Walter Russell Mead (born 12 June 1952, Columbia, South Carolina) is James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and Editor-at-Large of The American Interest magazine, and is recognized as one of the country's leading students of American foreign policy . Until 2010, Mead was the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations.[1] Mead's father, Loren Mead, is an Episcopal priest in Washington, D.C., who grew up in several places in the South. Mead received his B.A. in English Literature from Yale University. He is an honors graduate of Groton School and Yale, where he received prizes for history and debate. In addition to his position at Bard, Mead currently teaches American foreign policy at Yale University. He is a Democrat, and has said he voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 Presidential Election.[2] In 2003, Mead supported the Iraq War.[3] Mead's current writing is described by his supporters as centrist and contains a mix of liberal and conservative views. Detractors feel his writing reflects a Progressive/Collectivist slant.
Mead regularly writes for several journals, magazines and newspapers such as Foreign Affairs,[4] The New Yorker,[5] The Washington Post,[3] and The Wall Street Journal.[6] He is currently on the staff of Foreign Affairs as a book reviewer and on the editorial board of The American Interest.[7][8]
In an article in 1992, Mead famously wrote,
But what if it can't? What if the global economy stagnates—or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia, China, India—these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to the world than Germany and Japan did in the '30s.
(New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer 1992).
In 2001, Mead published Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World. It won the Lionel Gelber Award for the best book in English on International Relations in 2002. The Italian translation won the Premio Acqui Storia, an annual award for the most important historical book published. Special Providence,[9] which stemmed from an article originally published in the Winter 1999/2000 issue of The National Interest entitled "The Jacksonian Tradition",[10] describes the four main guiding philosophies which have influenced the formation of American foreign policy in history: the Hamiltonians, the Wilsonians, the Jeffersonians and the Jacksonians. The leftist New Left Review praised the book as a 'robust celebration of Jacksonianism as it historically was ... an admiring portrait of a tough, xenophobic folk community, ruthless to outsiders or deserters, rigid in its codes of honour and violence'.[11] Not all critics praised the book, however. "Despite the hype surrounding the book, it ultimately challenges little," geographer Joseph Nevins wrote. "To the contrary, it reinforces the tired notion of U.S. exceptionalism. Thus, he [Mead] paints U.S. deployment of violence as inherently less brutal than that of Washington’s enemies. In doing so, he sometimes grossly understates the human devastation wrought by the United States."[12]
In 2003, Mead argued that an Iraq war was preferable to continuing UN sanctions against Iraq, because "Each year of containment is a new Gulf War",[3] and that "The existence of al Qaeda, and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, are part of the price the United States has paid to contain Saddam Hussein."[3]
In June 2005, Mead published Power, Terror, Peace and War: America's Grand Strategy in a World at Risk. The New York Times Book Review called him one of the "country's liveliest thinkers about America's role in the world". The book attempts to elaborate on Joseph Nye's "soft power" concept, adding the ideas of "sharp" power, "sticky" power, and "sweet" power, which together work towards "hegemonic power" and "harmonic convergence". (Mead is known for naming movements and intellectual trends, as in Special Providence.)
In October 2007, Mead published God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World about the Anglo-American tradition of world power. The Economist,[13] The Financial Times[14] and The Washington Post[15] all listed God and Gold as one of the best non-fiction books of its year. Johann Hari, a pundit for the left-leaning UK newspaper The Independent, asserted in his The New York Times Book Review that "Mead offers the most eloquent possible defense of the swarm of WASPs that has shaped the world for centuries. But, ultimately, his God and his gold do not glitter."[16]