, we issue our red lines and then everybody listens to our red lines. And those are somehow laws of nature, facts of nature. You cannot have a guarantee that is stronger than the government that makes that guarantee. And this is the core problem right now, I think, is, you know, what does America stand for? I said in one of my columns that President Biden has been telling the world since he was elected, America is back. But as I think even President Biden said recently, other countries say yes, but for how long? And then when he makes speeches at home saying American democracy hangs by a thread, and if you don't pass this law, which it looks like the Senate is not going to pass on voter registration and so on, then American democracy could be doomed. So, you know, so the question is, what do any of these things mean? And how do we as a country get ourselves in a place where our words regain real meaning?

Well, if the U.S., I mean, I look at all the threats that have been made from the administration, either explicitly or implicitly, and like my back of the envelope is the ones that the administration would seriously consider doing in response to violence is possibly canceling Nord Stream 2, assuming it doesn't blow up U.S. relations with Europe, sanctioning Russian sovereign debt on the secondary market, sanctioning state-owned banks, Russian state-owned banks, restricting ruble-dollar currency conversions, restricting imports of commodities, Russian commodities. And then I think among the most aggressive is borrowing Russia from the SWIFT system, the dominant system for cross-border payments between banks, those are very aggressive steps. Now, I take your point that they could aggressively backfire

against the US economy and certainly the economies of Europe. But that said, it may not be as much of a blow to the West as actually deploying forces and getting into a military entanglement. So might the calculation of the Biden administration be. So if they took these steps and just did the things that I said, it could be very bad news for Russia. Do you think that still is a very big statement and is a form of escalation? Because I think that's where we're heading. I think we're heading towards some kind of military action from Russia in Ukraine and then some kind of very heavy economic response from the U.S. Right. Well, again, what you're saying is our sanctions will fail to deter Russia from military action.

Knowing that they have already failed, we will impose them anyway, right? They will presumably not cause Russia to retreat. So we will end up in a sense where we were after Crimea, you know, but more so in a sense, you know, there will be large, complicated sanctions against Russia, tension in the Western Alliance over how long do we maintain those sanctions. And the sanctions don't move Russia. Okay, so now I want to broaden things out here um so you wrote in your in a recent column that china russia and iran want mr biden and the nation he leads to fail i quote you here they are doing what they can they they're doing what they can to keep the president biden that is from focusing on asia ir. Iranian hardliners are not only slow walking any return to the JCPOA,

the Iran nuclear deal, with carefully calibrated help from both Russia and China, they also are exploiting every weakness and testing every boundary in the Middle East. And Russia, far from fading into the background so the U.S. can concentrate on China, is backing Belarus, threatening war against Ukraine, demonstrating its growing stranglehold, stranglehold over Europe's power supply and raising its profile from Southeast Asia to sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America. So that those were all your words. So I think where you're going with this is the Biden administration thought there was really they were going to pick up on the pivot to Asia, if you will, the focus on China and that China, Russia and Iran are sort of conspiring either directly or indirectly to not let the U S focus on China or focus on any one problem for that matter. And I think at this point, we have to say they're succeeding brilliantly. So explain.

Well, you know, I think, you know, we were hearing a lot of language early in the Biden administration. Their goal was to park Russia. Their goal clearly with Iran was to get Iran back into the JCPOA so that, you know, there would be some kind of stability in that relationship. And then with Russia quiet and Iran, you know, engaged in some way, then use all of American energy and effort and military spending and so on to deal with the Chinese problem. But obviously, Russia isn't part and Iran is not re-engaged or anything else. So, you know, at the same time that the Americans are worried about Taiwan and worried about other Chinese activities, they are contemplating, you know, massive sanctions, a war in Ukraine, and an Iranian problem that seems nowhere close to being resolved. So we're in a world that the Biden administration didn't expect to be in, and it's a much more difficult and an uglier world.

