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.

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

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

Is your assumption that the Iranians go back to building a bomb and this continues or is the bomb effort paralyzed while this continues?

There's no inspections.

There's no nothing.

Right.

And what about ballistic missiles?

Does Iran immediately start rebuilding those?

And is that becoming a strategic threat or are they kind of lying flat?

Well, you're actually making an argument for the MOU in a way.

All right.

Say more.

Well, that if what we have is a situation where the Iranian nuclear program, whatever they want, is by and large frozen for the foreseeable future, though not forever.

and the ballistic missile program, then ballistic missile capability is not really a threat, then a huge blow has been dealt to Iran, and there's no need to create a global energy crisis, an economic crisis, by interrupting trade through the strait.

I mean, that's a defeat.

I'm sure that's true, but I'm not sure if that's an existential concern, like they're desperately afraid that if the protests start, the regime will fall.

Or if they're actually like, yeah, that would be ugly, it would be messy, it would make everything else harder, but we'll survive like we have the 10 other popular uprisings in the 21st century.

So if your objective is economic pressure leading to regime change, then you hate the MOU.

But if you think that maybe that's not possible, leaving Iran with, for now, no nuclear program and no capability for a strategic ballistic missile program is hardly the worst thing anybody that has ever happened.

I would have to read a lot more secret squirrel documents than you've read so far.

And my sense is that the Iranians, I think, feel reasonably confident that they can maintain control.

Because let's not forget that revolutions more often come from rising expectations than from periods where everybody is spending 18 hours a day just trying to get some rice on the table.

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