A Conversation With Walter Russell Mead
On Joe Biden's Saudi trip and the danger of woke foreign policy
I was happy to be joined on the podcast yesterday by Walter Russell Mead — his latest book is The Arc of a Covenant, which we only discussed briefly. It’s on the relationship between America and Israel. (It’s a big book, I got it the day before the interview, and listeners know I’m loathe to do interviews where I haven’t read the book.) A brief excerpt of our conversation follows, and you can listen to the full interview here:
On President Biden’s Saudi Arabia trip:
[Biden’s] problem is that he is having essentially to reverse his Middle East policy of the first few months of the administration, which was kind of give a very cold shoulder to Saudi Arabia; Get Iran back in the JCPOA; Just try to keep Israel quiet and out of the way while you push forward on the JCPOA.
That's not working anymore. He needs the Saudis. The Iranians don't seem to be that enchanted with reentering the JCPOA. They're closer to a breakout than ever. So he's going in a tough position and what he's been doing isn't working. But what he's been doing is incredibly popular in his party.
On Biden’s shift away from making the Saudis a “pariah”:
Well, you know, this, the US-Saudi Arabia relationship is one of the most difficult relationships in the world, in the sense that you can't really talk about we have the same values. And oil, while it's the anchor of the relationship in many ways, we don't always see eye to eye about oil.
So over the years, the deal kind of became that the US would protect Saudi Arabia from external threats. And Saudi Arabia, even after OPEC, would try to keep oil prices rational. That wouldn't mean they wouldn't try to jack them up when they could. But Saudi Arabia has a lot of oil plants to produce oil for a very long time. So unlike some of these countries just want to sell their oil for the highest price they can get as fast as they can get. The Saudis want to keep the oil market alive for the long term. So US protection, Saudi sort of common sense about oil pricing — those were the fundamentals with the relationship.
I think, with the Greens come into having so much power in the Democratic Party right now, that whole question of what the US and Saudi Arabia thinking about a long term oil market is up for grabs. The Saudis look at the Americans and think they're trying to get to zero emissions under the Democrats as quickly as possible. They're going to be out to break the oil market. Well, wait a minute. And then with the US seeming less interested in protecting Saudi Arabia, and particularly when it comes to Iran, there was great fear there too. So both of the pillars of the relationship have been under threat and I think that's why the relationship has been under strain.
On what people get wrong about America’s relationship with Israel:
Well, the first thing that that most people get wrong or a lot of people get wrong in the United States and around the world is that America has a pro Israel foreign policy because “the Jews are running America”. And you know, “the Jews are running the media, the Jews are running the Senate,” etc. And even here, American politicians say things like that. Somehow the idea that these mysterious puppet masters are dictating American foreign policy is very much out there.
If you actually look at the historical record, one of the clearest things you can see is that whether American foreign policy with respect to Israel is smart or stupid, it's an American policy. It's not a Jewish policy. And America makes policy about Israel the way it makes policy about just about everything else. And again, we're not infallible we get things wrong. But the politics, the thinking, the relationship of ideals and and pragmatic considerations is pretty much the same there as it is anywhere.
On how our enemies use the wokeness of America as a weapon:
One thing we have to start with is that this is a propaganda war, in some ways, the contest with countries like China and Russia. So they don't, in those kinds of contests, they don't use speech as a way of communicating information and ideas. They're using it as a tool to weaken and divide you.
So what you will often see is, you know, Putin doesn't care whether the right wing goes crazy in the United States, or whether the left wing goes crazy. In fact, what his ideal situation is for us to just hate each other more every day — that we are more divided. If you can get Black Lives Matter going and stir up a big issue that way. And then you can get you know, some people carrying tiki torches or something in Charlottesville, Virginia. Putin is just happy, Xi Jinping is just happy, because they're not for one side or for the other. They're against us all.
They're against American power. They want to break American power. And so when, you know, and that means that you can have these problems, I mean, under Trump, they were certainly willing to exploit American divisions and so on. And now under Biden, you know, it's it's the same game, maybe different situations. But the real problem now for Democrats — and we could talk we wanted about Republican problems, but to talk about Democratic problems — is that they have a kind of a vision of foreign policy where it's really directly related to “our values”, “promoting our values” is what it's all about.
Well, during the Cold War, our values were church and family — church, synagogue or religious denomination of your choice and family — as traditionally understood. Well, what if our values now are LGBTQ, etc, etc — changing what our values are this week, because now we've got another letter in the alphabet or another symbol to add on to this. We're constantly saying to ourselves, what are our values?
