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

What is the Civil War about?

What is preservation of the Union about?

If I can do it without freeing any slaves, I'll do it.

If I have to free all the slaves, I'll do it.

Whatever, right?

Trump does not necessarily have those kinds of fixed objectives.

You know, he has some I'm not saying he has nothing, but operationally, that's how he goes.

And I think he does make him underestimate and undervalue some of the resistance that he encounters.

You know, I think most people would say at this point he clearly underestimated Ukrainian powers of resistance against Russia.

I would add to that that I think he also underestimated Putin's determination to defeat Ukraine at almost any cost.

Trump thought it actually would be a fairly easy thing to get some kind of a deal between Zelensky and Putin.

And he hasn't been able to, I think, because, in fact, that war is harder to settle than his kind of worldview led him to believe.

Yeah.

Yeah, and again, in some ways, the leader who in many ways reminds me of Trump would be Napoleon III of France.

For Napoleon, the thing that's really remarkable about him is in a country that was deeply divided between sort of Republican, Bonapartist, and monarchical ideas, traditional Catholic monarchists, zealous Republicans, and so on, Napoleon actually didn't really believe in any of these.

And that gave him a tremendous advantage because he could sort of dispassionately and in cold blood look at the situation and realize that these different ideologies are kind of rings through people's noses and you can pull on the chain that attaches them and get them to go where you want them to go.

And for the cynic, often –

Believers are the stupidest people on earth.

You just do a little puppet show of the pope embracing you and all the loyal Catholics come trotting along.

Or you say something nice to Bibi about Israel and all the pro-Israel people, you know, trot merrily after you like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

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