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
And we've seen, you know, different things that Trump says about what he thinks about the military.
He said some terrible things, very wounded soldiers, how terrible that is.
McCain captured so on and so forth.
And yet he's still able to kind of get up there with, of all things, the village people and have huge patriotic uprisings around him.
Right.
He knows and values the power of ideals to move masses.
But I think what he misses is that when you have leaders who are driven by conviction, a De Gaulle, a Churchill, people of this kind, or for that matter, I am sorry to say, the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran, those guys are much harder to move than you think they're going to be.
What will happen is that Trump will look at the situation and decide what he thinks is in his interest and do that.
That's what will happen.
And what will happen before that?
I can see a scenario where a lot of oil gets out on world markets.
Everybody's stocking up.
And so another long-term interruption for the Strait of Hormuz would not cause a massive economic crisis.
Well, maybe we turn up the heat.
On the other hand, stock markets would lose 30% of their value and the price of gas would go to $8 a gallon.
I suspect we'd see a very different response.
But what I can tell you is that for neither Trump nor the Iranian side, a deep, deep, sincere regard for the eternal verities and commitments encoded in the memo of understanding, that will be the last thing that drives them.
One thing that Americans have gotten wrong, and for that matter, a lot of people get wrong, is we have overestimated the power of American sanctions since the Napoleonic Wars.
When Thomas Jefferson levied an embargo against Britain and France, then it produced zero in the way of concessions, right?
The United States has thought that our economic pressure actually can achieve more than we think it can.
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