Ten years ago, Americans weren't running around telling the world that trans rights is a major human rights issue. Well, now we are. Well, what will we be telling them five years from now, 10 years from now, who knows? I don't think progressive activists really know what in five or 10 years they'll be telling us is the hot new civil right.
So that's a problem because again, the idea that the values are going to be defined as what European and American elites and their supporters back. And then the goal of American foreign policy is to advance this agenda globally. Well, that means that you're going to get toasted if you go to the Brussels Forum, and everybody's going to love you at the G7. But the people outside the G7 in Asia, in Africa, in South America, are not necessarily going to feel that way. So we're linking our foreign policy to a very narrow and historically specific understanding of what values and rights are, and in a way that globally is really very much a minority position. That may not be as smart as some people think it is.
Ruy Teixeira Leaves CAP for AEI
Self-cancelling before the inevitable?
Teixeira’s bill of complaints will be a familiar one for many who have followed the internal battles of the left over the past half-decade, or spent an afternoon on left-wing Twitter. Politically, as a strategist, he thinks the Democrats need to win culturally moderate voters if they’re going to ever create the kind of coalition that can get their policies enacted. And personally, as an employee, he’s none too fond of the institutional dynamics that he says are driven by younger staff but embraced by higher-ups afraid of a public blow-up.
“I’d say they have been affected by the nature and inclination and preferences of their junior staff,” he says. “It’s just the case that at CAP, like almost any other left think tank you can think of, it’s become very hard to have a conversation about race and gender and trans issues, even crime and immigration. You know, ‘How should the left handle these?’ There’s a default assumption about how you’re supposed to talk about these things, even the language. There’s a real chilling effect on all of these organizations, and I think it’s had an effect on CAP as well.”
Like a lot of older and whiter veterans of liberal think-tanks and foundations, he also says he’s exhausted by the internal agita. “It’s just cloud cuckoo land,” he says. “The fact that nobody is willing to call bullshit, it just freaks me out.”
The folks at CAP say they’re mystified by Teixeira’s move. “I am confident that he is unable to give expression to a single example when either his research or his thought leadership found resistance in the organization,” Patrick Gaspard, who took over the center last year, tells me. Gaspard says he encouraged Teixeira to raise his issues. “If you go for it you will find me applauding your questions,” he says he told Teixeira. “In my conversations with him I encouraged him to continue to be counterintuitive.”
As for the bigger issue of progressive organizations’ priorities, Gaspard also pushes back: “We are only going to turn around the attraction to illiberal autocrats if we are not focused with a laser-like intensity on issues of economic inclusion and creating a broad prosperity,” he says. “There is excitement in our ranks about the kind of pluralistic conversations we’re able to take up every single day about the economy.”
Unlike some of the other conflicts in the now-voluminous older-normies-versus-young-graduates canon, Teixeira’s does not involve claims of being snubbed or censored or canceled or maligned. Along with a group of collaborators — including another CAP fellow who remains gainfully employed — he’s been publishing his broadsides against alleged cultural radicalism and petrified progressive institutions on a substack called The Liberal Patriot. No one has slipped nasty notes under his door.
But, he says, the way projects work in think-tank world means that when an institution doesn’t embrace a scholar’s interests and ideas, life gets harder. He once tried to start something called the Bobby Kennedy Project, which would look at ways to appeal to the Black and White working-class together. It went nowhere.
“People sort of tolerated the idea at CAP but nobody wanted to push it,” he says. “We did have some conversations with people in and around the foundation world and nobody wanted to touch it. You could tell. People were leery of talking about the white working class, as if it was de facto racist … You’re supposed to do stuff that’s funded, and you can’t get stuff funded if the institution isn’t behind you.”
The generational and ideological dynamics may be classic 2022 stuff, but there’s still something particularly ironic about Teixeira, of all people, feeling driven to quit by identity politics. The Emerging Democratic Majority, his 2002 book with John Judis, is often cited as having predicted the coalition of college graduates and minority voters that brought Barack Obama to power. Whenever you hear someone on the left saying the path to victory involves expanding the electorate with young and diverse voters, they’re part of his lineage.
Teixeira, for the record, says that’s a massive misreading of the book, which predicted a governing majority based on the assumption that the Democrats could hold a healthy proportion of blue-collar white people, as happened in 2008. But Obama’s first win turned out to be a high-water mark, not a new epoch. Teixeira is in the camp that blames “cultural radicalism” for this failure, saying the noise around things like pronouns and police defunding have made many blue-collar voters think of the party as a bunch of annoying recent liberal-arts graduates.
The Limits of Woke Compromise
Are there questions marks to be raised? You bet. Considering that the consequences of getting this question wrong means the medical neutering of children and their physical mutilation I would say that the question marks are very real indeed. But everywhere people like Tlaib are busy pretending otherwise.
