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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So we shouldn't be overwhelmed with surprise that something like this is happening again.
Or did they really not win the war?
Well, if you think, you know, what are your goals?
That tells you whether or not you win.
What were your aims and did you achieve them?
If the aim was, as it has been in past military confrontations with Iran and Hezbollah, to mow the lawn, the lawn has been better mowed in this war than it's been in a very long time.
The grass is low.
It's not clear to me how quickly the Iranians could get back to a nuclear program, even if they wanted to.
which actually I kind of assume they do.
So in that sense, what more could you do?
But if the goal is political regime change, it would be, I think, something of a miscalculation.
You can hope that as a result of a military shock, there would be some kind of internal shift in Iranian dynamics, either a revolution against the old Islamic Republic or a shift to a far more moderate version of the Islamic Republic.
But that was a gamble.
And I don't think there was ever a huge chance of that happening.
So in that sense, Israel didn't win the mega millions jackpot.
But was that really a realistic expectation to go in at the beginning of the war?
They're not wrong to project it, but obviously looking strong, sounding tough, that's what you do.
And in fact, the weaker you are, the tougher you sound.
It's a huge mistake to assume that Iranian propaganda corresponds to Iranian reality, but they would be idiots not to project strength and confidence.
Ditto Hezbollah.
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