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

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?