Walter Russell Mead

speaker

379 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 22 Jun

Walter Russell Mead’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

Call Me Back - with Dan Senor · Trump’s Iran Deal - with Walter Russell Mead · 22 Jun 2026 podcast

But it means that Israel, the small size of Israel's population is less of a limit on Israel's ability to generate and use military power should that be necessary in the Middle East.

That's a good point.

you know, if you're Israeli, that's a good thing.

On the other hand, though, and this is something that is less positive from an Israeli point of view and from ours and maybe from everybody's, is that the information revolution is spreading a lot faster than the industrial revolution.

And so it is getting harder to create and sustain an advantage in military power based on technological superiority.

So the Industrial Revolution starts in Britain, late 18th century, and basically the British are able to just sort of romp around India and pretty much wherever they want for 100 years.

And it takes a very long time for people to catch up, even for Europeans to catch up.

All right.

That's not how this stuff works.

Maybe at the very cutting edge, the U.S.

and China have advantages that other it's hard for other people to get up into that league.

But if you wanted to talk about the ability to make missiles, drones and other things that are extremely problematic, say, for Israel, then it's clear that the surrounding countries are becoming more militarily formidable.

And again, the Iranians, when we talked about existential Iranian threats to Israel 10 years ago, the only threat we really talked about was the nuclear program because that was basically the only way Iran could really strike in a significant way at Israel.

But one of the triggers for the current war was that Iran's ballistic missile production was reaching a level where Israeli air defenses really could not reliably protect the country from the kind of missile barrage that was likely to happen.

And that would, on the one hand, allow Iran to shield the development of its nuclear program behind the capability of massive destruction through ballistic missiles.

but also that the ballistic missiles themselves become a threat.

So we've gone from just worrying about the nuclear program, which is a huge headache and difficult to deal with, but it is much easier to build a ton of ballistic missiles at distributed sites.

It is much harder to stop a ballistic missile program dead in its tracks.

And even if you do it once, it's hard to keep it from them to recover.

The spread of technological capability is making the Israeli task against Iran a more formidable one.

Showing 241–260 of 379 · page 13 of 19