Walter Russell Mead

Operations — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 16:39:32 -0400

Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy, Council on Foreign Relations

Walter Mead is Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a political economist who studies the global economy and its impact on American policy and society. Mr. Mead is a Senior Contributing Editor at Worth, and a Contributing Editor at the Los Angeles Times. His writings have appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Foreign Affairs, Harper’s, and Le Monde.

The New York Times called Mead's book, Mortal Splendor: The American Empire in Transition, “required reading for presidential candidates and their staffs.” His latest book, Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How… more

A World At Risk: Reshaping American Power

Communications — Mon, 12 Jul 2004 15:00:00 -0400

A New America Event
07/12/2004 - 12:07pm

Walter Russell Mead's book, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk examines America's historical approach to the world as well as the foreign policy of the Bush administration and its effects both at home and abroad. Mead takes a closer look at how the 2001 terror attacks have changed the political and strategic problems of American foreign policy.

Assessing both Bush and his critics, Mead offers a new approach to the war that can rebuild domestic and international support while outlining a new initiative for the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and recommends reforms for international institutions such as the United Nations Security Council.

Special Providence

Communications — Thu, 13 Dec 2001 11:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
12/13/2001 - 12:00pm

From one of our leading experts on foreign policy, a full-scale reinterpretation of America's dealings -- from its earliest days -- with the rest of the world. It is Walter Russell Mead's thesis that the United States, by any standard, has had a more successful foreign policy than any of the other great powers that we have faced -- and faced down. Beginning as an isolated string of settlements at the edge of the known world, this country-in two centuries-drove the French and the Spanish out of North America; forced Britain, then the world's greatest empire, to respect American interests; dominated coalitions that defeated German and Japanese bids for world power; replaced the tottering British Empire with a more flexible and dynamic global system built on American power; triumphed in the Cold War; and exported its language, culture, currency, and political values throughout the world.

Yet despite, and often because of, this success, both Americans and foreigners over the decades have routinely considered American foreign policy to be amateurish and blundering, a political backwater and an intellectual wasteland. Now, in this provocative study, Mead revisits our history to counter these appraisals.

He attributes this unprecedented success (as well as recurring problems) to the interplay of four schools of thought, each with deep roots in domestic politics and each characterized by a central focus or concern, that have shaped our foreign policy debates since the American Revolution -- the Hamiltonian: the protection of commerce; the Jeffersonian: the maintenance of our democratic system; the Jacksonian: populist values and military might; and the Wilsonian: moral principle. He delineates the ways in which they have continually, and for the most part beneficially, informed the intellectual and political bases of our success as a world power. These four schools, says Mead, are as vital today as they were two hundred years ago, and they can and should guide the nation through the challenges ahead.

Special Providence is a brilliant analysis, certain to influence the way America thinks about its national past, its future, and the rest of the world.

Building a Global Middle Class

Communications — Mon, 18 Dec 2000 12:00:00 -0500

A New America Event
12/18/2000 - 1:00pm

Eighteen months in the making, the Project on Development, Trade and International Finance's Final Report maps out global financial strategies which would support the growth of the middle class in emerging economies by promoting long-term, private sector capital flows from industrialized countries to developing economies.

Program directors Walter Russell Mead and Sherle Schwenninger will outline their proposals and make the case that such reform serves the long-term interests of developed and developing countries alike, and Robert Dugger, Jeff Faux and Richard Medley will provide commentary.