The Arc of a Covenant Quotes

“Any diplomat must be able to engage people across all kinds of political and moral divide; any historian, any student of foreign policy, must come to understand a wide variety of attitudes and opinions that, often for extremely good reasons, are largely unacceptable in polite American society today. Whether the issue is racism, misogyny, jihadi ideology, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, communism, fascism, or, yes, antisemitism, the student of foreign policy must develop the capacity to engage calmly, dispassionately, and sometimes even cooperatively with people committed to utterly revolting ideas.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The disappearance of American optimism would be a bad thing. Much of the dynamism of American life springs from the habits of risk taking, innovation, and entrepreneurialism that an optimistic mindset creates. A more pessimistic America might be a wiser country that made fewer foreign policy blunders, but it would be weaker, poorer, and less influential than the America we know.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“American culture is fundamentally an optimistic culture. The American experience for more than three centuries was one of material and social progress. An entrepreneurial, forward-looking people set in a rich continent, most Americans have been drawn to optimistic readings of history and of the human potential for improvement. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this cultural optimism was reflected in the development of a benign vision of a peaceful and gradual transformation of human history in a new kind of progressive march to a utopian future. As we’ve seen, many Americans came to believe, either as a religious idea or as a secular vision, that the gradual improvement of economic and social conditions that they saw taking place around them would culminate in a universal reign of peace. Liberal Christians interpreted this through the lens of scripture, arguing that human progress would eventually lead to the peaceful return of Christ and the establishment of a millennial kingdom. For secular thinkers, visions of the utopian future looked to a democratic world in which the nations of the world would renounce war, embrace democracy, and cooperate to establish universal equality and prosperity.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“To sell territory rather than losing it in battle, especially territory in the heartland of the Muslim world that contained one of the three holiest Islamic sites, would strike at the legitimacy of the Ottoman Empire among its Muslim subjects, a group who, after the progressive losses of mostly Christian territories in Europe, were increasingly powerful in what remained of the empire. There was, of course, another problem with Herzl’s proposal.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Perhaps ideological competition is one of the forms of international competition that must be discarded if humanity is to survive. President Richard Nixon’s foreign policy of détente with the Soviet Union and opening to Maoist China was based on the belief that the United States did not have the ability to produce a global liberal order”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The lack of political freedom in much of the Middle East combined with the failure of most countries in the region to provide rising living standards and good jobs for young people made radical ideology attractive, and as long as those conditions persisted, terror groups would find support.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“With regard to Europe, both the Jeffersonian neo-isolationists and the Jacksonian hawks were angry at what they saw as freeloading behavior by wealthy NATO allies like Germany who refused, as many Americans saw it, to take serious responsibility for their own defense while stiffing America on trade”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The volcano has not yet gone dormant; the wars of ethnic survival continue to break out. The Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, and the Syrian, Kurdish, and Ukrainian conflicts of the following decades demonstrate that the old dynamics are still there.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“by 2016 the wealthy, selfish countries of the European Union were rich enough to take care of themselves. Jeffersonian neo-isolationists wanted the United States to define its interests as narrowly as possible, to withdraw from contested theaters like the Middle East, to scale back and even to eliminate the American commitment to Europe, and to avoid military engagement wherever possible.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People