Walter Russell Mead on the Past and Future of American Foreign Policy

Walter Russell Mead — foreign-affairs scholar, Wall Street Journal columnist, and author of Special Providence — sits down with Tyler Cowen for Ep. 161 to survey American foreign policy from its religious foundations to the strategic miscalculations of the Ukraine crisis, ranging across the Middle East, China, Germany, Pakistan, and the domestic sociology of the foreign-policy elite.

Key ideas

1. American hegemony earns its keep by preventing catastrophic wars, not by producing visible everyday gains. Mead reframes the question — not what does the average worker gain from US power, but what do they lose without it — pointing to World War II conscription as the counterfactual. Nuclear weapons do not retire that logic; a cornered Hitler with a bomb would have used it.
2. The decline of religious faith has destabilised American foreign-policy culture. Without the grounding that a coherent religious or philosophical tradition provides, citizens and officials alike face the genuine existential fears of the modern world — nuclear war, climate, AI — and respond with denial, extremism, or paranoia rather than clear-eyed policy. Mass democracies are not built to hold their psychological balance without some such anchor.
3. The four schools — Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, Wilsonian — each offer a different prism on American interests. Mead (whose framework these are, from Special Providence) reads the Democratic tradition as shaped by the lesson of Vietnam: excessive reliance on hard power is dangerous, soft power and multilateralism are preferable. Republicans were less marked by Vietnam; their establishment figures (Baker, Shultz) drew a different cultural inheritance from the same war.
4. Bureaucratic groupthink is the structural enemy of strategic intelligence. The CIA and the State Department both house brilliant individual analysts, but institutionalisation buries that thinking under consensus. The answer is one — if you can find the right one — not a thousand PhDs. Mead reads the US handling of pre-invasion Ukraine intelligence as a case study: the intelligence was excellent and the diplomatic signal it sent to Putin (‘you will win fast’) was disastrous.
5. Germany’s foreign-policy future will be decided by economics, not ideology. The German economic model — cheap Russian energy plus large Chinese export markets — is structurally broken. How Germany makes a living in the next decade will drive its geopolitical orientation far more than anti-war sentiment, memories of Ostpolitik, or any affinity for ‘the Russian soul.‘

Content

The working-class case for American power

Mead inverts the usual framing when Cowen asks what an ordinary working-class American gains from US hegemony. The honest answer, he says, lies in the counterfactual: without a world order underpinned by American power, the cost falls on ordinary people first — through conscription, economic disruption, and the destruction of war. World War II is the exhibit. Nuclear deterrence — the idea that two sides holding warheads cancels out large-scale conflict — he dismisses as theoretically elegant and historically naive: a Hitler with nuclear weapons in spring 1945 would have used them without hesitation.

Religion, psychology, and the coherence of democratic foreign policy

This is the thread Mead returns to most insistently. Facing genuine existential stakes — nuclear war, climate catastrophe, AI displacement — democracies need psychological coherence at both the individual and societal level. A religious or philosophical tradition, he argues, has historically supplied that coherence; its erosion among significant parts of the American population has dissolved the social bonds that make collective action possible and left the political system prone to paranoia, tribalism, and declining trust in democratic institutions themselves. For Mead, this is not a conservative talking point but a structural observation about mass psychology.

The four traditions of American foreign policy

Mead’s signature contribution to foreign-policy studies is a taxonomy of four schools of thought that have recurrently contested American strategy — Hamiltonian (commerce and institutional order), Jeffersonian (republican restraint and minimal entanglement), Jacksonian (populist nationalism and decisive force when provoked), and Wilsonian (moralism and democracy promotion). He does not rehearse the taxonomy in full in this episode, but the conversation turns on its logic throughout. The Democratic Party’s post-Vietnam posture — ‘our over-reliance on hard power is dangerous; soft power is where it’s at’ — he reads as a Wilsonian-Jeffersonian coalition shaped by a particular cultural wound. Republicans, whose establishment figures drew different lessons from the same war, are less uniformly marked by it.

Best and worst presidents on the Middle East

Asked to rank American presidents by their command of the Middle East, Mead nominates Nixon and George H.W. Bush as the most effective: both understood that the US had hard-power goals in the region that were vital and achievable, and soft-power goals that were important but largely unachievable — and they pursued the achievable ones. For worst, Mead singles out Obama, arguing that however chaotic the Bush-era Middle East looked in 2008, the Obama administration found ways to make it significantly worse, both for American interests and for the people in the region.

