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 months

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

For that matter, ditto Hamas.

All you ever hear is confidence, resolve, we're winning in time.

Yes, a temporary setback even, but it was a great victory over the evil oppressor.

That's all they ever say.

Why is anybody surprised that they're saying it now?

Look, I think it's a mistake in trying to analyze President Trump to think that he has some kind of long-term strategic plan.

He's going to do step one, step two, step three.

That's not how he encounters reality.

He is sort of, we could call him, if we wanted to use a fancy Greek word, niketrophic.

He is turning toward, he wants to orient toward power and victory, right?

Dynamotrophic, you could also say.

But he is not doing this as a reason strategist, necessarily.

What he does is in each moment,

He surveys his options and then he kind of moves in the direction where he sees advantage or where he sees the need to shun some kind of danger.

And this can make him extremely effective, far more effective than people expect, because he can be sort of ruthlessly pragmatic in the moment.

And also because if you constantly seize on what looks to be the most advantageous course, when you don't always win or always get everything that you want, you often end up better than people who deeply believe in complex strategies expect you to.

And that, I think, has been the trajectory of Trump's career this far.

And so at the start of the war, I think Trump probably, you know, to the extent one can try to reconstruct the way that he looks at things, the big prize is that glittering gold prize of the regime change, baby Shah comes back, or pro-Western Iran miraculously emerges, Trump is world hero.

That's what he would love to have.

But then what he figured is, okay, if that doesn't happen—

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