On Tuesday this week the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on abortion access and the law. One of the people invited to testify was a professor from UC Berkeley (of course) called Khiara M. Bridges. Her “specialist” areas of study are “race, class and reproductive rights.” A well-known and vital specialism. During the hearing Bridges repeatedly referred to “people with a capacity for pregnancy.” Hawley understandably asked about this curious phrase. “Would that be women?” he asked.
In her response Bridges was as patronizing and rude as it was possible to be. Taking on the manner of an elementary school teacher she Berkeley-splained to Hawley: “Many women, cis women, have the capacity for pregnancy. Many cis women do not have the capacity for pregnancy. There are also trans men who are capable of pregnancy, as well as nonbinary people who are capable of pregnancy.”
Of course this is all a modern form of Jesuitical nonsense. “Trans men” who are still capable of pregnancy are still biological women. Nobody really knows what “non-binary” means, other than “look at me.” But anyone identifying themselves as “non-binary” who is also capable of becoming pregnant is also in fact still — wait for the big reveal — a woman.
Laughing nervously as people often do when they don’t know what they are talking about, Bridges then said: “So, um, I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and it opens up trans people to violence by not recognizing them.” She then went on to say that one out of five transgender people have attempted suicide and that “denying that trans people exist” causes this and much more to happen.
This is the same logic used by Twitter which now suspends peoples’ accounts unless they agree to the latest trans orthodoxy. All based on the same falsehoods that Tlaib and Bridges rehearsed this week. Which is that if you do not go along with an orthodoxy invented a couple of years ago you are actually committing violence.
The Uvalde Failure Reconsidered
What challenges all this is the two Uvalde, Texas, videos published by the Austin American-Statesman. You have seen them or read of them—they show what happened at Robb Elementary School when the killer sauntered in and heavily armed cops, massed in the hallways, failed to stop him for more than an hour. Any progressive with a normal human heart would watch and say, “Why didn’t the cops move, why weren’t they tougher?” They depend on the police as the first line of safety more than they admit. Any back-the-blue person would say, “What is wrong with these guys, the kids were dying.” They are doubting in private more than in public.
The cops in the video are heavily armed and look like combat infantrymen. They maintain form, weapons held high. But strangely, they are like people who don’t know school shootings happen, and have an unsure sense of procedure and what is expected of them. The key moment occurs three minutes after the gunman enters the school, when the first officers arrive inside. They make their way toward the classroom where the killer is. There is gunfire. The officers then retreat, running back to the end of a hallway. From that point and for more than an hour, the police stand about as victims inside are dying.
It is a great scandal, the biggest police scandal since George Floyd, meaning one of the biggest in U.S. history.
I spoke to a longtime veteran who operates at the top of American policing. From the beginning of time, he said, cops ran in when the shots rang out. It was the Wild West, they kicked in the doors, guns up. About 50 years ago police departments started to lean more toward the SWAT model for big incidents—containment, perimeters, coordination of information, controlled entry with superior firepower. An emphasis was put on negotiation, dialogue.
It worked pretty well, he said, until the incidents changed to mental illness and workplace shootings, school shootings, other mass shootings.
The Columbine High School massacre in April 1999 changed everything. There, cops did everything they’d been taught to do. Meantime, inside, the two killers were running around shooting. Victims waited for rescue. The shooters committed suicide hours before the police got in. Some of the injured died in that time. In the end, 13 people were killed, 21 wounded.
A new approach came into being. The first two or three officers on the scene would be the contact team. They would find the killer, neutralize him, stop the threat. Outside, rescue forces would build—SWAT teams and also ambulances, paramedics, EMTs ready to go with stretchers.
At Uvalde the contact team had what it needed, heavy vests and pistols, but it retreated. After the contact team failed, the SWAT team arrived, with police from different agencies, and at that point everything froze. “The main job—find, confront, stop the killing—isn’t getting done,” the police veteran said.
“It’s gonna be hard on them because this is a test,” he said. “It’s a test you face in policing, with all the training and equipment and practice: On game day, are you really prepared to go down there and do what you swore to do? That’s where heroes are born. No heroes were born that day.”
A problem in U.S. law enforcement is a preoccupation with weaponry but “a total lack of clarity about the immediate-action part.”
A complicating factor: Police officers are drilled in the need to get themselves and their partner home safe each day. In an active-shooter situation with a madman and an AR-15, you put yourself and your partner in extreme danger to save other people. A big question is how to train officers to handle their own fear when the gun is aimed not at them but others. You can train them tactically. Can you teach courage? You can inspire courage in people who have that within them, who have something to be brought out.
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