Stalin, Israel, and the destruction of British power

One of the episode’s more unexpected historical detours concerns Soviet support for the creation of Israel in 1947–53. Mead — drawing on his book The Arc of a Covenant — argues that Stalin had more to do with Israeli independence than Harry Truman did. The strategic logic: Britain was the dominant power in the Middle East and the weak point in any Western containment of the Soviet Union. By pushing the question of a Jewish state in Palestine, Stalin simultaneously inflamed US-British relations (Americans watching Holocaust survivors turned away from Palestine found it indefensible), radicalised Arab opinion against the British-backed monarchies, and accelerated the collapse of the entire British imperial position in the region.

Saudi stability and the limits of democratic theory

Cowen asks why Saudi Arabia has been so durable when the dominant American political-science assumption since World War II is that democracy is the only stable form of government. Mead’s answer is twofold: the Saudi monarchical tradition is not modern autocracy but something closer to feudal power-brokerage — the king as mediator among competing tribal and clan interests — and the oil-income cushion gives the regime the resources to respond to grievances as they arise. The American assumption of democracy’s universal instability advantage, he says, ‘bears very little relationship to the facts outside of Western Europe, Japan, and Australia.‘

The cabbage-leaf strategy and Taiwan

Mead describes China’s incremental territorial expansion as a ‘cabbage-leaf strategy’ — each individual move is too small to trigger an overwhelming response, but each one thickens the cabbage. The South China Sea islands, now militarised; the Solomon Islands, now aligned with Beijing and refusing US and Australian naval visits; the cumulative effect is strategic encirclement achieved without a single action large enough to justify a proportionate counter. He expects any Chinese move on Taiwan to follow the same logic: nibble before the final bite, and calibrate the timing to a Chinese assessment of their own capacity and international political conditions.

The Ukraine intelligence failure

Asked what shaped his thinking — his degree is a BA in English literature, with no dissertation — Mead offers a critique of the Biden administration’s pre-invasion signalling on Ukraine. The intelligence about Russia’s plans was exceptional: it shocked the Russians, who learnt that the Americans understood them better than they had assumed. But alongside that signal, the administration was offering Zelenskyy a plane ride out of Kyiv and pulling all US diplomats. The combined message to Putin: ‘You are going to win if you do this.’ Any voices inside Russia counselling caution against the invasion heard the Americans — with their demonstrably good intelligence — confirming the optimistic case. Mead reads this as the predictable product of a foreign-policy class trained entirely in universities, where the overall political impact of combined signals falls outside the disciplinary frame.

Germany’s broken model and the future of the Western alliance

Mead is notably blunt about Germany’s position. The German postwar economic model — built on cheap Russian energy and large Chinese markets — is simultaneously losing its energy source and watching its key customer develop the capacity to manufacture the high-tech capital goods it imports from Germany. Neither of those structural pressures has anything to do with German ideology, anti-war sentiment, or cultural sympathy for Russia: they are material. Where Germany goes, Mead argues, will be determined by how it answers the question of how it makes a living — and that answer will determine where a fundamental element of the American alliance system sits.

What Groton and the segregated South taught him

Mead attributes two formative influences on his foreign-policy instincts. Growing up in the segregated South during the civil rights era gave him the capacity to hold complexity — to love a grandfather whose politics he deeply opposed — and exposed him to the American experience of being both defeated and wrong. That experience, he argues, generates a structural scepticism about America’s capacity to transform other societies: the lesson of the failed Reconstruction, bad for both Black and White Southerners, sits in the background whenever he evaluates any American democratisation project.

Groton exposed him to the inside workings of the WASP foreign-policy establishment at the exact moment of its crisis. His national security adviser — McGeorge Bundy — was chair of the Groton board during the Vietnam years. Watching ‘the aggressive self-confidence of the WASP establishment meeting the Vietnam War and beginning to come to grips with what was going wrong’ gave Mead a ringside seat at the formation of the tensions his career has spent unpacking. The Wise Men tradition Groton taught was not an idealised one; he left understanding that the American system had produced both extraordinary achievement and profound moral failure, and that learning to hold that complexity without either denial or despair is perhaps the first requirement of serious foreign-policy thinking.

Related

• Walter Russell Mead — guest; foreign-affairs scholar, author of Special Providence and The Arc of a Covenant
• Nuclear Taboo — concept; Mead challenges the assumption that nuclear weapons eliminate great-power-war risk