You've talked about how we're completely underestimating what deepening Chinese-Russian detente or outright cooperation means for the U.S. We're just not focusing on it at all. ways to both Russia and China believe that liberal ideology is an existential threat to their regimes and their power. And so that whatever, you know, so they're sort of forced by their reading of what liberal ideology is about to engage in full-blown ideological conflict with us. I think it's also, you know, to say that China's ambitions are regional is a little bit misleading in the sense that, for example, Taiwan is clearly the thing that it's most concerned about. But if China were to succeed in forcefully reunifying or incorporating Taiwan, you basically have the problem where Japan at that point, its trade is in China's hands,

that China will have full military control of the waterways that Japanese imports of oil to the Middle East and trade with Europe and so on go. And so Japan at that point would more or less have no choice but to find some kind of accommodation with China. What that does in terms of the balance of power in the Pacific Ocean, the U.S. position, is something that we have been fighting against't think of that as a regional hegemony or, you know, a simple local readjustment in the balance of power. And you put the, you know, the Japanese economy and technological capability and, of course, South Korea would have no choice but to sort of integrate with that. It's hard for me to see either India or Australia looking under those circumstances to do anything other than make what peace they can with the reality that's around

them. So, you know, these are not insignificant stakes. A couple of questions in closing. One, where does the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the, shall we say, charitably incompetent withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, fit into all these fast-moving geopolitical events we're observing? Well, I think that with the combination of the Afghan shock and, say, a Russian conquest of large chunks of Ukraine, the impact on American prestige would be colossal. And people would see a pattern.

A lot of our allies would feel the time has come to hedge and to balance. I think particularly in the Middle East, you would't mean that there aren't things we could do at that point. But we are, you know, this is serious. It's important to remember that the last 20 years of the Cold War were not as bad as the first 20. You know, where you had things like the Cuba Missile Crisis and these sort of periodic things. The competition kind of stabilized, particularly after the Nixon-Kissinger detente. And so we're coming back to something that's more like the world situation in the 40s and 50s even, and early 60s, than what we remember of the eight, you know, relatively benign late Cold War, say of the 80s, which was, you know,

a tough thing. So it's, you know, these are dark times, and, you know, the dangers are greater than they've been in a very long time. And America is frankly less united and American people are less informed and less focused on these challenges than they need to be. So I want to close on that because you've written a lot, including one of my favorite books on U.S. foreign policy, which is a book by you that we'll put in the show notes. You deal a lot and you write a lot about the American public's mindset and almost ideology, if you will, whenians and Jeffersonians and the different historical periods and the mindsets they represent, and that we've, over the last few years at least, been experiencing a resurgence of the Jacksonian mindset in terms of U.S. foreign affairs. What I feel like we don't have are domestic debates, policy and political debates,

being waged in a healthy way about America's role in the world, right? The way Reagan ran on, you know, the bear in the woods about the Cold War, the way George W. Bush ran on foreign policy in 2004 after September 11th and the war on terror, the commencement of the war on terror. Where do you think the American public is today on American engagement in the world? Sounds to me like you think the public is distracted. And what would it require from a leader to shake that up? Yeah, I think, you know, that's really, we really, it's surprising when you think about how little presidents have done keep foreign policy from getting in the way of your domestic agenda, which serious threat though it was, is a kind of limited focused thing. But we are now back in an

era where the United States really does have serious international competitors, serious threats, serious problems. And we're going to have to re-educate. People are going to have to understand this world that we're in. And political leaders, presidents, certainly the president needs to get in front of this, respected political leaders. But it's going to be hard because there's the public trust in the media, the public trust in politicians, even in recent years, I think public trust in military leaders is not what it was. Well, on that upbeat note. You don't exactly come bearing good news, but your insights and your calling back on history are extremely important as we think about these events. This is a topic we've returned to a number of times, especially over the last few weeks on this podcast, from different angles. is, is very illuminating. At some point we, I do want you back not only on foreign policy, but to talk about the state of the blue state model,

which you, you haven't, I don't think written about in a while, but I'm as interested in. And I, and I think is as relevant today's when you started writing about it. So we will have to have you back on this podcast, but until then, thanks for joining. Great. Good to be here. days when you started writing about it. So we will have to have you back on this podcast. But

until then, thanks for joining. Great. Good to be here. That's our show for today. To follow Walter Russell Mead, you can track him down on Twitter. He's at W-R-M-E-A-D. That's at W-R-M-E-A-D. You can also find his material at Hudson Institute. That's a think tank he's affiliated with. And at WSJ, at the Wall Street Journal. Walter's book, the one I mentioned, Special Providence, you can find at barnesandnoble.com, your favorite independent bookseller. And then, of course, there's that e-commerce site they're calling Amazon these days. And he's got a new book in the works that should be coming out soon called The Ark of a Covenant, The United States, Israel, and the Future of the Jewish People, some of which I have read.

I would preorder it as soon as you can. It's a terrific and very important book. And then he's working on another book, but that's another topic for another day. Call Me Back is produced by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.